Paul McCarthy's Tree is the holiday gift that keeps on giving. First, the massive inflatable butt plug sparked right wing outrage and vandalism; then, it inspired French president Francois Hollande to pen an impassioned butt plug defense. Now, the giant butt plug is gone, but hundreds of ordinary-sized butt plugs have sprung up in its wake.
The internet has always been a natural habitat for the paranoid and angry, but it's never been as easy to mobilize your fellow conspiracy theorists than it is today. So why does the super-sophisticated conspiracy-troll machine draw diagrams like a 1st grader?
Guess how performance artist Sven Sachsalber just spent the past two days?
On Sunday, the artist Ryder Ripps spent the night at the Ace Hotel in midtown Manhattan. The hotel offered him a free room and $50 stipend to make some art—a deal he's since called exploitative—so he hired two "sensual masseuses" from Craigslist to make it for him, dubbing the project ART WHORE. Condemnation from the art world was swift.
Much has been made of the power of art to take its observer to magical, faraway places. In Northwestern Expansion, an installation currently on view in Park Slope, the artist Corina Reynolds takes an opposite tack, precisely replicating the mundane, fluorescent-lit waiting room of a Manhattan government building.
The Boston Globe, among our country's most venerated journalistic institutions, republished a New York Times story about chocolate on its website today. For some reason, the photo it chose to accompany that story on Twitter shows a chocolate butt plug next to a chocolate Santa Claus holding a chocolate butt plug.
Nature is so beautiful. So is art. It might seem right to combine the two, if you are stupid. That is what a woman named Casey Nocket has been doing on her grand hiking tour across America.
Francois Hollande, President of France, has something to say to the haters about the giant inflatable butt plug that was recently removed from Paris's Place Vendome: get used to it!!!
In Place Vendome, one of Paris's beautiful historic squares, next to a 19th-century column commemorating Napoleon's glory in the Battle of Austerlitz, sits a 24-foot inflatable butt plug. Despite the city's reputation as haven for cosmopolitan artsy types, some Parisians aren't having it.
Seventy-year-old painter David Huggins was first abducted by aliens when he was eight, he says in the documentary trailer below. He's met many more beings in the years since then, but one stands out: Crescent, the extraterrestrial woman who took his virginity.
BRANSON, MO—Among the things that I dislike most in this world are patriotism, religion, tourist traps, country music, and the Walmart corporation. So I traveled to the one area of this nation that captures them all. It did not go as planned.
