Rolling Stone Menu Here’s Why Alice Cooper Is Auctioning Off His Andy Warhol ‘Little Electric Chair’
Multimillion-dollar silkscreen owned by shock rocker for decades will hit the auction block in October
By MARKA/Alamy
Alice Cooper had all but forgotten that he owned an Andy Warhol silkscreen when his friend, the late actor Dennis Hopper, mentioned that he was selling some of his own Warhols over lunch a decade or so ago.
Owning an original Warhol seems a hard thing to slip one’s mind, but it never quite fit with Cooper’s offstage aesthetic and it does even less so these days. Cooper prefers the hot arid climes of Arizona to the steaming, humid streets of Warhol’s New York City stomping grounds. He’s more into the local desert landscapes than NYC grit.
Space for Experimentation
Around the time that the California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) was established, John Baldessari, the schoolâs chair of âPost-Studioâ practice, jotted down a set of notes outlining his ideal art college: âA watering hole, a flow of artists. Artists as ordinary people. Have artists as models. Create an environment where art can happen.â
Adapting his phrasing,
Where Art Might Happen: The Early Years of CalArts offers a bountiful history of the schoolâs formative decade, a companion to the eponymous 2019 exhibition at the Kestner Gesellschaft, Hannover. This volume partly aims to redress imbalances in previous critical coverage of CalArts, highlighting work by lesser-known figures and focusing on the legendary but long understudied Feminist Art Program.
By Bill Hathaway
May 5, 2021
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The new species of ant, discovered in an Ecuadorian rain forest, is notable for its smooth and shining cuticles and large trap jaw mandibles. (Phil Hoenle)
The ant came in a small vial of ethanol, sealed in a plastic bag, and packed in a small cardboard box. It was addressed to Yale’s Douglas B. Booher.
German entomologist Phillip Hoenle had discovered the ant, which he noted had some peculiar features, in a rain forest in Ecuador. Now he wanted Booher, a research associate in the Yale Center for Biodiversity and Global Change and the Department of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology, to confirm whether this trap ant was truly a new species. If so, Hoenle and Booher would have the honor of naming it.
Julie Mehretu
Until 8 August at the Whitney Museum of American Art, 99 Gansevoort Street, Manhattan
Julie Mehretu’s massive mid-career survey which has travelled from the Los Angeles County Museum of Art includes more than 70 paintings and works on paper that date from 1996 to today. It offers a chance for viewers to track the progression of Mehretu’s style from early pieces that focus more heavily on mapping and drawing to her sprawling abstractions with innumerable layers of visual information. Some of the most recent works on view also smartly deal with contemporary social issues, as the process begins with photographs one started with police in riot gear following the killing of Michael Brown, for example, while another began with images of climate change-related firescapes. These images are then blurred and erased beyond recognition before paint and other materials are stacked on, and are then sanded and erased, creating a pentimento surface where older layers peer through