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Broadcast Your Face Above Times Square
By Glenn Gamboa


NEW YORK -- The 50-foot-high faces that flash and twitch on a massive LED screen 48 stories above Times Square are all different. Some smile. Some scowl. Some try to look sexy. Some look like they're ready to brawl.
Unlike all the other faces in the advertising-saturated sky above midtown Manhattan, the ones in Raul Vincent Enriquez's latest art installation, which launches Thursday, aren't trying to sell anything. The only concept Enriquez says he is trying to convey with his new piece, I in the Sky, is the importance of eye contact.
"We just need more eye contact; it's what makes us human," the Brooklyn-based artist says. "I think it's really fascinating. It can be the invitation to a fight or a sign that you're understanding somebody."
I in the Sky's giant color close-ups mix the sci-fi creepiness of Big Brother's omnipresent eye with twitchy and amusing personal moments, depending on the subjects' facial expressions and animators' tweaks. Although the project's scope is big, with plans for more than 10,000 people to have their faces shown on the 2,500-square-foot Lumacom screen over the next seven weeks, Enriquez says the focus remains small -- on the eyes.
In fact, the eyes are actually what make the whole process technologically possible.
Each video portrait used in I in the Sky is the result of a subject sitting in a specially designed photo booth at the nearby chashama gallery. Participants stare at a camera for 30 seconds, and 30 photographs are produced. A computer program lines up the eyeballs in each of the pictures, and animators enhance certain facial movements to create a vibrant video portrait with a flip-book feel.
"You get to pick up on people's little tics and twitches, because they are sitting in front of the camera for 30 seconds," Enriquez says. "Some of their personality comes out in this very curious way. People [who've seen the portraits] have said they feel very voyeuristic, like they're looking at somebody who's looking at themselves in the mirror alone. They kind of feel like they're violating that person's privacy because you get to see this moment that they're having with the camera."
Anita Durst, chashama's artistic director, says that when she learned the $200,000-a-month LED billboard above the Durst Organization's building at 4 Times Square was available for a public art project, she thought Enriquez's animated portraits would be an excellent fit.
"It lets ordinary people be famous for a minute," Durst says. "It reshapes the way we think about the skyline."
I in the Sky adds a bit of human warmth to the Manhattan skyline, and Enriquez wanted that warmth to be reflected in the photo booth that serves as the interface between the public and the massive sign. Artist-designer Michael Casselli says that the booth was inspired by Federal-style architecture, H.G. Wells' The Time Machine and bits of the industrial revolution: all juxtapositions with the high-tech processes that would go on inside.
"If it's too slick and cold," Casselli says, "it wouldn't be as inviting."
For Enriquez, the invitation is important, since public involvement will help make the installation a success.
"It's important to take these little mundane moments and make them grand," he says. "There's an absurdity to it, but that's what makes it fun and engaging."
- - -
The I in the Sky project runs through April 26. Participants can have their portraits taken free for the installation at the chashama gallery, 112 W. 44th St., Manhattan, on Thursdays, Fridays and Saturdays from noon to 8 p.m. The videos will be shown on the LED billboard and be available for download at the project website.


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Stolen paintings found in Zurich

Two paintings stolen in one of the world's largest art thefts have been recovered in an abandoned car, Swiss police have confirmed.

Art News - IB Art Online StudioThe pictures, by Vincent van Gogh and Claude Monet, were among four paintings worth $160m (£82m) that were stolen from Zurich's Emil Buehrle Collection. They were discovered on the back seat of a white sedan parked outside a psychiatric hospital in the city.
Three masked, armed men took the artworks from the museum last week.
'Good condition'

The two recovered paintings are Monet's Poppies near Vetheuil (1879) and van Gogh's Chestnut in Bloom (1890).
They were in good condition and still under the glass behind which they were displayed in the museum, Zurich police commandant Philipp Hotzenkoecherle said.
The two other stolen paintings, Degas's Count Lepic and his Daughters (1871) and Cezanne's Boy in a Red Jacket (1888), are still missing.
Police closed the area around the Psychiatric University Clinic, about 500m from the gallery, on Monday after a suspicious car was found.
The impressionist artworks were identified by museum director Lukas Gloor after a thorough inspection.
After the 10 February robbery, Mr Gloor said the works were so well known that it would be impossible to try and sell them on the open market.
The three thieves who stole the paintings are still at large.
"The severe wound which was inflicted on our house on 10 February has been closed somewhat," said Lukas Gloor, curator of the collection at the museum.


