BRANT WATCH

The digital rendering above (leaked from the servers of Vibra-Dent Luxury Bod-Sculpting LLC) demonstrates planned anatomical modifications to be enacted on Harry Brant, exploiting the most advanced (and quasi-illegal) surgical techniques currently practiced in Switzerland. These include fuckurkling (in which residual fat from the underside of the arm is vacuum-sucked and reconstituted along the jawline); fibular distension via lurge-press (a painful, 48-hour process in which each leg’s length is extended by 7-8 inches with a mechanical press similar to that used to tamp down hot tar on the highway); aesthetic digit streamlining (a.k.a. “ugly toe removal,” in which the unappealing pinky toe is amputated in order to provide a more “goose-beaked” foot silhouette); and the introduction of a internal, no-seam pelvic compartment which—in layman’s terms—allows the entire male genital apparatus to be “tucked and stored” within the body, allowing for a minimum of tight-pant bulge and the dreaded SNS (squashed nut syndrome) that results from wearing size 0 women’s trousers. Harry’s publicist has stated that the above rendering, which floats his modified body against the backdrop of St Moritz, is “purely in the realm of the hypothetical” and that her client has “no concrete plans to undergo these alterations at this time.” 

THE VENICE SPECIAL

Ah, Venice: The fishy reek of the canals, endless popping bottles of prosecco, whimsically multi-colored suits, and ever-present threat of soupy, airborne loads of pigeon shit. The Brothers Brant are photographed here with German street art dealer Hanz Verguenza, heir to the Schoffer microwave oven fortune, and (in red), British poet Blaine Poule, author of the independently published chapbook, My Crotch Is A V, Your Eye Is An O. (Sample stanza: “The cream on your / Exquisite Prada handbag is / not from any latte, dear. / Let me be the / turgid barista of your / fleshy Hermitage.”) Behind the quartet, actress Milla Ivanovich—famous for her roles in the video game-based films Pussy Centipede Death Fest 1, 2, 3, and 4—takes part in an endurance performance entitled “Chick In A Box: (Re)imagining (Con)sumerism,” situated on the lip of the Grand Canal. For the piece, which was sponsored by Swarovski and Ketel One, Ivanovich spent three days in a glass box being gradually buried beneath the weight of consumer packaging while subsisting solely on a diet of Beluga caviar. “It’s about the pressures of desire and this constant slobbering want, want, want,” explained Ivanovich, later wearing an eye patch after a corneal injury sustained from a flying Manolo Blahnik box.

Peter II chartered a private jet-powered gondola to reach the National Pavilions, accompanied by celebrity curator Hans Ulrich Obrist and Marina Abramovic’s publicist, Klaus Biesenbach. He wore a skintight cotton top from Pal Zileri’s Fey Wetsuit collection and a barbershop quartet hat whose permanently jaunty tilt was achieved using water-based epoxy resin and Gorilla Glue. Obrist entertained the group with a story about how he once made $125,000 in 24 hours by delivering the same 10-minute lecture on “globo-tech future-functionality” in Zurich, Istanbul, Moscow, and Sydney. 

The Brants were especially fond of the installation in the Chinese Pavilion by the duo Wang Wang Dance, above, who presented several super-sleek sculptures depicting famous political leaders augmented with massive cartoon breasts. “I like that I can check my complexion in the areola,” Harry said. “It’s a very Koonsian effect.” One sculpture featuring Mao Zedong released rice milk from its nipples every forty-five minutes. “Art should always be this direct and powerful,” Peter II surmised. “I can’t stand that conceptual Marshall Douche Amp shit [sic].”

Another Brant favorite was found in the Argentinean Pavilion, with a mixed-media exhibition from Pablo Cerca Cielo, who works primarily with shaved bunny fur, chandeliers, and crushed cans that once held Goya-brand pinto beans. “Joseph Beuys had felt and fat,” Cerca Cielo said. “I have my own materials, equally spiritual.” The installation, entitled “Nunca Olvidas // Chupa Mi Conejito” explores the legacy of the war in the Falklands. Cerca Cielo had planned to include a massive effigy of Margaret Thatcher composed of fur that had been urinated on by drunken campesinos, but the piece was detained in customs.

