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Next season's highlight may be a Der Rosenkavalier directed by Maximilian Schell and designed by Downtown artist Gottfried Helnwein, and including sopranos Adrianne Pieczonka and Elizabeth Futral. ...

Gottfried-Helnwein-Portrait 
Documentary of the Helnwein-retrospective at the Chinese Museum for the Arts and the Forbidden City, Beijing, September 2004, by Claudia Teissig. ...

Alisa Shorr glanced at the teenager with a look of disbelief.
"This is dope," the 17-year-old boy was exclaiming as he looked at the images in the University of Arizona Museum of Art's latest exhibits, "Comic Release: Negotiating Identity for a New Generation" and "Wit's End: The Art of Laughs, Giggles, Cackles and Guffaws."
"I had never heard that before" uttered in the museum, said Shorr, the museum's spokeswoman.
The double display, on exhibit until Jan. 25, is attracting plenty of interest among teens and young adults who normally avoid the museum. Young people are drawn to the exhibits because both employ comic images - familiar and new cartoon characters - to address serious topics: war, violence, ethnicity, gender, loss of innocence.
Gottfried Helnwein's "American Prayer" incorporates a floating Donald Duck in a young boy's evening prayers, while Phillip Knoll asks the question "What if Superman flew naked?" in his sparse "Real and Imagined." ...

The following suicide notes were left by Japanese schoolchildren, aged ten to fifteen, who killed themselves within the last several years. Some of them met in suicide chat rooms, which are becoming increasingly popular in Japan.
translated from the Japanese by Patrick Luhan. ...

"Well, the world is a haunted house, and Helnwein at times is our tour guide through it.
I think in anything that is really relevant and emotional art, there is some kind of a mirror that people experience. I don't think that you can recognize a feeling from something that you look at unless it's part of yourself, and so when someone is willing to take on the sadness, the irony, the ugliness and the beauty in the kind of way that Gottfried Helnwein does.
Not all of Gottfried's work is on a canvas.
A lot of it is the way he's approached life. And it doesn't take someone knowing him to know that. You take one look at the paintings and you say "this guy has been around." You can't sit in a closet - and create this.
This level of work is earned."
Sean Penn ...

22.30 Artists and Intellectuals about Arnie.
Susan Sontag, George Clooney, Barbara Streisand, Warren Beatty, Jack Nickolson, the Austrian painter Gottfried Helnwein, and their views on Arnold Schwarzenegger.

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That’s what attracted Gottfried Helnwein, a fine artist who created a Marilyn Manson cover.
“There’s no record company involved to tell you all the things you can’t do,” said Helnwein, who collaborated with Manson for a cover that included a young girl loading a rifle. “There’s no commercial aspects, so you’re free. That’s the exciting thing. You can just create.”
Helnwein knows something about artistic freedom. He shot the cover for Manson’s latest record, “The Golden Age of Grotesque” – a ghastly image of Manson in white and red face paint. ...

Helnwein’s 20-by-60 foot outdoor installation “Modern Sleep 2003”, as well as photographs from his collaboration with Marilyn Manson, are included in the show, which opens with this evening’s gala and is open to the general public Friday through Sunday at Santa Monica Airport’s Barker Hangar.
“Modern Sleep 2003” (digital print) is the latest in a series dating back to the 1980s and reflects Helnwein’s use of children in questioning the human condition. It includes two images of a girl. In one, her skin is pale white, and she is dressed in black. In the other, she is black, dressed in white. In both images, her expression is death-like.
“They have open eyes, so modern sleep doesn’t mean they are just sleeping,” says Helnwein. “It might mean something else.” ...

The bizarre and squirm-inducing self-representations of Austrian conceptual artist Gottfried Helnwein - the guy who likes to puncture his cheeks with surgical instruments - are so disturbing that municipal councils have sought to ban his work.
But these are depictions of pain that make sense, given the intellectual and moral framework of Helnwein's personal and political past.
The odd bureaucrat might question his motivations, only to be instantly shouted down by a chorus of art critics and intellectuals who can think of thousands of cogent, intelligent reasons why Helnwein's work matters. Still, the few members of the bod-mod community who actually talked to me took the moral high ground.
Logic alone indicates that one person's Pamela Anderson is someone else's Lizard Man (Eric Sprague, a man who has, over the last few years, obsessively pursued his desire to become a human lizard via tattoos, teeth-filing, etc.)
In a free society, the body's canvas is something an adult person should have complete mastery over. ...