The MASI Museum in the city of Lugano in southern Switzerland, a newly formed union of two art spaces, is proving itself to be not only a world-class showcase for Swiss-Italian art, but also a repository for Europe's most notable private art collections.
After seeing Patti Smith's 'Horses' album cover, her jacket-over-shoulder ease of presence photographed by Robert Mapplethorpe, a young Swiss artist by the name of Franz Gertsch endeavored to immortalize the punk poet in a series of five larger-than-life paintings, presenting her as omnipresent yet authentic, while forging an auspicious, hyperrealistic start to his own career in art.
Edvard Munch, Godfather of Gloom, was neurotic before anxiety became big business, as seen in a new exhibition, Love and Angst (April 11 - July 21, 2019), at London's British Museum. Gen Z hangxiety or farting in Sweaty Betty yoga pants can't compete with classic vices like drugs and taboo sex.
Dead glamorous Egon Schiele obsessively sketched the genitalia of skinny sluts while his artistic father Gustav Klimt smothered his blondes in gilt half a century before Bond villains were invented.
The father and son of erotic art are inseparable from Vienna at that moment when fin-de-siècle decadence was reinventing itself as avant-garde innovation. But despite Freud, and Expressionism, and an ugly new ring road, Vienna never lost its bourgeois core. Likewise, Klimt and Schiele both aspired to success, while maintaining their outsider status.
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The confident handwriting of Frida Kahlo's diary watches over the entrance to the display of her possessions at London's V&A in Frida Kahlo: Making Her Self Up (until November 4, 2018). It almost doesn't matter what's written in Spanish; the words themselves seduce you. There is something evocative about ink on paper concealed within the pages of a journal.
David Bowie's infatuation with Japan is no secret. It began with a keen interest in the extreme make-up of Kabuki theater and continued with an interest in musician Tomoyasu Hotei and filmmaker Nagisa Oshima. And fashion followers will know about his work with fashion designer Kansai Yamamoto.
Suddenly fat cats are everywhere. They're hissing at the have-nots, kneading dubious tax cuts, and clawing democratic governments to their will.
Given Vivienne Westwood's outsized cultural relevance, it's hard to believe that 'Punk, Icon, Activist' is her first feature-length documentary. Needless to say, it will be a highlight of Sundance Film Festival, where it's slated to debut in January 2018.
Although The Kitten Covers — a Tumblr featuring classic records with tiny felines as the main attraction — is now defunct, we'll always have the meow-mories...