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Still Missing
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From The Times
January 25, 2008
Juan Munoz: A Retrospective
Rachel Campbell-Johnston at Tate Modern

Juan Munoz
Prepare to feel disconcerted. The Spanish sculptor Juan Muñoz does not allow you to settle. His pieces instil an intense self-awareness. As the spectator moves through this show, passing beneath empty iron balconies, across deserted courtyards, around isolated figures or through laughing crowds, he gradually feels a growing sense of unease. Was somebody watching you? Is it you they are waiting for? What are they whispering? Is there a threat? Muñoz offers no answers. As he explained in an interview with The Times at his 2001 Tate Turbine Hall installation, only a few weeks before his death at the age of 48, even he doesn’t really understand what he makes. His work may reach out to encompass something that he can’t quite put his finger on but in the end the places that he wishes to evoke are essentially poetic. They are those hinterlands that lie very close to comprehension yet remain unclear.
Muñoz first came to attention in the mid-1980s, a forerunner of a new generation of sculptors – Katharina Fritsch and Thomas Schütte for example – who were returning to a figurative tradition. Developing a fundamentally sculptural fascination with space, he began to create architectural objects and installations: stage sets that he peopled with his theatrical cast of slightly smaller than life-sized grey figures engaged in fragmented narratives that are never elucidated. A dwarf waits silently among the pillars, a ventriloquist’s dummy perches on a shelf, a man puts his ear to the wall and strains to listen. But these pieces are not complete without the visitor. You are a participant in, not a spectator of, this world. To move through this retrospective is to glide through your own inner feelings. The experience can feel pretty spooky.
Imagine the most frightening cocktail party you have been to. It is probably a bit like Many Times, the 1999 installation by Muñoz. A room is filled with a milling crowd of identikit grey men. Each has the same laughing face; each looks so animate. And yet none responds to you. You slide amid them, estranged and increasingly isolated. The eye-creasing smiles acquire a hard, sinister edge. It’s a mistake that his most effective installation, Towards the Corner, has not been included.
Muñoz is not interested in formal experiment. Why make it look new, he once asked, when it will only look old later? Faithful to a fundamentally idiosyncratic vision he creates an environment that can show us the world in fresh ways. As you progress through this Tate Modern retrospective you will probably find that your perceptions become subtly altered. Every step that you take raises another question. Your mind may come to rest again – but it won’t be in the same place.
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Art attack

When he accidentally put his elbow through his $139m Picasso in 2006, Las Vegas casino king Steve Wynn only had himself to blame. But who stabbed a Rembrandt? And why was a Rodin sculpture blown up? John Hind puts 13 unlucky works of art in the frame

