David Henry Brown at Daniel Silverstein
The idea of celebrity is completely fused with our perspective of everyday reality. Celebrity is a component of fame, a more momentary and satisfying instance in which the illumination of flash bulbs, the “royal treatment” of celebrity peers, and the adoration of unnamed masses all act to separate us from those from whom we bear away a large part of our common nature. As a subject for art, celebrity presents a slippery slope full of hidden agendas, mixed messages, and a breadth of cultural context which is rarely plumbed, for fear it may reveal the collusion between greatness and its opposite. Yet one artist today has made celebrity his main focus. David Henry Brown Jr, over the last few years, has developed an expansive body of work which explores these ideas. The first part of this exploration took the form of a series of actions, subtly interwoven into the social fabric of given public events. Brown invented a company in ‘98 called Carpet Rollers, which for $99 offered to roll out a