All posts tagged: artist

Pop artist who helped register most new voters in 2024 revealed

Pop artist who helped register most new voters in 2024 revealed

Sign up to Roisin O’Connor’s free weekly newsletter Now Hear This for the inside track on all things music Get our Now Hear This email for free Get our Now Hear This email for free Sabrina Carpenter helped register more new voters ahead of today’s US presidential election than any other artist. The “Please Please Please” singer, 25, worked with voter registration organisation HeadCount. HeadCount told The Independent that Carpenter registered 35,814 voters, with an additional 263,087 voters engaged in other ways, such as checking their registration status or polling location. She achieved this feat through giveaways, in-person activations and video boards on the US leg of her Short n’ Sweet tour, and mailers. The organisation also said that Green Day’s Savior Tour broke HeadCount’s all-time record for most voters engaged for a single tour, registering over 7,900 new voters and engaging over 61,000 voters through in-person activations. This figure nearly doubles the previous record set by Ariana Grande’s 2019 Sweetener World Tour. Green Day’s Billie Joe Armstrong, Sabrina Carpenter and Ariana Grande (Getty) In …

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb

A Short Visual History of America, According to the Irreverent Comic Artist R. Crumb

As a founder of the “under­ground comix” move­ment in the 1960s, R. Crumb is either revered as a pio­neer­ing satirist of Amer­i­can cul­ture and its excess­es or reviled as a juve­nile pur­vey­or of painful­ly out­mod­ed sex­ist and racist stereo­types. Crumb doesn’t apol­o­gize. He keeps work­ing, and his fans are grate­ful. He has par­layed his sex­u­al obses­sions and out­sider rela­tion­ship to black cul­ture into an intrigu­ing vision of the coun­try that reflects its own fix­a­tions as much as those of the artist/author of comics like Zap and Weirdo. But Crumb’s work—permeated by drug use, pop-cul­ture ref­er­ences, skirt-chas­ing over­sexed men, very specif­i­cal­ly shaped (and always sex­u­al­ly avail­able) women, and all sorts of creepy under­ground characters—has anoth­er side: an almost sen­ti­men­tal attach­ment to purist Amer­i­cana from the late-nine­teen­th/ear­ly-twen­ti­eth cen­tu­ry. Most notably Crumb is an anti­quar­i­an col­lec­tor of old-time music—country, jazz, rag­time, the blues—as well as a musi­cal inter­preter of the same. One of my favorites of his books col­lects a series of trad­ing cards he made into R. Crumb’s Heroes of Blues, Jazz & Coun­try, a rev­er­en­tial set …

Safeya Binzagr, Artist Who Preserved Saudi Culture, Dies at 84

Safeya Binzagr, Artist Who Preserved Saudi Culture, Dies at 84

Safeya Binzagr, a pioneering artist who eternalized folk heritage in her native Saudi Arabia, died on September 12 at 86. The news was first reported by the Abu Dhabi–based publication The National. Binzagr’s trailblazing career revolved the idiosyncrasies of indigenous Saudi culture, which was increasingly imperiled by modernization in the mid-19th century. Aware of the limitations of oral histories—at the time, record-keeping was not common practice in the Arabian Gulf—Binzagr documented traditional architecture and domestic rituals over several years. Once settled, she translated these studies into intricate fabric collages, expressive sketches, and boldly colored paintings. Related Articles Born in Al Balad in Jeddah in 1940, Binzagr grew up alongside the newly united kingdom. Oil money poured into immense urban projects, but arts infrastructure—the sort that sustains generations—was nonexistent. Options for an artist to succeed professionally were limited, and even more so for a female artist. That would change, in part, because of Binzagr. She left Saudi to study in Cairo and, later, London, finally returning home in the late ’60s. As a teacher, she supported …

Richard Pettibone, Artist Who Appropriated Others’ Art, Dies at 86

Richard Pettibone, Artist Who Appropriated Others’ Art, Dies at 86

Richard Pettibone, a painter whose enigmatic work involved copying famed contemporary artworks and then exhibiting these smaller-scale lookalikes, died on August 19 at 86. A representative for New York’s Castelli Gallery, which has shown Pettibone since 1969, said he died following a fall. During the 1960s, well before the heyday of appropriation art two decades later, Pettibone began making replicas of paintings by Andy Warhol, Roy Lichtenstein, Frank Stella, and others. Unlike Sturtevant, another artist famous for duplicating well-known pieces by giants of contemporary art, Pettibone produced objects that were clearly different in size from the originals. Related Articles Many of Pettibone’s paintings were far smaller than their source materials. This choice was part of Pettibone’s conceptual game of determining what constitutes value. Notably, he began this project during the ’60s, at a time when the art market was greatly expanding. The work was only partially intended as parody. “Stella thinks I’m mocking him, and he’s right, I am mocking him,” Pettibone once told Art in America. “But I also greatly admire him. But I …

King’s Birthday Honours list: Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon, artist Tracey Emin and actress Imelda Staunton among big names awarded | UK News

King’s Birthday Honours list: Duran Duran’s Simon Le Bon, artist Tracey Emin and actress Imelda Staunton among big names awarded | UK News

The King’s Birthday Honours list has been published, with leading artist Tracey Emin, pop icon Simon Le Bon and stage and screen actress Imelda Staunton among those recognised. Other well-known faces given honours include Strictly Come Dancing professional Amy Dowden, singer Heather Small and actor Alex Jennings, with the highest award, Companion of Honour, being given to former prime minister Gordon Brown for services to public and charitable services both in the UK and abroad. Post Office victims campaigner Alan Bates was honoured with a knighthood for his services to justice. Image: Alan Bates arriving at the Post Office inquiry in April. Pic: PA Sir Alan, who inspired ITV drama Mr Bates Vs The Post Office, founded the Justice for Subpostmasters Alliance and helped bring the Horizon IT scandal to light, while supporting the hundreds of sub-postmasters who were prosecuted for theft and false accounting, which turned out to be due to errors in the accounting software. In total 1,000 people from across the UK have received honours, for the “immeasurable impact” they have had …

