the NachtKabarett

April 5th, 2007

Marilyn Manson Spooks Hollywood

It's Halloween," said Marilyn Manson at the October 31st opening of his new Hollywood art gallery, the Celebritarian Corporation Gallery of Fine Art. Standing tall in a black suit and thick platform shoes, his eye sockets smeared with blue makeup, he added, "Not necessarily the best night for people to be interested in looking at art."

So Manson - fresh off a Tonight Show appearance that featured pyrotechnic Christmas trees - debuted some new paintings at an absinthe-soaked costume party. "This is lighting up the night with insaneness," he said, introducing a friend dressed in a clown outfit and blue wig. "He's not in costume. He is a cable repairman, and he steals girls' underpants."

Among the guests was actress Evan Rachel Wood, who arrived as a vampire. Wood first met Manson when he asked her to be in his upcoming horror film Phantasmagoria: The Visions of Lewis Carroll. Now there is a watercolor of her sharing wall space with a painting of Jon-Benet Ramsey and a large piece depicting a nude Adolf Hitler with breasts and a drooping penis. "It came as kind of a shock," Wood said. "I was beyond flattered."

The gallery represents a period of accelerating activity for Manson, who is nearly done with an album set for a 2007 release. "The process of opening a gallery ended up inspiring me to make a new record," he said. "We're about two songs away from a finished album that we didn't even have a few months ago. It sounds rather pretentious sometimes, but it's easier for me to just call myself an artist - if I decide to do music or if I decide to do a film, it works. I just want to uphold a level of integrity."

Syndicate; Rolling Stone Issue 1014, November 30th, 2006