It was an interesting week to be a kid. While we’ll start seeing Sesame Stret on HBO, “The Lion Guard” is coming to the small screen in a beautifully animated new series and Stephen saw a family-friendly animated short collection in a local theater, featuring the works of nine animators from around the world. If you happen to be an “adult-kid,” the red-band trailer for “Hell & Back” was posted and the Hollywood Antitrust lawsuit is back in play… OK, this week’s theme is stretched a little bit but it did lead to some VERY interesting discussions! There was technical talk over “The Lion Guard” animation style, social discussion over “Sesame Street” on a premium cable channel, and a bit of budget talk regarding the recommended reading this week (see below).

Annotations:

 
“The Lion Guard: Return of the Roar” trailer/sneak-peak

 
“Hell & Back” (2015) Red Band Trailer

 
“Candy Power Dorothy” animated short by Joe Yoon Hoon (this week’s Recommended Viewing)

 
Rob Yulfo’s “Creepy Paddington” trailer parody (referenced at 1:29:30 in this episode)

 
Stephen’s favorite Harut episode, “You Give Job” by Hayk Manukyan (referenced at 1:35:15 in this episode)

 
“Monsters University” movie review by Stephen & Rob (referenced at 1:44:13 in this episode)

 
Check out more of your hosts:
Stephen Brooks (@RubberOnion)
Rob Yulfo (@RobYulfo)
Pat Ryan (@TheBadPatRyan)

And please Rate/Review us on iTunes
… and Rate/Review us on Stitcher while you’re at it! (=

The post Sesame Street on HBO, Hollywood Studios’ Antitrust Lawsuit in play & Disney’s THE LION GUARD appeared first on Artiholics.

HBO’s newest artist documentary  Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman premieres tonight (Monday February 24th) at 9:00pm. Directed by New York based artist Mickalane Thomas, who only last month had her solo exhibition Origin of the Universe at the Brooklyn Museum, Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman paints a riveting and emotional portrait of her mother and longtime duende, Sandra Bush.

Featuring intimate interviews with “Mama Bush,” as well as personal and archival photos, the film celebrates this mother-daughter reconciliation as Sandra Bush achieves a measure of celebrity posing for her daughter’s most famous paintings.

I had the pleasure of meeting Thomas years ago during her residency at the Studio Museum of Harlem. Eloquent, hard-working, well spoken, she eagerly talked to me about her creations, all the while inserting each crystal into her paintings by hand, back in the days when she didn’t have the assistants that come from the acknowledgment and recognition of her work that she now has.

The Brooklyn Museum exhibit was a sparkling exhibition of Thomas’ plethora of talent. I have a penchant for glitter and shine; as I was walking through Thomas’ exhibit, a patron noticed my colorful sequined outfit and gleefully asked me “Are you part of the art?”. “Why yes I am.” I replied to her compliment. However the shimmer and rhinestone splendor aren’t the only things that draw me to Thomas’ work.

Her style is amazing, delving into a formal training that touches upon centuries of art history. Thomas is well versed in the art of art; beautifully informed, her skillful and thoughtful sense of technique, texture, composition, and of storytelling are all evident in her body of work.

Too many hip young people thinking of themselves as edgy artists disregard form, narrative, and color theory, but they don’t have much to say. Thomas is brilliant and poignant in her use of archetypal imagery: notions of Buddhism, influences of Adrian Piper’s political collages, classical painting, retro design, feminism, pulp pop culture, are all featured in her art.

The heartbreaking documentary tells the story of her mom’s survival of years of domestic abuse. Sandra Bush, a former fashion model, is well versed in being a muse. The love her daughter has for her makes one realize why Bush is such a symbol of revelry and strength in Thomas’ work.

Her mom’s arm was mutilated by her husband, he carved his own name into her flesh, scaring her for life. But Bush, a true survivor, transformed this marker in her psyche to be a reminder of the love she has for her son, who shares the same name as his father. All these human experiences lends themselves to the content of Thomas’ art. Thomas really is an artistic genius; she has the alchemical magic of transforming pain and hardship, into true beauty.

Happy Birthday to a Beautiful Woman

First airing (tonight) on HBO on Monday February 24th at 9:00pm.

Play times after the premier as follows:
Mon, February 24 – 9:00 pm
Tue, February 25 – 4:15 am
Wed, February 26 – 8:00 pm (HBO 2)
Thu, February 27 – 4:45 pm
Should you wish to see the film after the above times, it will also be featured at HBO ON DEMAND and HBO GO.

Written by Betty T. Kao

The post NY Artist Mickalene Thomas’ Emotional HBO Artist Documentary appeared first on Artiholics.

