déjà vu - fashion rocks, 2006
Diane Demirci
Artists must first of all distinguish themselves from members of the adjacent professional classes typically present at art world events: dealers, critics, curators, and caterers. They must second of all take care not to look like artists. This double negation founds the generative logic of artists’ fashion.The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should not take the form of a direct visual analogy. A stripe painter may not wear stripes.The relationship between an artist’s work and attire should function in the manner of a dialectic, in which the discrepancy between the personal appearance of the artist and the appearance of her work is resolved into a higher conceptual unity. An artist’s attire should open her work to a wider range of interpretive possibilities. The artist’s sartorial choices are subject to the same hermeneutic operations as are his work. When dressing, an artist should imagine a five-paragraph review of his clothes—the attitudes and intentions they reveal, their topicality, their relationship to history, the extent to which they challenge or endorse, subvert or affirm dominant forms of fashion—written by a critic he detests.
Communicating an attitude of complete indifference to one’s personal appearance is only achievable through a process of self-reflexive critique bordering on the obsessive. Artists who are in reality oblivious to how they dress never achieve this effect.
Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.
An artist compensates for a limited wardrobe budget by making creative and entertaining clothing choices, much in the way that a dog compensates for a lack of speech through vigorous barking.
Artists are not only permitted but are in fact required to be underdressed at formal institutional functions. But egregious slovenliness without regard to context is a childish ploy, easily seen through. An artist may dress like a member of the proletariat, but shouldn’t imagine he’s fooling anyone.
The affluent artist may make a gesture of class solidarity by dressing poorly. She is advised to keep in mind that, at an art opening, the best way to spot an heiress is to look for a destitute schizophrenic. Middle-class or working-class artists, the destitute, and the schizophrenic can use this principle to their social advantage.
The extension of fashion into the violation of norms of personal hygiene and basic grooming constitutes the final arena for radicalism in artists’ fashion. Brave, fragrant souls! You will be admired from a distance.
New Jersey (7/10/16)
Hey, this post may contain adult content, so we’ve hidden it from public view.
Inside Paris’ Secret Archive of Architectural Antiques
Hundreds of antique wood panels lie stacked against the walls of a glass-roofed warehouse just north of Paris’ Champs-Élysées. Beside them are shelves laden with cornices and sculptures.
This vast cache belongs to period boiserie dealer Féau & Cie. ‘It’s an old institution that’s been there for over a hundred years,’ says interiors photographer Joanna Maclennan, who was drawn to the archive after hearing about its history. ‘Everything is hidden, so unless you know it’s there and what they do, it’s not the kind of thing you’d come across. They don’t even have a shopfront, and everything is inside so it’s quite secret.’
Over 100 carvers, painters and gilders are employed by Féau & Cie, which has built up extensive expertise when it comes to preserving historic pieces, and a reputation for creating precise reproductions.
Images and text via
I think people mix up Virgo and Libra a lot. Here are some nuances. (Applicable to other planet placements)
Virgo: Strive for perfection, meticulous detail.
Libra: Appearance of perfection, plenty of frill.
Virgo: Doesn’t like to show emotion.
Libra: Habitually performs emotion.
Virgo: Deconstructive and understanding of systems (empirical systems, mathematical, theoretical, etc.)
Libra: Constructs and teaches systems (Moral systems, societal behavior, anthropology, sociology, etc.)
Virgo: Takes things apart.
Libra: Brings things together.
September 9, 2016 was the start of the largest prison strike in U.S. history. Over 72,000 incarcerated workers in 22 states refused to provide their labor to profit the prison industrial complex.
California forces 5,588 incarcerated workers to labor in exchange for little or no compensation. Another 4,000 earn $2 a day fighting Californian wildfires with inadequate training and equipment.The prison system in California reaped $207 million in revenue and $58 million in profit from forced labor in 2014-15. Each incarcerated worker in California generates $41,549 annually in revenue for the prison system, or $10,238 in profit.
The financial losses to the California prison system were as much as $636,068 in revenue, or $156,736 in profit, for every day of the prison strike.
No one will be surprised to learn that the campaign to build a national movement against gentrification is being waged out of an office in Brooklyn, New York.
For years, the borough’s name has been virtually synonymous with gentrification, and on no street in Brooklyn are its effects more evident than on Atlantic Avenue, where, earlier this summer, a local bodega protesting its impending departure in the face of a rent hike, put up sarcastic window signs advertising “Bushwick baked vegan cat food” and “artisanal roach bombs.”
Just down the block from that bodega are the headquarters of Right to the City, a national alliance of community-based organizations that since 2007 has made it its mission to fight “gentrification and the displacement of low-income people of color.” For too long, organizers with the alliance say, people who otherwise profess concern for the poor have tended to view gentrification as a mere annoyance, as though its harmful effects extended no further than the hassles of putting up with pretentious baristas and overpriced lattes. Changing this perception is the first order of business for Right to the City: Gentrification, as these organizers see it, is a human-rights violation.
Stephanie by Steven Silverstein, 1991