via highsnobiety
Building on its long history of supporting the arts, today Gap introduced Artist Editions T-Shirts, a limited edition collection of t-shirts designed by 13 of today’s most influential contemporary artists, including Chuck Close, Jeff Koons, Marilyn Minter, Kiki Smith, Cai Guo-Qiang, Barbara Kruger, Ashley Bickerton, Kenny Scharf, Glenn Ligon, Rirkrit Tiravanija, Kerry James Marshall, Hanna Liden and Sarah Sze.
Gap worked in close partnership with the Whitney Museum of American Art and Art Production Fund to create the collection with the 13 artists, who are all previous Whitney Biennial participants. The Whitney Biennial is a special exhibition held every two years at the Whitney Museum of American Art that features the most important contemporary art in the United States. Gap is a proud sponsor of the 2008 Whitney Biennial.
The limited edition collection is available exclusively at select Gap stores in the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and franchise markets, as well as online in the U.S. at gap.com. It’s also available at the Whitney Museum of American Art, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis and at Colette, a Paris-based boutique. The t-shirts range in price from $28 to $38.
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While I will run out and buy the Kerry James Marshall shirt and probably buy a Close, Philip Glass portrait t-shirt, I have to say with a few precious exceptions (KJM is awesome), what an old school, 80’s, list of people the Gap tapped for this. Koons! Yawn. Yes, yes, I know the gap is not in the business of breaking contemporary artists to the populous, but they could have jazzed this up a bit
I guess it is a well intentioned idea, I should be nicer
I have about 15 Robert Ryman tees.
Yeah, Richard, you are right! Wouldn’t it have been cool to have some artists from at least the 60s, 70s and now. A good mix.
Funny Tico! Now I will always think of mine as early Rauschenberg (white) and Malevitch (white and black). A whole new vision of my T-shirt collection!
iGoogle is following suit. It’s too bad I can’t get a Jeff Koons branded iGoogle theme or shirt of him fornicating his wife.
http://www.google.com/help/ig/art/artists/koons.html#utm_campaign=en&utm_source=en-ha-na-us-ct_themes&utm_medium=ha
Long history of supporting the arts? Are you fucking kidding? A long history of short sighted self interest. Nobody remembers the Gap Red campaign?….. Exploiting AIDS patients to sell T-shirts…..Now irrelevant has been artists are for sale to be used as tools to sell t-shirts to self conscious hipsters who are more concerned with acquisition and possession over any substance the art may have held at one time. Keep purchasing-let a corporation and R&D people steer your taste and style and soon your identity and by all means do it in the name of ART!…….. tools!
Koons isnt a yawn and hasbeen u twits! ugh. dont b so attention deficit sound bite oriented. yes some art and artists dont stand the test of time but critics are never was beens 2 start with! sheesh…the most current trend in contemporary art today is thumbing your nose at seperation of commerce and high art…Koons is pretty fricken releveant today, 7 months ago…On November 14, 2007 his art piece “Hanging Heart” sold at Sotheby’s auction house for $23.6 million becoming, at the time, the most expensive piece by a living artist ever auctioned. It was bought by the Gagosian Gallery which also purchased another Koons sculpture entitled “Diamond (Blue)” for $11.8 million from Christie’s auction house on Tuesday, November 13, 2007. [3
They could have a Yves Klein shirt where you pay for the shirt and don’t get anything.
A Damien Hirst shirt that costs $100 million.
A Yoko Ono shirt that’s just instructions for wearing a shirt.
A Fluxus shirt that has no arm or neck holes.
A readymade shirt that’s a t-shirt from Urban Outfitters.
Somebody stop me, I could do this all day.
Kathryn
Fabulous Kathryn! I think I’ll have my art history students steal your idea as an exercise.
A Neo-Conceptualist shirt — you hire someone else to buy one and wear it and get three curators to constantly follow the poerson around giving speeches about the importance of it all … A Chicago Neo-Conceptualist shirt , you copy the former idea and everybody is supposed to act like it is new and your idea … oh noooooooooooooo Kathryn you’ve got me hooked now …………………
A Chris Burden T: A bullet hole in the left short sleeve.
Richard Pettibone would wear Andy Warhol’s shirt.
Yes, I know Mark, it just goes on and on.
Monochromatic shirts, ill-fitting shirts, there’s no end.
On another topic, I’m reading every conceptual art book I can get my hands on. And I ask this crowd “What is the point of photographs in conceptual art books?” It’s this art book convention everyone feels the need to hopelessly follow. If I see one more photograph of an empty room, a barren field or a blank piece of paper, I’m going to go bananas.
K
You should have seen good-ole-trendy-to-the-bone Flash Art in the 70s — pages and pages of tiny b/w photos looking like bad photocopies (Xerox variety then). All of somebody naked or an empty room. Maybe you can find archived back issues and torture yourself. I find it intersting that it appears to be not only a convention, but it became a formal-aesthetic style issue, the very thing that it was supposed to be against. I have to admit that en mass, they were interesting, just not useful as conveyors of information.
There was some sort of Babrara Kruger protest about the T-Shirts and Gap’s involvement with sweatshops and human rights violations.
Some artists urinated on her installation or something.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BQ2FlqJ9v04
Article:
Pissed Off Artists Allegedly Urinate on Kruger Art
Installation
A group of artist protesters calling themselves “The
Infinity Lab” were arrested Thursday after witnesses
reported acts of vandalism on the new Barbara Kruger
Installation commissioned by University of California
San Diego’s Stuart Collection.
The protesters chanted, “Another formulaic Kruger”,
as one of them allegedly urinated on the
installation’s floor text. Campus police arrested the
3 protesters as they continued to mock the
installation.
http://rhizome.org/discuss/view/38019
THEY DID PEE ON KRUGER!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5t8pUQbZhhU
Proof positive that it is better to be pissed off than pissed on.