The Daily W: Downtown Gallery Hopping
By Karin Nelson

Courtney Love may be crazy, but she’s no fool. She’s fully aware of the eye-rolls that her debut art show will elicit—and she doesn’t give a damn. “If you see something elevated in it, good. If you don’t, I don’t care,” she told us last night at Fred Torres Collaborations in Chelsea, where some 45 of her recent works went on display for a curious crowd that included designer Johan Lindeberg, photographer Francesco Carrozzini and Opening Ceremony’s Humberto Leon.

Entitled “And She’s Not Even Pretty,” Love’s show consists almost entirely of childlike self-portraits with angst-ridden phrases such as “No one made me cry like you made me cry,” scrawled across them. “It’s like a diary,” she explained. “There’s evidence.” A whirling dervish of cigarette smoke and disjointed sentences, Love noted that art for her is nothing new. “My mother was trying to force me to be an artist when I was little, by not giving me pink dresses and canopy beds, but African finger instruments and friggin’ pastels.” She later attended the San Francisco Art Institute, where, Love made sure to point out, she learned nothing. It was Torres and photographer David LaChapelle who convinced Love to brave her first art show. “I learned a lot from going to Julian’s house,” she said, referring to Julian Schnabel. “He has a career I love. If a dude can do that, a girl can.”

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