At Art Basel Miami, Malcolm McLaren is getting back in the act:
Mr. McLaren allowed that since he had attended several art schools (and been thrown out of most of them), he was coming full circle. He also copped to being an opportunist. “I’m trying to meet the zeitgeist,” he said, “and art is the hottest cultural form around.”
David Velasco’s Art Forum Diary entry gives us this scene of Takashi Murakami:
Arriving very late for the latter, I bumped into a blissed-out Takashi Murakami, wearing a massive plush ball of a suit and dancing wildly in the gallery’s foyer. “You look familiar. Are you one of Perrotin’s artists?” asked a curious woman. Murakami nodded vociferously but didn’t stop prancing. “He’s finally living his ultimate dream—he’s become a giant cartoon character,” a friend observed. I couldn’t shake from my mind the acute perverseness of the gesture; its amalgamation of “furry” sexual subcultures and his performance of the artist as court jester hit all the right notes.
And the Independent‘s Arifa Akbar gives us the scene inside the Turner Prize party:
Germaine Greer stood imperiously at one end of the hall, while Sir Nicholas Serota hugged Nicky Haslam warmly at the other and dismissed the bile visited upon the Turner every year. “It was conceived as a prize to raise public debate, which is what it continues to do,” he said. Antony Gormley, another Turner laureate, was momentarily gripped by a huge sculpture which he gazed upon in awe.
Anarchy? Not It’s Art (New York Times)
Fair Enough (Art Forum)
The Fine Art of Revelry (The Independent)