Search results for ""author matthew thurber""

Matthew Thurber s Art Comic is a blunt and hilarious assault on the swirling hot mess that is the art world. From sycophantic fans to duplicitous gallerists, fatuous patrons to self-aggrandizing art stars, he lampoons each and every facet of the eminently ridiculous industry of truth and beauty. Follow Cupcake, the Matthew Barney obsessive; Epiphany nee Tiffany Clydesdale, the divinely inspired performance artist; Ivanhoe, a modern knight in search of artistic vengeance, and his squire, Turnbuckle. Each artist is more ridiculous than the last, yet they are tested and transformed by the even more absurd machinations of Thurber s fantastical art world. Can the Free Little Pigs destroy this blighted system? Will The Group continue its indirect assassination of promising young artists? Can artistic integrity exist in this world amid the capitalist co-opting, petty rivalries, otherworldly portals, heavenly interventions, and murders at sea? Art Comic is brimming with references and cameos, outsize personalities and shuddering nonsense?Robert Rauschenberg smashes a beer bottle, Francesca Woodman, a wineglass. In the center of it all, Thurber s twisted drawings and laugh-out-loud dialogue convey a complicated picture of an industry at the intersection of fantasy and reality. Part scathing condemnation, part irreverent appreciation, Thurber s comics skewer the art world in a way only an art lover can.

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A hilarious detective story that manages to critique and explore digital culture, Infomaniacs is marked by the author's restless questioning and heightened sense of the absurd. With the iconic Amy Shit as his Philip Marlow, Thurber looks in on 'The Scriveners of Tweet Street', Albert Radar, a Joseph Beuys-lookalike psychiatrist, a perfectly preserved brain that has never seen the internet, an organic server farm, the Anthropamorphic Task Force, and so much more. But all of this is in service to a tightly plotted thriller.

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Are we not all criminals eating our take-out, foraging for mushrooms, lapping at puddles? What happens when sleep becomes commodified? What if all the people at your local cafe were piloting drone strikes? What is the hidden cost and darkness of the society we must all engage with? Mr. Colostomy opens up cans of worms faster than they can restock the Goya on your bodega shelves. Who is Mr. Colostomy? Why, he s a manifestation of a searching consciousness, a marginally employable horse detective who sleeps outside, standing up. As he attempts to unravel a ridiculous plot that follows the disappearance of a couple of brats who turn into atomic particles after sundown, Mr. Colostomy remains always alien, a mutant mustang, an eccentric equus who might just be trying to make a buck in Babytown, the Babylon built by babes or, is a more sinister plot a-hoof? The surreal comedy of Mr. Colostomy is enhanced by Thurber s process of creating the comic through parapraxis, meaning with no forethought or pencilling. This comic honours the mistake as the desired or hidden expression of the unconscious. All that matters is that the comic is funny or real or neither! All comics were created in a public space in order to swim in or feel the audience.

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This long-awaited rich graphic novel is a cross between Thomas Pynchon, Robert Altman and J.R.R. Tolkien and has earned Thurber raves from The Comics Journal, Vice and The Fader. 1-800 MICE is an anthropological study of the imaginary city of Volcano Park (where flying mouse couriers have replaced Federal Express), with a soap-opera fractured narrative and a cast of thousands. Over the course of the story readers meet: Peace Punk, a punker on the verge of bourgeois; Tom Chief: A beat cop with an identity crisis and Groomfiend, a daffy, if driven creature who directs the story.

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