[Sponsor] The Avant/Garde Diaries: David LaChapelle & Reiner Opoku – Reinventing Yourself

The Avant/Garde Diaries is a digital interview magazine that documents artists on the forefront of their creative field. In each article a featured diarist speaks about people or individual works of art they consider to be ahead of their time. These iconoclasts discuss the cutting edge of art, design, fashion, music and film. Through their eyes we experience uniquely personal profiles that celebrate and inspire the avant-garde. This week Avant/Garde Diaries visits with artist David LaChapelle whose pop-culture influenced art and and photography is widely recognizable with its loud colors, exposed skin, glittering bling, and phantasmagoric blend of fact and fiction.

I really enjoyed this clip with an introduction by curator Reiner Opoku, and it ends with a great quote about the power of imagery and art from LaChapelle, which I’ll paraphrase here: ”Art is for everyone in that for the time that you look at it — a painting, or listening to a song, or reading a book — those words were written for you. [...] And it’s yours. You own it, as much as you own anything else in life, just for the time your are looking at it. And if you can hold that in your mind’s eye, then you have it forever.”  You can watch the video in its entirety here, it also includes a quick retrospective featuring samples of his work spanning the last three decades or so.