Monday, June 18, 2012

Asshole

by Robert Boyd



This is a video of an asshole spray-painting on Woman in a Red Armchair (1929) by Pablo Picasso at the Menil. According to the YouTube video, the asshole is named Uriel Landeros. Assuming this is true (and I acknowledge that it may not be true), this may be his Facebook page. You can read more at Glasstire and click2houston. Of course, this incident recalls the episode in 1974 when Tony Shafrazi spray-painted some nonsense onto Picasso's Guernica. Shafrazi is now a highly successful art dealer. Perhaps that is Landeros' ambition as well.


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4 comments:

  1. Don't forget Mark Bridger who in a "performance piece" poured a vial of india ink into Damien Hirst's formaldehyde stewed lamb "Away from the Flock" redubbing it "black sheep." Of course some may have secretly commended Bridger for recoloring D's scrappy pastoral scene, including Bridger himself who in court testified that his act was collaborationist and improved on Hirst's game. I suppose the public will view a Picasso defacing as the more mortal of the two acts, but perhaps Damien just needs time...

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  2. Also, let's not forget about the target or "victim" of the vandalism. It's harder for me to stir up a lot of pity for a million-illionaire huckster like Hirst, while on the other hand the Menil is one of the most selfless and altruistic museums I have seen anywhere on this earth.
    All signs point to this guy not having any ideological cause besides his own greed for fame and an overwhelming amount of idiocy. His actual self-made paintings are also some of the shittiest I've seen in a long time.

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  3. I don't approve or anyone vandalizing art, even art I don't like or disapprove of. At least in the case of the Hirst, though, he can just make another easily enough. It's not an irreplaceable object like a painting. But still--naughty, naughty, Mr. Bridger!

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  4. In all fairness to D, it would be negligent not to point out the Menil's sanctified/vandalized Woman in Red Chair by the huckster Picasso is part of the cock and bull artist's "kitsch" period. The Spanish Stallion was competing with a Matisse retrospective and was churning out soft-porn portraits of his teenage mistress hourly. One could almost imagine the dot paintings--with their precise edges and color separation---required more care....;)

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