Sunday January 27, 2008
The Observer


1 Pablo Picasso goes 'Pop'LLe ReveOne day after informing them he'd just agreed to sell Le Reve for a record $139m to a hedge fund manager, Las Vegas casino kingpin Steve Wynn invited guests to view it in his office. While explaining the painting's provenance, he put his elbow through it, exclaiming: 'Oh no, oh s--t!' A conservator charged $90,500 for 'rissverklebung' (thread reintegration) and then Wynn put in a claim to Lloyds for $54m, based on a post-restoration valuation of $85m. 'Picasso used the cheapest thin canvas - and it went "Pop!", like shrink-wrap,' noted Wynn. 'I almost made the biggest mistake of my life selling that painting, but I got lucky and poked a hole in it.'
2 Diego Velazquez gets slashedRokeby VenusAfter repeatedly slashing the naked back of the woman in the Rokeby Venus at London's National Gallery in 1914, suffragette Mary Richardson explained: 'I tried to destroy the picture of the most beautiful woman in mythological history as a protest against the government for destroying Mrs Pankhurst. Justice is as much an element of beauty as colour and outline.' Thirty-eight years later she gave a different explanation for her actions: 'I didn't like the way men gaped at it all day long.' In 1918 three suffragists attacked 13 paintings in Manchester City Art Gallery with hammers - three of the works were by Victorian painter George Frederic Watts, the worst damaged being his Prayer
3 Rodin is dynamitedThe Thinker-castIn 1970 one of Auguste Rodin's original casts of his world-famous sculpture The Thinker, situated outside the Cleveland Museum of Art in Ohio, was dynamited by members of the radical group The Weathermen, who later accidentally blew themselves up. The lower parts of the legs of The Thinker were annihilated, its base expanded, twisted and contorted. Since the decision was made to re-mount it in its damaged form, a generation has grown up in Cleveland believing that the sculpture was conceived that way by Rodin. At Tate Britain in 2003 Rodin's The Kiss was (with permission) wrapped in a mile of string by artist Cornelia Parker, prompting outraged artist Piers Butler to cut the string.
4 Mondrian is vomited onComposition With Red and BlueThe head conservator at New York's Moma says that decisions to undertake restoration, such as 'pigment work-ups', are often based on whether 'the thrill has gone from a painting'. Similar motivation was claimed by artist Jubal Brown, who ate blue cake icing and blue Jell-O before entering Moma in order to projectile vomit on to Piet Mondrian's Composition With Red and Blue - to 'liven it up... I found its lifelessness threatening'. Brown had months earlier vomited red on to Raoul Dufy's Harbour at le Havre in the Art Gallery of Ontario, where the head conservator said: 'Fingerprints can be much more difficult. Touching - of abstracts especially - is chronic here.'
5 Rembrandt is slashed, slashed again and then sprayed with acidThe NightwatchThe Nightwatch holds the dubious honour of being attacked three times in Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum. In 1911 an ex-navy chef, disgruntled by discharge and considering it the state's most valuable possession, attacked it with a knife 'to cool my anger'. In 1975 an unemployed teacher, declaring 'Jesus sent me', slashed it repeatedly, later explaining: 'Rembrandt was the master of light, but when he painted The Nightwatch he was under the influence of the dark.' In 1990 an escaped psychiatric patient sprayed sulphuric acid on it. Released nine years later, the same attacker cut a large circular hole in Picasso's painting Nude in Front of the Garden
6 Andres Serrano is given a good kicking and then gets hammeredPiss ChristIn 1997 the director of the National Gallery in Melbourne closed down an exhibition after two attacks in two days upon Serrano's Piss Christ. In the first attack, Christian John Allen Haywood wrenched the photograph - of Christ on the cross submerged in urine - from the wall and kicked it; in the second, a youth hammered the photograph eight times while another youth 'distracted guards' by jump-kicking a juxtaposed Serrano portrait of a Ku Klux Klan member. Last year, hooded neo-Nazis broke into the Kulturen Gallery in Skane, Sweden, to attack photographs in Serrano's The History of Sex, then posted film of it on YouTube.
7 Marcus Harvey is splashed with inkMyraIn 1997, at the Sensation show at London's Royal Academy, artist Peter Fisher threw red and blue ink at Harvey's Myra, hours after another artist, Jacques Role, had thrown eggs at it. Sensation, which also included Tracey Emin's Everyone I Ever Slept With (later destroyed in a £60m warehouse fire) subsequently moved to Brooklyn's Museum of Art. There, Chris Ofili's Holy Virgin Mary (portraying an African Virgin decorated with dung and pornography) was sprayed with white paint by retired teacher Dennis Heiner, whose blind wife found it blasphemous. When Mayor Guiliani withheld the museum's grant, 200 'art lovers' threw dung at a painting of Guiliani as the Virgin Mary.
8 Claude Monet is punchedLe Pont d'ArgenteuilOne midnight last year, five drunks somehow accessed the rear of the Musee d'Orsay in Paris, wherein one of them punched a hole in Monet's prized painting of the Seine. Following the attack, the minister of culture promised to seek stronger sanctions against the painting's 'desecrators'. A week later, having visited Avignon's Museum of Contemporary Art and kissed an all-white abstract painting by Cy Twombly, a woman appeared in court and heard the owner's lawyer declare her lipstick stain 'as aggressive as a punch'. She insisted that she loved Twombly's work, had been 'overcome with passion' in its presence and 'thought he would understand'.
9 Leonardo Da Vinci is blasted with a shotgunVirgin and Child with St Anne and St John the BaptistIn 1987, for reasons he couldn't explain, ex-soldier Robert Cambridge drew a 12-bore shotgun from under his coat and fired at the Virgin's breast in Da Vinci's Virgin and Child with St Anne and St John the Baptist at London's National Gallery, resulting in 'cauliflower-like' damage. In 1962 an artist had thrown an ink bottle at the same painting, asking afterwards: 'Would you be prepared to die to protect it?' Also at the National, in 1990 Federico Barocci's Madonna and Child was slashed by Martin Came, an art lover experiencing 'subconscious distress' in relation to the painting due to recent separation from his wife and child.
10 Pablo Picasso is graffitiedGuernicaDuring an anti-war protest at NY's Moma in 1974, 'KILL LIES ALL' was sprayed on Guernica in red by Tony Shafrazi - then an artist, now a top art dealer. He explained: 'I wanted to retrieve Guernica from art history and give it life. I wanted to trespass beyond that invisible barrier that no one is allowed to cross; to dwell within the act of the painting's creation, put my hand within it.' The following year Guernica was moved to Spain, where it was exhibited in a bullet-proof container with armed guards on either side. Picasso, noted Shafrazi, once painted over a Modigliani.
11 Damien Hirst is rubbished and inkedAway From The FlockArt not recognised as art has often fallen prey to cleaners. The most celebrated case is cleaner Emmanuel Asare's bin-bagging at London's Eyestorm Gallery in 2001 of Damien Hirst's installation Painting by Numbers, a representation of his studio and its detritus. 'I didn't think for a second it was art,' explained Asare. Hirst found this 'hysterical'. Less so the pouring of black ink into his sculpture Away From the Flock during an exhibition at the Serpentine Gallery in 1994. The perpetrator, artist Mark Bridger, re-labelled the piece Black Sheep. 'I was providing an interesting addendum to his work,' said Bridger in court.
12 Michelangelo takes a hammeringPietaIn St Peter's in Rome in 1972, geologist Laszlo Toth attacked the Virgin cradling Jesus in Michelangelo's Pieta, removing her arm at the elbow and most of her nose, and chipping her eye. He explained: 'Today is my 33rd birthday, the age Christ died. I did it because the mother of God does not exist. I am Christ. I am Michelangelo. Now I can die.' And in 1991, an unsuccessful artist hammered a toe off David, leading conservators to discover the origins of Michelangelo's marble.
13 Tracey Emins bed springs are testedMy BedIn 1999, at Tate Britain, artists Yuan Cai and JJ Xi intervened in Tracey Emin's installation My Bed. 'Although they got on the bed for a few seconds, mostly they just threatened guards with kung-fu kicks,' said witness Harry Pye. 'They realised we were serious artists - doing it purely from a creative point,' said Xi. 'Don't take seriously Emin saying we were "like failed artists threatening to jump off Waterloo Bridge unless given a gallery" - probably she got drunk.' In 2000, Cai and Xi urinated on Marcel Duchamp's La Fontaine to alleged cheers from Tate Modern visitors.


