A Florida pastor’s recent conviction for selling forged Damien Hirst spin paintings provided an absurdist twist to the tired art-scam narrative. Witness: a clergyman debunked by Science Ltd. (the name of Hirst’s studio).
Damien Hirst
Posted inNews
Pastor Convicted for Selling Fake Damien Hirsts
Kevin Sutherland, the Florida pastor on trial for attempting to sell counterfeit Damien Hirst works, has been convicted in New York State Supreme Court. Jurors found Sutherland guilty of attempted grand larceny in the second degree.
Posted inOpinion
The Art of Nonfiction with Damien Hirst
Who says you actually have to remember your life to write about it? Damien Hirst has announced he is publishing his autobiography, despite the fact friends say the enfant terrible of enfants terribles (the Young British Artists) can’t remember a 10-year period that began in his 20s, according to the Daily Mail.
Posted inArt
What Does It Mean to Be a Cultural Disrupter?
Coverage of the visual arts in the New York Times hit a new low last weekend in its Arts & Leisure feature, “The Disrupters,” a roundup of interviews with “people who broke the rules” during 2013, “a year of cultural upheaval.”
Posted inArt
Moral Distortions: Versailles, Qatar, and Kings
With inadvertent timeliness, a retrospective of the world’s richest artist opened in one of the world’s richest cities in the middle of the run of Robert Polidori’s elegiac photography exhibition, Versailles.
Posted inOpinion
The Perils of Public Sculpture in Qatar
Statues: like many things that exist in the world, people sometimes have idiotic opinions about them. Mute and immobile, they are the helpless victims of sad little moralists of all stripes, from Kansas to Qatar.
Posted inArt
Art and Its Surrogates: Allan McCollum at Petzel Gallery
Allan McCollum is the author of a story describing a character that Damien Hirst embodies.
Posted inNews
Damien Hirst’s New Studio Complex Is Called “Science”
While his toxic, formaldehyde-based work may not be the most environmentally friendly art production in the world, Damien Hirst’s new personal studio and gallery in Stroud, England — where his team will be plunging ever more creatures into preservatives — is being designed by a small, eco–conscious firm.
Posted inNews
One of World’s Biggest Art Collectors Charged With Insider Trading
In a statement released earlier this afternoon, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has charged Steven A. Cohen of SAC Capital with supervising, and profiting from, the insider trading of two of his employees. The move followed years of severe scrutiny for the Connecticut-based hedge fund manager and prominent art collector.
Posted inNews
Miami Pastor Indicted after Sending Fake Damien Hirst Paintings to Sotheby’s
Damien Hirst’s Spot and Spin series of paintings might look like endless repetitions of the same thing, but, unfortunately for one Miami pastor, it’s still possible to tell a real from a fake. Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus Vance has indicted Kevin Sutherland on charges of attempted grand larceny for claiming that his “limited edition” Damien Hirst artworks and prints were real when they were decidedly not.
Posted inArt
The Flaming Lips’ Wayne Coyne Talks About the Womb, Damien Hirst, Acid, and Yoko Ono
“I’m mostly a visual artist, I think,” Wayne Coyne told me in a recent phone conversation. That the frontman of The Flaming Lips, one of the biggest experimental rock groups out there, sees himself as a visual creator more than a musician is not too surprising. This is after all the band that’s landed a UFO on stage, made one of the weirdest cosmic horror holiday films of all time with Christmas on Mars, and regularly starts its concerts in a flurry of confetti with Coyne himself rolling in a hamster ball over the crowd. (And it’s not only their recent work, just look at this concert video from 1996 of “Abandoned Hospital Ships” and watch the swirling DIY light installation pulse on with the crescendo.)
Posted inArt
An Artist Creates the Ruins of America
Danh Vo’s objects are unremarkable without history. We can debate until Miami freezes about over the place of artworks that don’t do much visually, that make references so opaque you have to a) be a specialist or b) have the work explained to you by an outside aid. Vo’s challenges to our assumptions about art are as frustrating as they are exciting.