Jill Greenberg has been around a long time.   She's a very successful commercial photographer and has had some success in the "fine art" photography world.  Although it looks just like her commercial work hung in a "fine art" gallery if you ask me.    Like McCain or not, is beside the point here.
This scandal is all about ethics.  Deception was employed to manipulate a public figure who's only fault is that he is a political candidate running on the Republican ticket.    Yes, he's a warmonger, but make a painting if you want to address that.       Unfortunately for him, McCain was the pawn that Greenberg manipulated; unbeknownst to him.   The above images are before and after "personal" shots that Jill did, below is the unretouched cover where he looks like shit, she purposefully left red eyes and bad skin.

A little backround about her.   Jill is the same photographer who shot "crying babies" a couple of years ago and had a billboard on Highland Ave advertising her show at her gallery.     During the shoot she asked the parents to leave the room for a few minutes and proceeded to upset the children, take candy away, yell at them, do whatever it took to get a shot of them crying.      As a mother, I wonder why would you do this?
  Ms. Greenberg is terribly self involved.     Stick to bears and dogs- Jill.
 
Her legacy, aside from her work, she will be remembered as the photographer who ruined it for everyone else.    The repercussions are as follows:
photographers will have less control on the publication of their images. 
-magazines will have less chance of getting public figures to pose and if they do will demand photo approval.
Here is the quote Jill gave PDN about the shoot and how the shots were done.


Greenberg asked McCain to "please come over here" for one more set-up before the 15-minute shoot was over. There, she had a beauty dish with a modeling light set up. "That's what he thought he was being lit by," Greenberg says. "But that wasn't firing."

What was firing was a strobe positioned below him, which cast the horror movie shadows across his face and on the wall right behind him. "He had no idea he was being lit from below," Greenberg says. And his handlers didn't seem to notice it either. "I guess they're not very sophisticated," she adds.  In the meantime Jill was fired by her agent and sued by The Atlantic.    She has since gone back to Bruce at Artmix who was her agent (and mine) a few years ago.     What she really needs now is a PR clean up crew to do some damage control.

   
PDN article

Oops he did it again.    Damien did it his way and won, again.    I speculate that Damien, Larry Gagosian and Jay Jopling, (his power dealers) have been buying back his works for the last couple of years to make this auction historically profitable.     Luckily for them it happened one day before the dow jones industrial average dropped over 300 points.    You know those hedge fund guys.   Good for Damien, bad for artists and the gallery system.

Damien is quoted as saying an auction is , "a very democratic way to sell art."

LONDON -- A sale of pickled sharks, butterfly paintings and other pieces by provocative British artist Damien Hirst has raised $198 million, silencing his doubters and defying the global economic gloom.

Sotheby's auction house said the total for the two-day sale was a record for an auction of works by a single artist.

The turmoil engulfing global financial markets did nothing to dampen prices as more than 600 prospective buyers packed the showroom for each of the three auction sessions. Others around the world bid by phone. (LA Times/ Assoc press) Images from White Cube gallery

"Although there is risk involved, I embrace the challenge of selling my work in this way," he said. "I never want to stop working with my galleries. This is different. The world's changing. Ultimately I need to see where this road leads."

The lots, previewed Monday, include "The Golden Calf," an embalmed calf with hooves and horns of 18-carat gold. It is expected to fetch 12 million pounds (US$17 million) at the Sept. 15-16 sale. "

The Incredible Journey," a zebra in formaldehyde, has an estimated sale price of 2 to 3 million pounds (US$2.8 million to US$4.3 million).

The sale also will include Hirst's paintings of spots and butterflies.

Four of the works are being sold to benefit charities, including youth group Kids Company and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Hirst, 43, is among the best known of the "Young British Artists" who came to prominence in the 1990s. His often provocative and disturbing works have included a diamond-encrusted skull, sharks and sheep preserved in formaldehyde and maggots attacking a cow's head.

Contemporary art collectors such Charles Saatchi helped make Hirst famous and his works expensive, and they are displayed in museums such as the London's Tate gallery and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. (source:  Herald Tribune)

Damien piece

Her photomontage work is sexy, glossy, provocative and contemporary.      Can you believe she's been doing it for over 30 years.   Meet Martha Rosler.    
Rosler is one of the most influential artists of her generation and her work frequently compels the viewer to rethink the boundaries between the public and the private, the social and political. During the Vietnam War, she produced Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful (1967-72), a series of photomontages assembled from the pages of Life magazine, where news stories featuring images of the dead and wounded shared column inches with glossy adverts for consumer products.    Martha's new work, "Bringing the war Home" will be running thru Oct. 11.

