ALERT! On Friday, December 16, 2022, the author of this article, Efrem Zelony-Mindell, was arrested and charged by the FBI for the attempted enticement of one minor boy in Manhattan, New York, and possession and distribution of child pornography. I mean, Jesus Christ. The case is so viscerally revolting that we can barely read it … Continue reading
I’m not used to suffering from invasive flashbacks inside a major museum. But, pulling back the heavy curtain, leading into Kenny Scharf’s Cosmic Closet, a cozy yet mind-altering intergalactic Day-Glo-painted trash utopia, I was immediately sent through a time warp to June 2011, boogying to The B-52s “Planet Claire” and Martha and the Vandellas “Jimmy … Continue reading
New Zealand-born, NYC-based artist Jess Johnson’s recent exhibition Everything Not Saved Will Be Lost at Jack Hanley Gallery was a maximalist installation in which analog met digital, whereby her drawings were translated into virtual reality. Filthy Dreams’s Jessica Caroline chats to Johnson about her hyper-psychedelic theme park of cyber bodies in both unison and discord: … Continue reading
Blue and red make the hottest of color combinations. Oppositional yet no less alluring, the passion of these contrasting colors is perhaps best exemplified by the opening scene of Jean-Luc Godard’s chaotic domestic classic Le Mépris. Laying in bed with her husband Paul, Brigitte Bardot’s Camille questions him on how much he loves her body, while bathed in a red glow. Continue reading
Having a body can be a burden. Perfume Genius knows this all too well. Through numerous albums, the musician documents the frustration of having a body from Too Bright’s nihilistic “My Body” (“I wear my body like a rotted peach. You can have it if you handle the stink”) to the more uplifting yet no … Continue reading
After the dreamy crack of fireworks and a soar of cinematic strings, Lana Del Rey begins her lush love song “National Anthem” with the frank line: “Money is the anthem of success.” Celebrating the all-too-rich, beautiful and doomed, the corresponding 8-minute long video features Lana immersed in a Kennedy-esque Camelot fairytale with A$AP Rocky playing the JFK to Lana’s Jackie. Continue reading
“…all press is good press to the contemporary enemy and they absorb all weapons launched at them ‘no weapons formed against them shall prosper’ reformed as ‘all weapons against them shall prosper’ they will absorb them into their promotional machine its best to keep it private account,” reads House of Ladosha’s vinyl Untitled (a carry) in … Continue reading
ALERT! On Friday, December 16, 2022, the author of this article, Efrem Zelony-Mindell, was arrested and charged by the FBI for the attempted enticement of one minor boy in Manhattan, New York, and possession and distribution of child pornography. I mean, Jesus Christ. The case is so viscerally revolting that we can barely read it … Continue reading
Walking through Anton Kern Gallery’s exclamatory (and inflammatory) current exhibition Drawings By Mike!, I had to stop myself from sighing like Tim Curry’s Dr. Frank-N-Furter, “Oh ROCKY!” That urged bubbled up from deep within while viewing drawing after drawing of impossibly tanned, blonde and muscular figures scattered on the walls of the gallery’s chic 55th Street space, which gave its top floor over to deliciously lurid trash. Continue reading
“Over the past year four more of my most beloved friends have died of AIDS. Two were artists I had selected for this exhibit. One of the writers for this catalogue has become too sick to write. And so the tone of the exhibition has become less theoretical and more personal, from a show about … Continue reading