BEAUTIFUL LOSERS: CONTEMPORARY ART AND STREET CULTURE

First edition, first printing. Signed by KAWS and ten other contributing artists, photographers and filmmakers. Publisher's original red cloth with gilt titles to the upper board and spine, in dustwrapper. Illustrated profusely in colour and black and white throughout. A fine copy, the binding square and firm, the contents clean throughout. Complete with the fine original dustwrapper. Produced in conjunction with the international travelling museum exhibition of the same name which opened at the Contemporary Arts Center in Cincinatti, Ohio in March 2004. The related Aaron Rose and Joshua Leonard directed documentary film was released in 2008.

Signed in black ink on across the front pastedown and endpaper by KAWS, Terry Richardson, Tobin Yelland, Chris Johanson, Cheryl Dunn, Christian Strike, Aaron Rose, Ivory Serra and three other contributors. Scarce thus. In the 1990s, a loose-knit group of American artists and creators, many just out of their teens, began their careers influenced by the popular underground youth subcultures of the day, such as skateboarding, graffiti, street fashion, and independent music. Artists like Shepard Fairey, Mark Gonzales, Spike Jonze, Margaret Kilgallen, Mike Mills, Barry McGee, Phil Frost, Chris Johanson, Harmony Korine, and Ed Templeton began to create art that reflected the lifestyles they led. Many had no formal training and almost no conception of the inner workings of the art world. They learned their crafts through practice, trial and error, and good old-fashioned innovation. Not since the Beat Generation have we seen a group of creative individuals with such a unified aesthetic sense and varied cultural facets. The world of art has been greatly affected by their accomplishments as have the worlds of fashion, music, literature, film, and, ironically, athletics. Beautiful Losers is a retrospective celebration of this spirit, with hundreds of artworks by over two dozen artists, from precursors like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring, and Larry Clark, to more recent adherents Ryan McGinniss, KAWS, and Geoff McFetridge. Work in all conceivable mediums is included, plus reproductions of reams of ephemera. The accompanying essays are contributed by half a dozen writers who have championed these beautiful losers from the start.