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A Saviour is born!

Be not afraid; for behold we bring you good tidings of great joy which shall be to all the people. Proceed to the promised land:

happyfamousartists.com/blog

After some hefty concept- and design work, we're ready to introduce the new look of our blog. As of today, Bad Art for Bad People has a new home: happyfamousartists.com/blog. New posts will appear there, we hope you enjoy embracing change as much as we do and forgive the odd teething issue as we fine tune our new site. It's also quite pretty!

Pass the Sickbag: Lacoste Censors Larissa Sansour

Lacoste, the rag maker of choice for the fashion unconscious, has found that Larissa Sansour is just a bit 'too pro-Palestinian' for their taste in upscale banality. Her work 'Nation Estate' was nominated for the €25,000 Lacoste Elysee Prize awarded by the Swiss Musee de l’Elysee, but mysteriously the polo shirted chumps at Lacoste misplaced their taste & spine and had her removed from the nominations, then-

In an attempt to mask the reasons for her dismissal, Sansour was asked to approve a statement saying that she withdrew from her nomination ‘in order to pursue other opportunities’. Sansour has refused.

Quite a neat little censorship scam- censor the work then try and force the artist to pretend they withdrew it, which makes me wonder did Stalin wear polo shirts? One person who does like Lacoste is mass murdering fascist scumbag Anders Behring Breivik, to the point where Lacoste asked the police to make him stop wearing the brand in court. Which leaves Lacoste desiring a prosaic, conservative, elite image that is so intellectually vacuous it does not discern between a far Right Christianist terrorist and an artist's work that represents a dispossessed and oppressed people. I guess they sought to avoid controversy, Mission Accomplished...in the Bush sense.

Larissa Sansour's press release & related article and her work Nation Estate.

Update: Today (Wednesday 21st December) after the news spread to many international newspapers Lacoste reacted by cancelling their sponsorship of the entire Lacoste Elysée Prize 2011. You can read their hilariously awful statement here and the statement by Sam Stourdzé, Director of the Musée de l’Elysée here. Index on Censorship articles are here. The Musée de l’Elysée has offered to exhibit Sansour's work, in the event she takes them up on the proposal may I suggest for the private view a strict clothing policy be enforced: No Lacoste.

Showtime: Stefan Gross @ HLP

"Sustainable Trash", first solo exhibition of Stefan Gross in Belgium opens tomorrow @ Harlan Levey Projects. Stefan's work transforms the gallery into a surreal kingdom of colorful plastic, plush toy animals and other sculptures, offering the visitor a trip into his own magic world. The exhibition starts very playful and light with a selection of recognizable pieces but the more you enter into the epicentrum of the show, the more Paul McCarthy-like sensation it evokes. The back room of the gallery is one giant parallel-universe: goodbye Xmas and jingle bells, this is the real stuff! Ho, ho, ho...

Must-Read: Eat. Shop. London

(Image: Bar/Cafe/Bicycle workshop Look Mum No Hands @ Old Street, one of our favs!)

Just purchased a second edition Eat. Shop. London, a great guide through locally-owned eating and shopping establishments in the HFA's soon-to-be new hometown. It has many of our favorite places included plus plenty of others that we're dying to explore in the coming months. Congratz to the author, Caroline Loncq, on doing an ace research, compiled in a nicely designed book & accompanied by photographs to make one's mouth water.

(More local gems guides are available on Rather.)

Music: - Makes the World Go Round

Play here with the infographic!
(HT @deafmetal)

Showtime: The War On Drags

(image: Nocturne PAN by Silvia B.)

If you hurry you can still catch the opening and/or afterparty of The War On Drags/based on a true story curated by Martin C De Waal & happening at this very moment @ Meneer Malasch in Amsterdam.

Participating artists include Ton of Holland, Caron Geary, Natasa Heydra, Silvia B (see image above), Bloedworst (previously known as Antistrot), Iris Roskam & Martin C De Waal himself - selection which promises that you definitely won't get bored!
The exposition runs till January 29th 2012.

Architecture: Living on a Pixel Cloud

We're adding the Cloud skyscrapers from Dutch architecture bureau MVRDV to our "dream buildings to live in" list. The design of the two towers creates the effect of being exploded into a pixel cloud in their middle part. They are to be built in South Korea, at least if the recent controversy around their shape - said to resemble the exploding WTC towers - won't bring on too much of a bad karma. Fingers crossed these beauties will see the light of the day!

Fashion: Peter Gronquist's Branded Tools & Weaponry

Branding of items from all ways of life - Chanel logos firmly leading the competition - served as art inspiration so many times, that the intended surprise effect (we resisted using the word 'juxtaposition' ;-)) became a commodity of its own. Yet these sleek chainsaws customized by Peter Gronquist still managed to bring a grin of amusement to our faces. More branded arsenal can be seen on Peter's website.
(The Vuitton electric chair also scores well.)

And The Winner Is: Martin Boyce

(image: visitor inspecting Martin Boyce's installation "Do Words Have Voices" at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art in Gateshead, the hosting institution of this year's Turner Prize)

Congratz to Scottish sculptor Martin Boyce on winning this year's Turner Prize. Boyce's victory has been largely predicted, so no real surprise; what's worth noticing 'though is he's the third Glasgow-born or -educated artist in a row (preceded by Susan Philipsz last year and Richard Wright in 2009) to win it and therefore confirming the importance of Glasgow on the map of contemporary art.
Boyce has been selected from four candidates, the other shortlisted being sculptor Karla Black, painter George Shaw and video-installation artist Hilary Lloyd.