The Beloved Leader Shares the Struggle of the Heroic Engineers, 2022
601Artspace, NYC
The Beloved Leader Shares the Struggle of the Heroic Engineers, 2022
601Artspace, NYC
Art Fairs
The Spring Break Art Fair Once Again Brings
Quirky Surprises to Los Angeles, From Musical Chandeliers to Live Mystery Tattooing
The popular fair returns for its West Coast outing.
Sarah Cascone, February 16, 2023
David Howe at his booth at Spring Break Art Show Los Angeles 2023.
Photo by Sarah Cascone.
Like any art fair, Spring Break also has its fair share of paintings, including a trio of monumental canvases by David Howe that ape North Korean propaganda art, replacing Kim Jong-un with Meta founder Mark Zuckerberg. An investor and Silicon Valley veteran in his 70s (and the founder of New York gallery 601 Art Space), Howe actually started what he calls the “Howe Factory” in Brooklyn to produce the works, since he is trained as a photographer, not a painter.
“The only thing that I painted was my signature on the back,” he admitted.
The paintings, curated by Jac Lahav, range in price from $24,000 to $32,000, plus a custom car dealership inflatable figure with Zuckerberg’s face for $2,200, and $900 posters.
David Howe, Young People Follow the Beloved Leader (2022).
Courtesy of the artist.
Howe was inspired to create the series after stumbling across images of the original paintings, which are rarely shown in the West, online. Struck by the utopian vibe of the works, depicting a murderous ruler as a benevolent figure, Howe remade them as a commentary on the incredible power that Facebook’s wide reach gives Zuckerberg, even though the tech mogul rarely flaunts his influence.
The artist wasn’t trying to suggest that Zuckerberg was an evil dictator, exactly—”I don’t know if you need to be worried about it,” he said, “but maybe there are aspects of it that you need to be worried about.”
Spring Break Art Show is on view at Skylight Culver City, 5880 Adams Boulevard, Culver City Arts District, Los Angles, February 15–19, 2023.