I guess when you’ve got a ton of sand and water available and time to spare, you’d be a fool not to build a giant replica of Minas Tirith, the fantasy capital city of Gondor from Lord of the Rings. At least that’s what I assume Joseph Alvanez was thinking when he decided to create his massive tribute to one of the greatest stories ever written. Alvanez’s Minas Tirith measured approximately 10’ by 12’ and was made completely of sand and water, and it stood proudly until he realized that one of the kids who helped him had buried his cell phone in one of the houses.

Actually, it was that worthless wench Mother Nature who did Alvanez’s great achievement in.

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James Franco was in Berlin last week, hanging with some of his students from California and introducing an art exhibition called, naturally, Gay Town. A Financial Times writer was there to write about it, and like virtually every James Franco conceptual multi-media whatsit, the description is hilarious. Maybe not Dicknose in Paris hilarious, but still funny.

Some of his feelings about celebrity form the subject of Gay Town.

The story quickly moves on from this sentence, but before we go with it, I just want to highlight what an amazing sentence this is. James Franco created a show expressing his deepest feelings about celebrity, and that show is called “Gay Town.” Wasn’t the singer of Gay Town on that Dr. Drew show a while back?

The exhibition is a sprawling, infernal mess. Mixed media from an evidently mixed-up mind: videos, printed rugs, neon signs, many of them profane, all questioning the motives of a culture that simultaneously values and trashes those to whom it assigns celebrity status. A recurring image is one of a crudely-drawn Spider-Man figure, with the words “F*ck Spider-Man” scrawled across it.
“At first I thought that I couldn’t involve my acting in my art; people wouldn’t take me seriously – they would say it wasn’t a good subject. But then I did this project called Erased James Franco (2009) that was loosely based on Robert Rauschenberg’s “Erased de Kooning” [drawing], where we collected all this stuff from my previous film performances and used it as raw material. It was a very interesting piece.

“And that showed me that all this stuff I do with film and my public persona is actually great material for the other work I want to do.” A lot of other artists – Cindy Sherman, Paul McCarthy, Douglas Gordon – look at the film and performance world and filter it through their own work. But here I am, in this unique position, with a foot in each world. And it is a great subject.”

Well De Kooning, sure, of course. My piece “The Oscars Are Hella Gay” was actually inspired by a fecal scrawl Kandisnky left on a mistress.

Assorted other quotes:

At a gallery opening later in the evening, a Berlin dealer will tell me that he finds Franco’s work “juvenile” – a not uncommon reaction.

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The above triptych shows an unauthorized restoration of a 19th-Century fresco on the wall of the church of Santuario de Misericordia in Spain, recently completed by an unidentified 80-year-old woman. It may not look as good as your average Banksy, but hey, let’s see that limey poser work without stencils like Grandma Picasso over here.

Three separate photographs of “Ecce Homo” by painter Elias Garcia Martinez show extensive damage caused by an elderly woman who decided the masterpiece needed a little refurbishment.
But in a time of austerity, rather than calling in a professional to complete the job, the unnamed woman attempted to restore the mural herself – at a devastating cost.
The result was a botched repair where the intricate brush strokes of Martinez were replaced with a haphazard splattering of the octogenarian’s paint. Years of carefully calculated depth of expression simply washed out by copious amounts of red and brown.
The damage was discovered after the 19th century painter’s granddaughter made a donation to the Centro de Estudios Borjanos in Borja, Spain, a couple of weeks ago. The Centro holds an archive of regional religious paintings with regularly-updated photographs.
After receiving the donation, employees at the Centro went to check on the mural at the church of Santuario de Misericodia only to find it drastically altered.
An original photograph of the painting taken in 2010, shows only minimal deterioration with Jesus crowned in thorns clearly visible in the portrait. There is slight white speckling across the piece.
Large white patches appear in a second photograph of the painting taken in July this year, possibly scrubbed off as the octogenarian began her project.
A final photograph reveals a portrait transformed beyond recognition.
The amateur restorer said she had undertaken the project “with good intentions” but, as culture councillor Juan Maria de Ojeda said, “she had gotten out of hand”. [Telegraph]

Well hey, you know what they say, you gotta have hobbies. Normally, I’d say destroying a priceless piece of art is never funny – even that scene in Borat (which I otherwise love) where he’s smashing the Civil War-era china makes me break out in hives – but this comes pretty damned close. What was once a realist portrayal of Jesus now looks like Edvard Munch’s The Scream in a furry hat. I’d call it even money.

I’d like to think this lady now wanders around the nursing home “fixing” the drawings from other residents’ grandchildren, charging collectors thousands for them.

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An art student in Taiwan recently won an art prize by creating an image of Iron Man using his own bloody urine.  The student said he was inspired to create the image when he saw blood in his urine one day creating the iconic Iron Man red and yellow. No word yet on why he was peeing blood, but my racism says martial arts. (Too many kidney shots during kung fu sparring).

He took about two months to find a toilet bowl with a similar oblong shape to the outline of Iron Man’s face. Then he was eating edible pigmentation and successfully produced red, black and green urine. He arranged the colored urine to make it look like the character, and used his saliva to create foam for touching up. He needed to keep adding spit to his work while waiting for the judges to get to him during the contest. And of course, his artwork had produced a foul odor at the exhibition.
The creative artwork has defeated more then 600 competitors to win for the first prize. The graduate student is a fan of Marvel superhero and has a collection of Iron Man products. He said he tried to make his work realistic as possible, otherwise using urine would have been ridiculous. [ChinaTimes via MicGadget]

His winning piece was called, aptly, “Blood Urine Man.” Reached for comment, James Franco just shook his head, saying “You’ve made yourself a powerful enemy today, Blood Urine Man,” as he strapped a dick to his face and rode off on a BMX with a gang of naked gangbangers holding boomboxes.

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Eat your heart out, James Franco. While you were filming naked

Marion Laval-Jeantet [pictured, in 2007] prepared her body to accept the horse blood plasma by getting injected with different horse immunoglobulins over the course of several months.
These foreign animal antibodies were injected in progressively larger amounts to allow her to build up tolerance in a process that she referred to as “mithridatisation,” after the Persian king of Pontus, Mithridates VI, who supposedly built up an immunity to poison by regularly consuming small doses of it.
Earlier this year, after months of preparation, she was injected with horse blood plasma, which contained the full spectrum of immunoglobulins without provoking an allergic reaction.
As part of the performance piece she also wore a set of stilts with hooves on the end to feel at one with the horse. She walked around with the donor horse in a “communication ritual” before having her hybrid blood extracted and freeze-dried.
She explained to Centre Press that the whole process made her feel “hyperpowerful, hypersensitive and hypernervous.” She added: “I had a feeling of being superhuman. I was not normal in my body. I had all of the emotions of a herbivore. I couldn’t sleep and I felt a little bit like a horse.” [Wired]

I consider this an important piece.

She injected herself with the blood of a horse and it made her feel “a little bit like a horse?” Why, I hardly know where the science ends and the art begins! Eat your heart out, James Franco. Suddenly it seems… the dicknose is on the other hoof.

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