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Breaking: Julian Schnabel’s Abode Fading from “Pompeii Red” to “Venetian Pink”
News that Mr. Schnabel is turning to rentals is the latest twist in the Palazzo Chupi soap opera, which has taken on a life of its own. Next week Mr. Schnabel is scheduled to auction off a Picasso painting he has owned for 20 years, “Femme au Chapeau,” in order to pay back loans he took out to build the project. (If you look closely, you can see the Picasso—or a copy if it—hanging in the living room in the pictures in the old listing for one of thea schnabel picasso copy
rip east coast skater andy kessler
The current state of skateboarding — the ubiquitous television presence, the department store displays of designer skater apparel, and the proliferation of free municipal skateparks around the country — is roughly to Kessler’s brand of skating what a Country Club swimming pool is to the ocean. His was a raw, aggressive way of skating, fast and slashing and explosive. He fell a lot, bled and got hurt a lot. But there was also a grace to it, a power and soulfulness that often gets lost in the flashy spectacle of televised competitions. There’s a reason Kessler’s skate crew called themselves The Soul Artists of Zoo York. (Incidentally, the Zoo York moniker has resurfaced as a trendy company owned by Ecko Unlimited, but it has precisely squat to do with Kessler or the roots of the East Coast scene.) For most of Kessler’s life, years of which were mired in violence and addiction and the existential angst that torments many a non-conformist, skateboarding wasn’t merely a sport or pastime or even the artistic expression of his soul. It was the path to his soul’s salvation.youtube video central park / ny magazine article '05
Which maybe sounds a little fruity and abstract, but I mean quite the opposite. That is, Kessler’s great and lasting contribution to skateboarding was recognizing its transformative and transcendent qualities, the myriad ways in which a highly individualized endeavor invited, not precluded, community. Such community is why so many of us know his story. Such community is why skaters who never met him feel like they’ve lost a friend with whom they used to seek out drained swimming pools. For all of their perceived destructiveness, for all of their purported unthinking and lawless mischief, skateboarders are a creative and compassionate breed. Often, especially when Kessler was nurturing what would become the East Coast scene, the kids who gravitated toward skateboarding were misfits and malcontents, the shy outcasts who’d been intimidated and sullied by the complex pressures of social interaction. Skateboarding gave them an identity and voice, and Kessler, by example, gave them the confidence to declare themselves to society.
Then, as both he and skateboarding matured, he gave his followers something else: sanctuary. In a landmark initiative, he persuaded the New York City Parks Department to build Manhattan’s first public skatepark in Riverside Park at 108th Street; after the park opened in 1995, Kessler was dubbed the Grandmaster of 108. A unique thrill of skateboarding will always be finding a piece of architecture —the brick banks under the Brooklyn Bridge, say, or a Wall Street handrail or the drained pool in Van Cortlandt Park that became known as “Deathbowl”—and appropriating it, converting it into skateable terrain; however, in staking out land where skaters could convene and ride without harassment, Kessler not only ensured a safe haven, he also mandated that society start seeing skateboarding as more than a nuisance, more than juvenile delinquency. Understand: he wanted more than legitimacy for skateboarders; he wanted respect. Until his death, he supported himself by building and designing skate parks in all of the five boroughs, continuing his life’s work of literally and symbolically transforming the city’s relationship with the skateboarding community.
And he continued skating — dropping into cement bowls, floating his frontside airs and falling and getting wrecked, then limping back to his board. As recently as a few years ago, Kessler slammed so hard that he dislocated his femur and shattered his kneecap. Kessler was 45 at the time and uninsured. To offset his medical expenses, friends held a fundraiser where artists like Julian Schnabel painted skateboards that were auctioned off in a SoHo gallery. A couple of surgeries and $51,000 in medical bills later, Kessler was back on the ramp. This is who he was and how he’ll be remembered, as a man who understood the abiding and cathartic power of resilience. You don’t give in. You take every run — on the ramp, with recovery, at City Hall. It has everything and nothing to do with skateboarding which, at its essence, is the act of focusing so intensely on the body that you feel liberated from your physical form. Think not of swimming in a pool, but of becoming the ocean itself. Think not of flying, but of floating in a place where the ground or gravity has never existed — a place where, at long last, there is no irony, no pain or struggle, where there’s no such thing as falling.
the big schnabowski - doesnt he know that this project and the other decorating endeavours devalues his "A"rt? and the meier slagging, defensive much?