“I think it’s about the stock market,” Peter II said, discussing the massive and controversial sculpture by American firebrand Dustin Piccoliti, included in the “Encyclopedic Palace” exhibition. “I could picture this in the garden, maybe with that pudgy devil guy smushed up against the south wall of the compound.” Piccoliti himself earned a fair share of column inches at a Campari-sponsored cocktail event later in the week, erecting a D.I.Y. booth where the artist offered amateur prostate exams in an edition of 50.

Not everyone was feeling the Venetian love. “I keep getting ditched by my own fucking kids,” Patriarch Peter I said, pictured above looking lost and forlorn on the lawn of the Swedish Embassy, the venue for “this fucking C-list party full of a bunch of nobodies,” he said. “I explicitly asked the boys to CC me on all party RSVPS, but are they fucking capable of doing that? They are fucking not.” He itemized the soirees that he had already missed—including a Luigi Bormioli event featuring nude aerial burlesque, and a Cristal reception for Sarah Tze with a Yoko Ono DJ set. “You know what I did last night? I went back to my room at the Aman Canal Grande at, like, 8 pm, and spent the night struggling, unsuccessfully, to avoid succumbing to a torrid Italian softcore movie that featured a one-legged gondolier and a buck-toothed whore. And then I surfed the BFA site to see what the fuck I had missed out there in the world.”     

“I’m sort of having a flashback to a sweaty San Francisco summer back in  ’69,” Patriarch Peter I chuckled nervously, flanked by Guido Schulutz, A-list leatherdaddy and inventor of The Hole Truth (TM), the first biodegradable, BPA-free artificial anus. “They called me the Reluctant Pony. I was just grooving the scene, trying to start up an amateur polo league with some of the so-called squares. If I’m being honest there’s a period of three months or so that I just don’t remember at all.” Schulutz and the Patriarch are seen here at the launch of the Brant Foundation’s latest experimental project space, BrantNowFasterYes2.0, located in a former ketchup processing plant in Detroit. The concept is notable for its reliance on a single artist—Urs Fischer—who has been given almost unbelievable creative control (and an unlimited budget). “We call it instantaneous gratified creative spurtage, or IGCS,” Patriarch Peter I explained. “Essentially what it means is that whenever Urs has an idea he’d like to materialize in the world—however insignificant or fleeting—we’ve put the machinery in place to fabricate and install within 24 hours, from conception to completion.” Case in point: Fuckheaded Gremlin, 2013, a 60-foot tall bronze sculpture that had been created a mere three hours before the opening, based solely on an iPhone picture that Fischer had snapped of a puddle of vomit on a Dublin street. “This is also a highly progressive jobs initiative,” the Patriarch stressed. “Infamous for being one of America’s ‘dead cities,’ Detroit is ripe for a revival. We guesstimate that by 2014 a solid 87% of the local population will be employed, in some capacity, in the manufacture of Urs Fischer artworks.” A reunited Stooges performed at the launch event, turning in a searing set that ended with Iggy Pop literally slithering down the length of Fuckheaded Gremlin, his impossibly leathered skin barely chafed from the unimaginable friction. 

A much-bruised, unidentified youth dodged yet another expertly flung baseball at the Brant compound’s Peg-A-Fuckin’-Ginger celebration, held annually since 1985, for reasons that no one fully agrees on. “I seem to remember a ginger prick we came across on the beach in Cannes,” Patriarch Peter I surmised, “one of those real gangly bastards, all ruddy cheeked and meek, with body hair like a bunch of fire ants. He kicked sand in my face, so I thought: Why not organize an event in which everyone throws lead-weighted baseballs at these fuckers?” Peter II took home top honors at this year’s edition, racking up 4 black eyes, 6 broken ribs, and 3 subdural hematomas. Florence + the Machine played a 6-hour durational cover of Simply Red’s “Holding Back The Years” organized by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, who later admitted to being ignorant of the event’s specifics.  Harry, as usual, abstained—not out of ethical concern, but because “I throw like a freaking girl,” he said.

Moments after his mistress Fernanda Pokum brutalized the cabana waitress at bottom right, Patriarch Peter I’s volcanic temper erupted on the chin of Argentine playboy Ju-Ju Palacho, who had just (jokingly, he assured) mentioned that the Patriarch’s “budding manbreasts” would one day “make perfect ski jumps for dainty, miniature leprechauns.” After his initially timid left hook, bystanders reported that Patriarch Peter I straddled Ju-Ju in the sand, delivering one punishing blow after another and generating a frenzied scene that “was like some shit out of Silence of the Lambs,” according to one witness. Hours after the violent outburst the pair had already made amends, and were spotted sharing a two-strawed Zombie on the patio of Fernando’s, St. Bart’s go-to spot for top-shelf novelty cocktails. The renewed friendship was likely the result of obvious financial  and interpersonal considerations: Patriarch Peter I is a majority investor in Yo No Lo Creo!, the oft-sued franchise of outpatient penile augmentation parlors that Palacho founded in Buenos Aires.