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Museum says Gaugin's Faun a fake
Posted Thu Dec 13, 2007 9:23am AEDTFake Gaugin

A sculpture by French artist Paul Gauguin which has drawn crowds to a Chicago museum for the past decade is a fake, museum officials say. The ceramic sculpture, The Faun, supposedly by the 19th century French artist, was bought from a private art collector in London in 1997. The collector had purchased it at a 1994 Sotheby's auction. A spokeswoman declined to divulge how much the Art Institute of Chicago had paid for the sculpture, which has been on display at the museum for 10 years. "We were very disappointed, but also very impressed - not only by the very, very good forgery of the object, but also by all the paperwork that identified its origin and its former owners," said spokeswoman Erin Hogan. It turns out that the sculpture is by 47-year-old forger Shaun Greenhalgh, who was jailed for four years and eight months by a Manchester court last month. Greenhalgh and his elderly parents had made a small fortune and fooled experts since 1989 by faking artworks in their small house in Bolton, north-west England. Greenhalgh did most of the artwork while his father played the salesman. Detectives say they may have made some 120 pieces with a total potential value of more than $US20 million ($22.6 million), although their actual profits were less than $US1.2 million. Greenhalgh, his father George and mother Olive pleaded guilty to conspiring to defraud art institutions. His mother was given a suspended 12-month prison sentence, while his father has yet to be sentenced.

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Sex, Money, Glamour, Tractors

Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov are charting new terrain by using the language of Socialist Realism to comment on contemporary Russia
Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov sit and smoke in theirArt News - IB Art Online Studio penthouse studio, not far from Moscow’s Sheremetev Airport. They are laughing as they tell a story about Night Fitness (2004), their large painting of a woman doing a push-up in the shallow end of a swimming pool beneath a night sky filled with stars. They are laughing because the work sold at the Phillips de Pury & Company auction in London last June for $250,000, a record price for them. A few years ago the painting sold for about $15,000.