Performance Artist Tags Controversial Courbet Nude with “Me Too”

Performance Artist Tags Controversial Courbet Nude with “Me Too”

A protestor writes “Me Too” on Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Source: Deborah de Robertis.   On Monday, two women painted the words “Me Too” across the protective glass covering Gustave Courbet’s L’Origine du monde (1866) at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. The protestors also chanted the phrase before being removed from the museum and arrested. The French-Luxembourgish artist Deborah de Robertis organized the protest as part of a performance piece titled Don’t Separate the Woman from the Artist.   The famously controversial Courbet nude is currently on loan to the Centre Pompidou-Metz from the Musée d’Orsay for a special exhibition. Four additional artworks in the exhibition were also marked with “Me Too,” and one—I Think Before I Suck by Annette Messager (1991)—was stolen. The missing work is now allegedly in de Robertis’s possession.   Deborah de Robertis and L’Origine du monde Protestors tag artworks and shout “Me Too” at the Centre Pompidou-Metz. Source: Deborah de Robertis.   Monday’s protest was not the first time Deborah de Robertis engaged with L’Origine du monde. In …

Painting of vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet sprayed with ‘MeToo’ graffiti | France

Painting of vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet sprayed with ‘MeToo’ graffiti | France

Two women have sprayed the words “MeToo” on a 19th-century painting of a woman’s vulva by French artist Gustave Courbet in a stunt by a performance artist, a museum and the artist said. “The Origin of the World”, a nude painted from 1866, was protected by a “glass pane” and the police were on site to assess the damage, the Centre Pompidou in the north-eastern city of Metz told AFP on Monday. The work had been on loan to the Centre Pompidou-Metz from the Musee d’Orsay in Paris as part of an exhibition centred on French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who once owned the painting. Metz prosecutor Yves Badorc said two women born in 1986 and 1993 had been arrested after five works in total, including Courbet’s nude, had been sprayed with the words “MeToo”. A third person – who has not been detained – is believed to have stolen another artwork, he said. The stolen piece – red embroidery on white material by French artist Annette Messager – is called “I Think Therefore I Suck”. …

Indie artist Washed Out’s new music video was fully AI-generated

Indie artist Washed Out’s new music video was fully AI-generated

A chillwave musician last week uploaded the first entirely artificial intelligence-generated music video created by OpenAI’s text-to-video model, Sora. Washed Out’s latest song, “The Hardest Part,” was released Thursday, complete with a four-minute music video following a couple’s romance from high school through the rest of their adult lives together — speeding through scenes alluding to a wedding, child-rearing and eventual death. The video’s director, Paul Trillio, wrote in a statement shared by Washed Out’s record label, Sub Pop, that he had wanted to film such an “infinite zoom” concept for a decade now but never attempted it because he believed it would be too ambitious. “I was specifically interested in what makes Sora so unique. It offers something that couldn’t quite be shot with a camera, nor could it be animated in 3D, it was something that could have only existed with this specific technology,” Trillio wrote. “The surreal and hallucinatory aspects of AI allow you to explore and discover new ideas that you would have never dreamed of.” Sora, which is not yet …

Artist hopes rare signed portrait of Churchill will fetch £1m at auction | Winston Churchill

Artist hopes rare signed portrait of Churchill will fetch £1m at auction | Winston Churchill

At the age of 90, and with a successful career as a sports artist under his belt, there is one work of which Paul Trevillion is particularly proud. Perhaps surprisingly, it isn’t among his portraits of legendary stars such as Sugar Ray Robinson, Pelé, Muhammad Ali, George Best, Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. It is an image of another of Trevillion’s heroes: a pen-and-ink drawing of Winston Churchill created in 1955, and carrying a rare signature of the UK’s wartime leader. Now, to mark the 80th anniversary of D-day in June and the 150th anniversary of Churchill’s birth in November, Trevillion has decided to auction the portrait. He hopes it will fetch more than £1m, the sum it was insured for when it went on display in 2017 at the National Football Museum in Manchester. Some of the proceeds will go to charity. Paul Trevillion’s portrait of Churchill. Trevillion, who was born in Tottenham, north London, in 1934, decided to create an image of Churchill after he read about the former prime minister’s dismay over …

American Abstract Artist Frank Stella Dies at 87

American Abstract Artist Frank Stella Dies at 87

The artist Frank Stella photographed by Christopher Gregory. Source: The New York Times.   Frank Stella, an American artist famous for testing the limits of abstraction across artistic media, died on Saturday, May 4 at age 87. In a statement announcing his passing, the artist’s New York representative, Marianne Boesky Gallery, said, “A giant of post-war abstract art, Stella’s extraordinary, perpetually evolving oeuvre investigated the formal and narrative possibilities of geometry and color and the boundaries between painting and objecthood.”   Frank Stella’s Early Minimalism Was Subversive and Successful Zambezi by Frank Stella, 1959. Source: San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.   Frank Stella was born in Malden, Massachusetts in 1936 to Italian-American parents. By his early twenties, he had achieved critical and commercial success as a pioneering post-war artist in New York City. At the start of his career, Stella created a series of abstract works known as Black Paintings. Wielding a house-painter’s brush and commercial enamel paint, Stella applied evenly-spaced black lines onto a bare canvas. He painted about two dozen of these …