Hi-Fructose is an arts magazine along the lines of Juxtapoz that does street art, but street art that has gone gallery. Thus, it's full of shit a lot of times. The wife bought it for me while I was laid up in the hospital, and like Hi-Fructose (which I had personally given up on a while back), the paper is a thicker type paper like an art magazine taking itself serious as fuck, probably recycled and special inks made by Peruvian Indians from the tears of their systematic oppression. And as I expected, most of the stuff in this Hi-Fructose did not move me, did not speak to me. There was even a group called the Billboard Liberation Front that over-valued what it did, feeling itself some great monkeywrench gang style free art organization, but I don't know. Seemed like a bunch of assholes who had a bunch of the old RE:Search books from back in the day. Really, if you had those, you've seen what they are doing already. It's nothing new. Which is my problem with a lot of the street art gone gallery style stuff - it's nothing new. And a lot of it is the same. Like I guess if I see some beady eyed dark painting of a girl lost in a forest, I'm supposed to know who the artist is, since that's their style. But it looks a lot like this other style.
This has probably come to a head for me as well after the whole Oscars Who is Banksy? Exit through the Gift Shop con game. I watched that movie the weekend of the Oscars (and I don't care about the Oscars, it just happened to coincide with me watching that movie). The movie kind of pissed me off, because it seemed a rather obvious con job, not just in creating Mr. Brainwash but creating this fake documentary, and yeah sure, I dig the fact the art world is full of shit. But so were those dudes. I mean, I have long not been down with Shepard Fairey as a pretentious con man who overhypes his actual artistic value to the world at large. There is an aspect to that with Banksy as well. And if I know the con is on, but I am part of your con, well, as a con artist, I find that insulting. Do not work me in the process of working the marks, or fuck you bro. (And do not get me wrong, this world is still full of marks. I think the hyperpace of internet/twitter/facebooks makes it easier to trick people into thinking they are part of something they are not rather than harder. That's one of the reasons I try to be extremely honest here, and if you contact me or comment, I will try to comment back and definitely contact back. There are too many con men inside these cyberbots, and I do not want you to associate me with that. Although I am probably fucked up.)
That being said, I decided to find something I liked in this here Hi-Fructose number 18, and that would be Jean-Pierre Roy and his weird cybergeddon paintings. They are really pretty, and if sized correctly as I imagine them in my brain (3 foot by 5 foot), I would love to have one of them hanging in the Museum of my Mind one day. Still though, even at only $7 (which is cheap by high-falutin' art magazine standards), Hi-Fructose was yet again a goddamned waste. Unless you are a Peruvian Indian natural ink maker.
3 comments:
you didnt like the cut wood pieces that one dude makes?
i appreciate those because i can only imagine that they are painstakingly tedious-and that dude must get all kinds of lost (or found) in his brain when he is cutting and sanding and painting those hundreds of tiny pieces. so i can respect that dudes process.. if he was trying to really sell out on those so to speak, he could have made up a whole entire story behind all the characters he creates. instead, he just says i never liked religion and these are what they are.
so i think based on his process and the fact that they just look cool, they are respect worthy. Besides--its kind of more more folksy crafty true to himself art that just happened to get scooped up by a big name gallery
yeah, that stuff was cool. I just get bogged down with how derivative a lot of that stuff is, and how it's derivative of this tiny little genre, but then props itself up, preaching to the converted. I always hate preaching to the converted.
that billboard liberation front shit killed me though.
Hi-fructose = art candy, literally.Bubble gum colored, rainbow bag of bubbles,
and Mark Ryden.
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