“Julian is an aesthetic omnivore,” said Dodie Kazanjian, who covers the art world for Vogue and is the director of Gallery Met at the Metropolitan Opera; she toured Chupi a few weeks ago. “Everything he touches becomes a Schnabel. So I looked at it” — Chupi, that is — “like another piece of art.”
But in the neighborhood, there are lingering resentments. “It’s woefully out of context and a monument to this guy’s ego,” said Andrew Berman, executive director of the Greenwich Village Society for Historic Preservation, one of the neighborhood groups that fought to block Chupi’s construction. He has called the building “an exploded Malibu Barbie house.”
“The biggest thing we took away from all this,” he continued, “is that the system is somewhat broken. Developers have the opportunity to break the law and beat the clock on rezoning and the public has little recourse.” (In response, Brian Kelly, a musician and old friend of Mr. Schnabel’s who managed the project for the artist, said, “We played by the rules and didn’t seek any favors.”)
“Personally, I adore it,” said Paul Rudnick, the novelist and playwright, who lives across the street and watched the “landing” of Chupi with great interest. “It’s in the grand tradition of Manhattan white elephants, which make you wonder, Who lives there, and why? It’s already a landmark. And it’s much more in the tradition of the West Village, which is supposed to be outrageous and theatrical, than all those glass towers. When the transsexuals left it seems they were reincarnated as real estate,” said Mr. Rudnick mistily, referring to the professionals who used to line the streets here. “At least the Palazzo does them proud.”
the schnab
Of course, Schnabel’s West Village building is an entirely different kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, or total artwork, but it is born from the same fervent attitude that makes Giotto’s blue-backed frescoes so unforgettable. It also owes a huge debt, which Schnabel freely acknowledges, to two American architects: Addison Mizner and Stanford White. Schnabel’s experience with both architects’ work is personal and direct. He has rented a Mizner house in Florida in the past, and owns an 1880s fishing “cottage” by White in Montauk, on Long Island, where Schnabel spends lots of time painting and surfing. The West 11th Street building abounds in nods to both architects, all of them put through the Schnabel strainer. He’ll take a Mizner fireplace, for instance, and create a pumped-up version by, in his words, “putting some balls on it.” Likewise, the kitchens in each of the Chupi residences—with their board-and-batten wooden ceilings, emerald-green terra-cotta tiles, and cast-concrete countertops dyed chromium-oxide green—are straight out of Schnabel’s Montauk house, though re-tuned. None of this is simple mimicry. What’s interesting is how Schnabel mixes references to White and Mizner into a global iconography, including Moorish, Turkish, and Venetian touches, motifs the architects were attracted to themselves.
more big pink
schnabels shabby chic in pink house nyc
move over julian, tom sach is designing too. from the new nyt sunday mag fall design issue. this (also see the non linkable art + commerce slide show) is a loathsome trend my friends and rather speaks to the design-y forwardness of these artists work. and dont lets not throw in (out) hirsts pill-bar while we're at it. whats that... sorry i cant hear you... for the sound of all these artists cashing in. once youve sold out your critical edge you cant buy back a radical position and without radical ground, your dead to me as an artist.
What’s the difference between design and art? The question has cropped up again and again since a Marc Newson chaise longue sold for just under $1 million at Sotheby’s this past summer.
The short answer is: Who cares? And that isn’t meant to sound brusque, but I don’t care as much about whether something is labeled “design” or “art” as I do about the thing itself and the objectives of whoever created it. Nor have I met a designer or artist who cares, at least not one whom I admire. Yet some people do care, and not all of them work for the auction houses and design galleries with a commercial interest in selling design — or “design art,” as it is now branded. What’s more, the process whereby the distinction between design and art has become so fuzzy as to be almost invisible tells us a lot about the changing role of design in our lives.
In ye olden days the distinction between art and design boiled down to the beaux-arts prejudice: art = good, design = bad. Art, or so the argument went, was superior to design, because artists were free to express whatever they wished — which, back then, was likely to be beauty — in work they made themselves. Designers, on the other hand, faced numerous creative constraints, from meeting their clients’ needs and ensuring that whatever they designed would fulfill its intended function to delegating production to someone else.
