...it's just fake.
I found the below quite entertaining [86] and twisted and ironic in many, many ways.
Artist Damien Hirst so considers punk clothing art that he paid $160,000 for a collection of it for his museum. Unfortunately, Sex Pistols founder Malcolm McLaren has declared it all fake, and he should know: He created the originals with designer Vivienne Westwood.
Hirst,
most famous for his installations of sliced cows and tiger sharks
floating in formaldehyde, bought garments he thought were from the
couple's 1970s shop Sex & Seditionaries, from Simon Easton, owner of risque site Punkpistol.com. But when McLaren went to Hirst's house, he had bad news.
"I
felt terrible, but they were fakes," McLaren told us. "Seeing these
clothes, I said, 'Wow, they've gone to great lengths to manufacture the
labels, and distress the fabrics.' But clearly they were not the
fabrics we used 35 years ago, and the stitching was totally different.
And there were bags and bags, big black bags of them. We simply didn't
make that many. I mean, we literally made these clothes on my kitchen
floor. They were each unique."
Hirst, whose mother used to cut up
his own punk clothing and who once melted his Sex Pistols album to make
a fruit bowl, is under a gag order about the situation. But word has
spread, and yesterday, a curator at Christie's called McLaren, asking him to authenticate 70 punk garments they'll put up for auction come the fall.
The punk progenitor wants to protect collectors from phony merch, "from the kid in Englewood Cliffs who buys a fake God Save the Queen T-shirt to museums," McLaren told us.
He's
notified the fine-art publisher Rizzoli to excise his essay from the
upcoming book, "Punk Couture: Clothes for Heroes," if Easton has
anything to do with it. A Rizzoli spokeswoman said the respected house
was on the case.
Easton insists that "absolutely everything my
clients have purchased [is] authentic. ... McLaren actually had very
little input in the design [of the clothes]. ... He will rewrite
history on a daily basis. ... [He] has less knowledge about these
clothes than the people who collect them."
Hirst, the world's highest-paid artist, e-mailed McLaren: "It's a shocking story."
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