Everyone Will Be famous for 15 Minutes
“I never know what I'm going to put on the canvas. The canvas paints itself. I'm just the middleman.”- Peter Max"America is the canvas, throw up as much paint as you can. We are just the middlemen"-Ed Reif
The Power of Myth
The myth that REAL artists don’t make money is the wrong myth. Pop Artist Peter Max is no miraculous exception--He is having his 70 something-ith birthday this week onboard the Celebrity Solstice.
Optimistic, generous, and naive, that's the German-American Dreamer in a nutshell. He isn't the industry standard- He's industrial painting; churning and burning cotton-candy, Art-Nouveau-ish limited editions---the inedible raised to the unspeakable, funk and Junk.
The copies are better than the originals.... from Xerox to Infinity.The man who mass-produced the decade(s) even has Cosmic iPhone Aps, Max has more game than Milton Bradley.
Holy Cow!
The coolest things I can think of about him is that he doesn't eat his friends-Peter is a vegetarian. Noteworthy is his cow rescue-- a $180,000 barter deal ) at a Cincinnati slaughterhouse, and a 1984 Statue of Liberty extreme makeover with with then Chrysler CEO Lee Iacocca, and Nancy and Ronald Reagan's blessing and clout.
His paint is on a Boeing 777 Continental fuselage, the 1999 Woodstock stage, The Beatles Yellow Submarine Album cover, a giant mural at the 2002 Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. Max has been designated as the Official Artist of five Super Bowls, five Grammy Awards, World Cup USA, The World Series, and the United Nations Earth Summit.
"Sometimes you fantasize that people who are really up there and rich and living it up have something you don't have, and their things must be better than your things because they have more money than you. But they drink the same Coke and eat the same hot dogs and wear the same clothes and see the same TV and the same movies. . . You can get just as revolted as they can -- you can have the same nightmares. All this is really American -Andy WarholSo
