Furious and snarling, the Sex Pistols exploded onto the world stage in 1977. Their anti-authoritarian stance, expressed in songs like Anarchy in the UK and God Save The Queen, outraged society and turned the music world upside down. As the years passed, more and more people started to recognize how great a rock band the Pistols actually were, and while…
I groaned when I first read that rocker turned postmodern artist, David Byrne, had written a musical about Imelda Marcos titled Here Lies Love. Does the world really need another de-politicized musical ala Evita? The musical premiered at the 2006 Adelaide Arts Festival in Australia. Byrne collaborated with British DJ Fatboy Slim to produce the musical. The Adelaide Arts Festival…
Andy Warhol’s statement that “every person will be world-famous for fifteen minutes,” was an amazing insight into a consumerist culture driven by media, but he hardly could have imagined that artists would someday be interviewed in virtual publications that exist in a place called cyberspace. Here’s my fifteen minutes of world fame, as the LAist website put questions to me…
On February 16, 2006 Australia’s Special Broadcasting Services (SBS) program Dateline aired previously unpublished video and photos taken by US troops at Abu Ghraib prison in 2003. The damning pictures show Iraqi prisoners bound, naked, wounded, some covered in blood or excrement – undergoing abuse at the hands of their American jailers. Caution: this essay contains violent imagery not suitable…
While watching the televised opening ceremonies for the 2006 Turin Winter Olympics, I was stunned to hear the anchorman casually mention the fact that the stadium had been “built by Benito Mussolini,” a fact to which was attributed no historical context or significance. I found myself wondering if such a nonchalant attitude would have been taken had the stadium been…
The National Guard Association of the United States commissioned a life-sized portrait bust of President Bush from famed artist, Charles Parks, who for the last 50 years has created over 500 sculptures in the realist tradition. In a special February 9th ceremony at the National Guard Building in Washington DC, Park’s bronze statue memorializing Bush’s service in the Texas Air…
The Italian Futurists had an obsession with all things modern, the city, the automobile, the plane. They turned their backs on the past and set their sites on the technological future, hence their name. Their mania for speed, whether that of a fast moving car or a diving plane, was based upon a veneration of technology; they even came to…
The militant symbol of the clenched fist has been around since the early 1900’s, springing up in graphics from Mexico and the US, to Europe and Russia. Typically depicted as part of the human figure, holding tools or other symbols, or breaking through a barricade, the iconographic fist underwent a change at some point in the 1960’s; it became an…