Patriarch Peter I poses with a steely-eyed Leonardo DiCaprio at the Brant Foundation’s Mother’s Day Pig-Flaying. ‘Leo’ wears a rumpled blazer from Target X Ralph Lauren’s Great Gatsby collection and a Newsies 20th-anniversary commemorative cap; he flaunts goatee micro-cultivation courtesy of Sim-Jook Industries. “I’m not surprised that so many well-known individuals turned up here, despite the supposed holiday,” Patriarch Peter I said. “I’ve always held that celebrities are birthed by the Universal Collective, arriving here on earth through the vaginal canal of fame. They are, essentially, orphans. It’s a sentiment that Warhol would have approved of.” The shock-haired contemporary art icon was well-represented at the Pig-Flaying, with previously unseen selections from his “Death & Disaster” series, including silkscreens of Balinese castration mishaps and a Honduran blimp accident. 

Harry, wearing a crotchet-embroidered baby-T designed by Ryan McGinness, stretches a recently waxed arm around billionaire Alan Lindehamm, erstwhile art critic and director of the vanity project, Penis Over Manhattan, whose quirky dual focus (vintage Tiffany lamps, and East Indian sculpture depicting tumescent male genitalia) has earned him the title of “most unpredictable art maven on the East Coast.” (Lindehamm rose to notoriety last year for an essay, entitled “I’d Rather Give Myself A Drano Enema And Then Punch Myself In The Face With A Dead Rabbit Than Go To Miami Basel,” in which he lambasted the “hangers-on and poor, groveling dumbfucks” who were “turning the once-proud fair into an orgy of slutty non-socialites with tons of student debt” and “shabby journalists who don’t even have health insurance” who “I hope will drown themselves in the ocean quickly so that the real people can go back to doing what they do best: Making and spending money.”) “I wrote that article as a considered, passionate thinkpiece,” Lindehamm said at the Brant Foundation. “After people got pissed off, I cleverly went back in time and recast it as social satire. I don’t see why no one understands that.” Lindehamm wears a suede Member’s Only jacket and a pair of color contacts expertly modeled on the eyes of Leonardo DiCaprio.

Anton Kerbunkle III, 7, and Davis ‘Skipper’ Rhoades, 6, watch as employees of Quik-Mexicans-Now! (the contract-hire labor force that recently erected the Frieze Art Fair) tend to a series of roasting pigs on the south lawn of the Brant Foundation. The gruesome food sculpture, a clear homage to the oeuvre of Francis Bacon, utilized Corten steel stakes designed by Richard Serra, and a proprietary barbeque sauce curated by Cyprien Gaillard.

“I wanted to look like a werewolf all hopped up on, like, Blink-182 had just, like, went fucking punkwild on my shirt and ripped it to shreds,” said Harry, photographed here at the Met’s Annual Sad & Wealthy Ball. “The crazy thing is that this is, like, a $19,000 one-off T, so the little scraps I cut and threw out could probably have fed a fucking family of Guatemalans for a few months.” The Brants were only a few of the A-list celebrities who got “punkified” for the hotly anticipated Met gala. Anne Hathaway, for instance, may have found a cure for her plummeting popularity: Wearing a sheer chiffon skirt, she showed off her platinum-dyed pubic hair, which had been artisanally shaved into the shape of an anarchy sign. Carey Mulligan sported a Chelsea girl hairdo and a henna face tattoo advertising the underground band A Million Dead Cops; Sarah Jessica Parker went edgy and referential by dressing as Dead Nancy Spungen, wearing little more than an XXL t-shirt soaked in actual lamb’s blood. Guests were thrilled to explore the exhibits that are part of the Met’s current show, “fRom cHaOS TO couTURE,” which is underwritten by Hot Topic, Dorito’s, and Vita Coco; the show includes a life-size replica of the infamously nasty CBGB’s bathroom. (“Don’t tell anyone,” Debbie Harry was overheard whispering to a friend, “but I just took a brutal shit in there.”) Fall Out Boy performed at the event, joined by Richard Hell and Iggy Pop for a set entirely composed of Crass covers. “I would say I’m ‘punk as fuck,’ yeah,” Peter II told a reporter. “I once punched a Barney’s salesgirl in the face for failing to separate my purchases in the bag with those little in-between layers of crinkle paper. I’d say that’s pretty fucking punk.” Patriarch Peter I attended the Sad & Wealthy Ball dressed as G.G. Allin—“something of a personal hero,” he explained, enigmatically, while adjusting the reins of his leather-and-metal scrotal harness.

