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“Wouldn’t it be cool if you could buy sprouts and a Jeff Koons in the same place?” Bowie mused during an interview back in 1995, tucked somewhere in an anonymous gallery. With an idle tap of his chin, he adds “—which may not be too far away, judging by his prices.”
Whatever his thoughts on the accessibility of art, the late David Bowie amassed an impressive collection of artwork including paintings, sketches, and sculptures that easily cost more than a metric ton of sprouts. During his lifetime he actively loaned pieces to museums and collections, happy to share the pieces that brought him such happiness, but the public finally got a chance to view his collection in full this fall thanks to Sotheby’s, who displayed the work in multiple cities prior to their sale, titled Bowie/Collector.
On paper, Bowie collected Post-War British Art, but Bowie was never a man to be neatly categorized: his collection contained examples of Contemporary African and American art, Surrealism, and Italian design. In fact, very few pieces seemed to “go” together, let alone fit a theme. Brightly colored large-scale paintings hung beside small sketched studies, bronze sculptures rested on pedestals beside futuristic dayglo furniture. If there’s any common thread between what seem like radically different pieces in Bowie’s eclectic collection, it’s the simple fact that they moved him. Art was a passion, and it’s that passion that holds the collection together.
In this way, Bowie’s collection is much like his career: varied and diverse, at times scattered and downright strange, not always executed with the best technique or foremost skill, but pursued with enthusiasm because of a genuine emotional response. As an artist, Bowie was prolific, writing, performing, and producing music for more than fifty years in addition to pursuits in acting and painting. His work touched millions of people, created a soundtrack for so many memories, became the catalyst for so many emotions. Considering his own power to move, Sotheby’s preview seemed like a rare and precious opportunity to see what moved the man behind the icon.
Standing in front of Méret Oppenheimer’s La Condition Humaine, one of the four hundred pieces being sold at Sotheby’s in London this November, one can’t help but wonder whether the piece appealed to the same frenetic neon desperation that produced “Be My Wife,” or “Always Crashing In The Same Car.” Frank Auerbach’s Head of Gerda Boehm recalls the discordant synthesizers of “Ashes to Ashes,” and again the thought creeps in—did the heaps of paint on canvas evoke the same feeling in Bowie that drove him to write the song?
Sotheby’s did not provide dates of acquisition for any of the pieces, though it would certainly help to give fans a better idea of Bowie’s relationship to the works themselves. Such dates may become available in the exhibition catalog, currently available for preorder to ship some time in October. In the meantime, the only item on which no one needs to speculate is 1966 radio phonograph designed by Pier Giacomo and Achille Castiglione. Set beneath a nearly life-sized still from the 1979 “DJ” music video, Bowie’s well-loved phonograph undoubtedly played countless LPs, inspiring so many evolutions we’ve come to recognize in his own music. But art isn’t the only thing on the gallery walls: listed beside the phonograph are Bowie’s 25 Albums That Could Change Your Life, a list spanning nearly 70 years containing everything from chanson to electronic to comedic novelty. It seems to only further the feeling that in the end, it seemed what mattered most to Bowie was not collecting trends or making tastes, but inspiring passions and evoking emotions.
It’s been retrograde city over the last few months—with a whole pack of planets on the Rx (Mars, Mercury, Jupiter, and Saturn to name only a few of the big ones), it’s no surprise that things haven’t exactly gone according the plan lately. That includes last month’s tarot forecast. Don’t worry, though: Mercury went direct last weekend and Mars is back on track before this month is out. We still have a while before powerhouse Jupiter gets with the program, but by then our planetary woes should be long behind us!
In the meantime, we’ve got a lot to celebrate—the weather has finally broken, summer is well on its way, and with it come all of the fun-in-the-sun plans we’ve missed for the last eight months. It’s time for block parties, barbecues, and picnics in the park—it’s time to recharge your batteries and detox all those winter worries. Friends might be coming out of the woodwork, but this is a perfect time to spend some quality time with You, especially if you’ve neglected your own base needs in the frantic energy of the last few months. Take yourself on a date. Go for some long walks on the beach, buy yourself a piña colada, reconnect with yourself.
This would also be a great time to have a heart-to-heart with yourself and forgive all the things you’ve been blaming yourself for lately: not everything is your fault. There’s a difference between taking responsibility and berating yourself. If things haven’t worked out, examine the situations as they transpired and really think about what went wrong. Consider them missed opportunities instead of failures: the growth you’ll achieve by learning from this will be more valuable in the long run.
