Matty Mo is a Los Angeles-based contemporary artist and marketing entrepreneur best known for creating the conceptual art group, "The Most Famous Artist." Through this platform, Matty Mo makes social media-themed installations, public stunts and exhibitions to challenge viewers to examine how technology and the Internet impact society. In 2017, Forbes published a feature on Matty Mo, promoting his innovative outlook on technology. That same year, ABC News reported on his large-scale public installation in Los Angeles where he painted three residential homes bright pink as a commentary on class, community and digital legacy. Matty Mo has partnered with international brands such as Gucci and his "#selfiewall" in the Venice Beach neighborhood in Los Angeles was dubbed by Los Angeles Magazine as being "The Most Instagramable Wall in L.A."
Video Matty Mo
Early History
Before creating the group, "The Most Famous Artist," Matty Mo attended Stanford University and had a career in advertising technology. In 2013, while he was the CEO of AlphaBoost, he was vacationing with Jesse Thomas in India when Thomas posted photos and video of Matty Mo drunk and nude to his personal and company social media accounts. The incident jeopardized Alphaboost acquisition talks that Matty Mo was involved in.
Maps Matty Mo
"The Most Famous Artist"
Matty Mo launched his platform, "The Most Famous Artist," in 2013 when he began taking preexisting paintings and adding something to them or painting over their surface. This concept of appropriation is a longstanding one in art history and was used by iconic artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol. Matty Mo; however, adds an awareness of digital promotion and social media to this technique that modernizes its impact.
"100 Thousand Dollars," 2016
In 2016, Matty Mo created ten works, each resembling a stack of one thousand $100 bills; however, only the bills on the top and bottom of the stacks were visible making their literal monetary value a mystery. The stacks were priced at $5,000 each and the first sold within twenty minutes of being posted on Instagram. While buyers could look through the stacks of cash to count their actual monetary value, Matty Mo added a seal to each piece that keeps all the bills together and said it will become an illegitimate art object should that seal be broken.
"The Pink House" (2017)
In 2017, "The Most Famous Artist" painted three houses in a Los Angeles residential neighborhood bright pink that were scheduled for demolition and to be replaced by a high-end apartment building. The installation was embraced on social media but also seen as an important lens on gentrification and community displacement.
"Artificial Intelligence: THE END OF ART AS WE KNOW IT", 2017
In 2017, the group mounted a solo exhibition at The McLoughlin Gallery in San Francisco where they partnered with anonymous hackers to build an artificial intelligence capable of analyzing and reproducing art styles of iconic artists, such as Chuck Close. The first group of images is a series of portraits of people, including: factory workers, art dealers, pilots, artists and taxi drivers, whose jobs could one day by eliminated by artificial intelligence. This exhibition serves as starting point for a discussion about the challenges facing humanity in light of big data, AI and robots.
Public Speaking
In 2016, Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art's Artinfusion Insight program hosted Matty Mo to speak about his innovative use of social media in his art and, in 2017, he delivered lectures at Sotheby's Institute of Art and at the Tech Open Air conference in Berlin.
Charity Work and Presence at Auction
In 2016, Matty Mo partnered up with artist Andrea Russett to paint a mural in Los Angeles that raised money for The Thirst Project, a non-profit organization whose aim is to bring safe drinking water to communities around the world.
"The Most Famous Artist" has sold multiple works at auction through Julien's Auction and in 2017 was a featured artist on Artsy benefiting the American Civil Liberties Union.
References
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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