Marilyn Minter published by Gregory R Miller and Co

You'll want to snap up the Marilyn Minter's monograph published by Gregory R. Miller & Co asap, because its a surefire collector's item. Minter's name has been in recent circulation amongst the fashion press because of Tom Ford's decision to drop her imagery of the Tom Ford For Men fragrance. As a spokesperson for Tom Ford Beauty announced to Women's Wear Daily, “We loved the original Marilyn Minter images, but while on a shoot with [Terry Richardson] in Milan, we decided that a sharper, more graphic approach clearly communicated the bold and provocative mood of the fragrance.” A more graphic approach doesn't necessarily mean "clean lines" though. The new ads are apparently to feature the desireable fragrance bottle placed tightly in between a woman's crotch.

Tom Ford. Ph by Marilyn Minter New York Magazine

No tears for Marilyn though. After 30 patient years of refining her work without attention, not being au courant in fashion advertising is unlikely to devastate her . And there's the comfort of knowing that in your late 50's , you've woken one day to find NYC staggered by your Creative Time billboard series, and your imagery riding the cover of the 2006 Whitney Biennal. And what gorgeously sticky and resinous imagery it is!

Marilyn Minter : Piquant 1998

We love the dripping, drooling , rich, wet, seeping quality of the work . Its full of bleeding colors and red mouths, bared teeth and plump nipples mingled with pubic hair and pearls and painfully high heels. All those smeared eyes and cracked heels ! Make-up lines and shoe companies wish. In an age frozen over by the over-retouched imagery of computers, Minter's viewpoint is already influencing a new generation of photographers. Minter is the reminder of sex and sweat in a medium where sex with sweat no longer exists. And then there is her technique, the masterful way of transposing the mechanics of photographs that have the dripping nature of paintings against paintings that are thoroughly photo-realistic. In the end its fantastic that Minter may have failed to move the Tom Ford product. The tension between fashion's imperative towards assurance and control (Sharper! More Graphic! Clearly communicated!) and art's drive to pull everything apart and make a mess of our assumptions is what makes Minter a vital artist of our moment. What is that moment? Minter can speak for herself on that. "It's in the moment when everything goes wrong," Minter explained to Paper magazine in 2006 "It's when the model sweats. There's lipstick on teeth and the makeup's running." Nothing is more compelling in the image trade that a beautifully rendered meltdown.