The work shown here, Bringing the War Home: House Beautiful, new series (2004), is a reworking of that project. A critique of the current war in Iraq, it draws an immediate comparison with Vietnam. Re-connecting the reality of a distant war with the living rooms of America, she underlines the relationship between the spoils of war and a consumerist society.  (source:www.tate.org.uk/.../mediaburn/martha.shtm)

     
For Martha is represented by:  Mitchell-Innes & Nash
more information about Martha Rosler:   

Martha RoslerMartha Rosler was born in Brooklyn, New York. She took her B.A. from Brooklyn College in 1965 and her M.F.A. from University of California, San Diego in 1974.

Rosler works in video, photo-text, installation, and performance, and writes criticism. She has lectured extensively nationally and internationally. Her work in the public sphere ranges from everyday life -- often with an eye to women's experience -- and the media to architecture and the built environment.


She has published several books of photographs, texts, and commentary on public space, ranging from airports and roads to housing and homelessness. Her work has been seen in the "Documenta" exhibition in Kassel, Germany; several Whitney biennials; the Institute of Contemporary Art in London; the Museum of Modern Art in New York; the Dia Center for the Arts in New York; and many other international venues.Tate museum (www.tate.org.uk/.../mediaburn/martha.shtm)

A retrospective of her work has been shown in five European cities and in New York at the New Museum and the International Center of Photography (2000). An accompanying book has been published by MIT Press. Her writing has been published widely in catalogs and magazines, such as Artforum, Afterimage, and NU Magazine.

Rosler has ten published books. She has produced numerous other "Word Works" and photo/text publications -- now exploring cookery in a mock dialogue between Julia Child and Craig Claiborne, now analyzing imagery of women in Russia or exploring responses to repression, crisis, and war.


Martha's gallery and information

Back in the day the KISS army was the shit.   It is  the only army parents really want their kids to join.    This little star was part of a series I did on rock fans in 1997.   I pulled it out of the archive for this post.
KISS put on a damm good show and always have.    They have also got to be the most resourceful band in the world.    Well, I should reword that to ego-maniac Gene Simmons just seems to be a money making machine.     Gene's book, or writer assisted memoir (doesn't every rock star have one) is actually hilarious.    He's obnoxious, arrogant, cheap and funny. 
  If you love KISS read it..Ace was always my favorite and Detroit Rock City my song.  Kiss has been a part of pop culture for 20 years and many artists have been inspired by their antics.      One of DREW STRUZAN'S sketches of Gene.

If you are a really big fan, you can buy the shoe from VANs, always a classic.

We've all heard the hype.   The teen pregnancy, the anti- environmental stance, the pro drilling policies.   (Although she isn't in bed with "big-oil")  I guess she was against teaching sex ed because she couldn't teach it at home to her own kid.    Hey, I get it, we all make mistakes.     This election should not be about gender or race.   It's about issues- and in this case bad taste or poor judgement.   Can someone get a PR clean up crew in there for damage control.    In this day and age, do you really need to be photographed with a giant grizzly bear under your ass?   Love the giant crab.  (There is a similar portrait of her in Newsweek this week on the same rug)

Now these images may not offend the 60 plus middle American somewhat uneducated constituancy of the shrinking Republican party.   But I find it offensive.   I know I have to keep my values in check, but come on.    Is this a woman I can look up to?  Maybe if I wanted to take woman back 100 years in terms of the progress we have made.    


Didn't McCain do a little backround check to see what he was getting into, I guess this just shows his lack of judgement.    It is a sad day in America when the best the Republicans can do is the McCain- Sarah Palin ticket. 

PROUD TO SAY THAT LIPSTICKTRACEZ IS PRO-OBAMA.   

One of my favorite artists is Cady Noland.   AMAAAZINGLY DISTURBING is how I would characterize her work.    The sculptures and installations remain ever so timeless even 10-15 years later.   She disappeared from the art world in the late 90's and many suggest that she had a difficult life and suffered from alcoholism.  (maybe the nod to Betty Ford had something to do with that)   Unfortunately, she wouldn't be the first or the last great artist to have a substance abuse problem.     I wish she would come back.    Great artists are hard to find.    A constant source of inspiration for me. 

