In 1988, the artist Jeff Koons created the brilliant porcelain sculptural object “Michael and Bubbles,” a kitschy, super-sized 3D depiction of late man-child and mega-pop-star Michael Jackson and Bubbles, his famous chimpanzee pet-as-sidekick.
Michael and Bubbles were kind of like best friends for a while. Human and chimp as pals. Cross-species buds. Besties. BFFs way before BFF was even a term that would be abbreviated. Continue reading
The British jazz-pop singer Sade can be counted in the Pantheon of 1980s music icons. Her music videos for songs like the “The Greatest Taboo” and “Smooth Operator” were a staple of MTV (back when MTV entire programming consisted of music videos).
She is among several influential 1980s pop-cultural icons depicted in street art portraits by Los Angeles artist Alex Ali Gonzalez. This mural of Sade pictured here is in the Arts District near Downtown Los Angeles.
Have you binge watched season two of Stranger Things? If you have then you know how good it is. Some are saying it’s better than season one. Go figure.
We admit we’ve already seen all of season two of the Netflix original series. It lives up to the hype. Yes, that’s right, savvy reader, it’s still “critically acclaimed”!
Given its critical and popular success, there’s probably going to be a third season. (Netflix doesn’t share viewer numbers and the show is commercial-free so in audience and dollars terms we don’t really know how successful it is.)
But no matter. As long as current subscribers don’t cancel there Netflix accounts, it’s as a good as a hit. Continue reading
Within a couple of days of appearing as part of pop singer Katy Perry’s concert at the 2015 Super Bowl half-time show, “Left Shark,” an errant dancer dressed in a cartoonish shark costume, appeared as a chalk drawing in the lobby of an advertising agency.
The U.K. newspaper the Daily Telegraph has just published an excellent interactive feature titled “How YouTube Changed the World” that looks at the profound ways the online video website has impacted not just pop culture, but society, media, politics, celebrity and the world at large. YouTube is the third most-visited website in the world (Google and Facebook are first and second, respectively), and as such has a share of — has the attention of — a vast global audience.
As the Telegraph explains …
What is beyond debate is YouTube’s influence (spotted by a far-sighted Google in 2006, when it bought the site for $1.65 billion). Almost anyone can upload almost anything to YouTube, for free, and be in with a chance of reaching its one billion monthly users – whether they’re activists, terrorists, politicians or pop stars (or just the proud owner of a “mutant giant spider dog”). It has changed our world.
True that.
One of our New Year’s resolutions was to sift through our library here and choose books to throw out, give away or sell. Our bookshelves here at GG HQ in New York are overflowing with printed matter. It should be an easy task, but whenever we embark on one of these semi-annual house-cleaning bookshelf purges, we stumble upon an old book or magazine that stops us; its striking cover design or title forces us to pause and re-consider whether we should throw it out.
That was the case with the anthology of articles and essays by pop-culture writer Chuck Klosterman’s aplty titled “Chuck Klosterman IV,” pictured below. (The title is a nod to British rock legend Led Zeppelin, which the author devotes a dozen or so pages to.) The book’s cover design caught our attention again much like it did the first time we saw it while browsing the “New Non-Fiction” shelf at the McNally-Jackson Bookstore in Nolita.
Anyway, we spent the next hour re-reading a few of the articles and were tempted to keep the book, but in the end, we decided to say “Goodbye” to this volume and find it a new home with a friend or colleague who will enjoy its humor, insights and opinions. If you’re not familiar with Klosterman’s work, “IV” is a good intro. His book “Sex, Drugs and Coca Puffs” is one of the 2000’s pop-culture must-reads, and we highly recommend it.
This example of street art by French artist Invader in Tokyo is probably one of the best we’ve seen in recent months. The pixelated Space Invader videogame icon here has been created on a larger scale than most of the mosaic artworks Invader has put up around the Japanese capital and elsewhere around the world. We found this one in the quiet cool-kids neighborhood of Naka-Meguro.
We recently spotted this truck painted with a graffiti art homage to Oscar the Grouch on West 47th Street in New York’s Hell’s Kitchen neighborhood. The trash can-dwelling Oscar is one the iconic group of puppet characters from the long-running and popular children’s television series Sesame Street. Graffiti and street artists have often made made use of characters from pop culture, as in this example inspired by South Park.
French street art suprstar Invader (a.k.a., Space Invader) is back in New York City, re-invading the Lower East Side where he’s been putting up some new mosaic artworks the past few days. We spotted this fresh New York-themed “Big Apple” Space Invader piece on a tenement building, above the entrance to the bar Marshall Stack, at the northwest corner of Allen and Rivington streets in the LES. Invader’s visit to NYC coincides with the screening of his new film “Art4Space” and comes on the heels of British street art phenom Banksy’s month-long residency in the city.
Hey, it’s Mr. Miyagi! Ya’ know, the sensei in the “Karate Kid” movies of the 1980s? To be more specific, this piece of stencil street art is the face of actor Pat Morita, who portrayed the Miyagi character in the films series. We began noticing these stencils in SoHo this past weekend. This one appears next to the Deitch Wall at the corner of the Bowery and Houston Street, an intersection where SoHo, NoHo, the East Village and the Lower East Side/Nolita converge, a kind of “four-corners” of downtown Manhattan.