When proposing a building design, an architect will draft a realistic architectural rendering.  This is a fiction, the illusion of a 3-D concept model of a building which only exists on paper.  This sort of rendering makes it easier for a client to “picture it” as a finished structure in relation to the existing architecture and being a physical fixture in the world around it as very little is left to the imagination.

If you are an entrepreneurial mogul such as Jay Z setting out to launch and brand a previously unknown Cognac, you find yourself with a unique challenge. How do you go about giving something that didn’t previously exist in the marketplace a chance to compete with other high-end alcohols, all of which already have a strong foothold on the nightclub’s coveted top shelves?

Aside from paying top dollar for that shelf placement, you can also skew your advertising with some fantasy. You realistically render it into reality.  Place the liquor in an atmosphere in which your product “should” exist.  A beautiful photograph of the largest musician in the world sitting in his massive Tribeca penthouse with a $6,850,000.00 view, wearing a $4,000 Tom Ford suit, smoking a $45 cigar, while admiring his print of Basquiat Untitled (1983).

This “Insta-cred” elevates the alcohol to the level of all that is around it, as we (as well as products) are judged by the company we keep. It’s validated as an intrinsically high status liquor because of its dominant placement in a world of previously validated status symbols.

So with this in mind, let’s come up with a further proposition. You are Jay Z.  You love the fine art world, are a collector of the arts, and seek acceptance by the upper crust fine art elite as an artist.  You feel like the modern day Basquiat, like the modern day Picasso, yet you aren’t garnering any fine art respect.

You would like to be dually embraced as an entity that exists outside of the “Mtv Rap World” as well as continue to be looked upon by rap fans as somewhat of a god among men.  How do you bridge the gap between a hip hop performance and performance art?

By using the business model of selling an unknown Cognac to a high-end consumer. The key would be to craft a narrative that places you into a position of power as a reputable performance artist.  A lot of art world players would have to be precisely aligned “in the same picture” to give the illusion of uniformity, so that your product — in this case “Jay Z” himself — is not only integrated into the fine art performance art world as a supporting element, but as a powerful entity with dominant placement (the glowing bottle in the foreground).

Throughout this new album Magna Carta Holy Grail Jay Z sings about the various art pieces he wants to own, or currently owns.  If you want to build an art collection of that scale, it would total slightly less than $500 Million dollars, which if he had his heart set on it, he could buy up all the pieces he mentions and still have $500 Million left in the bank.  There are some things money can’t buy, and apparently art world Insta-cred isn’t one of them.  Let’s examine in detail.

Because this song is so fine-art-centric, Picasso Baby director Mark Romanek is quoted as saying he was directly inspired by the documentary The Artist Is Present. The film chronicles Marina Abramović ‘s retrospective at MoMA which was highlighted by her daily “duration performance piece” whereupon she would sit facing members of the public one-by-one, making a lot of them cry.  The artist was present, and you were eye level, an equal.

To “sample” this performance (with a few tweaks) and jump into duration performance art piece without having previously existed in the fine art performance world takes balls, but if you have a nice warm glowing bottle- it’s part skill, part psychology, part who you know, and a lot of creative fine tuned editing.

A few months ago the Internet blew up because Jay Z was in Chelsea secretly filming (not so secret to the art world twitter heads) a six hour performance art piece at a small white wall gallery reminiscent of the Marina piece- and Marina was invited. This was edited down to a 7-minute (11 minute with credits) “Performance Art Film” aka Music Video which “isn’t a video.” Watch the HBO film Picasso Baby (above), and as you do, think about Jay Z’s positioning, posturing, and the way it’s cut.

As the performance was going on in real time, the internet buzz from people watching the vines and reading the live tweets were mixed between “this is an amazing piece of performance art” and “this isn’t art.”

A musician on a stage in front of an audience is performing, and Jay Z is a hip hop artist, so yes, this is performance art… if you do it in front of 60,000 people (his normal audience size) or 60, it doesn’t detract from the art of performing, so I don’t see what the beef is.

You might have thought you were coming to view or participate in a performance art piece, but you were also unwittingly invited to a sparring match. A shootout at high noon.

A Matrix duel in a white dojo, and tough luck, you are Morphius- oh, and you have to sit on a bench……against Bruce Lee…

…with slight of hand skills.

I’ve got 99 Problems and Marina ain’t one.

and fists……forming invisible guns… you are no match.  Because you aren’t the cowboy in the white hat, he is, and you also don’t have a voice. There are a lot of people with pure white shirts in the crowd, but he never squares off with any of them. There is a lot of subliminal shit happening here.

