Booking review

One night shy of a full moon on a warm Saturday night, L.A.’s Westside was alive with gallery openings celebrating the work of Diego Rivera, Diane Arbus and Julie Adams Eamer, to name a few. But only one offered a Warholian salute to celebrity: Russell Young’s “Pig Portraits,” a collection of famous police booking photos, colorfully silk-screened onto giant canvases and sold for $4,800 each. (Thirty percent of sales went to the Art of Elysium, a nonprofit that brings art to chronically ill children.)

Young, a straight-talking Brit and former celebrity photographer stood amid the sweaty masses packed into the Don O’Melveny Gallery on Melrose Avenue on July 12 and shared his inspiration. During an Esquire magazine shoot, he said, Mickey Rourke asked Young to make him look edgy and mean. Four years later, Young saw his booking photo, in which Rourke “looked cooler, harder, meaner than I could ever make him look. He’d just beaten up Carre Otis, at least that was what he was charged with, and he just looked so cool!”

And so, an idea was born.

The evening’s host, Patricia Arquette, dabbed her brow and took in the work. Meanwhile, guests -- including celebrity mutt Mr. Winkle -- took turns posing for their own mug shots in an old LAPD booking chair, courtesy of Patricia’s brother David Arquette.

“They say the last person to sit in that chair was Hugh Grant,” said an event publicist. “But who knows?”

There was a shot of Jane Fonda (1970, booked on suspicion of drug smuggling, assault and battery) wearing her “Klute” era shag and holding a fist in the air. Alongside hung a photo of Malcolm X (1946, larceny and gun possession) in a porkpie hat.

“We thought when you get arrested ... it’s your worst possible moment,” said the show’s curator, New York art dealer Vanina Holasek. “And yet, they still look iconic. The Patty Hearst looks like a 19th century Viennese portrait.”

Beyond the dejected Martin Luther King Jr. (1960, tax evasion), the defiant Steve McQueen (1972, reckless driving) and an exhausted Juliette Lewis (1989, underage drinking) hung the beginnings of Young’s next project: a collection of cardboard signs created for solicitation by homeless people.

The artist bought them from men he met on the streets of New York for as much as $60.

On this night, they were priced at $2,500 each. (Proceeds, Young said, would go to a homeless charity.) One read: “Just lost everything could use a little help!” Another, written in ballpoint pen on a discarded file folder, read: “I need a beer Why lie about it Still homeless.”

Yet another sign, written on notebook paper and posted on a bathroom door between the two, read: “Out of Order Use facilities 2 doors down.” This one was apparently still in practical use.