About King Adz

The advertising executive, filmmaker, editor and producer King Adz has more recently made a name for himself as a writer focused around the multi-sensory experiences street culture has to offer, particularly taste. But who knows if he’s a writer who loves to cook or a cook who loves to write – it’s a chicken and egg situation. When he’s serving up delectable offerings such as his breakthrough book The Urban Cookbook: Creative Recipes for the Graffiti Generation, or his forthcoming monster Street Knowledge – An A to Z of Urban Culture, creativity rules supreme.

Cash rules

Some thoughts on money and art by King Adz

I once got involved in a ‘debate’ with a New York Cop (who was also an artist who had a keen interest in Graffiti and street art) about art, business and war. He asked me to read a rough draft of a piece he’d written about Artists at War. In the end he finished his piece with these words:

‘To close, I want to share the profound thoughts of King Adz – a British writer/director who, after reading the rough draft of this article stated: “Art is something you can’t define, almost like life itself. War is the opposite of both these things. I think you are standing on very dodgy ground by speaking about art and war in the same sentence.”’

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Thief? Smuggler? Collector? Curator?

Michel van Rijn is one of the world’s last true adventurers, full of bravery and spunk, with a vast repertoire of stories about taking risks, about how he had a dream and beat the system: a rare thing indeed in this day and age of feckless famous-for-absolutely-nothing ‘celebrity’ wannabees and droves of star-fuckers. MvR’s 1993 book Hot Art Cold Cash (Little, Brown) is more a bond-esq adventure story than art history book and it generated him a whole lot of fame when it was published.  I have been writing about Michel for many years and by 2008 he had a serious price on his head. Whenever we’d meet in London he’d have his faithful armed-to-the-teeth ex-special forces body guard, and then it all went quiet, he disappeared and sometime later, surfaced in Amsterdam where he was safe, where his adventure had began in the 60s.

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