In the last century, those distinctions eroded. Artists became less inclined to express ideals of beauty, in favor of using art to explore political and emotional concerns. The conception and process of producing art became as important as the work itself, which was increasingly made by someone else, not the artist.
The technology of design, meanwhile, became so sophisticated that designers could assume the artist’s role of creating beauty. Can you think of a contemporary painting or sculpture that is lovelier in the old-fashioned aesthetic sense than an iMac? Technology has also enabled designers to exercise greater control over the production of their work by using their computers to execute tasks once delegated to engineers or typesetters.
Designers still have to meet a client’s brief and to ensure that their work fulfills its function. Some, like the graphic designers Stefan Sagmeister and M/M, counter these necessities by producing experimental work alongside their commercial projects. Others, like the product designers Marc Newson and Jasper Morrison, argue that those very constraints make design more challenging and rewarding than art.
Doubtless there are artists who disagree. Why else would Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol, Richard Artschwager, Dieter Roth, Barbara Kruger and so many others who emerged between the late 1950’s and early 70’s have started out in design and switched to art? Today’s young designers are less likely to switch, partly because technology gives them greater creative control over their work, but also because they’re now licensed to exercise it.
Just as artists are increasingly preoccupied by design — take Thomas Demand, Liam Gillick, Jorge Pardo, Tobias Rehberger and Andrea Zittel, for starters — designers are venturing onto artistic turf by addressing emotional and political concerns. Whether Zittel’s replicas of domestic spaces tell you more about our relationship with our homes than the (I’d say) equally eloquent, functional objects designed by Hella Jongerius is entirely subjective.
Personally I still find that art is more adept than design at confronting the messy, troubling and sinister things I don’t understand, and that’s why I love it. Though design can do that, too. Take two pieces introduced at this year’s Milan furniture fair. Just as the W.M.D. and Red Cross trucks carved into Studio Job’s Biscuit ceramics for Royal Tichelaar Makkum are a damning indictment of the Iraq war, Maarten Baas’s burnt chairs for Moooi (he calls them Smoke) speak volumes of a post-industrial culture heaving with too much stuff.
Ironically, the examples of design that are least likely to address such issues are branded “design art.” It’s not that the flamboyantly sculptural chairs auctioned at Sotheby’s and Phillips de Pury & Company are pointless. At their best, they’re intriguing exercises in form and materials, just as haute couture is to fashion. (Newson’s forthcoming show at the Gagosian Gallery will feature pieces in Carrara marble. It is too expensive to use in industrial production, but he will apply the experience to projects like Qantas Airways cabins and Nike sneakers.) But at its worst, design art is flamboyant, sculptural and not much else — design without discipline, art without the bite. As Donald Judd, who practiced both design and art, wrote: “If a chair ... is not functional, if it appears to be only art, it is ridiculous. ... A work of art exists as itself; a chair exists as a chair itself.”
I don’t really feel like talking about this,” Mr. Schnabel said one recent morning at the hotel, again evoking the often evasive Mr. Starck. He was pacing the crowded lobby in sneakers, baggy shorts and a Western checked shirt, waiting for the delivery of the hotel’s estimable collection of plus-size art (much of it his own), adjusting the placement of the chairs and side tables (also heavy on the Schnabels) and generally helping to put the finishing touches on the $200 million project that has transformed the old Gramercy Park from a bastion of musty authenticity with wall-to-wall carpeting and Swedish meatballs in the bar.
Mr. Schrager was there, too, with his in-house architect, Anda Andrei; his business partner, Michael Overington, vice chairman of the Ian Schrager Company; and other essential and long-serving staff members. But though Mr. Schnabel’s friend Lou Reed would drop in briefly to view and praise the artist’s latest work in progress, Mr. Schnabel had brought with him only a small and quirky entourage: an assistant imported from Paris to perfect the French dialogue in his forthcoming film adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s book “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” and his twin 12-year-old sons, Olmo and Cy.
Ever the rebel, Mr. Schnabel rejects the obvious term for someone who does what he has just done at the Gramercy Park Hotel. “I’m not a designer, but I’ve always built things,” he said. “Basically I’m a painter, and this is something that really isn’t that hard to do.”
schnabel towers
"Keep the sofa; sell the Schnabel."