Kozik rips off Charles Krafft...

not.

 

Curious as to how his not-so relatively new fondness for acting like a racist douche has caused his work to suffer?

And everybody knows Kozik only rips himself off these days

 

It suffers because what I believed the message attached to the work was has now changed. The humor disappeared. It's no longer irony. I still think the porcelain guns and grenades are great (and funny). It's very possible that I didn't know much about Kraft and if he was openly racist all along.

 

Sad news that Krafft has gone down the white supremacist road, was always a fan of his work which I thought was clever and funny. In this video, he clearly has done very multi-cultural work without racist hesitations. What the hell happened?

 

That isn't clear at all. Just because he used elements from another culture doesn't imply any feeling either way.

His words make things VERY clear, however. I just listened to parts of the 2 hour podcast referenced in the article...and it's far worse than they conveyed.

This guy is scum.

 

The irony here is that the guy made art with nazi imagery & people loved it & bought it. But now that they found out he really is a Nazi, they don't like it anymore..

If it was a joke, it's good. If he's serious, its bad......Huh??...It's a fuckin Hitler Tea Pot. He should have never been held in high regard to begin with. His work is pretentious, predictable, & boring. The art world sucks.

 

Isn't it about time to change the name of this thread?

 

Nefasth thanks for the plug!

Now may we see some of your work?

 

I wouldn't say boring, I mean its very hard to get behind the stuff he's made because of who he is but I'm not going to lie I do find some of it very interesting, the plate he shows in the video with a man being beaten to death, I really liked that in a 'catch you off guard' sort of way, thats the sort of art I do like, just a shame a lot of it is tainted by his fucked up self and comes from a hateful place

 

I don't like the guy or his art at all & I'm in no way defending him or it. But IMO an artist's personality or opinions should have nothing to do with his work. If you liked a piece for its aesthetic quality & style, it shouldn't matter if you like the artist who created it. Caravaggio killed a man over a tennis match & fled the country. Does that mean his paintings aren't masterpieces he wasnt one of the greatest artists of his time?

And when I say the work is pretentious predictable & boring. I mean clearly Krafft is choosing loaded imagery that he knows will already get a reaction out of people. He isnt putting much thought or creativitity into it. To me using an image of Hitler or a gun to shock is so predictable & juvenile.
And that's where the pretentiousness comes in. Beer cans, guns, murder scenes, nazis, are all deemed as low brow or taboo by the "art world". But yet certain artists get a pass or praise when they use these images.

 

When I find out people are Nazis, that usually colors how I see what they do. I never thought this guy's work was interesting before I found out he was a piece of garbage...I'm just glad people have found out.

I have had the fortune (and misfortune) of getting to know many people whose art, music, toys, films, etc. I have enjoyed and even obsessed over. If I find out firsthand they're shitheads, it's sort of impossible not to let that have some effect on how I see their work. We're human beings.

Pretending to live in some amoral bubble where aesthetics trump everything else is absurd.

It goes the other way too...ever support someone whose work blows because you like them? This place is infested with the types of people who sit in art class crits and back up their friend's bullshit work because they're buddies. I find that far worse, disgusting even, than deciding not to support someone because they're a scumbag.

 

just saw this, how did I miss it?

Im sorry, This is Lei Xue, 'drinking tea' is the name, not Krafft. Same region I believe, but I cant remember or be bothered to look it up.

EDIT:

Also, to try and separate the art from the Artist is very hard, given that the process by which one makes art is heavily influenced by ones belief system. He did admit to have tried to shock people, but now it seems that saying it was just a way of hiding his real intentions.

 

Lorne the point I was trying to make about Krafft's work was that If he were doing expressionist paintings or some other form of art, that had no loaded meaning or nothing to do with the holocaust. And then said some fucked up racist shit. I could understand people being shocked. But he was doing busts of Hitler. It's odd to me that people are shocked he's a Nazi sympothizer.

My point about people's opinions of the artist is the same. If someone honestly liked that bust of Hitler & put that piece of shit on display in their home. Why the hell would it matter if the artist who made it was a racist? Of course he was a racist. Who the fuck else makes busts of Hitler??

Lorne this wasn't directed towards you. I know youre not a fan of this dickhead to begin with...


And BTW this thread is ridiculous. Saying Frank bit Kraffts work because he put a knife in one of his characters backs is just silly. If you don't like Franks work that's fine. But calling him a plagiarist & a biter is a whole different ball game. Seriously.

 

I do get it where you are coming from. But if you just take for example, pollock from his early works and then visualize how his alcoholism drove so much of his impressionism, then you can get an idea of how the psyche and ones state of mind can affect the work. That is true for all art.

If one pretends to be one thing and then go turn around and comment with colleagues and friends how you are 'pulling their legs' then that is offensive and it changes the statement the artwork might make.

