This Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we bring you an interview from the podcast Bad at Sports with artist Kehinde Wiley, courtesy of our sister publication Art Practical. Wiley, a highly celebrated artist himself, is best known for his large Orientalist paintings of men of color, utilizing the immaterial visual vernacular of authority and the materiality and scale of wealth to reframe his anonymous, systemically disenfranchised subjects in positions of power. This interview was originally published on January 15, 2013. 

Kehinde Wiley. Leviathan Zodiac (The World Stage: Israel), 2011; oil and gold enamel on canvas; 115 x 79.75 in. (framed). Collection of Blake Byrne. Courtesy of Roberts & Tilton, Culver City, CA.

In September 2010, Bad at Sports founders Richard Holland and Duncan MacKenzie, along with Dr. Amy Mooney, associate professor at Columbia College, sat down with artist Kehinde Wiley at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, in Chicago, during the installation of his exhibition The World Stage: India-Sri Lanka. The interview was presented as Episode 263 on the podcast. We bring you an abridged version of that conversation in anticipation of Wiley’s upcoming exhibition at the Contemporary Jewish Museum (CJM), The World Stage: Israel. The eighteen paintings included in the CJM exhibition and represented here are, like the series presented at Rhona Hoffman Gallery, portraits of young men that Wiley has encountered on the streets of cities around the globe who are influenced by and style themselves in the fashion of urban African American youth culture. Regardless of their diverse ethnicities, Wiley renders these men in poses that adopt the conventions of European aristocratic portraiture. The World Stage: Israel will be on view from February 14 through May 27, 2013.
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Richard Holland: In your earlier work, you have these patterns that define the space and then work themselves onto the figure. But now the work is back into that more illusionary mode, in which you are obviously quoting a lot of Orientalist work. But you’ve put these figures back in control of spaces and things.

Kehinde Wiley: So much of my work is defined by the difference between the figure in the foreground and the background. Very early in my career, I asked myself, “What is that difference?” I started looking at the way that a figure in the foreground works in 18th- and 19th-century European paintings and saw how much has to do with what the figure owns or possesses. I wanted to break away from that sense in which there’s the house, the wife, and the cattle, all depicted in equal measure behind the sitter. In my work, I want to create an understanding, not about what a painting looks like but about what a painting says. In many of those earlier works, the paintings speak about landed gentry who possess not only women’s bodies but the bodies of indentured servants and the bodies of, well, we could almost consider the land a body. What happens when we empty that out and create this swatch through which we push through the decorative?

I started working with street casting in the streets of Black America and then moved on to the streets of Africa, from Nigeria to Senegal. I went on to Rio and São Paulo, to Afghanistan and Israel. I find models who are completely unknown to me. I find people who take the train and get to work every day or people who go to the store to buy milk. I stop them and say, “Look, I think there’s a characteristic in you, and I can’t really describe what that is, but I need you to trust what this is. Look through the historical sources that I found. Which one do you like? Who do you want to become in this picture?” That is revealing.

Read the full interview here.

This Summer Session we’re talking about celebrity, and today we bring you Bean Gilsdorf’s Help Desk arts-advice column and a question about fame. With the art world, the art market, and celebrity so deeply intertwined, what is the difference between being a famous artist and a successful artist, and can it be described by the similarities between Thomas Kinkade and Damien Hirst? This column was originally published on April 16, 2012. 

How do you become a famous artist? I am an artist and make lots of art (performance, paintings, drawings, etc.) but I never went to art school. What should I do to slowly but surely become better known in the art world?

Fame, huh? Without a doubt, you must already know that there is no way to “surely” become “better known in the art world,” especially if you are going to do it slowly. Fame strikes like lightning, white hot and irrefutably blinding to those in its immediate path. If fame is your goal, why bother trying to climb the ladder, rung by greasy rung? Why not charter a helicopter and get airlifted to the top? Since my job as an advice columnist is to answer the queries set before me, here is a short list of actions that others have tried in pursuit of fame:

• Kiss (with lipstick on) the museum-hung artwork of an already-renowned artist. When you are arrested, explain to the press and the jury that it was a form of homage and that you were simply overcome by the power of the art. Alternately, if you are the fighter-not-a-lover type, you could punch, kick, stab, or otherwise wound an artwork you find objectionable or offensive.

• Sleep with someone powerful. It’s pretty well tested as a means to gain recognition, so why not give your favorite rock star/politician/A-list dealer a bounce? And then he or she can give your career a boost in return.

• Make a complete spectacle of yourself: do buckets of drugs while making art, have sex in the gallery, don’t bathe, etc. Be the wild and crazy guy who publicly justifies all the stereotypes of the tortured artist. Bonus points if you are a.) attractive and b.) from an old-money family.

Two words: reality show.

Read the full article here.

