(In)Famous "Filthy Art" By Openly Gay Artist Robert Mapplethorpe Sold For $478,000

Interesting news from the New York Times today. Robert Mapplethorpe's (in)famous black and white photograph (innocuously titled "Man in Polyester Suit") which once was called "filthy art" by Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina during an ongoing cultural war about publicly funded art and the Southern Republican senator's crusade against homosexuality and pornography, has been sold for almost a half-million dollars at auction.

The picture, which features what is clearly a dark-skinned man wearing a 3-piece polyester suit with his penis hanging out out of the fly of the pants, has been analyzed as many things, but is clearly a signature piece of homoerotic art and a blunt representation of (black) masculinity.

This is how the Times describes it:

“Man in Polyester Suit,” a black-and-white image from 1980 depicting a black man wearing a three-piece suit, with his penis exposed, was estimated at $250,000 to $350,000. 

The image helped touch off a cultural conflagration in 1989 when Senator Jesse Helms cited it among examples of “filthy art” which had received funding from the National Endowment for the Arts. 

“Man in Polyester Suit” was also part of a show of Mapplethorpe works that led to criminal obscenity charges against the director of Cincinnati’s Contemporary Arts Center. (He was acquitted in 1990.) The decidedly not-safe-for-work image, which cannot be reproduced here, can be easily found through a search engine. 

In subsequent years the image has come to be seen as a key Mapplethorpe work, touching on issues of race, class and sexual stereotypes. 

Even though my personal blog is flagged as pornography by some search engines, I am not comfortable with posting the uncensored image, which you can find easily in any search engine, or at this link. It's quite an image!

Hat/tip to Arts Beat

CELEBRITY FRIDAY: Tarell Alvin McCraney: Black, Gay Genius!

Recently the MacArthur Foundation announced its latest roster of MacArthur Fellows, better known as the "genius grants" they are no-strings-attached $625,000 awards given directly to individuals "to encourage people of outstanding talent to pursue their own creative, intellectual, and professional inclinations."

At least two of this year's 2013 class of 24 winners are openly LGBT. Tarell Alvin McRaney, 32, is an award-winning playwright and Carrie Mae Weems, 60, is a well-known photographer. Here's a short description of this talented young gay Black man:

Tarell Alvin McCraney is a playwright exploring the rich diversity of the African American experience in works that imbue the lives of ordinary people with epic significance. Complementing his poetic, intimate language with a musical sensibility and rhythmic, often ritualistic movement, McCraney transforms intentionally minimalist stages into worlds marked by metaphor and imagery. 

His most well-known works, a triptych collectively titled The Brother/Sister Plays (2009), weave West African Yoruban cosmology into modern-day stories of familial self-sacrifice, unrequited love, and coming of age. The audience becomes an essential part of the story as the characters speak their stage directions and inner feelings directly to the viewers. In Head of Passes (2013) and Choir Boy (2012), McCraney draws on themes that run throughout the Book of Job and traditional spirituals, respectively, to explore the role of faith and tradition in two very different close-knit worlds. Head of Passes, set in the isolated marshlands of the Mississippi River Delta, dramatizes a matriarch’s struggle to maintain her faith as her world literally falls apart around her. In Choir Boy, students at an elite boarding school remain united in their dedication to performing traditional spirituals even as they navigate the fraught nature of adolescent self-expression.

It's nice to see the MacArthur Foundation recognize that "genius" comes in all different shapes, sizes and colors and is present in every community. Very psyched to see LGBT people of color recognized in this way!
Hat/tip to Rod 2.0

Celebrity Friday: Los Angeles' Lesbian Poet Laureate

Mayor Antonio Villaraigosa has named Eloise Klein Healy to become the first Poet Laureate of Los Angeles.

The Advocate reports:

Healy has written six collections of poetry, including Passing and Artemis in Echo Park, which were both nominated for Lambda Literary Awards. The latter publication is inspired by a Los Angeles neighborhood. She also received the Grand Prize of the Los Angeles Poetry Festival and has been honored with several Pushcart Prize nominations. Her latest book, A Wild Surmise, is forthcoming.

Healy will "serve as the official ambassador of Los Angeles’ vibrant poetry and literary culture,” according to a press release, with responsibilities that include oversight of several readings, programs, and the composition of poems dedicated to the city.

Healy responds with some thoughts of her own on being named to the position:

I thought of the hundreds of readings I have done and the audiences who welcomed my work. I've had time to look back on benefits I've read at for poets who were ill and causes that needed some fundraising help--the things that are a part of most poets' lives because we usually have a community of two that holds our emotional and political allegiance. For example, since the AIDS crisis came into our lives, I have never published a book without a poem about someone who died from an AIDS-related illness.

It's just quite amazing that such a thing has happened to me.

I'm fine with it, but I feel the tug to get back to writing and I already know I will worry about my time. That's just part of being a poet--needing time and space and there's never quite enough of that.

I have lived in and loved the City of Los Angeles for 58 years and I am happy to be a servant of the people and their languages and traditions. I am also happy to have a major new challenge at this point in my life.

Congratulations!

Celebrity Friday (extra): Keith Haring on google.com

Today's Google doodle recognizes openly gay artist Keith Haring who would be 54 today if he had not died of AIDS in 1990 at the age of 36.

MOVIE REVIEW: Midnight In Paris

I must admit that Woody Allen movies are not usually my thing although I have seen the classics (Annie Hall, Hannah and Her Sisters, Sleeper, Bullets over Broadway, Manhattan) and more recently viewed Match Point on Netflix but have never gotten around to seeing his latest triumph, Vicky Cristina Barcelona. However, lots of people recommended this summer's sleeper hit, Woody's Midnight in Paris,  which like most of his films has a stellar cast. This time that cast include Oscar-winners Marion Cotillard, Adrien Brody, Kathy Bates and Owen Wilson and Rachel McAdams. Oscar-nominee Michael Sheen (The Queen, Frost vs. Nixon) has an amusing role. 

The movie is centered around an interesting question: Would you rather have been born in a different historical era? The question stems from a character who is unhappy with his life and thus wonders whether life was better in the past. The movie explores Paris in the 1930s when famous figures like Gertrude Stein, Pablo Picasso, Ernest Hemingway, Scott and Zelda Fitzegerald, Salvador Dali and many others were all contemporaries.

The film is somewhat diverting but suffers from the historical equivalent of a movie shot in numerous picturesque locations without a compelling plot to maintain the attention of the audience. In other words it seems like something of a "travelogue" with various famous historical figures breezing in and out of the frame without the audience becoming fully engaged in the characters' dilemmas.

That being said, Midnight in Paris is a film which you will think about more than very many of the other entertainments served up by Hollywood (Thor, Captain America, X-Men: First Class, Green Lantern, just to name a few) which have an evanescent presence in one's memory almost immediately after leaving the theater.

Title: Midnight in Paris.
Director: Woody Allen.
Running Time: 1 hour, 34 minutes.
MPAA Rating: PG-13 for some sexual references and smoking.
Release Date: June 10, 2011.
Viewing Date: August 27, 2011.

Plot: B+.
Acting: B+.
Visuals: B+.
Impact: A-.


Overall Grade: (3.416/4.0).

Design For Obama

Joe.My.God hooked me up to this cool site called Design for Obama where artists have submitted some amazing posters to inspire people to support Obama. Here are a few of my favorites:





Which do you like?