Art Stars

Posted by laura on 12/17/2007

The Paper Rad T-shirt was just featured in the December issue of NYLON Guys. Check out the accompanying article:
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When Frankfurt school theorist Walter Benjamin took his own life waiting for a visa on the Franco-Spanish border to escape the grip of the Holocaust, the possibility that his ideas would eventually influence a group of young artists in Philadelphia 70 years later probably seemed slim. But as history had it, Benjamin's now-famously influential meditation on the nature of reproducibility and originality "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" found a sympathetic home in the minds of Nick Paparone and Tim Gough, who cribbed the essay's titale for their ambitious project of creating limited edition T-shirts with some of today's leading artists.
A Midwest native, Paparone set up shop after college in the city of brotherly love with the goal of opening a gallery for just two years. Black Floor gallery, as the project was called, did so well that when it closed, the Institute of Contemporary Art Philadelphia hosted its final show. Wanting to expand the scope of the art experience to the largest audience possible, Paparone and his friends looked to the humble T-shirt as a way to diffuse the same ideas to people who would never have to step into a white box gallery. As Paparone says, quoting Warhol's mantra, "The greatest art is the art of business"
ERIK LINDMAN
For more information, see artintheage.com