DON'T MISS!: GOT IT COVERED
So Bob Dylan is just a merry old prankster at heart. That’s the take-home message from his just-opened gallery show, “Revisionist Art,” at the Gagosian.
He’s taken 30 real magazine covers — Life, Time, Rolling Stone, Playboy and others — fiddled with the photos and cover lines with a wink, and turned them into eye-popping 4½-foot-high silk-screened canvases. The results are a hoot.
A Baby Talk cover features what looks like a professional wrestler (one of several, along with many nude cover women), with the lines “How To Strengthen Your Baby” and “Face Lifts for Babies.” A bloodied wrestler licking his fingers is the cover image of a Gourmet magazine that teases “5 Things You Didn’t Know About Asparagus.”
One Life cover, dated June 23, 1997, shows a gun-toting soldier in water and tells about “Oliver Stone’s New Movie, ‘Apocalypse Now,’ ” and has the line “Charlie Sheen Hides From Helicopters in Starring Role.” (The image, a Google search reveals, is of an Israeli soldier from a 1967 cover.)
Dylanologists will have fun investigating the address labels, which the artist made up. Might Jo Davis Olson and Orvil Jo Davis from Blue Earth, Minn., be friends of Dylan’s from his native state?
980 Madison Ave., near 77th Street, fifth floor; gagosian.com.
— Billy Heller
Robert McKeever