Use this month to really balance your energies—have fun, lighten your load, and go forward with the understanding that you’re only human. You adapt and evolve based on the challenges you’re presented with. Where were you at this time last year? Where were you even six months ago—how long ago does that feel? You may not have always been in control, and you may not have made all the right choices, but look how far you’ve come. Six months from now, you’ll be somewhere entirely new all over again, with new things to celebrate and new challenges to face.
Art has always been, for myself and so many others, an outlet for so many deeply personal emotions. It has not only been a way of working through the trials and tribulations of human experience, but also a means of communicating these feelings to others without explicitly recounting details. Art gives us a way to articulate emotion while circumventing circumstance: a painting or poem is often a short-cut to the heart, a way of saying, “this is how it feels,” regardless of whether the audience can sympathize with the situation that prompted it. Because human emotion is a complex and varied thing, I may not feel the sadness you experience by falling out with a friend, or the frustration you have at a romantic rejection, but I have no doubt experienced them myself under other circumstances and can recognize their presence in artistic works.
That said, when it comes to light that a piece was not, in fact, composed out of its “proper” emotion, it feels like a sort of betrayal. I recall a number of times when I found out a song I deeply identified with was written from a totally different viewpoint, or exclusively pandered to radio production and popularity. My entire existence seemed to crumble when, at sixteen, I found out Robert Smith had written “Let’s Go to Bed” simply based on what got radio airplay—the song that had defined my first ‘adult’ relationship suddenly felt like a lie. I had been convinced that Smith had written from the same insecure, fugue-like daze of affection that I had experienced. I couldn’t believe those words that had actually moved me to tears had been complete fabrication.
However, I was also so thoroughly touched by works of fiction in literature—I wept for the doomed loves in so many Gothic novels, and thrilled at the triumph of good over evil in works so obviously fantasy. When I read urban legends (my generation’s fairytales), I found myself jumpy and unsettled for days. Never for a second did I believe these accounts were true, but I still allowed them to move me and spark very real emotions. Whether or not the authors had experienced unrequited love, or ridden dragons triumphantly into battle, or escaped the horrors of Satanic cults firsthand was irrelevant. Whether or not I had any emotional basis of comparison was also irrelevant—the work felt authentic enough to create those for me. Years later, with more of life behind me, those feelings hold true. Now, instead of reading Leroux and thinking, “that must be what love feels like,” I can examine the dynamic between Christine and Raoul and say, “that is love” and feel just as strongly with the bonus of recognition.
We can watch Leonardo DiCaprio fight bears and struggle against a historical wildness without questioning the emotional credentials he or director Alejandro González Iñárritu have behind them. We can even give them both awards of global artistic recognition. So why did I feel so betrayed by Robert Smith for his lyrical fiction?
Perhaps it’s because it caused me to question the authenticity of his other songs, songs I aspired to experience myself. If “Let’s Go to Bed” was a total fabrication, what did that mean for songs like “Just Like Heaven,” or “Icing Sugar,” songs that summed up everything I wanted out of love? Maybe, if the emotion I felt came from lyrics confessed to be fictional, the feelings I got from other songs were just as fictional, and described experiences I couldn’t possibly have. For years, I thought that may have been painfully true—real relationships, at least as far as my experience extended, did not include the dizzy euphoria or frenetic excitement of love that Smith had promised me. It pained me that the emotions they described would exist only in these musical fantasies, and my initial feelings were replaced with resentment.
It wasn’t until years later that I realized the sincerity of Smith’s lyrics were irrelevant: my emotional reaction was no less real, those feelings no less authentic, than they would be born from my own experience. Listening to those words produced in me a reaction—that alone was totally valid. And later on, they proved an invaluable base of comparison for my own feelings in response to other life experiences. Like Aristotle’s poets, Smith’s songs had taught me to recognize love in its playful, creative, joyful form, which I had no previous concept of through my own experience. Whether or not Smith had written them out of like experience made no difference: the emotions I felt listening to those songs were real, and prepared me to identify those same emotions when they came into my life organically.
There are aesthetic theories that deny we, as viewers, can experience any real feelings from art. With no personal stake in the creator’s experience or the plot at hand, we go through the motions of reacting—while sitting in the dark of a theatre, watching the latest James Wan flick unfold before us, we experience what feels like a genuine stress response. Our heart may beat erratically, we may have difficulty breathing, we might even scream, but according to theorists, this isn’t really fear: at the end of the movie, we know the lights will come up and we’ll all shuffle out of the theatre safely. But those feelings stay with you. Days, weeks, months later, when you find yourself alone in the dark, that same sense of dread may creep back in and you find yourself re-living the fear you experienced in the theatre. My sister still won’t use public restrooms alone thanks to a certain Japanese horror film, and loathe as I am to admit it, I kept all my coats out of sight for days after watching the Babadook so I wouldn’t see them out of the corner of my eye as something else.
