Blog About Photography

The New Yorker came on Tues­day, and the first thing I opened to was this elab­o­rate Mas­ter­card ad, which I have since taken the time to remove, scan and post here. The first page reads “ARE YOU SEARCHING FOR THE PRICELESS THINGS IN LIFE?” and some­thing to effect of “maybe it’s on the next page.” It then opens to a spread of this Julian Schn­abel paint­ing (self por­trait?). The back of that has an enve­lope pasted to it, which is a chance to win a com­mis­sioned Schn­abel paint­ing of you­self, which opens to reveal that, alas, you did not win but should check out the Mas­ter­card website.

Sch­a­bel, I think, is the kind of post­mod­ern painter who started paint­ing in order to make mil­lions of dol­lars any­way, so why the fuck this ridicu­lous credit card ad and pro­mo­tion? Good for him. I can’t imag­ine how many other mag­a­zines they could pos­si­bly run this thing in that would reach peo­ple that would actu­ally give a shit about it though. Art­fo­rum aaand that’s pretty much it.

Also, when I first wrote this post before the whole thing got lost when my browser crashed, I said some kind of insight­ful stuff about the art mar­ket, but now I’m just going to say that that it’s a good thing Schnabel’s tight­ened up his game since ’96 when he made Basquiat because that movie totally fuck­ing sucked.

Posted on Wednesday, April 16th, 2008 at 10:26 pm

Click here to hide the comments

4 Responses to “Diving Bell, Butterfly, Mastercard”

1. Danielle Says:
   May 2nd, 2008 at 5:10 pm

   I’m so glad some­one else finally admits Basquiat was ter­ri­ble. Yes, Jef­frey Wright is an act­ing god but the movie itself? No, thank you.

   Before Night Falls was good but the edit­ing was just weird.

   Div­ing Bell and the But­ter­fly is the first gen­uinely good movie Julian Schn­abel made; in that the aes­thet­ics match the direct­ing, edit­ing, and act­ing choices.

   But this Mas­ter­card ad just seems taste­less some­how. Not that I expected any­thing more from him. I saw that ad in GQ or some­thing. It just cheap­ens art and makes it seem like art is about fuck­ing around and shmoozing.

   And maybe that’s what art is to a lot of peo­ple but it isn’t to me and a lot of peo­ple I know. Stuff like this makes it hard to be taken seri­ously, but what­ever. I’m still going to do my thing and say no to all this BS going on right now. Because it goes fur­ther than Julian Schnabel.

2. annon Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 11:32 am

   Oh, it was in Time this month too.

3. Greg Says:
   May 5th, 2008 at 11:59 am

   i haven’t won this con­test three dif­fer­ent times.

4. ALYSE Says:
   May 6th, 2008 at 2:25 pm

   http://​c​-mon​ster​.net/​b​l​o​g​1​/​2​0​0​8​/​0​4​/​2​6​/​j​u​l​i​a​n​-​s​c​h​n​a​b​e​l​-​a​n​d​-​m​a​s​t​e​r​c​a​r​d​-​p​r​i​c​e​l​e​ss/

Leave a Reply

Name (required)

Mail (will not be published) (required)

Website

Anti-spam word: (Required)*
To prove you're a person (not a spam script), type the security word shown in the picture. Click on the picture to hear an audio file of the word.

Notify me of followup comments via e-mail