A one-sided rap battle in which you have literally no chance of winning or even anything close to looking superior.  Not because you are an inferior artist, but because you don’t get a chance to defend yourself.

If you have ever seen 8 mile, or watched any Rap Battles on Youtube, you will have noticed that the protocol is very much the same as this performance.  One rapper gets the opportunity to get up in the other rapper’s face, tearing them down with rhymes as an audience reacts.

They have to just stand there silently and take it… but the beauty of the rap battle is that the person taking the punishment gets a chance to retaliate with their own rhymes, while the initial rapper takes his turn remaining silent as the audience reacts.  Not so in this case, as the only one with a mic is Jay Z.

Was this a duration performance?  Yes.  Was it one where the artist stands above you, yelling down at you from a white pedestal, directly into your face,  in an all white room, wearing white, while you sit there and have your reaction filmed from multiple angles and by dozens of smart phones? Yes again.

I wondered about how Marina might have felt in accepting the invitation to be upstaged at a performance which would be ripping off her own performance, knowing it would be edited.

There was a lot of subliminal psychological stuff going on in this film, to position Jay Z as an authority figure in the fine art high-brow performance art world.

For one, the constant battle for height with Marina.  We reduce our height to show subordination to others and increase height to gain status.

Shaking a finger “no” at her, and laughing when she pushed her face on his… very weird shit happening.  I’m really breaking this down, probably too much, but 6 hours was edited to 7 minutes. These exact seven in this exact way. Pretty sure they thought about every second of footage.

In editing this tight, there are no accidents or misplaced frames.

I’d imagined Marina might have felt something like the former The Police front man Sting to P.Diddy.

Do you remember when P.Diddy and Faith Evans did a tribute song to the Notorious B.I.G. and they “sampled” Sting’s I’ll be watching you, with “I’ll be Missing You?”

Later, after there was no signs of this going away, Sting showed up on stage in a (If you can’t beat em’ join em’) appearance to sing the hook underneath Puffy literally talking over what was once his song. Although it appeared as though Sting refused to change the lyrics from I’ll be Watching You to I’ll Be Missing You, it still seemed to be giving P.Diddy the OK, even if it was reluctantly.

Marina looks like Sting.  This is her world, but Jay Z is more famous.

It seems like people were kind of enamored.  Some people danced and played along, others were being beat down by shadowboxing and words being thrown in their face.

You know when you are on the subway and those groups of 3 kids with a boombox get on, and they start the music super loud and then start spinning around the poles, doing flips and stuff very close to you, where they almost hit people?  It’s the proximity that makes it uncomfortable, and if you embrace it and let yourself be impressed, you will be part of the show, but if you bury your head in your phone and don’t want to participate, it becomes more awkward.  And when you look awkward, you get dominated.

Jay Z came off looking like Jesus Christ walking into the room giving out gold bars.  Yes, if he wasn’t famous nobody would give a shit about a guy talking in rhyme about what art pieces he “wants to line his castle” with.

Yeah, the discomfiture is probably what sets it apart from being a rap concert. Plus having all those alpha art-world personalities in the room and basically making them sit on a bench.
The balls behind the concept: I’m going to rhyme talk at your face, about how I want to own artwork – really loud, and you will sit there awkwardly, and this is art.

Were they swept up in the moment? They felt like they were special, because they were invited to be there, and in the room with one of the most famous musicians currently on the planet.  Like the Marina piece, they got to look into his eyes and connect.  They got to be performed to one-on-one.

Actors, film makers, painters, gallerists, art critics etc..

It is a very strange little art video, and there is a lot to be learned behind the psychology at play here. To put it in the rap musician mindset… If I sign with a record label that already has a lot of big named acts on their label, that makes me legit, and makes me on their level, a big name act – so when Jay Z throws these big performance artists into his video and they dance around with him, it’s fake legitimacy. But since they are into it, do they in fact make it legit?

I did like that there is a line in the song about him being the next Jean-Michel, and that’s one of the only lines where you don’t actually see him saying it. That would be too pompous a line to come out of his mouth on camera, and he felt that, and edited appropriately.

All this said, I think Jay Z is a genius.  To say he isn’t  an artist is absurd.  When it comes to marketing, making hit music,  and the business of art – he is on par with Andy Warhol.  Andy once said:

“Being good in business is the most fascinating kind of art. Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” – Andy Warhol

Jay Z has got that part of the art game on lock.

The post Jay Z’s Empire State Of Mind: The Hip Hop Picasso is Present Baby appeared first on Artiholics.

Over the weekend I did a marathon session of HBO on demand, and the first series I knocked out was the Christopher Guest comedy series Family Tree.

