Nate Lowman

The most important thing about this picture is the message that Askar (the dude sitting on the paint bucket) was trying to explain via the Lizzie Grubman article he read to me. "Not all press is good press" was the gist of it. Had I not realized this, I would have been jumping on a couch in my other studio, which looks a lot like a television set for a daytime talk show. The young woman in O.J. Simpson's face is a Swedish artist and gallery proprietress here in New York. The other young woman (holding the gun to my head) is also a Swedish artist who lives here. Askar is a Swedish rock star who also works with retarded people. I don't have a fetish for Swedes. The oval painting is an ill-rendered portrait of Ol' Dirty Bastard that was made right after he died. He was rad, and I wish it were a better painting. The woman in sunglasses is Nicole Brown Simpson. The guy painted on linen (also in sunglasses) is a Liberian soldier. Above him is an enlargement of his cellphone. Accessorizing is the answer. If you fold a twenty-dollar bill a certain way, you get an image that looks like the World Trade Center on fire. That's what the painting is on the left. The spray-painted "FUCK" on the pink canvas later came to say, "FUCK Giuliani and Howard Safir."