Harry and Peter II provide emotional back-up for Eunice Prask, center, at the Horshance Foundation’s bimonthly support group for former Renaissance Festival staff and participants. “It’s a long fucking road, excuse my language,” said a visibly shaken Nat ‘Pip’ Huckins, the Foundation’s press agent. “I look out there and I see just waves of archaic frills; bosoms squeezed into hellish bodices; lurid patterns that would make Robin Hood and his Merry Men fall into a deep, deep depression. And the headgear, the fucking headgear—there I go again—the braided forehead necklaces, the goddamn feathers everywhere…” Harry and Peter II have known Prask since the late ’90s, when they attended the same survivalist-themed summer camp outside of Greenwich. “I kick myself for not noticing the signs even then,” Harry said, squeezing Prask’s arm to remind her that he’s still there, and always will be. “It started small: those Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett paperbacks, the amateur lute playing. We just never thought it would end up where it did—a full-time job playing M’Lady Trucklefeathers out in Crossford, New Jersey, slowly losing her hold on that dividing line between fantasy and reality…just like Tom Hanks in Mazes and Monsters.” Prask, for her part, is committed to recovery; when pressed, she will admit, shakily, that unicorns “probably do not exist.” She appeared absolutely beatific during the closing performance by Joanna Newsom.

It was hard to stay upright at the 10th Annual Cinco de Mayo and Inspi(RED) World AIDS Fundraiser, held this year at the jewel-dappled Skronkquist Hotel’s Venetian Orgy room, in Montauk. “I slipped on somebody’s puke,” explained Paul “Titties” Goober, star of Showtime’s Gigolos, pictured here at the bottom of a veritable Brant pyramid. “It’s fucking amateur hour in this place. You’d think people could calmly celebrate Mexican awesomeness and decry the brutality of AIDS without turning into, like, tequila-spewing asshole fountains.” Stretching a pencil-thin calf across the torso of “Titties” Goober is carpet empire heiress Paula “Jackie” O’nutsausse, still recovering from a price-gouging PR disaster in 2007 in which O’nutsausse Textiles grossly overcharged for AIDS Memorial Quilt materials. Peter II and Harry participated in a joint Win-A-Date-With-The-Brants auction, going for $10,500 to an anonymous Korean bidder via telephone. At the event, 3ball MTY performed a medley of selections from Rent, and Patriarch Peter I participated in a comedy skit which involved Jennifer Rubell rolling him into the world’s largest burrito; he appeared visibly distraught for the remainder of the evening. “I’m going to have gaucamole in my ass for days,” he explained.

The brothers Brant made unlikely but stylish diplomats during a two-day cameo at Estonia’s National Reindeer Refuge, a wildlife heritage site located roughly 45 miles from the capital of Talinn. President Toomas Hendrik Ilves personally invited Harry and Peter II to act as cultural ambassadors at the First Annual Pro-Austerity Bonanza, an elite event organized to counter the recent wave of blowback against the academically influenced policies which have successfully eviscerated most of Europe’s economies. “We have done everything right, and now it’s time to celebrate that,” Ilves said, to scant but enthusiastic applause. “In the following years I plan to balloon the expense of higher education, privatize all natural resources in Estonia, and bring our medical care up to the high cost, low quality standards demonstrated by our friends, the United States. I also hope to build many more prisons, perhaps by importing some minorities, which we can then imprison.” Harry looked visibly perplexed during the duration of the proceedings, and admitted that he only agreed to come in exchange for a tailoring session with Viga Broonsvn, the Antwerp-trained designer known for inventing the popular genre of “shrunken Nordic clusterfuck.” Peter II shocked a gaggle of elderly ladies by relaying an anecdote about the time he accidentally tweeted a photo of his penis to the Prince of Monaco. Sigur Ros performed their new song “Iiiiiu Plik Hiiii*__@aaa” at the event, with accompaniment from the Estonian Castrati Chorus.