While Seated [018]
Then Mark Alexander Dalio hits me back with the reverse angle, which makes the whole thing seem staged. Either that, or Kaepernick is unknowingly blocking the first photographer from seeing the front-facing photographer below, in a moment of unchoreographed, synchronistic brilliance.
Keith Haring’s original, from which LIC Beer Project has also taken/borrowed/copied/appropriated their IPA’s name, “Pile of Crowns” was called, in full: “A Pile of Crowns, for Jean-Michel Basquiat”.
There’s always a thin-line between admiration, appropriation, and then trying to make money off someone else’s iconic but idiosyncratic style. Advertising and branding agencies are full of the latter, contemporary art’s full of the middle, and we’re all full of the first.
“Transformation” of the original piece helps, as does the kind of fusion we see here in the label’s artwork, which is using Haring’s original as a jumping-off point to incorporating Basquiat’s signature rushed and scratchy style.
When is homage no longer homage? Or, how thin is the plank off the back of the homage boat? What does it take to stay teetering on its edge; what pushes you off into the chop?
The irony, for me, is that the LIC label artists chose to “organize” the crown-pile into neat rows, and (while we’re at it, let’s) not re-purpose Haring’s ubiquitous copyright symbol.
Or maybe Haring’s copyright symbol (which wasn’t needed, legally, but reappeared in paintings to the degree that there was a very specific reason Haring included it) wasn’t ubiquitous at all — I just feel like it was because when I was in high school I ran around with a t-shirt with this on the front:
Either way, it feels like the Stillwater kerfuffle, where the brewers created this label for a brett-based porter that supposedly tastes like Dr. Pepper.
Modeled “after” the Life of Pablo album cover which may have looked like this in one of its many iterations:
And while Stillwater’s brew was “an homage”, the beer’s name was taken straight from Kanye’s lyrics, the label art looked exactly like Kanye’s album, and sure enough:
“Stillwater’s recent release is being recalled amid a legal imbroglio with a firm that claims to represent the merchandising rights to Kanye West.”
Does the old Kanye miss my old ticket stub? I found myself looking at it a few extra times this weekend, upon hearing Paris Hilton was in attendance, and vandals ripped-up some billionaire son’s pay-to-play pleasure pad.
The picture above reminded me of the sequence from “Crumb” when he’s explaining how he went and photographed Sacramento so he’d have source material for drawing all the power lines and bib-bobs of modern industrial nowheresville. Now, we call that The Built Environment, but in the 90s it was called crap.
“In the real world this stuff isn’t created to be visually pleasing, it’s just accumulation of the modern industrial world that people don’t even notice, they block it out.”
I’m redo-ing a site (michaeldavidmurphy.com) and I thought I’d rebuild it “in public”, slowly, over time, in a way that breathes a bit of life into how site creation is so plug-and-play and free of surprise these days.
My goal is to make something that works for me (rather than looking good to everyone else) and hopefully gets away from professionally-presented grids of thumbnails, and social badges. It’s going to be a not-so-professional site that aggregates all my everything.
I thought it would be fun to put it on github, not because I’m a coder, but I want to explore how github tracks changes, and I want to be able to quickly pull diffs on files and sharpen my familiarity with contempo-version control, because no one uses CVS anymore.
Current site is here: http://michaeldavidmurphy.com/
New site in process here: http://michaeldavidmurphy.com/index.html
Medium will play a role too, as it offers some unique ways to present photo-based work that will supplement my little list of text links. And I applaud and appreciate Medium’s ability to export your own work — an essentiality that others ignore or needlessly complicate.
I’m also looking for a clone. Of me.
My wife needs one, too. Can you rubber stamp us, please?
20160825 — That feeling when your kid is crying and you open the door to take the garbage out and you hear a siren from a fire truck in the distance that’s in complete sync with the rising sobs of your child, and as the cop car gets closer, you get closer to dumping the trash (which acts as an aural apex) and as you turn to walk back inside and the police car passes, the siren fades and is replaced by the cries of your kid, who’s been trying to calm herself but just can’t find that pure pause of relief.
And then you remember you wrote about the very same effect, while watching a movie, a few months ago.