Dubossarsky talks vividly and almost incessantly, while Vinogradov looks on with a smile. Why are they so amused? “Because we are not the clever ones,” Dubossarsky says.
Andy Warhol in Moscow, 2002, from a series the artists refer to informally as “People Who Never Came to Moscow.”


Clever or not, the duo have entered the top echelon of the market for Russian contemporary art. At Phillips de Pury’s London auction of the John L. Stewart collection last October, their paintings outperformed all sales estimates, according to chairman Simon de Pury. Their 2005 painting Snow sold for more than $225,000, almost doubling its high estimate. More significant, their canvases were auctioned alongside works by some of Russia’s most prominent living artists.

“We are doing consistently well with Dubossarsky and Vinogradov,” says de Pury. “What was interesting was not only the level of prices they attained but to see international collectors as well as Russian collectors bidding.”

The artists are also garnering recognition at home after showing at the Venice Biennale and Deitch Projects in New York in 2003, Vilma Gold in London in 2004, and Saatchi Gallery in London in 2005, among other venues. Their large picture Russian Troika was included in the Guggenheim Museum’s “Russia!” show in 2005. They will be returning to Vilma Gold in March and to Deitch Projects later this year.

Last year they had a surprise hit in Moscow: their picture installation The Four Seasons of Russian Painting, shown as the grand finale of the Tretyakov Gallery’s exhibition of 20th-century Russian art, was a crowd-pleaser. There is only one way out of the Tretyakov’s 20th-century exhibition, and that is to follow it through 42 rooms. This is not an easy undertaking, but The Four Seasons rewards visitors who reach the end. It’s a massive multipanel work that wraps around the room. The first in a series of special projects commissioned by the Tretyakov, it is part of the permanent collection and will be on view for at least the next year.

For the piece, Dubossarsky and Vinogradov took photographs of paintings in the Tretyakov that are recognizable to every Russian—heroic depictions of Lenin and Stalin, sentimental genre scenes, portraits of Pushkin and Gorky, and images of characters from folktales, among many others—then scanned the photos onto canvas and painted them. The result is an exuberant collage of clichés—a Socialist Realist–style pastiche that many gallerygoers find entertaining.

Critics and painters, on the whole, are less enthusiastic about the work. Critic Alexander Panov, for example, said that the entire exhibition appeared to have been put together by designers rather than curators and called Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s contribution a triumph of decoration over art.

The exhibition’s curator, Irina Lebedeva, acknowledges that The Four Seasons has aroused a certain amount of disdain. After all, it was produced by two artists who have been accused of spawning Socialist Realist porn, or “Capitalist Realism”—art intended to capture the fancy of the new rich. But, she adds, visitors like it. “Vladimir Dubossarsky and Alexander Vinogradov are classically trained artists creating a new approach to painting,” she says, standing in front of the work, which hangs from wires like a banner. “They have found a new and unusual approach, the way Erik Bulatov did.” (Bulatov was one of the first painters to parody Socialist Realist icons.) “Not everyone understands that this has been done with great love for Russian art,” Lebedeva insists.

Dubossarsky, 43, and Vinogradov, 44, have known each other since they were teenagers. Both were born in Moscow, studied art at the Surikov Academy, and served in the Russian army. Dubossarsky likes to say that he flunked out of art school: “I left the institute, or they kicked me out. Anyway, I stopped going there, but Sasha [Vinogradov] finished. Afterward we had an idea to paint our first picture together.”

Their initial collaboration, painted in 1994, depicts Picasso standing on the Moscow River Embankment. The first in a series they informally call “People Who Never Came to Moscow,” it was followed by images of the Beatles and Jesus. Andy Warhol also showed up, with a tiger, standing in front of the Cathedral of Christ the Savior. His portrait can be seen in the new Moscow museum (and Web site) Art4.ru, a private showcase for the contemporary-art collection of window-blind tycoon Igor Markin.