Cady Noland works three-dimensionally and spatially with ready-made objects and photos from the mass media. Her works include the "ideals and symbols of the American Dream" including the US flag, basketball baskets, car tires and neon advertising signs are placed with "control mechanisms" such as flags and portraits of politicians, but also barriers, bars, chains, handcuffs, pistols and instruments of torture. source: askart.com

"Cady Noland Approximately" is, according to its organizers, "the first survey ever devoted to Cady Noland's oeuvre." This esthetic act of karaoke, identity theft, body snatching and entrepreneurial table turning, created by Shelly Bancroft and Peter Nesbett, co-directors of Triple Candie, a not-for-profit space that they have dubbed "Harlem's alternative for contemporary art," is a slap in the face, an act of misguided love and an extremely challenging, maybe even radical idea that could end up a fascinating footnote in future art history books. According to Bancroft and Nesbett, "The exhibition consists of objects re-created by the co-directors and four artist-assistants from images of Noland's art found on the Internet and in exhibition catalogues."

None of the work is for sale. Bancroft and Nesbett claim the exhibition "is meant to incite the public's desire and curiosity to experience the real thing, which remains frustratingly elusive." As a huge Noland fan, I know where they're coming from. Noland, not Barney, Hirst or Gonzalez-Torres, is the crucial link between late-1980s commodity art and much that has followed; she is the portal through which enormous amounts of appropriational, political and compositional notions pass. So mercurial, fierce and originally poetic is she that I think of her as our Rimbaud.

Then, about a decade ago, for whatever reason, she absented herself. Noland hasn't had a gallery or museum exhibition in more than 10 years. When her work turns up in group shows it is said that she tries to have it removed. Thus, the idea of any kind of Cady Noland show is mouthwatering. Nevertheless, judging from the results of this exhibition, if I were Cady Noland, I'd think about getting a lawyer to get medieval on Triple Candie. Rather than creating a shining moment of revival, an artistic revelation or a shrine, Bancroft and Nesbett are unintentionally playing the roles of Rupert Pupkin and Masha, who in the 1983 Martin Scorsese film The King of Comedy are so enamored of Jerry Langford, a talk show host, that they kidnap him.

This isn't a kidnapping. But remaking Noland's work without her permission is, in a sense, holding art for ransom. It's also nothing new. The art world has grappled with ideas about authenticity, the aura of the artist, originality and transgression since Dada, Duchamp, Hugo Ball and Walter Benjamin. Ball said, "Ideas are only labels;" Duchamp that "artists should be completely non-existent." Warhol maintained he wanted "to be like a machine." Recently, Elaine Sturtevant, Richard Pettibone, Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine have made renditions of other artists' works. Now gallerists are doing it.

"Cady Noland Approximately" tests these ideas and practices in ways that are at once admirable, complex and vexing. The show asks several pressing questions, among them, do artists sacrifice their rights to anyone who wants to study their output? And is the art world only willing to grant permission to appropriate to artists or can art dealers get in on the act as well? A weirder wrinkle is that this isn't the first time that Bancroft and Nesbett have gone around an artist's wishes. Just three months ago they mounted "David Hammonds: The Unauthorized Retrospective," an exhibition consisting of scores of xeroxes of Hammonds' work. I liked the tribute-band aspect of that show, although I later heard from a third party that Hammonds was livid.

"Cady Noland Approximately" goes far further and onto trickier ground. Bancroft and Nesbett make no claims about these being real Nolands. The checklist explicitly describes how these works were fabricated. One entry reads, "Noland used 34 A-frames in the original; for this exhibition 28 were used; Noland used a single wood plank that ran through all the A-frames, this piece is made from short, individual planks that were collected from Triple Candie's parking lot, painted white and assembled to create the illusion of a single plank. . ." Another entry begins, "We were unable to locate the same stanchion bases Noland used, so substituted sign bases that we rented from a movie prop company. . ." Bancroft and Nesbett, who obviously love and admire this work, have gone to great lengths to make clear that these pieces are only approximations.

