This photo sent to us by a reader in Manhattan Beach, CA, during his recent trip to the Los Angeles County Museum of art. Are you kidding me?! I can’t believe my eyes or what I’m reading about this statue. I have to “break the 4th wall” for this blog entry…..
Do any of you know about this piece?!
This WDLM site is all about being ridiculous. It’s fun to be ridiculous for a few hour each week. But….. are you kidding me?? This is actually a serious piece of $5.6 million art (and that was 15 years ago)? There is nothing that I could write that would be more entertaining than what has already been written in the wikipedia entry describing this statue. No way you could make this stuff up:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Jackson_and_Bubbles
Dave, I don’t feel like reading the whole wikipedia entry. Can you just give me the Cliff’s Notes version?
“Bubbles was Jackson’s domestic animal [he bought] from a Texas research facility in 1985. It has been claimed by the media that he was Jackson’s best and faithful friend who even joined the singer on his world tours and helped in the household.”
I didn’t make that up. Really. Those are true sentences about Michael Jackson and his chimpanzee.
“[The] Michael Jackson and Bubbles [statue] has also been read as a symbol of the human desire for self-discovery….The assimilated chimp on his lap underlines this aspect of self-exploration. He is a traditional symbol in fine arts which serves to mirror human nature. But meanwhile the plastic [surgery] demonstrates the tragic impossibility of this attempt. The material’s aesthetic and Jackson’s aura of transcendence show how unnatural the results of this self-exploration must be.”
Hilariously brilliant. I can’t stop laughing or re-reading that. If I spent a year working on a satirical paragraph about this sculpture, I couldn’t have said it any better than that. Or this:
The American artist Paul McCarthy created some sculptures relating to Michael Jackson and Bubbles by Jeff Koons, e.g. Michael Jackson and Bubbles (Gold) from 1997 to 1999 or Michael Jackson Fucked Up (Big Head) from 2002.
True dat.
Sometimes life is more ridiculous than fiction. And they say “art imitates life.” So, there you go.
I can’t believe that’s a serious piece of art. (heavy sigh)
Keep those photos and stories coming! 🙂