The duo had occasional gallery shows in Moscow in their early days, “but we were seen by only a hundred artists and critics,” Dubossarsky recalls. In 1994, the artists say, they were the first to create bright, beautiful paintings in reaction to Moscow’s oppressive atmosphere of confrontational installations and street performances. “You have to understand, when we started working together, there was an opinion here that painting had died,” says Dubossarsky, a tall, lanky man known to friends as Volodya. “In some way, our first project was alternative at that point in time. We didn’t understand what we were doing, but we understood it was against the trend. Aggressive performance art was very popular here. Art was either depressive or aggressive. We decided to create paradise.” Vinogradov smiles at the floor in agreement.

The pair charted new terrain later in the decade when they started to parody the visual language of Socialist Realism to deal with the new Russian ideology of money, sex, and glamour. Russians who have been bombarded from childhood with paintings of idealized life on Soviet collective farms—Sergei Gerasimov’s 1937 Collective Farm Harvest Festival, for example—can appreciate the humor of Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s Harvest Celebration (1995). The painting comes from a series called “Commissioned Paintings.” In the Soviet era, state entities of all kinds commissioned artists to paint pictures. “We pretended we had orders from different institutions, and this one was from the collective farm,” Dubossarsky says.

Western superheroes were also grist for the parody mill. In an untitled painting, a youthful Arnold Schwarzenegger sitting in a field of flowers flexes a bicep for a group of admiring children. And in Happy Day (1995)—the artists call it “a picture for the Reichstag”—shown at Galerie Kai Hilgemann in Berlin, then German chancellor Helmut Kohl watches a wedding ceremony, intended as an allegory for German reunification, under a sky crowded with angels and flowers. Der Spiegel commissioned a portrait of Kohl for its cover after the show.

Russian Troika (1995), the finale to the Guggenheim’s “Russia!” exhibition, was inspired by a familiar image from 19th-century painting and literature. Gogol ended his novel Dead Souls with a vision of Russia as a speeding troika that would one day force the rest of the world to give way. In Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s version, the coachman fires a Kalashnikov machine gun at a flying demon while wolves run alongside, howling. Dubossarsky calls the painting a tongue-in-cheek “welcome to Russia.”

More recently, the artists have produced utopian visions in such works as Total Painting (2001), Night Fitness (2004), and the dreamlike Snow (2005). But this utopia is in the style of advertisements and TV commercials. The golden sunbeams, overripe fruit, and lush flora and fauna are frankly artificial. Relaxed bodies seem to be floating out of orbit, whether they are on land, in water, or in space.

The artists are “particularly fascinated by images of earthly paradise in advertising,” critic Ekaterina Dyogot wrote in the catalogue for the Stewart collection auction. “This world of immediately fulfilled desires, with its effective erasure of differences of sexes, ages, and seasons, inflicts universal boredom—this is usually the final ‘truth’ about Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s ‘models of happiness.’ The more exuberant these images of fulfilled life are, the more skeptical and even sarcastic [the] artists appear to be.”

Snow is a strange picture in which a young man is submerged to the neck in what seems to be warm water, while snow falls around his head. He is walking in the water, his face hidden from us. He has no purpose other than to keep walking, Dyogot said, “to keep being alive, young and happy. This is a particularly poignant portrait of contemporary society.”

In 2001 the artists started Total Painting, a work in progress that now includes more than 150 panels dispersed around the world. Painted in a deliberately slapdash style, parodying the joy offered by advertising images and Socialist Realism, the panels jumble movie stars, fashion models, and pop singers with the artists and their friends, all kinds of commercial products, naked sunbathers on a beach, and Tolstoy and Dostoyev-sky as nude models. When 38 of the panels were shown at Deitch Projects in 2003 under the title “Our Best World,” they prompted New York Times critic Ken Johnson to ask (in imitation of David Letterman), “Is it something or is it nothing?”

“If this painting is anything,” Johnson decided, “it’s a goofy, distinctively Russian satire of consumerist euphoria. There are reasons to think it’s not much of anything—it’s not admirable as painting nor is its iconography surprising. Still, its effect is exhilarating. It may not be something, but it’s not nothing.”

Just as difficult as defining Dubossarsky and Vinogradov’s work is persuading them to explain how they do it. Both eschew questions about who holds the brush, and when. Finally, the generally silent Vinogradov ends the mystery: “First we discuss our project. Then we make a sketch on the computer, and then we think of characters. We simply paint. We have assistants who help us. In the end, we put our signature on it.”


Nora FitzGerald is a Moscow correspondent for ARTnews.


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