The same extends to other works of art, poetry, and music. “Let’s Go to Bed” remains an emotional song for me, whether or not it was emotional for Robert Smith. I had a genuine experience, one that I relive each time I hear that song. I believe that my emotional experiences with other pieces are authentic as well—each time I’m moved to tears or imbued with excitement, I trust the feelings that evoked the response are relatable and repeatable, whether they are insights for future experiences or recall specific emotional occurrences. Those emotions aren’t packed into a box and stored on the shelf at the end of the experience, like the record that provoked them—they’re carried with me, recalled over and over again.
The Cure – Let's go to Bed by bebepanda
Most months, when I pull my tarot cards, I instantly understand the message at hand. This month, however, wasn’t as clear. I pulled one, two, three cards–they weren’t entirely disparate, they weren’t in conflict, but something felt “off.” For a moment, I doubted my intuition: there was something here that I wasn’t seeing, something overlooked. I had to ruminate on the reading for a few days.
“Another post about the 1975?” you’re probably groaning. I know, it’s been weeks since their album came out and I’ve all ready mentioned them so many times…but the moment I saw the video for Love Me back in October, I knew I needed to play with their look.
The video, directed by Diane Martel, featured the band partying with a horde of cardboard celebrities, but let’s face it: the real star of the show was Matty Healy’s makeup, as done by the incredibly artistic Jeffrey Baum. Powder blue and neon pink is a very particular colour combo, and definitely serves as a throwback to the kind of retro 80’s glamour the band is channeling, but Baum keeps it from looking dated by keeping lips clean and natural, tying it all together with dashes of dayglo liner.
Considering that “Serendipity” blue is one of Pantone‘s dual Colours of the Year, I decided to bust out my new Sephora Pantone Universe lipstick and do some role reversal. You’ve seen the blue eye pink lip combo a thousand times, but I’m always interested in paths less traveled. And considering the song’s New Wave influences, I thought it was appropriate to play with some heavy contouring and bright blush.
I used Sugarpill‘s Dollipop, Urban Decay‘s Savage, Bones, Alien, Truth, and Too Faced‘s Your Love is King to create a bold pink eye and blend it out into my contour, a la some of my New Romantic image idols. Then, using Dior‘s Dior Addict Fluid Shadow in Magnetic, I traced a silver line under my waterline before creating a second line in black liquid liner–everyone has their favourites, but mine is Urban Decay‘s Perversion. Extending the line beyond my natural eye on both sides, I let the inside corner fall downwards while the outside corner continued up.
Rather than creating a full line along my upper lash line, I joined the lower line with a wing on top and piled on the black mascara. Leaving a slight gap between the upper and lower lines creates an even larger-looking eye–something between a doll and a wild animal, two things everyone aspires to of course.
I filled in my brows as usual, and finished the look off with the fabulously blue Serendipity lipstick from Sephora’s Pantone Universe collection. For such a light colour, Serendipity goes on opaque with the first stroke, so application was painstaking–moreso because the bullet itself is a rather strange shape and doesn’t lend itself well to drawing lines or creating shapes. If you’re a dedicated brush-user or have a magic supply of blue lipliner, this probably won’t bother you. Personally, I think this shade is worth a little time and effort–it’s the perfect counterpart to the classic (cliché?) powder blue shadow.
While I love the clean neon liner seen on the video’s models, I felt like taking it back–Love Me via ’81 if it was done by Boy George. Naturally, this isn’t a look for some light afternoon shopping or a family dinner. Luckily for me, there’s never a lack of good dance parties in town, and with a New Order show the same night, I was in good company.
The next time you see an artist or model in a video you like, take a look at their makeup. I challenge you to create something from it, to turn it into something you identify with or feel strongly for. Not only does it inspire you to break out of your daily beauty routine, it also creates a unique place for you within the music. You strengthen your relationship not only with the song itself, but also with yourself–it really is amazing how far a little makeup can push the boundaries of our identities.
It was a frigid February morning and I was huddled with my sister on Orchard Street trying to soak in sunlight to combat the unforgiving wind. I had only been standing there for about 20 minutes, but she and her friends had been on the street since 2AM counting down the moments. We barely noticed when the car pulled up at the curb and the 1975 rolled out, all retro fringe and rockstar shades. Screams erupted as Matty Healy pulled off his sunglasses and sniffed the frozen air, “Oi, it’s blazin’ out here!”
“You used to have a face straight out of a magazine
Now you just look like anyoneI just had a change of heartI feel as though I was deceived
I never found love in the cityI just sat in self-pity and cried in the car”
“You got excited and now you find out that your ‘girl’won’t even get you undressed or care about your beating chest”