White Ring by Matthew Williams

Matthew Williams is an art director and photographer. Formerly Creative Director to Lady Gaga and the Haus of Gaga, Williams now works with Kanye West, Nick Knight and SHOWstudio amongst others. Lives between London, New York and California.

Paco Rabanne - 1 million and Lady Million commercial

1 Million Parfum by Paco Rabanne tv commercial
Directed by Paul Gore 
Models: Mat Gordon & Dree Hemingway (great-granddaughter of Ernest Hemingway)

Stephen Fry Kinetic Typography - Language

Although Stephen Fry is mostly known as an actor and television presenter, he also has written four novels and two volumes of autobiography 'Moab Is My Washpot' and 'The Fry Chronicles'. Fry is also highly regarded in the UK for his audiobook recordings (particularly as reader for all seven Harry Potter novels) and BBC documents (like 'Stephen Fry in America', 'Stephen Fry's 100 Greatest Gadgets', and Emmy award-winning  'The Secret Life of the Manic Depressive' which I impatiently plan to see). His last audiobooks include 'Children's Stories by Oscar Wilde' and selections of 'Anton Chekhov's short stories' and 'Saki’s Short Stories'

Humanity’s deadliest pocket device. Andy Warhol's GUN

Painted in heavy black pigments and overwhelming scale Andy Warhol's Gun was sold for $7,026,500 at the Contemporary Art Evening Sale, 10 May 2012, New York.

ANDY WARHOL Gun, 1981-1982

acrylic and silkscreen ink on canvas, 178.1 x 228.9 cm ( 70 1/8 x 90 1/8 in.)

.......................................
JORDAN CRANDALL: You don’t like guns, do you?

ANDY WARHOL: Yes, I think they’re really kind of nice.

(from Splash No. 6, 1986, excerpted in I’ll Be Your Mirror: The Selected Andy Warhol Interviews, Edited by Kenneth Goldsmith, New York, 2004, p. 373).


Interesting video material about that work here 

"After Andy Warhol’s assassination attempt in 1968 by Valerie Solanas, much of the violent imagery that had occupied his work of the 1960s—electric chairs, traffic accidents, nuclear explosions—vanished from his new pictures. Instead, during much of the 1970s, both famous and unfamous faces became a prominent trope. Warhol also began to incorporate different series into his silkscreens, including the infamous oxidation paintings and the “shadow” paintings of the late 1970s. Yet as the injuries from 1968 exerted their relentless and painful influence upon Warhol’s life and work, he returned in 1981 and 1982 to the subjects that he had avoided for more than a decade. 1982 saw showings on opposite sides of the Atlantic for Warhol’s Guns, Knives, andDollar Signs, some of the most ominous and captivating work of his entire career. The present lot, Gun, 1981-1982, exhibits Warhol’s full-circle return to the events that shook him to his mortal core in 1968, as we observe upon his canvas the exact style of pistol that almost claimed his life two decades before his death.

Warhol’s obsession with death spawned a variety of frightening images in much of his earlier work. His Big Electric Chair, 1964, along with several other works from the early 1960s introduced America to the morbid side of Andy Warhol, where an intersection of aesthetics and mortality begat a body of work that was simultaneously beautiful and unsettling to behold. As a Pop artist, Warhol’s eternal mission of image reproduction gave way to a nearspiritual transformation for each of his selected subjects.

Gun, 1981-1982, is actually misleading in its title. The silkcreen portrait of humanity’s deadliest pocket device actually bears the inkprint of two compact, small caliber revolvers. (...)

In Warhol’s rendition, silkscreened twice, every detail is highlighted and dramatized in raw and monochromatic screens. Warhol’s inclusion of two screens of the firearm is eerily resonant when one investigates his testimony of the seconds surrounding his attempted assassination: the confusion and quickness of the moment lent itself to a variety of mental reconstructions for Warhol in the following weeks, so the vision of two pistols makes the memory more representative of his actual experience.

Finally, Warhol’s chromatic choice makes the present lot’s subjects all the more stark and terrifying in their neutrality. They sit upon the canvas without the benefit of color, which was otherwise commonplace in Warhol’s contemporaneous silkcreens. Only black, white, and shades of grey give the pistols a steely determination, as if they are unaffected by the protests of pleading victims or hesitations of the shooter’s moral conscience."

( via phillipsdepury.com)

Carlotta Manaigo photography

Carlotta Manaigo - born and raised in Italy, moved to US to attend college at the prestigious Rhode Island School of Design. Graduated in Fine Arts/Photography in 2003. Now based in NY, she often spends time in Europe.

Unable to find more fancy words to describe Carlota's artwork, I'm unpretentiously copying+pasting the description from Manaigo's About page:

"Her work deals with the representation of moments of intimacy in every day life. The image making plays with the ability to be allowed into the most private states, or even solitudes, of her subjects who are portrayed in the beauty, anxiety and decadence of their fleeting youth. Her work comes accross as dreamy, soft yet somewhat dark, a cold romanticism." ( journal.carlottamanaigo.com)

from carlottamanaigo.com
and journal.carlottamanaigo.com

Ingrid Michaelson - Ghost

Director: Ingrid Michaelson and Deborah Lopez
Label: Cabin 24 Records/mom+pop

Johnny Depp featuring Natalie Portman - Paul McCartney´s My Valentine

This is one of three new videos of Paul McCartney's single “My Valentine” featuring Johnny Depp and Natalie Portman signing the lyrics. Well, we can sing with Paul "with a little help from my friends..." ...celebrities, by the way. And of course stylish daughter Stella is the one who came up with the idea.

Johnny Depp, unfortunately, seems to be much more 50 than he used to be as Jack Sparrow (what a sorrow ;)

Human Furniture Photography by David Blázquez

Whatever they say in the most popular HBO tv shows: Summer is coming ;). 

Bored to death while day is turning unbearably hot? You can always invite some friends and create all kind of home furniture with naked human poses, like Spanish artist David Blázquez did. His show Human Furniture (‘MOBILIARIO HUMANO’) is challenging and funny, but I'm not convinced it's sparkiling enough to ask, like some net critics: "Does that mean that we can be watched by objects such as a table or ironing board? Can our minds project an element of humanism in inanimate objects?" (www.furniturefashion.com) Oh, please! For me it's just an artistic interpretation of fact that we can have quite different bodies while having indistinguishable Ikea junk in the house ;)

via www.elfotomata.com