Art Fag City at The L Magazine: On the Total Vacuity of Richard Phillips

by Art Fag City on September 26, 2012 The L Magazine

Richard Phillips, "First Point", 2012, Courtesy Gagosian Gallery

This week at The L Magazine I attempt to find something to say about the Richard Phillips show at Gagosian. It wasn’t easy. The time he spent selling his reality show appearances is more culturally relevant than this show.

Poor Richard Phillips. When Marcel Duchamp first dragged that toilet into the gallery, no one knew it was art. Now, 100 years later, we don’t recognize Phillips’s photorealist paintings of female celebrities as the avant-garde trailblazers they really are! This is only part of the sob story Phillips weaves for Huffington Post writer Michael Hogan, who dutifully reports on the artist’s show at Gagosian on W. 24th Street (through Oct 20) as though he’s never questioned a press release before. Hogan paraphrases a few of Phillips’s thoughts on why his art has its critics: “It doesn’t fit with [art connoisseurs’] image of themselves as soldiers in the noble war against vulgarity and dumbed-down main-stream culture.”

Read the full piece here.

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