Salvador Dali's
Dream of Venus, one of the
earliest full-scale art installation pieces, raised some eyebrows at the 1939 World's Fair. Visitors entered beneath the spread legs of a woman in high heels to find a grotto featuing Venus,
a topless sleeping actress on a red satin bed surrounded by lobsters and champagne bottles. Her dream, visible through the nearby window, included
cavorting (again topless) mermaids flapping their rubber fins and playing a woman-shaped piano. Murry Korman
took many iconic photos of the spectacle. What few knew was that Dali was engaged in
a battle of creative crontol with his sponsor, a rubber tycoon and creator of rubber mermaid tails among other things. Dali would appear on site while the exhibition was being created and
snip the tails off of the mermaids (pdf). While he was not around for the opening of his creation, he purportedly hired a plane to drop printed leaflets over New York: "
The Declaration of the Independence of the Imagination and the Rights of Man to his Own Madness," a protest against efforts to interfere with his vision.
[some links NSFW, via]
posted by jessamyn
on Nov 5, 2011 -
27 comments
Amanda Lear is one of the greatest enigmatic personalities to emerge from the 70's. Known in equal measures for her disco hits (such as
Enigma,
Queen of Chinatown, and
Follow Me WARNING, youtube link) and her affairs with David Bowie, Brian Ferry of Roxy Music (and thus appearing on their
For Your Pleasure album cover) and Salvador Dali. Her past was
hazy at best. The most debated aspect of her past (so prevalent as to be mentioned even in
reviews of her paintings is what sex she was born (One popular telling of the rumor even claimed it was
Dali who paid for her surgery to become a woman). Her more recent, very private life took a tragic turn in 2000 when her home in France burned down killing her husband, the equally interesting
Alain-Philippe Malagnac d'Argens de Villele. [MI]
posted by piratebowling
on Mar 13, 2006 -
17 comments
"Romantic"...or "Neo-National-Socialist" Realism? If the following
representations can whatsoever be called 'realist', then wherefore the campy
ideological vulgarity of their subject matter, which make
Leroy Neiman's works - yes, you may remember him accurately from the notorious
Burger King collection of the late 1970's - seem as profound as Salvador Dali (
156 MB - and "obscene" - MPEG file)? To wit:
"Romantic Realism, the movement which renews the high esthetic standards and techniques of pre-20th century ateliers, brings a rebirth of comprehensibility, beauty, romanticism and stylization to contemporary subject matter."
Linked from Instapundit. (Do political posts rendered as purely aesthetic questions merit "newsfilter" warnings?
Consult the
zeitgeist! And apologies for the question sounding like the title of a
Paul Zindel play.)
Qu'est-ce que c'est, le 'degenerate art', vraiment?
posted by objet
on Oct 11, 2005 -
32 comments
Way Lay is the homepage of cartoonist Carol Lay, creator of the strip Story Minute. In addition to being one of the few places one can
view the strip without going through Salon's obnoxious free pass system. The site has the best
autobiography I've seen for an artist site and images of earlier
bizarre parodies of Salvador Dali and the Shroud of Turin.
posted by KirkJobSluder
on Apr 24, 2003 -
7 comments
