Painter of the AoSHQ Lifestyle?

From "balloon-breasted" women to now outright, anatomically-detailed full-on penetrative porn.

Typical purveyor of filth? Usual artist trying to get attention through outrage and shock value?

Well... yes. And No.

Currin's mood today is perhaps buoyed by what he has achieved with that single finished canvas, a languid scene of boy-girl penetration with no anatomical detail spared, which quickly tells you that Currin has entered a porn phase (meaning many of his new canvases are too explicit for publication in a national newspaper).

...

Part of the problem, Currin asserts, is that critics somehow take offence when artists start making serious money. "They have a bug up their ass if you get high prices for things. They wouldn't say this stuff about Mary J Blige. I have never understood this idea that there is something scandalous about artists making money."

Hold tight, it gets better.

...

Indeed, he now acknowledges that several factors contributed to what was indeed a long dry period after the retrospective – a time when, he says, he was also depressed and experiencing a disconcerting "impotence with the brush". Currin remained shaken, for instance, by the experiences of the 9/11 attacks on the Twin Towers, which had almost cast their shadows on the block where he lived. "I don't think anybody would be able to deduce it from my pictures – the way my life changed and my mood changed and my surroundings changed after that. It was a dividing line in my life."

...

It might seem "silly" or "bombastic" (Currin's words) to try thereafter to cast these new works in the context of Islamic fundamentalism and more specifically the furious reaction in parts of the Muslim world to the publication by a Danish newspaper in 2005 of a cartoon depicting the Prophet Mohamed. But this is where Currin, almost embarrassed by the murkiness of what he is saying, takes the conversation.

...

Few things motivate, meanwhile, more than anger and that is what was stirred in Currin by the cartoon furore. He was infuriated first by the tirades of some Islamic clerics against the cartoon and was then doubly dismayed by what he considered the cowardly response of the West and its media. "I found it incredibly dispiriting that The New York Times and Time magazine wouldn't publish the cartoon. After people had been killed over these things, they wouldn't show people what it was about. You could not find it anywhere." He goes on: "I am caught up in a lot in fear for Europe and fear for the West, that we will lose the war against Islam. And it is a war against Islam, I think."

At this point, I have to confess to losing Currin's thread a little. Are these paintings therefore some kind of repudiation of our political correctness? Or perhaps a celebration of our freedoms, now under threat, including the freedom to disseminate porn? Something like that, he says.

Thanks to DelD.

One Not Quite Safe For Work pic here, though before, it seems, his outright porn phase.

More images through Google -- including the porno ones (need to take off safe search, of course).

Eh, true enough, he's still doing the standard artistic thing of shocking the squares and outraging the rubes.

However, unlike most, he's not too stupid -- or too cowardly -- to name those who are truly responsible for medieval oppression and sexual hyperpanic.

Plus... look at the tits!

posted by Ace at 04:09 PM

| Access Comments