Today for our Summer Session topic of celebrity, we bring you an interview from The Late Show with Stephen Colbert with the feminist art activists the Guerrilla Girls. Colbert and the Guerrilla Girls talk about the ways in which institutional power limits the possibilities for representation in museums and galleries, thereby shaping the narrative of art history and also popular taste. Moreover, the interview itself is an intriguing overlapping of celebrity engagement with feminist activism. This video was originally uploaded on January 14, 2016. 

For this Summer Session topic of celebrity, today we bring you Allegra Kirkland’s review of the 2013 Llyn Foulkes retrospective at the New Museum. Across all of his multi- and mixed-media works, Foulkes’ oeuvre holds a special fascination for the hollow promises of fame implicit in American popular figures, like Mickey Mouse and Clark Kent. His heavily textured style viscerally manifests the darkness beneath the saccharine gloss of pop culture, revealing the physical and economic violence that underwrites Americana’s most beloved characters. This article was originally published on August 22, 2013. 

Llyn Foulkes. The Lost Frontier, 1997–2005; mixed media; 87 x 96 x 8 in. Courtesy of the Artist and the New Museum.

Llyn Foulkes ranks among that rare cadre of artists for whom fame is an optional extra. Over the course of his fifty-year career, the Los Angeles–based multimedia artist and musician has experienced periods of success—for his monumental Pop-influenced paintings of rocks and, decades later, for his zany, large-scale narrative tableaux. But much of his work has been met with silence from critics and buyers, allowing Foulkes an enduring reputation as an underappreciated art-world outsider. The artist’s retrospective at the New Museum, a traveling exhibition organized by the curators of Los Angeles’ Hammer Museum, positions him squarely in the canon of acclaimed American artists. Yet Foulkes, now seventy-eight, remains stubbornly opposed to the pitfalls and pretensions of the gallery and museum circuit. He is a product of the midcentury American West—a cynical, eccentric figure intent on skewering our national pop culture, political institutions, and military might in equal measure.

Read the full article here.

For this Summer Session topic of celebrity, we bring you a video from Hennessy Youngman, creator of the satirical YouTube series ART THOUGHTZ. In this clip, Youngman outlines the core criteria for becoming a commercially successful artist—a short list of requirements that might be funnier if they were not so true. This video was originally uploaded on May 2, 2010.

This Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we bring you a piece by celebrity James Franco from our sister publication Art Practical on his role in various art films, especially Spring Breakers (2013). Here, Franco attempts to tease out the intersections of commercial and art film projects from the inside, simultaneously offering a meta-narrative on the self-referentiality of his collaborations while enacting it himself. This article was originally published on July 9, 2014. 

Harmony Korine. Spring Breakers, 2013 (film still); 01:34:00. Courtesy of Spring Breakers LLC and A24 Films.

Part 1: Alien

What’s in a name, homegirl? What’s in a name?
Everything and nothing that you thought,
When y’all’s mothers and fathers named you
Sarah, or Eve; or yo’ brothers Cain, and Abel.

These be ancient names, like Moses, and Jesus,
And Mohamed, and Pharaoh; but all these names
Be of the earth, be of man; and homegirl,
I be anything but of this earth. I am in it,

But not of it; I’m deep in it, relish it, like vagina;
Like an alligator deep within the swamp water
Who gets to lie about and eat the fishes passing,
Sweet pods of Mother Nature’s love I accept.

But I’m Alien, girl, an alien. The sheikh gathers treasure,
Not because he needs the glitter, but because
That sumofabitch can. I’m a racist, girl, a racist
Against the human race. I’m not of this world.

Read the full article here.

For this Summer Session we’re thinking about celebrity, and today we’re considering the divide between the promise and the reality of celebrity influence. Over at Dazed, Thomas Gorton has penned a review of artist James Ostrer’s series The Ego System, a set of portraits of famous figures made out of meat and viscera. Ostrer’s work is an attempt to refuse the glamor of celebrity, and to remind himself that there is a real difference between “what we are being sold and what we are actually getting.” The article was originally published on March 22, 2016.

James Ostrer. Emotion Download 213M, 2016, from The Ego System series; photograph; 101 x 67 cm. Courtesy of the Artist.

We love celebrities. Seemingly, even if we hate them. Despite invoking endless torrents of “I fucking hate her!” each time she appears on a website, Kim Kardashian was the most Google-searched person in 2015 across 26 countries and heavily clicked on. Similarly, Donald Trump might make mind-blowingly awful, heavily criticized remarks on a daily basis, but he’s by far and away the most searched for U.S. presidential candidate. Like it or not, we’re hooked.

In his latest body of work, The Ego System, artist James Ostrer is seeking to challenge the idea that our modern icons and the very concept of celebrity isn’t what it seems to be. “I am responding to the vast divide between what we are being sold and what we are actually getting. I’ve labeled them “Emotional Downloads,” as in the process of making them I am trying to remove the information in my head that I realize won’t represent value systems that will lead towards my own happiness.”

Read the full article here.