In July of 1976, Giuseppe Scaggoli (aka Joey Skaggs), proprietor of the Celebrity Sperm Bank, planned to hold an auction of rock star sperm in New York City. But when the sperm samples were stolen the night before the auction, havoc and mayhem broke out in the street.
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Joey Skaggs arranged for a throng of screaming admirers with cameras to greet him as he arrived by limousine at the opening of the 8th annual Avant Garde Festival at 12 noon on November 19, 1971. Unsuspecting on-lookers were amazed to see John Lennon and Yoko Ono arrive at the same time. But all the attention of the adoring crowd was directed at Skaggs, who was totally unknown to the most of them.
Read more →To save a dilapidated Opera House from the wrecking ball in Earlville, New York, Joey Skaggs bought it and donated it to a community group with the proviso that it would never be sold for profit. It is now a thriving performance and exhibition center.
Read more →On the 4th of July, 1969, to protest the war in Vietnam, Skaggs erected four obscenely grotesque sculptures of the Statue of Liberty at Cooper Square in the East Village of New York. They were life size mannequins painted green and wrapped in barbed wire. One was in a wheelchair. Several were holding dismembered baby doll bodies instead of torches.
Read more →To satirize the Hell’s Angels, many of whom lived in Skaggs’ neighborhood on the Lower East Side in New York, and weddings, which he believed legalized the enslavement of men and women, and to generally have a good time, the artist built a customized tricycle and decorated it with all sorts of car stuff, i.e., fox tales, horns, lights, flags, a radio, and lots of chrome. With an actress friend playing his bride, he rode the trike around the neighborhood, calling it his Hell’s Angels Wedding.
Read more →On Valentine’s Day, Joey Skaggs and friends strung a fifty foot bra across the U.S. Treasury Building on Wall Street in New York City to embarrass Wall Street workers who were making national headlines for harrassing a female colleague with very large breasts.
Read more →On Christmas Day, Joey Skaggs and friends constructed a life size Vietnamese Nativity scene in New York’s Central Park and, dressed as American soldiers with plastic and wooden weapons, attempted to burn it to the ground to protest the war in Vietnam.
Read more →To satirize the busloads of tourists who came to the East Village to gawk at the hippies, Joey Skaggs rented a Greyhound sight-seeing bus and took sixty bearded, beaded, camera-toting hippies on a tour of suburban Queens. He called it his “Cultural Exchange Tour.”
Read more →On four consecutive Easters in the 1960s, Joey Skaggs took a two hundred pound sculpture depicting a cross with a naked rotting skeletal corpse to the streets of New York to protest the hypocrisy of the Church and man’s inhumanity to man.
Read more →In 1976, country western singer Joe Skaggs staged a night in a dog bordello, where for $50 patrons could get their dog sexually gratified, specifically, and only, for the media.
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