The Bishop and the Butterfly: Murder, Politics, and the End of the Jazz Age

    No Splash meets The Help

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    Origins of "art for art's sake"


    actually he's interesting because he's not a one-trick pony and the Hockney stuff was not snark and he's not into simplistic politically correct statements:

    [....] Later, he moved on to Hockney, with whom he feels a certain kinship. “We’re both gay males and see LA as outsiders in some way.” [....]

    Gomez has now moved on from Hockney. “I don’t want to make a career out of [remaking] his paintings,” he explains. Now he’ll occasionally cast his references further back: he recreated, in a cardboard cutout, the Infanta Margaret Theresa from Velásquez’s 17th-century masterpiece Las Meninas, but had her attended not by Spanish ladies-in-waiting, but by Mexican-American domestic workers. To drive the point home, Gomez installed the work, street-art style, in and around the driveways of Bel Air. “There are so many new princesses,” he says, “so many new courtly homes.”

    Many of those homeowners are now collecting Gomez’s paintings. He quit the nannying job six years ago and is now represented by the commercial yet politically engaged New York gallery PPOW, which is just about to show his work in their booth at the city’s ADAA art fair. Gomez is now coming to terms with “fulfilling a role that affluent people demand. It’s a really hard thing to navigate.” [....]

    He's actually a good example of the type of work that is selling now to upper middle class at art fairs now. Hence PPOW signed him, they do secondary level art fairs all the time