Dennis Hollingsworth

Fame Face

Attention, Gunslingers:

WINSLET: Jamie, tell us about stage fright doing stand-up.
FOXX: Oh, man, that's horrendous. Doing stand-up in L.A. is like being a gunslinger. But the first time you go on and you get the first laugh... you're good, because you have something to say. The scariest thing that can happen to you at my stage now is fame face.

Fame face?
FOXX: When you become famous, you eat a little more, and your face kind of puffs up. So before, you'd come onstage skinny, hungry, going, "What's up, motherf----r?!" But now, you come on, and go, "I just got the new Range Rover. Anybody?" [Laughter] Years ago, after I'd done "In Living Color," I was kind of in that place. Not doing anything new, just riding the after-burn, you know. I got offstage one night, and I'm talking to this girl outside. The door opens and I hear [the crowd roaring]. I open the door and there's this young skinny kid named Chris Tucker, and he's just cutting their heads off. I knew I had to go back to comedy gym, you know, get my thing back, because I'd gotten that fame face. Here's the end of the story: about a month and a half ago I'm in the Laugh Factory and Chris Tucker gets onstage. He's wearing a suit with a red tie, like he's doing taxes or something, and he goes, "Man, I wonder if women love me for my money or do they love me for me?"
SWANK: Fame face.
FOXX: I went to him and I said, "Go get your sword back. Go get it."

Then, i came across this tidbit from the website of Sperone Westwater:

Mr. Tuttle has become something of a jet-setter. Three days after the Drawing Center opening on Nov. 5, he flew to San Francisco to discuss the retrospective with museum curators; from there to Florida to work on the mural; back to New York on the 16th for the reopening at the Museum of Modern Art. He manages to negotiate the sleek, expensive universe that has helped sustain his career and elevated the monetary value of his work, while maintaining an unpretentious aura. "This is not about making money," he said. "But I can also say that making money is fun. It is fun, but making art is more fun."

Describing the magnitude of the Aqua project, for example, he uses a practical and recognizable comparison. "To discuss 140,000 tiles, that is at the edge of imagination, what that means," he said. "In a bathroom you use maybe 200 tiles." He readily moves from a discussion of art and the cosmos to the tribulations and pleasures of having a teenage daughter; he and his wife, the poet Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, have one, Martha, age 15.

Even when his clothes are nicely pressed, as they were at his opening in SoHo, Mr. Tuttle gives the impression of being rumpled. The bag he carried to an interview at a hotel near his home in TriBeCa contained a book about quantum mechanics as well as his polite chocolate -brown poodle, Choco. (Mr. Tuttle has also taken Choco to a concert at Carnegie Hall; the dog is so quiet that Mr. Tuttle says he once left him behind, in his bag, at a restaurant.)

To be fair to one of my favored artists, this was probably written by some gallery intern (cough -hack-). "Aqua" is a reference to the prospects of his prospective installation, the size of a side of a building.

Tuttle is partially redeemed further down the page:

Now that he's tasted supersize, will he abandon small? "There is something very American about big," he said. "Pollock put that idea in his paintings and Rothko put that in his paintings, but I also see paintings that are big without any understanding, and I find it disgusting, a waste of materials and resources. Unless it means something, don't do it. For me, for the Aqua project to be successful, it will have to reach the invisible. I don't want the world to say, "Oh, give Richard Tuttle some walls in China." I'd rather move a pencil around."