Diving Bell, Butterfly, Mastercard

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.