Val Kilmer Art, Miami Art Basel, 2012

In late 2011 I helped organize a group show called LikeArtBasel, featuring internet aware works by JOEY CARD, PETRA CORTRIGHT, STERLING CRISPIN, NICK DEMARCO, BEA FREMDERMAN, RACHEL LORD, WILL NEIBERGALL, RAFAEL ROZENDAAL, LIZ RYWELSKI, ZACH SHIPKO, RYAN TRECARTIN and myself.

Val Kilmer came to the show but didn't buy anything. Below you can see him at the show and not buying anything (photo credit Nick Demarco).

Hypothesizing Val's inner dialog while he was at LikeArtBasel became a running joke.. I started thinking about how funny it would be to make art specifically for his sensibilities.

Rachel Lord, Brad Horenstein and I started to back and forth ideas for art that Val Kilmer might like.. mostly based on reading his twitter, the outfit he wore at LikeArtBasel and knowing that he lives on a ranch and raises buffalo.. for more of these idea's checkout the Val Kilmer Art Twitter

We also started to debate what is and isn't "VKA"..

I created this photoshop of the truck..

and then got a sticker printed..

and put it on an all white truck we rented from U-Haul's "for sale" division

We went to thrift stores and found pieces of art we thought Val would like..

..and used wood varnish to make them more moody..

Rachel Lord made original works like this painting of skulls..

Some of the work were assisted readymades.. like this piece called "How America Started", featuring an American flag connected to a Navajo blanket by old jumper cables.

..and all the work came together inside the truck..

above is a photo of Rachel Lord inside the truck.. note the matching hat, palm frond and instagram filter.

We parked the truck on December 7th in the W parking lot. Some rich looking guy asked if "Val was in town", I told him no, but that in this truck is art we think he'd like.. he laughed and said that he would send a pic of it to Val.. soon after, this tweet appeared in our stream..

Instead of the artist's experience/expression/technique being at the center of an art work, Val Kilmer Art puts the projected sensibilities of another central. The fact that Val Kilmer is that person is entirely circumstantial to him being famous, of another culture and coming to our internet aware art show. Creating art outside of ones own artistic sensibilities/practice for a specific named person/people is the core conceptual aspect of the work. For me, this aspect is undoubtably reactionary to social media's trope of user as content creator. Exhausted by the exhibition of personal experience/feeling within social media and art, I was driven to try something new. Val Kilmer Art considers the taste of another through the inference of information. We read his tweets, listened to his music and read interviews to arrive at the work within the truck. In this way, Val Kilmer Art is as much a reaction against the self centered content found within art and social media practice as it is an ode to it – creating something new from the interactions that otherwise end in a Retweet or a Like. By taking the content of another found online and tailoring art to it, new life is given outside the stream (imagine if someone made an art show featuring works manifested from the various posts you've made). It is also a critique of the way some art is produced through the inference of collector sensibilities.

– Ryder Ripps