Kanye West’s Infamous ‘Famous’ Sculpture Can Now Be Yours: Here’s How
Kanye West’s infamous “Famous” sculpture can now be yours, provided you are willing to dole out $4 million for it.
A hyper-realistic silicon rendering of arguably the 12 biggest names in popular culture at the moment, the sculpture was used in the video of Kanye West’s “Famous” song. The video, as well as the sculpture, have together polarized audiences ever since their release in June earlier this year, marking an especially bitter feud between West and another pop culture icon of our times, Taylor Swift.
Apart from Swift, the sculpture depicts 11 other nude celebrities including West, who, not surprisingly places himself at the center of the sprawling bedspread. Other figures include a representation of George W. Bush in the fetal position, a face-down Donald Trump, a playful Amber Rose and Rihanna, an almost angelic Anna Wintour, as well as Bill Cosby, Chris Brown, and Ray J. Of course, two of the biggest first names of the reality entertainment business, Kim and Caitlyn, are also seen sleeping in their silicon avatars.
Kim was present on-site to open the exhibition, according to People, where she revealed that she had provided the finishing touches to her assets herself.
“I shaved my own butt,” Kim Kardashian said at the event.
You can check out the NSFW Instagram pics here and here.
“It was a little too small, and then it was a little too big. I was there with the tools to get it right.”
The sculpture is kinetic in nature, in the sense that the set of doppelgangers are charged with their own batteries, helping their chests heave up and down as if the celebrities are in the middle of sleep.
Now that the infamous “Famous” video has divided opinion around the world, something West ought to be proud of, the time is ripe for it to be exhibited for the world to see. The sculpture, which took four months of animation modeling, 3-D scanning, stylist consulting, and Instagram searches to come to life, is completely hand-made, right from Cosby’s freckles to Donald Trump’s fleshy behind.
It is potentially one reason that the artist who startled audiences last month by 3-D mapping Frank Lloyd Wright’s Hollyhock House, Aaron Axelrod, believes that the selling price of the sculpture should not be set at anything less than a multi-million figure.
“I did the math in my head, and it took $500,000 to a million just to make it. It caught me off guard. It is one of the coolest pieces I have ever seen, which is kind of annoying because it is Kanye West.”
Axelrod added that the best part of the “Famous” sculpture is that it is animated, something that was imperative since the figures were to be used in a video.
“[Since] this was made for the music video, no one would have been able to tell [how] those sculptures were moving,” Axelrod said.
“Which means [Kanye] is going above and beyond.”
“Kanye suddenly felt the urge to show the work,” clarified Blum when asked about how the sculpture, which was basically conceived as a video prop for the rapper’s “Famous” video, became an art installation in a matter of days.
“Long story short. We made it happen. We pushed some things around and five days later, we had a show. Monday hey, Friday open.”
Nobody knows the next stop of the sculpture, not even the people closest to Kanye. Blum envisions the unique sculpture in a gallery of a large museum in the near future, such as LACMA or MOCA, but neither West nor any of his confidantes have yet revealed where the 12 silicon pop icons are headed to next.
In any case, Kanye West’s sculpture, which has even been dubbed as a singular piece of art by people such as Werner Herzog, is certain to be on sale after the tour is over.
[Photo by Jason Kempin/Getty Images]
