The Bad Art Cafe

Amazon Wish List

click on the Amazon Wish List to see a list of books I recommend for your art library. this list will be added to time and again

and maybe a podcast too . . . .

and maybe the sistine chapel some day too . . . .

the receptionist's story

from: It Hurts, by Matthew Collins

Once there was a young woman who lived in Manhattan and was offered a better job at a famous art gallery. She attended long, arduous interviews in person and on the phone. Her new boss had her astrology chart done, and every picky-uni detail about her personal life was delved into. The gallery owner would not tell her was the job was. Finally, he gave her the job, and told her what it was: she was now the receptionist for the art gallery. The front office girl.

The gallery owner made her memorize all his clients phone numbers. If the client had a phone in Switzerland, one in the back of his, a cell phone, a house on Long Island, she had to memorize them all by heart, and rattle them off to the client on the phone. The owner to make sure she knew everyone’s phone number gave her daily quizzes.

He’d sit all day behind a glass partition and communicate to the receptionists with a series of hand signals, like a baseball umpire. She had to get to work early, and stay late, and work through lunch. Once the gallery owner got mad at her for not knowing who was calling into the office. She had one perk: a limo picked her up and dropped her off at the beginning and end of the day.

One day, she suddenly couldn’t take it any more after two months, and she quit.

So, how did Jean-Michel & Andy meet?

From: the Diaries of Andy Warhol, edited by Pat Hackett

Monday, October 4, 1982

Down to meet Bruno Bischofberger (cab $7.50). He brought Jean Michel Basquiat with him. He’s the one who used the name “Samo” when he used to sit on the sidewalk in Greenwich Village and paint T-shirts, and I’d give him $10.00 here and there and send him up to Serendipity to try to sell the T-shirts there. He was just one of those kids who drove me crazy. He’s black but some people say he Puerto Rican so I don’t know. And then Bruno discovered him and now he’s on Easy Street. He’s got a great loft on Christie Street. He was a middle-class Brooklyn kid – I mean he went to college and things – and he was trying to like that painting in the Greenwich Village.

Famous for 15 Minutes

Famous for 15 Minutes is an art tell-all autobiography by a French woman named Isabelle Collin Dufresne. You know her better under her assumed art person name, Ultra Violet. Andy & his people in the 1960’s was mostly made up from a bunch of cute talented kids who liked drugs and publicity, (like Edie and International Velvet) and professional artistic drug people (like Ondine and Billy Name), and then there was someone like Ultra, in her 30’s, rich, upper middle class French bourgeoisie socialite turned art dealer who became the girl in Andy’s soup. How that happened is described in this book. It’s a companion book to POPism, the Warhol 60’s, but it’s different, shorter, more readable, more self absorbed, but I always think there’s some fiction going on in some of her reminisces as the former Warhol follower. The best part is about artist Ed Roucha. one of Ultra’s boyfriends, later in the book. More later.

Creativity Kit

Found a "Creativity Kit" for half price sometime last year. I do not use it much for anything myself, but I like to leave it fully intacted and only look at it once in a while, then maybe write something in the journal provided in the kit.

It contains:
* one journal with inspiring quotes
* sandlewood incense to inspire your dull environment
* an incense burner, a tiny circular painted piece of wood
* 75 artistic tasks to on round cards to inspire your dull life.

Some selections (like a bunch of Chinese fortune cookies):
- sing to a friend's answering machine
- frame a postcard
- paint your toenails in all different colors
- borrow a friend's coat for the day

Andy

"Although Warhol works are instantly recognizable, he opposed the concept of art as a handmade object expressing the personality of the artist. In his multiple images, endlessly repeated as in saturation advertising, Warhol brought art to the masses by making art out of daily life. If art reflects the soul of a society, Warhol's legacy is to make us see American life as depersonalized and repetitive.

'Andy showed the horror of our time as resolutely as Goya in his time,' said contemporary painter Julian Schnabel."- from The Annotated Mona Lisa, A Crash Course in Art History From Prehistoric to Post-Modern by Carol Strickland, Ph.D.

Artists: Some all-time favorites, (of author Scott Heim):

Artists: Some all-time favorites, (of author Scott Heim):
Vincent Van Gogh,
Egon Schiele,
Caravaggio,
Francis Bacon
Cindy Sherman,
Henry Darger,
Alberto Giacometti,
Diane Arbus,
Oskar Kokoschka,
Andres Serrano,
Larry Clark,
Sally Mann,
Gilbert & George,
Edward Steichen,
Bernd & Hilla Becher,
Andy Warhol,
Jules Bastien-LePage,
Andrew Wyeth,
Frank Hurley,
Jean Debuffet,
James McNeill Whistler,
Julia Margaret Cameron,
James Ensor,
Max Beckmann,
Gerrit van Honthorst.

Little Art Stickers

Day after X-mas. The weather is nice in Chicago for a change.
Working for a few days, so I ran down to the Art Institute on Michigan
Ave. & renewed my membership. Took a quick look at
Dreaming in Pictures: the Photography of Lewis Carroll,
and then ran back to work.

Meanwhile, in the basement where the photography is located, the
mini children's museum shop is there, and it, historically, has always
had the best stuff for sale. I bought 3 little sticker books put out
by Dover Publications for $1.50 each. Monet, Degas, Cassatt.
As one who cuts up art books, brochures, computer printouts
of different works, and tapes them (unprofessionally, like a kid)
inside journals or collages them, these little art stickers are perfect.

They can be used as flash cards for kids:

And the picture of the lonely lady sitting at table with the desolate
look of a true Parisian Bohemian of the 19th century is what?
L'Absinthe by Degas.

i was cleopatra once

“…..i was
cleopatra once she said well i said i
suppose you lived in a palace you bet
she said and what lovely fish dinners
we used to have and licked her chops”

It’s a copy of “archy and mehitabel” by Don Marquis, first introduced in 1916 in NYC’s The Sun Dial. archy is a cockroach whose writings are found in the morning on a typewriter, lower case, cause he can’t maneuver the shift. mehitabel is his friend the alley cat who has had many past lives.

There’s a picture of the infamous feline in a boat made from a watermelon rind, floating somewhere on the Nile River. She has a fishing pole in one hand and a flower bending down to her in the other; the pyramids are in the background.

Francios Gilot

She started out being called the “intelligent one” by Picasso. Francios Gilot, a 21-year painter in Paris, France was introduced to the 62-year-old artist in a café during WWII. Over time, they became closer, and she ended up living with him for 10 years and having 2 children with him too.

Francious also wrote an autobiography 10 years after they parted company: Life With Picasso, which is not a kiss & tell mistress memoirs at all. It’s about Picasso’s intense artistic process and how it made living with him almost impossible, even though she was an artist too. When she wanted to leave him, because she was burning-out, he told her:

“You imagine people will be interested in you? They won’t ever, really, just for yourself. Even if you think people like you, it will only be a kind of curiosity they will have about a person whose life has touched mine so intimately. And you’ll be left with only the taste of ashes in your mouth. For you, reality is finished; it ends right here. If you attempt to take a step outside my reality – which has become yours, inasmuch as I found you when you were young and unformed and I burned everything around you – you’re headed straight for the desert. And if you go, that’s exactly what I wish for you.”