ART HIGH-JINKS ON MYSPACE

The mega-popular, Rupert Murdoch-owned social networking site MySpace, has room for everything these days, even some high-art high jinks. Some highlights:

MySpace provides fertile soil for artist fan-sites, albeit ones that can be rather bland, like those for the performance art group and rock band Tracy and the Plastics, and for "most important artist of his generation" Matthew Barney. On the other hand, the page for Damien Hirst is something of an anti-fan site, offering an annoying duck graphic that floats in the center of the screen, and soliciting viewers to send rubber ducks "to be part of the largest duck inspired art exhibit EVER." The Hirst site also highlights a quote from Tracey Emin, who purportedly said, "Would Damien Hirst really bother to create a MySpace page?"

On the other hand, the art provocateur Banksy actually uses his MySpace page to promote his street art projects, and visitors can check out updated pics, including images of Brad Pitt schmoozing at the opening of his recent "Barely Legal" affair in L.A.

A true original in the MySpace art-scene is Puerto Rican artist (and Artnet Magazine contributor) Pedro Vélez, whose "Hell in LAMB UC" is an online multimedia piece that makes semifictional hash from Hunter Thompson’s lost novel, The Rum Diary.

MySpace can also be extra-exclusive. Fashion photog extraordinaire David LaChapelle has his MySpace profile (which boasts a jpg of a painting by Kehinde Wiley) set to "private" -- LaChapelle must add you to his list of friends before you can visit.

There is also a page devoted to Thomas Kinkade, and though it is a meant as a lampoon of the "Painter of Light," it features many seemingly sincere comments from fans. The late how-to-paint television star Bob Ross gets a similar treatment, with a page that offers up a notably crass series of photos from visitors on the comments page -- though the painter of "happy little trees" still manages to have over 6,000 friends.

You don’t have to be alive to get in on the online networking action, however. Pablo Picasso has an impressively informative page for those looking to commune with the modernist master, aggregating vintage clips of Pablo painting, images of artworks, a blog (with entries like "My Dora painting sells for 95 mil!!") and lengthy biographical info written in the first person ("At the time of my death, I had many paintings, as I had kept off the art market what I didn't need to sell. . .")

Plenty of top art stars are featured in this vein, including Salvador Dalí (he has 4588 friends, and a hideous tiled background of a desertscape), Henri Matisse (Favorite TV Show: Duckman; Hero: Albert Barnes), Jean-Michel Basquiat ("basquiat i went to your exibet at the moca it was awesome," a fan comments to Jean-Michel), Leonardo da Vinci (most of his "top 8" friends are TV characters, for some reason), Vincent van Gogh, Chaim Soutine and Caravaggio.

Andy Warhol, on the other hand, is a bit of a disappointment -- not the iconic New York Andy, but a "proletarian/socialist filmmaker" from Bergen, Norway. (Okay, so there are – at least – two other Warhol pages, here, here, as well as one "Warhol Boy".)

Finally, perhaps the eeriest artist page is the still-active site for the recently deceased Jason Rhoades’ performance art cabaret project, Black Pussy ("Female, 18-years-old"). The final comment, posted Aug. 8, 2006, days after Rhoades’ untimely death, is from "Fast Friends, Inc.": "Thank you for everything."

-- Ben Davis
taken from ARTNET NEWS