JJ Brine. (Photo: Nicole Disser)
This past weekend, Bushwick occult store Catland put yet another hex on Brett Kavanaugh. If you’re wondering whether it’ll work, consider this: JJ Brine, founder of the “Official Art Gallery of Satan,” is taking credit for the defeat of Kim Davis, the Kentucky clerk who refused to marry same-sex couples.
Davis, who was briefly jailed in 2015 after defying a court order to issue same-sex marriage licenses, lost her reelection bid yesterday after her Democratic challenger got 54.1 percent of the vote. That caused JJ Brine, the self-declared “crown prince of hell,” to tweet “IT WORKED BITCHES!”
Brine and other artists and performers got together to curse Davis in September of 2015, after Brine had moved Vector Gallery from the Lower East Side to Los Angeles (it subsequently relocated to East Williamsburg). Broadly’s description of the event should give you some idea of how very strange Vector Gallery is, never mind its altars to Charlie Manson and Condoleezza Rice:
Throughout the night, a woman named Liat sang about the Holocaust in Hebrew, another girl named Annelise asked guests to pull out tarot cards with quotes from her 14-year-old diary written on them, and the Girl Group walked around, cursing Davis with just their presence. At one point, Torie, the Minister of Synthetic Light, recited a poem about the power of femininity. These women’s prayers—whether they knew it or not, Brine said—cursed Davis.
(Photo: Nicole Disser)
It wasn’t surprising that Brine would target Davis. He’s gay, stylish, and satanic: everything Kim Davis most definitely is not. Then again, after launching as the “Official Art Gallery of Satan,” Vector morphed into the official art gallery of Jesus Christ. But not Kim Davis’s Jesus Christ, rest assured. Last year, Brine told V Magazine that, contrary to Broadly’s headline, he was not a cult leader and that he was more into the idea of Jesus as “an A.I. consciousness that we’re uploading into ourselves.” As for the Biblical Jesus, Brine considered him “a brilliantly sarcastic brat.”
In any case, Brine clearly has a knack for predicting the future, though it’s hard to pin him down. Last year, in a “Valentine to America,” he predicted that Kanye West would become president and usher in the apocalypse. By the looks of this posting from last week, he’s got a new 2020 favorite. “YES, THIS IMAGE IS A SPELL & IT SHALL WORK ITS MAGICK,” sayeth Brine.