If you haven’t seen it, it’s a story of a British guy who is left a trunk by a deceased relative, and in decoding it’s contents is set on a transcontinental adventure to trace back his family tree.  His sister on the show is played by Nina Conti, whom in going through some emotional turmoil and has subverted some of her subconscious banter into a hand puppet named Monkey.  A ventriloquist dummy which is undoubtedly one of the funniest parts of this quirky show.

I hadn’t heard of Nina Conti before Family Tree, and was pleasantly surprised to find that she is an accomplished ventriloquist and comedian, and Monkey is her primary puppet.  Even better, there is a recently released to Netflix documentary she self funded and filmed in 2009 (released in 2012) titled Her Master’s Voice, which is a touching and darkly funny.

It chronicles her trip to America (Kentucky) for The World Ventriloquist Convention in the wake of the death of her ventriloquism mentor, Ken Campbell.  She is left all 6 of his puppets in his will, and she decides to lug them all along with her to America, to try to lend them a voice, if for the last time.

Part of the journey is to visit Vent Haven, a museum that serves as a resting place for puppets of dead ventriloquists (yes, depressing).  She plans on donating one of Campbell’s puppets (you will have to watch to see how this plays out).

I highly recommend adding Her Master’s Voice to your Que, starring Nina Conti, executive produced by Christopher Guest.

If you enjoy her humor, and are in England, you can see Nina Conti and Monkey Performing Live on tour in the UK through October – tour dates here.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

The post Add To Your Que: Her Master’s Voice appeared first on Artiholics.

HBO has a stick up their ass in the shape of a dragon, and they really want you to know about it.  If you’ve seen The History Channel’s Vikings, and thought to yourself “This feels like Game of Thrones, but without magic or dragons”, or if you’ve seen The Hobbit, and thought to yourself “Hey, this was a small book, I should be seeing some dragons by now!”  But the only dragon you’ve seen thus far is Peter Jackson draggin’ his ass to get Smaug some screen time.  Your wait is over, HBO assures you, this season on Game of Thrones they are going to deliver you what you have been missing, some muthafuckin’ dragons.

The first Adverts I saw for the new season of Game of Thrones popped up in the subway stations a month ago.  They reminded me of something I saw in a previous HBO ad buy, maybe for The Sopranos, or one of the other big properties of yesteryear, so I didn’t really give it a second look.  The posters looked like this- and they bought out ENTIRE subway stops of wall space with just these posters.

It wasn’t until I happened to walk past this giant billboard by NYC’s Port Authority that I had to stop in my tracks.

It was at night and I figured that they must have brilliantly rigged a bat-signal style shield over the spotlight to create the shadow of a dragon which I assumed would only be visible at night.  But this might not even be the case, because the dragon shadows were starting to pop-up in daylight hours.

On the side of the HBO building in California.

Across two pages of the New York Times.

It wasn’t until my friends on facebook started posting pictures of themselves sitting in the Throne itself that I truly understood how much HBO was pushing all in.  It seems HBO and Time Warner Cable has a free traveling Game of Thrones Exhibition, which launched last Wednesday with appearances by Jon Snow, Sansa and Arya Stark.  It is currently still in NYC until April 3 (Today!).  It is free and open to the public, if you don’t mind a 3+ hour line.

My friend and fellow artist Antoinette Johnson (who you see in the photo at the top of this article) attended the Exhibit on Easter Sunday, the day of the season premier, and took a bunch of photos.  I caught up with her last night online to get the scoop.  The rest of the photos were taken by Antoinette Johnson.

“We were in line for about 3 hours, but the people in line were really cool.”

“Blackwater experience was like a updated yet medieval version of Duck Hunt…..and I’m a big fan of Duck Hunt :)”

“Dragon eggs!! Happy Easter!”

“#gameofthrones #costumes #jonsnow #thebastard #cloak”

“The costumes with the dragon were worn by the Daenerys Targaryen character.”

“There were a lot of props. It was a bit small but still and awesome show, it was well worth the wait.”

“It might have been the real thing, but I think it was a replica.”

Thanks Antoinette.  HBO seems intent on on stealing away that AMC’s Walking Dead, 9pm Sunday night audience.  The last season of G.O.T. ended with a zombie army, and started with a zombie battle, it’s a no brainer- oh, and did I mention they also have dragons.

Written by Cojo “Art Juggernaut”

Special thanks to Antoinette Johnson.  You can view her work at Antoinette Johnson, and you can read past articles about her on ArtSucks.com by visiting her page on ArtistinRepose.com

The post HBO Brings The Fire With The New Game Of Thrones Ads + Exhibit appeared first on Artiholics.