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dcba

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mitch

Good taste is art enemy.

Correct BUT when the band looked for "tastelesness" they went for Warhol and R. Frank.

Now they knock at the door of this Audubon wannabe... Yuck!

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Papo
Normally, I would have bought a lot more merchandise at Hyde Park. I love mugs with motives of my favourite artists or their logos.
This time around I avoided anything with 'Grrregory' on it and this included mugs, t-shirts and more.
And I noticed that many people around me at the Hyde Park merchandise stand discussed it and were looking for anything without "that ugly thing" on it.

Makes me think that "Grrregory" did not work well as a selling point.

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sonomastone

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bye bye johnny
Rolling Stones Gorilla Logo Artist Slams Critics

Walton Ford offering limited-edition etching of widely seen gorilla logo


PK Shop

By Patrick Doyle
August 5, 2013 12:30 PM ET

When the Rolling Stones were organizing their 50th anniversary celebrations, Mick Jagger approached his friend, contemporary artist Walton Ford – who has made a career painting naturalist scenes – to design a logo. In the Seventies spirit of the National Lampoon magazine and "grotesque ungerground comics," Ford repurposed one of his sympathetic paintings of King Kong, adding the band’s famous tongue-and-lips logo. "I saw the Rolling Stones as a sort of silverback,” Ford tells Rolling Stone. “All the metaphors of King Kong and all of that are applicable – their kind of enormity of their accomplishment over the period of 50 years.”

The band loved the image. “The irreverence of Walton Ford’s imagery captured the spirit of the tour,” they said in a statement. They used it on the cover of their 50th anniversary compilation GRRR!, and in marketing their massive "50 and Counting" tour, at one point displaying the piece at 50 locations around the world.

But some fans weren’t as excited about the logo. “A lot of people didn’t like it at all,” Ford says. “That was good. I was glad that they didn’t like it. I mean, the last people who I wanted to please were Rolling Stones fans.”

Ford continues, “They are really nasty. It’s a general rule they have a fan base that just seem to be always angry at the Rolling Stones for a lot of reasons. They’ve got their own grudges. I shouldn’t say that I didn’t really care. I probably did care, but when the Rolling Stones were doing their best work, they were a step ahead of the people that loved them so much. I thought, ‘How cool that I get an opportunity to piss their fans off?'"

The logo is now for sale as a limited-edition etching of 1,000 signed and numbered by Ford, available at the Paul Kasmin Shop. “They are really beautiful,” says Ford, who has made a practice of creating etchings for the last decade. “I just go and work at this print shop and we use all the old tools that were used by Rembrandt, you know, this is a very ancient technique of marking on copper plate and making prints by hand. It seemed appropriate to do sort of an anachronistic tribute print to the 50th..”

The piece doesn't come cheap though; the price, available upon request, is over $5,000. “It’s just this is going to be an elitist, kind of expensive thing because the processes are expensive," says Ford, who's still buzzing about the experience. "I was born in 1960 and I had an older brother who collected records. The Rolling Stones were pretty much it for us growing up. That’s what we aspired to be – that sort of attitude."

[www.rollingstone.com]

sounds like he has the same attitue about Stones fans that the Stones do.

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mitch
I don't think they wanted tastelesness for Exile. This is even one of the more elaborate artwork they ever did.
And they called Franck because they couldn't afford Man Ray.

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flacnvinyl
Allow me to bring up something that has bothered me from the start...

The album is called GRRR! but GRRRegory is sticking his tongue out. Shouldn't the album be called 'BLAAAHHH' instead?

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Glam Descendant

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71Tele
He took the Stones' tongue logo and added it to King Kong. So it's not only bad art, it's lazy art.

It's a "send-up", not unlike the original logo, which was a send-up of paintings of the Hindu goddess Kali. They've done it numerous times, e.g., the Peelaert design for IORR, or the SG cover being a send-up of wig ads.

Noun

send-up (plural send-ups)

1.A satirical imitation of a work of art or a genre.

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ZantiMisfit
NEVER understood the criticism of this cover artwork and album title!!! The second I saw it I said--Yep--that's the Stones all right. It is very Stonesy...and I've been a fan since '68.

Anyone remember the print ad for 'Black & Blue'? The one for 'Monkey Grip' (how about THAT for an album title?!)? And the one for 'It's Only Rock 'N Roll'? The 'Devil's High-Heel' for 'Tattoo You'? The 'goat's head soup' picture in 'Goats Head Soup'?

It is very iconic and eye-catching--like 'Forty Licks,' 'Flashpoint,' 'Voodoo Lounge,' etc. Album covers can't be 'subtle and classy' these days--they HAVE to stand out in the crowd. The criticism is absurd.

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stonehearted
According to the Stones In Exile DVD, when it came time to think of images for the album cover, Mick said that he and Charlie "went to loads and loads of bookshops in Los Angeles", and it appears that Charlie made the choice, as according to him "To me, Robert Franck was perfect for America and that time."

According to another source:

....after a foray into LA’s book stores turned up a copy of his celebrated The Americans, the legendary Swiss-born photographer Robert Frank was approached to produce the art work for Exile’s gatefold sleeve.

“Charlie was very keen on Robert Frank,” says Jagger. “And when we asked him what his ideas were, it seemed a very easy thing for us to do. We knew it was going to be a gatefold cover and he had an instant idea for using collages and found material that we liked. So that was pretty cool. But it’s always good to work with people of a different kind of vision from the run-of-the-mill. It’s hard to do, because it’s very hard working with artists – often their ideas are totally impractical. But Robert’s idea for Exile was a good one. He’d obviously seen a record cover before."

Above text and quote taken from: [www.mickjagger.com]