Beautiful Losers - Hardcover

Rose, Aaron; Strike, Christian; Baker, Alex; Nelson, Arty; Weyland, Jocko

4.09

1,317 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1891024744 ISBN 13: 9781891024740

Publisher: D.A.P./Iconoclast, 2004

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The greatest cultural accomplishments in history have never been the result of the brainstorms of marketing men, corporate focus groups, or any homogenized methods; they have always happened organically. More often than not, these manifestations have been the result of a few like-minded people coming together to create something new and original for no other purpose than a common love of doing it. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers in just such a way. Influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and independent music, artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Over the years, the group has matured, and many have become more establishment-oriented; but no matter, their independent spirit has remained steadfast. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinniss, KAWS, and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by a half-dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start.

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About the Author:

Harmony Korine was born in Bolinas, California in 1974. At 19, he wrote the screenplay for Kids, directed by Larry Clark, and later wrote and directed Gummo, which won awards at the Venice and Rotterdam film festivals, and Julian Donkey-Boy, which won an award for best art direction at the Gijon International Film Festival in Spain. He is the author of the novel A Crack Up at the Race Riots.

From Publishers Weekly:

Most of the work in this exhibition catalog is not beautiful by traditional standards. Nor can its makers, artists whose work is now displayed in museums and top galleries around the world, really be considered losers. Yet the loosely affiliated group of skateboarding and punk music aficionados represented in this book seems to have a considerable amount of cachet invested in their outsider status, their ability to see the beauty in being a "loser." Many of the painters, photographers and cartoonists in this book appear to be taking a cue from the most famous insider/outsider of them all, Andy Warhol: witness Harmony Korine’s photo-collage of a disaffected Macauley Culkin, Terry Richardson’s photo of a young man sitting on a toilet or a scarf design by Mike Mills titled "Fight Against the Rising Tide of Conformity." The artists consume popular culture and then spit it back out in a highly personalized form to express their alienation from the usual boogeymen (suburbia, capitalism, middle-class middlebrow culture). Bucking the traditional art school route, these self-taught artists prefer a more laid-back, "D.I.Y." ("do it yourself") attitude. This approach involves doodling, spreading graffiti and taking snapshots of their friends naked. The book’s accompanying essays narrate the development of these street culture artists with an absurdly exacting level of detail, the kind usually reserved for the lives of geniuses who’ve been dead for at least 10, maybe even 20 years. And while the book is excellently produced and the works in it are a lot of fun, it’s hard not to wonder if these artists enjoy posing as outsiders a little too much, especially given their newfound success. 200 color & 200 b/w illus.
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