Monday, May 12, 2008
A Brooklyn entrepreneur prints shirts proclaiming that the wearer had sex with everyone from the Strokes to Anna Wintour -- and New York is eating them up.
Jul 1, 2003 |
Lists cover the walls of 31-year-old artist and entrepreneur Ken Courtney's Brooklyn apartment. "Reproduce, Consume, Jerk off, Eat, Reproduce, Fuck, Shop, Reproduce, Consume," reads one. Another catalogs trendy celebrities: Chloë Sevigny, the Strokes, Matthew Barney, J.T. Leroy. Luxury brands fill another: Tod, Gucci, Prada, Lexus, Burberry, Range Rover, Marc Jacobs, Rolls-Royce.
Against one wall leans a rack of 50 or so vintage shirts, almost all of which have been screen-printed with statements like "I Fucked Paul Sevigny" (the brother of actress Chloë Sevigny and a member of the Brooklyn band A.R.E. Weapons) or "I Fucked Anna Wintour" (the editor of Vogue) or I Fucked -- fill in the blank with any celebrity, media personality or downtown New York scenester whose name Courtney can fit onto a shirt. Most of the shirts bear their original logos and slogans with the occasional rugby or polo thrown in for variety. Courtney sells them through his company, Just Another Rich Kid for approximately $80 each, and they've become a hot item in New York, where the revival of '80s synthesizer music, Flock of Seagulls haircuts, leg warmers, and heavy black eyeliner have heralded the age of ironic fashion.
The combination of Courtney's text and the original logos is often intentional and the results can be amusing -- and at times, disconcerting. A black D.A.R.E. T-shirt -- a vestige of Nancy Reagan's drug wars -- sits beneath the text: "I Fucked Kurt Cobain," a heroin addict who killed himself. After hearing about the T-shirts from a friend, I ordered one that reads "I Fucked David Remnick" (the New Yorker editor), with the letters centered around a Champion logo.
To a casual observer, the lists and the T-shirts could easily be mistaken for the obsession of someone who has spent too much time watching MTV and reading US magazine. But as Courtney explains, it's all part of an art project he calls "The Commodification of Celebrity."
"Everyone's trying to be cool by name-dropping, associating themselves with celebrity," he says, rolling his eyes. "Instead of doing this slimy name-dropping thing, I was like, well, why don't you just put it on a shirt? Take it to, like, the nth degree. Not 'I sat next to Paris Hilton at a concert' or 'I saw Danny DeVito at a restaurant,' but 'I fucked Paris Hilton.' The literal interpretation isn't there. It's more just name-fucking, using this commodity of the celebrity name to buy coolness, or insider status, or whatever."
As Courtney explains his various "theories," he becomes more animated. Every time his athletic frame relaxes into his computer desk chair, his body tenses a few seconds later as he leaps up to find another vestige of a previous exhibit, a printed-out e-mail, or an article that demonstrates his point. His eyes widen and his tenor voice reaches a crescendo at the end of sentences, which he often punctuates with a "You know?" and a furrowed brow that indicate he's not entirely sure he buys his own explanations -- or that you do. Occasionally, he pauses in the middle of his discourse de la célébrité, letting his eyes wander to some invisible spot on the wall or ceiling, running his hand through his close-cropped brown hair, and wrinkling his nose as if searching for one last piece to tie all of his ideas together.
The walls of Courtney's apartment are decorated with large, Rothko-esque abstract paintings that he created over a year ago. Bright blocks of orange, yellow and black are arranged with precision on rectangular canvases interspersed throughout the living area and bedroom. The paintings, the lists and the shirts were recently part of a small exhibition at Duke University titled the "New American Dream." A friend of Courtney's at the university contacted him about exhibiting the paintings as a stand-alone project in a student center gallery, but Courtney took the opportunity to add the lists and shirts to the mix, to use all of his "art" to elucidate his philosophies about celebrity.
"I think our past heroes -- the people we used to be into -- were Nelson Rockefeller and Oprah, Bill Gates, Madonna," says Courtney. "People who had actually done something." (Lumping Nelson Rockefeller and Madonna in the same category? That's a new one.) His work, Courtney explains, is about instant, overnight celebrity -- celebrity for no reason and fame for simply existing. Reality TV stars, naughty White House interns, and party-girl hotel heiresses.
"Now I think everybody wants to be famous," he says. "Everybody wants to be paid for being themselves, and no one wants to work hard anymore. I kind of got into this idea of the 'New American Dream' being fame and celebrity and effortless wealth. The hard-work thing is gone. People just want to be like, 'I'm here! Pay me!' Every American wants to be famous!"
Every American? "I don't know that they want to deal with the reality of it," he says, "But even my mom. She'd want to be a Hollywood star. I feel like it's almost un-American to not want to be famous."
OK, I say. His shirts seem to illustrate this point. But where do the paintings come in?
"I had these three paintings," he says, gesturing to the abstract canvases on the wall. "One of them was called 'Eminem,' one of them was called 'Andy Warhol,' and one of them was called 'Lil' Kim.'" What do big blocks of color have to do with Eminem? Nothing, Courtney says. "Because people are so trained to recognize [Eminem's] name, it engages them in a dialogue, and they don't know why they're in it. They're trying to figure out why it's named Eminem." In other words, they're tricked into interpreting the painting through the lens of a celebrity ideal.
Warhol did something similar, says Courtney. "When Warhol did Marilyn Monroe, he used the commodity of her face to get attention for his paintings. If he'd just used me or you or his mom, no one would care. Not to devalue the fact that he did it in twelves or nines or silk-screened. Presentation was important. But it's still Marilyn Monroe."
Get Salon in your mailbox!