I wouldn't display a racist piece in my home, but something that makes a point about racism would get my attention, they are different connotations.

Kozik does what he does, and it has no real impact on the scene, he is just what he is. Krafft on the other hand has influenced a whole scene. In a way he was a the beginning of the whole pop surrealist movement that people like English and Kozik and so many others make a living out of these days. Lowbrow has benefited from his work, specially from taking it as frontal as we thought it was.

It is always important to see where the artists stand, with their work and the world that it inhabits, there is no separation to be made.

 

Says the homophobe douchebag with the somewhat ambiguous handle and an Indian skull for a logo that jokingly implied all Germans are Nazis the other day. Irony just stuck its head up its own ass and died.

Following your sharp line of reasoning, I've also deduced that Kozik surely must be a Nazi:



Oy vey!

 

I completely disagree with this statement, and your false equivalency. Depending on the work, an artist's intent has everything to do with how a piece of art is perceived.
And to suggest that an artist who condones (or denies) genocide, while making artistic representations of those who perpetrated said genocide is at all similar to an artist (likely with some form of mental instability) who once killed a man, and whose paintings have no relation to his views on murder, is just kind of absurd.

 

This.

And I seriously don't get what Kozik is doing with his Hitler imagery. I don't see any sort of commentary, and certainly nothing condemning his actions. It looks like idolatry to me.

 

WOW!

 

is this nazi skull the same one you "appropriated"?

 

^^^^

Not to mention, what could easily be "assumed" as iron crosses in the headgear...

 

The use of the appropriated Native American headdress on the appropriated, formerly-Stahlhelmeted skull creates a temporally- and culturally-transcendent visual loop unifying genocidal perpetrator and victHOOOOOOOOOAAAAARRRKKKK….

Whoops… puked on my own joke… sorry…

Postmodernism? Yes, I’m all about it.
Irony? I grew up in New Jersey. Next.
Mashing of disparate visual elements/interplay of signs and symbols, and the occasional brilliance which can arise from it? Please Sir, can I have another.

However… the value we assign to signs and symbols varies in quality and quantity. Some are much easier to play with than others; some really should require more of the artist, in terms of communicable intent (when it's not readily apparent in the work). I can't stand it when artists are slippery on this point... it's fundamentally ludicrous and weak. If you wanna play with symbols that are associated with, for example, a horrific persecution/mass murder that happened not even 70 years ago (and let us Americans in this convo try to strike a small blow here against our deserved, legendary American capacity for completely forgetting/devaluing/never even learning hugely important (and recent) historical events), well, go ahead… but much like stepping to Mssrs. B-Real, Sen Dog, et al, one had best step correct.* It’s easy to toss Nazi visuals around, weightless, in your studio; put it in front of the world and my feeling is yes, be prepared to explain yourself. Hopefully intelligently. Hopefully not in sympathy with murderers.

As for Kozik’s use, I never understood the 90s-birthed vogue for using Hitler/Gacy/Ramirez/Manson faces and the like (and I was wide open to much in art at the time, being in my 20s) in a flip, unqualified Pop context. It always seemed like simple and empty provocation to me. The crimes and bad things of the world’s past are enough with me, lodged in my head from reading the details about them, that I don’t require crude visual reminders/provocations. Do the artists feel that some people do require such? Is it intended to shake that American Historical Memory Problem I mentioned above? If so, I don’t think it works that way; I think it just results in young people being further estranged from understanding the living realities and outcomes of recent history. If it’s just the artists enjoying a joke at the expense of ignorance (“Look! I put Himmler in a hot rod on this Horton Heat poster! Haw!”), well… back to Charles Krafft.

Love,
Guy On A Message Board


*Yes, Cypress Hill are pretty much awful. Thanks.

 

It is the same skull & yes the juxtaposition of the Native American headdress & the Nazi Skull was very much on purpose. I wanted a logo that had a loaded meaning but also had a really good graphic quality to it. The name Scumbags & Superstars to me represents the high & the low in society. But it also speaks about perception. The Native Anerican logo is deemed to be offensive but is used over & over in American culture. It is seen by certain people in different ways. Some people see it & think of genocide. Others see it & may think of a sports team or a collage. That's were the Superstars & Superstars comes into play.

And yes the skull was ripped from an old German Nazi image. It was also meant to add fuel to this already loaded image. I'm well aware that some people may see our logo & be offended. But to me those people are ignorant & aren't seeing the meaning behind the image. We aren't praising the Nazis & we aren't praising the genocide that was performed on Native Americans.

The logo was chosen because of its graphic element first & foremost. I wanted to mashup a headdress & a skull. Two images that have been used in the US for years & are very easily recognizable. When I starting looking threw images & skulls. These are the 2 the I thought work best. I'm very aware that some people(maybe some people of this board) may misunderstand the meaning...And I could give a fuck less.