Tag: art

Did a dose of LSD spawn some of cinema’s greatest films?

Federico Fellini, one of the greatest filmmakers of the 20th century, attributes much of his success to a single dose of LSD he took in the summer of 1964 ​“during a time of creative crisis”. According to a recent study looking into how this experience influenced his work, the dose was administered by Dr Emilio Servadio, one of the most prominent Italian psychoanalysts of the time. It induced a trip so intense that the filmmaker later needed sedative medication to put it to an end.

Fellini took part in the psychotherapy session directly after he had finished working on his masterpiece 8 ½, and before he started writing his next film Giulietta degli Spiriti. The talking therapy that occurred after the LSD dose was recorded with a magnetophone. The tapes have never been found by researchers, but in an interview with the BBC a year later, Fellini explained how the experience stimulated his creativity by altering his perception of colour and allowing him to perceive colours in an entirely different light.

“The doctor gave me an explanation and I agree with him,” he told a reporter in 1965. ​“He said that an artist lives always in the imagination so the barrier between sensorial reality and his imagination is very vague… I saw colours not like they normally are – we see colours in the objects, you know; we see objects that are coloured. I saw colours detached from the objects. I had for the first time the feeling of the presence of the colours in a detached way.” Fellini’s work after the acid trip was later praised for having ​“supernaturally brilliant colours”.

Fellini’s perception of time was also altered during his trip, which was was reflected in his work post-LSD trip – the authors of the study said his films started to incorporate plots involving ​“puzzling and disorienting flashbacks”. The filmmaker was also said to have had epiphanies during the trip involving space and perception of self, both of which were apparent in his subsequent work. ​“The world depicted in his post-LSD movies includes major changes in the perception of space, time and others,” the study concluded.

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Hunter Biden’s bong-smoking lawyer Kevin Morris, who paid first son’s $2M tax bill, ALSO spent fortune on his art – along with California Dem donor Elizabeth Hirsch Naftali, who Joe appointed to prestigious heritage board

Hunter Biden’s paintings have been bought by a top Democratic donor and the lawyer who has caught smoking a bong during a visit from the First Son last week, a bombshell new report has revealed.

Despite a White House promise that all purchasers’ identities would be kept a secret, two names have been revealed: Los Angeles-based real estate investor and Democratic donor Elizabeth Hirsch Naftali and Hollywood attorney Kevin Morris. 

In July 2022, eight months after Hunter’s exhibition opened in New York City, Joe Biden appointed Naftali to the Commission for the Preservation of America’s Heritage Abroad. It’s not clear whether she had already purchased the art at that time.

Hunter’s Hollywood ‘fixer’ lawyer Morris was seen smoking on the balcony of his Malibu home last week and loaned the president’s son $2million to help him pay back taxes.

When Hunter Biden first announced he would make a high-dollar foray into the art world, the Biden team promised the identities of those who purchased Hunter’s art would remain anonymous. On the campaign trail, Joe Biden promised an ‘absolute wall’ between his duties as president and his family’s business dealings. 

In 2021, Hunter made his debut at a ritzy New York art gallery, where the sticker price clocked in on some of his amateur pieces at $500,000. 

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Pilgrims Are Flocking to This Psychedelic Temple

UPSTATE NEW YORK has been the birthplace of many Great Awakenings. In the 1820s, religious fervor so swept the region it became known as “the burned-over district.” In the 1960s, Timothy Leary’s commune in Millbrook became ground control for the East Coast psychedelic movement. “By the time we got to Woodstock,” sang Joni Mitchell, “we were half a million strong.”

More than five decades after Woodstock, in Wappinger Falls, Alex Grey and his wife, Allyson Grey, are trying to use art to get back to the garden. Under the full June moon earlier this month, the Greys opened the bronze, 700-pound doors of Entheon, a temple-museum hybrid dedicated to advancing visionary art, and a message of ecological unity. 

“Humanity’s materialistic worldview must transition to a sacred view of oneness with the environment and cosmos,” Alex tells me after the celebration where soap heir David Bronner, who funded part of the museum, billowed about in his purple robes like a psychedelic Medici. It is a message Americans heard before — in the indigenous language of animacy, and in the prose of Alan Watts, who wrote that the individual is not, contrary to our common perception, a separate “ego inside a bag of skin,” but more like a wave coming out of the ocean. 

As psychedelics return from the outlaw regions of the culture, arriving alongside the climate crisis, the gospel of interconnectedness is spreading again, this time through the mycelial tendrils of the internet. Alex Grey, demure and snowy-haired at age 69, is not entirely sure why he has become such a popular progenitor, but he nevertheless has: On Instagram, he is one of the most famous living visual artists in the country, with 1.4 million followers — more than Jeff Koons and Yayoi Kusama combined. 

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AI Artist Creates Satanic Panic About Hobby Lobby

People on social media are sharing pictures of what they think are Satanic-seeming displays from Hobby Lobby stores and vowing never to shop there again much like many people refuse to drink Bud Light or shop at Target for bigoted reasons. Aside from the fact that Americans are currently eager to boycott any company that feigns tolerance at marginalized people, there’s one big problem with these Hobby Lobby store pictures: They’re not real. 

