Misery loves company, and the art scene is full of miserable people. In our vast, virtual memetic culture, @JERRYGOGOSIAN is dissecting the great unregulated art market and its strange ecosystem of fear, lies and egomaniacism. Everyone knows she, or he, is on the inside, but the constant guessing only fuels the fire: Who is @JERRYGOGOSIAN? Click here to read.
Read Our Exclusive Interview With Alex Kazemi on the Creation of Mudditchgirl91 and the Social Experiment Gone Awry →
A few weeks ago, a mysterious series of short vignettes began arriving on Snapchat under the handle mudditchgirl91. Soon, the vignettes were edited together for a short film called Snapchat: Mudditchgirl91. In the film, mudditchgirl91 pines for a mudditchboy with a string of strange and shocking anecdotes, like wondering if mass murderer Elliot Rodger’s cum tastes like avocado oil. People freaked out. Who was mudditchgirl91? In another week, Marilyn Manson had tweeted a link to the video and the mudditchgirl91 phenomenon went viral. A day or two after that, one more film was released – it was mudditchgirl91’s suicide note. Just like that, she was dead. The real story, though, is that mudditchgirl91 was a character in an elaborate plot filmed in real time on the popular social media video sharing site, Snapchat, and directed by Vancouver based artist, novelist, and boy genius Alex Kazemi. Read our interview with the social provocateur on the true story of mudditchgirl91 - and see an exclusive behind the scenes video of Kazemi directing the actress, Bella McFadden.
Mark Flood Gives An Obscene and Depraved Lesson On How To Become An Artist @ The SFAQ [Project] Space
It’s clear that Houston based artist Mark Flood has a love/hate relationship with the art world – with the scales often leaning toward the latter. It feeds him, clothes him and allows him to make his work, but what he hates is the politics, the obsequiousness of collectors, the hyperbole of the press, the endless “bad” art, and the rusty, death defying latter good artists put themselves through to get to the top. These are allow things Flood is exploring in Some Frequently Assked Questions – a show that is on view now at the exciting SFAQ [Project] Space in the gritty Tenderloin neighborhood of San Francisco. A perfect place to stage Flood’s vitriol, but nonetheless it’s a brilliant, must-see show that may be one of the best of the year. Some pieces of note are two triptychs smattered with memes that read as a how-to-guide for making it to the top of the art food chain – the images are gruesome, pornographic, horrifying tidbits plucked from the netherweb – stand back and it spells out LOL and KEK, which is a World of Warcraft translation of the former. Some Frequently Assked Questions will be on view until August 15, 2015 at the SFAQ [Project] Space, O'Farrell, 441 O'Farrell St, San Francisco, CA. Text and photographs by Oliver Maxwell Kupper