Don’t kiss the world goodbye!

Unleash all the furies of hell on the fucker!

Like Sophie did.

Sophie?

Yes, Sophie Calle, the French artist who has brought grudge-fucking to a high art and become the hit of this year’s Venice Biennale — sort of a Cannes Film Festival for the art world and one of the most competitive venues in Europe for the bright and the new.

When Ms. Calle’s boyfriend emailed her a “Dear Jane” letter, she replied by setting 107 raving women on his ass — Furies, indeed — installing the entire “work” in a pavilion at the Biennale.

Reports the Washington Post’s sharp-eyed and shaper-tongued Blake Gopnik: (read the full article)

Quick, nasty and narrative.

The illustrations of Michael Kirwan never fail to give me a hardon — surely the highest accolade one can pay a piece of really good jerk-off art.

The illustrations have for me a crude teenage exuberance, as if they were sketched in the margin of a high school notebook, or found in the boy’s bathroom, hallucinatory images of illicit cocksucking.

Yet everywhere there is the patient hand of the mature artist: in the theatrical setups and lighting, the frequent play of clashing patterns, the stagey, orgiastic groupings. (read the full article)

“I think the human body is a remarkable machine in all its shapes and sizes,” says Portuguese artist HvH.

This refreshing point of view is exactly what drew us to the artist’s graphic celebration of bears and even overweight men.

When we asked if he were attracted perhaps exclusively to bears, HvH gave us the sort of answer that — while it let slip nothing really personal — seemed to embrace all humanity:

“I am linked to the ‘bears movement’ but only because I started showing my erotic work on a bears website,” he said. “Even there, I drew all sorts of characters: young, old — bears, twinkies, transsexuals. Men and women.”

In a world of gay art that magnifies standard perfection and beguiles us with studly impossibilities, HvH strikes out for wider vistas and undiscovered continents, where the natives, with their chunky down-to-earth bodies and odd “imperfections,” are just as hot and universal yet so different from the sons of Tom of Finland that we know and love back home. (read the full article)

Jacques Lacan was a French psychoanalyst who advanced the work of Freud by reinterpreting some of the masters’ basic tenets. Lacan wrote extensively of a “mirror stage” in a child’s psychological development. Above, Philadelphia artist Rebecca Fuchs has applied Lacan’s theory to her stunning new series of photographs.

Lacan maintained that infants pass through a stage in which the external image of the body creates in the psyche a mental representation of the Self — or an I. For Lacan, this mirror stage establishes the ego as fundamentally dependent upon external objects, on an other. In Lacan’s world, without an other the I doesn’t exist.

Fuchs shows how bathrooms and locker rooms become, for many of us, places where the mirror game takes on a highly-charged, precarious connotation. She stages her photographic narratives in public restrooms and school locker rooms to highlight the acts of mimicry and performance associated with such spaces. Locales where, she writes, “the self is performed and peers are mimicked.” (read the full article)

The humongo cocks, the flying gizzum, the pink depths of ever expanding a-holes – no, the kink never flags in the comic books of Patrick Fillion. Particularly in his call-boy series Satisfaction Guaranteed, which, we are sad to report, comes to an end in this final issue.

“Satisfaction Guaranteed was always our most popular franchise,” says Fillion, who has created a dozen continuing comic titles for his Class Comics enterprise, many of them featuring the sci-fi adventures of heroes with outrageous, over-the-moon size humdingers. (read the full article)

We’ll be the first to admit it. Bringing our queer eye to the art museum is somewhat redundant.

The great works so clearly speak for themselves, and often in accents we recognize as native to our own little corner of the universe.

Digital artist Harald Seiwert decided to take this idea over the top and do explicitly homosexual versions of great masterpieces, calling his new series Inspired by …

Using a combination of Photoshop and photo shoot, he enhanced already homoerotic works like Caravaggio’s nubile boy cupid in Amor Victorious, at left (click here to see the Caravaggio original), by switching in a live model.

But why limit himself to the handful of often marginally attractive men — mostly burghers, popes and patrons — in great art? The vast majority of masterpieces envisioned beauty in an exclusively female form. He needed to throw in a few transgendered curves to widen his scope, often to pranksterish effect. (read the full article)

It’s called Rainbow Country.

That’s the new title from Patrick Fillion’s line of Class Comics, which usually feature the far-out sexcapades of oversize superheros in distant galaxies.

Rainbow Country is set in the real world — as long as the real world is located somewhere off the French Riviera — and features everyday guys like you and me…

… as long as me and thee have mega pecs, industrial-strength abs, expanding orifices and the sort of flexibility that would bring a gold-medal gymnast to tears — if not his knees.

Dicks the size of salamis, of course, cockheads the size of a baby’s fist — all that comes standard in a Class Comic, and we mention them only in passing, for documentary purposes.

Welcome to Sodom by the Sea: Rainbow Country is a dazzlingly buff gay mecca — all male, all the time — where everyone lives in luxury condos that tower over a glittering aquamarine sea. (read the full article)

I guess we’re supposed to laugh at a painting like this.

There was a thin line in the 19th century between art and pornography, and the best way to get lots of sweetly-scented pink flesh into a painting was to set it safely in the past.

Homoerotic art of the time was usually signaled by a resort to ancient Greece and Rome.

The British academics — that is artists that painted in a style certified by rigorous art academies — were particularly good at this homoerotic slight of hand.

Here Lord Frederick Leighton — an artist all but forgotten but once so celebrated he was elevated to a peerage — shows us Icarus being fitted out with wings for his famous flight of hubris, an ascent too close to the sun that would end in a fiery, topsy-turvy plunge into the sea.

Forget that the story has particular relevance to the bloody war-torn, page-strewn headlines of this week. We offer this as an antidote to all that. Public servants that we are, Nightcharm brings you your prettiness break. (read the full article)