These pictures of Satanic merchandise on the shelves of Hobby Lobby were made by Jennifer Vinyard using the AI image generating tool Midjourney. That didn’t stop people from credulously sharing the photos on Facebook and TikTok as if they were real and expressing their shock and horror that Hobby Lobby, which bills itself as a Christian company, was selling giant statues of Baphomet.

Vinyard, an Austin-area pharmacist in training, generated the pictures with Midjourney and posted them to her personal Facebook, Reddit, and an AI art group on Facebook on June 5. The public post in AI Art Universe went viral and, as of this writing, has been shared more than six thousand times. The post gained more than 100 comments before the page shut them down.

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White People Told They’re Not Welcome at BLM-Inspired London Play

White people have been told not to attend a BLM-inspired theatre production in London so that black audience members can enjoy it without being subjected to “the white gaze.”

Yes, really.

The Theatre Royal Stratford East, which is located in a ‘diverse’ area of London has been accused of setting a “dangerous precedent” after it was revealed that white visitors have been told to stay away from the July 5 performance of Tambo & Bones.

The director of the play Matthew Xia said that the play was a “darkly provocative satire on race” about two characters who “find themselves trapped in a minstrel show” and end up doing “the only thing that is possible to do to really break out of the white gaze.”

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How Occultism Was a Catalyst for Avant-Garde Art

Twenty-first-century art has seen a proliferation of tendencies that can be collectively referred to as ‘the esoteric turn’. The manifestations of this proclivity show no signs of waning in the 2020s, discerned in the work of legions of contemporary artists, the recuperation of once-dismissed oeuvres, in academic research projects that reveal how occultism was a catalyst for the avant-garde and innumerable thematic institutional exhibitions. Swedish Ecstasy amalgamates all these symptoms, bringing historical figures together with living artists, all of whom originate from Sweden (or in the case of Carsten Höller, reside there). The exhibition’s opening gallery is devoted to a substantial extract from Hilma af Klint’s renowned 193-piece opus Paintings for the Temple (1906–15); this is the first time af Klint has been exhibited in Belgium, but it’s just one of several major European institutional exhibits featuring her work this year. The extent to which af Klint’s legacy has (rightfully) been validated and revived over the past two decades is remarkable, and a similar process of restitution is now taking place in response to the work of Anna Cassel, who collaborated with af Klint both in the studio and in séances as part of a small Christian Spiritualist group known as The Five. Here Cassel is represented by a suite of diagrammatic paintings – all produced over consecutive days in April 1913 – that are built upon Anthroposophical and Rosicrucian symbolism.

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Mysterious Artwork Visible From Space Discovered Near Las Vegas

A mysterious piece of artwork has been discovered in the desert outside of Las Vegas and the curious drawing is so enormous that it can actually be seen from space. According to a local media report, the peculiar design was seemingly first spotted last month by Dr. David Golan as he and his wife were walking their dogs in an area of wilderness at the edge of the city. When they reached a particularly high plateau, he noticed “this pattern in the rocks” which resembled “a face and a yin and yang sign.” A subsequent excursion to the site revealed that the artwork is largely hidden to those on the ground. Golan explained, “all you can kind of tell is that there are rocks piled up.”

Lest he had any suspicions that his mind might be playing tricks on him, when Golan later looked at the location on Google Earth, the remarkable artwork was clearly visible. Amazingly, the area resident says that he has often walked his dogs in the mountainous location over the last five years but never spotted the drawing until last month and an online search for references to the mysterious piece turned up nothing. “Someone did some pretty miraculous artwork up on the top of the hill,” he marveled, “and it’s just sitting here.” The presence of the piece was apparently also news to the Bureau of Land Management, which is responsible for overseeing that particular portion of the desert.

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CEO of Balenciaga Parent Company Owns Auction Site That Sells Child Sex Mannequins With Genitalia For Faces

The CEO of Balenciaga’s parent company Kering also owns an auction website that sells grotesque art depicting naked children with mutated bodies and sex organs for faces.

Groupe Artémis, the holding company of billionaire Kering CEO François-Henri Pinault – husband of actress Salma Hayek – owns Christie’s auction house.

The Christie’s website features a series of art pieces by brothers Jake and Dinos Chapman, including mannequins of children with erect penises and anuses in place of a nose and mouth.

Their works fetch from hundreds of dollars to more than $500,000.

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White House Flags Art Industry for Money Laundering While Letting Hunter Sell Art to Anonymous Buyers

The White House flagged money laundering in the art industry on Monday as a point of corruption while allowing Hunter Biden to sell his artwork to anonymous buyers for as much as $500,000.

The first report of its kind named the United States Strategy on Countering Corruption is geared towards exploring the ways and means “government officials abuse public power for private gain.”

Though the White House’s report specifically focused on the art industry as a “market” where financial crimes occur, it did not mention the Biden family’s involvement with corruption, such as Hunter’s art selling scheme to investors while his father is president.

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