Here's what I love about this. Dali was "excommunicated" from the surrealist movement for painting a picture of Lenin with his pants down, as the surrealists were all communists. Although the surrealist "establishment" led by Andre Breton had declared him no longer to be a surrealist, Dali went on to become the public face of surrealism, and doing these commercials was an added "fuck you". A long time ago, i thought I knew what surrealism is, and maybe I never really did, but for surrealists to have rules about paining unflattering portraits of communist politiicians seems far more hypocritical to me than making an alkaseltzer commercial. By freeing surrealism from political dogma, he purified it, and to me that seems to go along with that. Whatever your reasons for thinking artists i shouldn't do commercials for chocolate bars, that's a dogma. I think dogma is ananthema to surrealism. Dali was open about loving money, and I think part of was because he knew he wasn't supposed to love money.

Dali was a pretty shameless and opportunistic self-promoter. He sided with Franco during Spain's fascist days and pretty much gave a big fuck you to his old friend Luis Bunuel all in the interest of saving his own skin.

Wikipedia gives a pretty good summary from George Orwell: "One ought to be able to hold in one’s head simultaneously the two facts that Dalí is a good draughtsman and a disgusting human being."

P.S. +4 stars for general awesome.

Yeah, paintings stop being good after their creator starts making money. Like with Rembrandt. The Night Watch was lovely when it was painted, but then one day someone gave him a quarter and it instantly became total shit.

Never talk about art again.

making money is fine - I would hope every artist capable of doing so, does -- via art, not endorsement.
It's such a huge let-down to see somebody so gifted and "strange" shill for something so banal.

Thank god Durer is still unmolested

Seriously, where have you been that "playing up his 'crazy' reputation" doesn't immediately come to mind when you think of Dali?

Wow, I guess to some people the fact that Dali was a bit of a pop-culture whore (especially later in life) is still some big newsflash.

Dear theFlu: How the FUCK would you know if Durer was "unmolested" by horrible, horrible commerce? He lived 500 years ago! You know nothing, and your comments are laughably naive.

...when did it become the highest honor to sell-out?
Because it seems my disapproval of a pop-culture whore, and his greedy antics is the stuff of contempt amongst a population of faceless pseudo-intellectuals playing Devil's Advocate - or, are just utterly useless champions of decay who can't fathom 'good taste,' and will go on to live a modern day yuppies existence until death comes to save them.

If any of you give me shit because I don't think it's good for a respectable person, with talent, to utterly decimate their reputation via incredibly awful marketing ploys, then you are indeed massively compatible, arrogant faggots.

I'm an arrogant faggot, but i won't give you shit. you got a point, but the problem is that just like roachbud, you get randomly rabid and angry and that makes whatever argument you sell unappealing, no matter what the content of your words may hold.

I agree with you, but the guy is long dead at this point. i think he was a stupid fuck and if i met him I'm sure I'd hate him.

BUT

i do like his work. alot. separating the artist from the art is something that alot of folks should get used to doing, otherwise alot of things are just gonna get spoiled.

I'm well aware that when I type a paragraph-long "rant" defaming _______ - or just a paragraph in general - that my charisma drops to zero -- I just don't care.

If you look at a lot of the topics I've trashed, they can pretty much be divided into Kaufman-styled trolling (a hollow attack on the ironic-status of cats, for example) or general rabble rousing: such as attacking Dali's cancer-ish commercialism [and not his work]; because, no matter how eloquently put, the average poeTV poster is a rage-driven cyborg, that must filter fragments of information, rather than comprehend it (see Xenocide's not getting it, above).
Typical cognition is as follows:

"Criticism of Dali's product-mongering" instantly becomes "Criticism of Dali's work, and" as evidenced by Xenocide, "of everything else attached to Dali."
...because who the fuck has the gull to ever attack A MASTER?

(ps. I'm an arrogant faggot too -- that's why I post long-winded rants on something as redundant as poeTV. But the facts remain.)

Yes. No. Yes. Yes. No.