The ideas are interesting and the organizers' hearts are in the right place, yet the show falls flat. Ironically and significantly, the problem isn't that these are para-Nolands; it's that the room feels so visually inert and lackluster. In a way "Cady Noland Approximately" makes one believe in artistic aura again. You start to understand why artists are so controlling about their art and also just how much of a spatial and material genius Noland was.

"Cady Noland Approximately" will not explain to the many who have never seen an exhibition of her work why seeing Noland's art was once like taking an esthetic joyride. To grasp the envelope-pushing impact of Noland's work, consider the famous story about Jackson Pollock, who, after completing an early drip painting, turned to his wife, painter Lee Krasner, and asked not if this was a good or bad work, but "Is this a painting?" The only time I had that kind of clueless, desperate, scared, amazed reaction in the face of contemporary art was with Noland's 1989 debut exhibition at the old American Fine Arts gallery. I didn't know what I was looking at or even if it was art. I was lost. Noland opened the door to a vast chamber within the house of art that no one knew existed. It was striking and unforgettable. This show is neither.

artnet.com

If you want to learn about Cady and many other fabulous women contemporary artists one of the best books I have read is WITNESS to Her ART.   Great interview by Michele Cone in 1990.   This is a great book and I highly recommend it. 

My Dad was a huge opera buff and Wagner was usually playing in the background at my house growing up.    I think when I had nightmares Die Walkure was like the background music.     At the time I thought it was annoying, but now I think fondly back to those days when my Dad would blare Beethoven or Wagner and sit around talking about Nietzsche.    My sister and I were dragged to the opera and just hated it at the time, does any 10 year old like opera?     After high school I found myself listening to classical music quite a bit, especially the Italian composers like Vivaldi and Verdi.     I also listen to a lot of Bach and have turned Nova onto it.   Very soothing, kids love it.   (Baby Bach is a great kid relaxer) 
One of my favorite opera's is La Boheme.   It's so tragic and beautiful.        A few years back I discovered Maria Callas.   Her signature operas were Tosca and Norma, although she performed La Boheme as well. (source for these images is the Maria Callas website)
She was the Audrey Hepburn of Opera.   A mezzo-soprano with incredible talent, a voice to die for and great style.     They just don't make em like they used to.     A true Diva. 
   Unfortunately the great love of her life, Aristotle Onassis left her for Jackie O (hard to compete with that).    He broke her heart and her spirit.   She was never quite the same after that.
Maria Callas official site 

Maria Callas  (December 2, 1923 - September 16, 1977) was an American-born Greek soprano and perhaps the most renowned opera singer of the 1950s. She combined an impressive bel canto technique with great dramatic gifts. An extremely versatile singer, her repertoire ranged from classical opera seria to the bel canto operas of Donizetti, Bellini, and Rossini, and further, to the works of Verdi and Puccini, and in her early career, the music dramas of Wagner. Her remarkable musical and dramatic talents led to her being hailed La Divina. (wikipedia source)


    
 

Rapper, "clothing designer",  and Hermes bag- toting rock star extraordinaire Pharrell WIlliams is ready for his new role.    Contemporary art collector.     Thank god Pharrell is setting an example for his peers.   Much like Jay Z and other blue chip rappers like Nas, Pharrell (arrogant as he may be) has just elevated the game.    He has great style, he's hot, can actually sing, make block rockin beats..... and has good taste in art.
Thats all it really boils down to.   GOOD TASTE- and yes, hard to get and impossible to buy.  You are usually born with it, or in the case of most celebrities, you just pay a stylist to have it for you..

Pharrell's collection has a long way to go, he's not the Eli Broad of rap-YET- but he's off to a good start with anchor pieces by Keith Haring and ubiquitous street artist KAWS.    I have another post about KAWS in my blog from a few months ago if you want to follow up.   Aside from the fact that art is beautiful and inspiring to have around, it's also valuable stuff.    In today's economy art is more valuable than most stocks.   As witnessed here, the new status symbol.  Art is in.
I hope more musicians go to MOSS for one of a kind design pieces, Regen and other great  galleries to spend their windfalls instead of JACOB the Jeweler.    Bling does't age quite as well as the Baldessari or KOONS.    .

FYI: if you are interested in starting to collect contemporary art,  the top galleries are listed in our links on this site to firmiliarize yourself with the artists.    There are also tons of great galleries on the lower east side and Chelsea in NYC and Chung King Road,  Silverlake, Bergamont Station and Venice in LA etc. where you can buy great affordable pieces.    Collect art and support the arts-it's a great way to support creativity.

