A tape recently made public reveals that Bacon was busted by the Chelsea drug squad after a feud with his lover George Dyer.
drugs
Thousands of Objects Tell of Sex, Drugs, and Transcendence Across the Centuries
Altered States: Sex, Drugs, and Transcendence in the Ludlow-Santo Domingo Library at Harvard’s Houghton Library explores the human desire to escape the ordinary.
Archaeologists Find Solid Gold Scythian Vessels for Opium and Weed
In “a once-in-a-century discovery,” archaeologists excavating in the Caucasus Mountains of Russia have discovered two intact, solid gold vessels used by the Scythians.
Aussie Artist Wants to Put the “High” in High School with Educational Marijuana
Australian artist Leon Ewing has come under fire for suggesting that drugs should be given to high school students to help unlock their creative potential.
No, Accepting Art Donations for Marijuana Is Not Legal
In a surprising new business model for art galleries, a space named 530 Gallery on Santa Fe Boulevard in Denver, Colorado, was caught offering free marijuana to anyone who donated to the gallery, reports CBS.
Required Reading
This week’s Required Reading has Serra at the Met, pole dancing’s relationship to art, tech’s relationship to whiteness, mud stenciling, sound art, ruminations on the art world by a bigwig at Christie’s and the art of getting high.
Fred Tomaselli’s (Non-Chemical) Influences
One might be excused for mistaking Fred Tomaselli’s solo show at the Brooklyn Museum for a pharmacy. Upon closer look, the collaged paintings, baroquely-arranged magazine clippings coated in a thick layer of resin, are embedded with pills the way a microchip is implanted under the skin. Sometimes the names are visible, Vicodin, Oxycontin, even a few Viagras. More often than not, though, the pills only become pills upon closer inspection. From afar, they just look like another element of Tomaselli’s works. Drugs are synthesized into the artist’s paintings, and though the psychological shock of recognizing a pill name remains, the chemicals form just another ingredient.
Yeah, there are drugs in the paintings. Most of them are probably illegal in such vast quantities at Tomaselli uses them. But though that’s the form of the work, that’s not the content: in this case, the medium is not the message. Aren’t we all done with the drug hysteria and fetish, now that weed is basically legal in California and the cliches of the painkiller-addicted housewife and the coke-snorting, bowl smoking banker are just that, cliches? So let’s giggle and move on. What’s behind the drugs in Fred Tomaselli?