Pete Doherty, Latest News

Pete Doherty

by HEDI SLIMANE

Pete Doherty: writer, performer, fashion icon, gladiator. A true artist: perpetually hungry? Permanently in opposition? With our appetite for scandals, our rampant consumerism, voyeurism, “vampirism”, nothing is more desirable, nothing tastes better, than the suicidal junky rockstar. Using his body, his music, his life, as the canvas for a daily protest and public sacrifice, Doherty is pushing the limits of extreme political violence. Chris Burden, the American artist who was shot in the left arm from a distance of about five metres by an assistant, in Santa Ana, California in 1971, would have loved and respected this young man. The endless excess, the violence, the disappearances, the fights with policemen, judges, fans and friends, like his drug addiction, are artistic forms of protest and body mutilation, akin to those of artists such as the Venetian actionist Rudolf Schwarzkogler, and the French…