Images of  Pharrell by Alasdair McLellan      layout courtesy of Fashion rocks.

One of my favorite rappers after Biggie is Jay Z.    Jay has just proven over and over again that he is a lyrical genious.     He is a savvy business man,  and maintains his street prowess and elegance simultaneously.    Mr. Z keeps elevating the genre.   The bling is still there, but it works- you have to have a little flash right?   He made 3 piece bespoke suits cool again.    He's private and doesn't hang out with groupies in clubs. 
  He runs his business like a tight ship.     Here's to you.
  (photos in magazine by Mark Seliger, Cover of Jay Z by Michel Compte)

Not so horrifying in person.

The amazingly talented Kembra Pfahler is gorgeous sans her costumes.     With a long art and performance career that has spanned 18 years. Ms. Pfahler has cracked eggs on her crotch in concert (see video below), sewn up her vagina  to make a statement about gender, and been an artist and downtown fixture on the scene for almost two decades.    I was lucky enough to photograph her band for Details years ago and have been a huge fan ever since.   Kembra's new album, Actresstocracy is out this fall.   Kembra performed at ART BASEL Miami last year and the 2008 Whitney Biennial.   I'm so excited that she is getting the recognition she deserves.   An incredible artist and performer.


Image above from Kembra's album cover.   The songs on the first album are hard rockin with driving quitars set to hilarious lyrics.     Honky Tonk Biscuit Queen and Born to Bake are funny as shit.
Here is a bio from the Whitney biennial.  Image a still from her performance "Actresstocracy" on Independent Film Channel. (VFAIR)


Kembra Pfahler is the woman behind The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black, a theatrical rock group that links a hideous monster aesthetic to a dark, hysterical feminine archetype. Named in honor of cult horror film heroine Karen Black, Pfahler's band performs heavy-bottomed punk-metal songs amid elaborate hand-constructed sets where she engages an animalistic, fetishistic practice of acting out transgressive physical feats. Pfahler's stage persona has been described as a dominant "lady devil" who relishes destroying notions of female beauty rooted in purity and innocence. Wearing a teased black bouffant wig with blacked-out teeth, black stiletto boots, and black underwear, her nude body painted blue, pink, or yellow, Pfahler heads a team of ladies appointed in similar campy glamour while male band members including her ex-husband, Samoa, maintain masculine rockabilly stylings. Pfahler and Samoa formed The Voluptuous Horror in 1990 after ten years of making Super 8 horror films and visual and performance art that they felt would benefit from a musical soundtrack, looking to Viennese Actionists Hermann Nitsch, Otto Mühl, and Rudolf Schwarzkogler as original influences. Rebelling against a degraded, polluted world, Pfahler developed an "anti-naturalism" platform on which to promote VHOKB reflecting their desire to reveal the attraction of repulsion.

The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black fashion their props and sets from low-tech, readily accessible materials under the rubric of Pfahler's theory of Availablism, creating structural items and costumes such as ladybug and flower head uniforms as visual accompaniments to their songs. For Chopsley (1996), an oversize animal trap controlled by a female band member snaps open and shut on Pfahler as she sings about a "rabid bikini model." In a 2006 performance at New York's Deitch Projects, The Sound of Magic, band members danced with Mylar-covered boards shaped like giant razor blades and shark heads before a backdrop of starkly striped paintings. Members Pfahler, Samoa, Adam Cardone, Magal, Adam Pfahler, Dave Weston, and Karen Black Girls Bijoux Altamirano, Alice Moy, Anne Hanavan, Jackie Rivera, Laure Leber, and Armen Ra writhe and jump throughout these ritualized ceremonies-cum-rock shows.

Recently Pfahler has directed her interests in bodily transformation to curatorial practice. In Womanizer (2007), also at Deitch Projects, she co-curated a show that demonstrated an "evolution beyond gender" by showing works by women seeking to explode the dualism inherent to male/female opposition. Pfahler exhibited a suite of photographs in which, dressed only in thigh-high lace-up boots and blue body paint, she mimes fornicating with a skeleton symbolizing her recently deceased boyfriend. Conflating horror, death, and female sexuality, Pfahler and VHOKB tantalize the viewer by exemplifying an abhorrent sublime, terrible as it is irresistible. TRINIE DALTON