
In the spring of 1973, the surreal collided head-on with the theatrical when Salvador Dalí and Alice Cooper met at the St. Regis Hotel in New York City. It was the kind of encounter that seems almost too absurd to be true, but somehow, when you put Dalí and Cooper in the same room, it feels like the universe aligning in all its weird, wonderful glory.
Alice Cooper, the godfather of shock rock, had always drawn inspiration from the avant-garde. He and his bandmates were art-school kids who saw their over-the-top stage shows—complete with guillotines and snakes—as living, breathing surrealist performances. “We worshipped Dalí,” Cooper later said. “We thought of ourselves as surrealists.” So, when the Spanish maestro of eccentricity himself expressed interest in creating a holographic portrait of Cooper’s brain, it wasn’t just a dream come true; it was a collaboration between two minds cut from the same delightfully twisted cloth.
The meeting itself was pure theater. Dalí, ever the showman, entered the room flanked by a coterie of eccentrics. His wife, Gala, was dressed in a men’s tuxedo; his entourage sparkled in pink chiffon. And Dalí himself? He was clad in a giraffe-skin vest, gold Aladdin shoes, and Elvis Presley-gifted purple socks. “The Dalí… is here!” he bellowed upon arrival, making it immediately clear that even a rockstar like Cooper would have to work to keep up with this level of flamboyance.
What followed was an artistic experiment as outlandish as their meeting. Dalí envisioned a “cylindric chromo-hologram” of Alice Cooper—a first-of-its-kind artwork that would blend the shock rocker’s theatricality with Dalí’s surrealist genius. For the project, Cooper was adorned in a million dollars’ worth of Harry Winston diamonds, posed cross-legged on a rotating pedestal while cradling a statuette of the Venus de Milo. Behind him loomed a plaster brain topped with a chocolate éclair and crawling with live ants, a literal representation of Cooper’s brain as Dalí saw it.
“Dalí couldn’t quite believe that I wasn’t the Alice character all the time,” Cooper later said. Indeed, the artist seemed genuinely fascinated by the blurred line between Vincent Furnier, the man, and Alice Cooper, the persona. But if anyone understood the art of living as a larger-than-life character, it was Salvador Dalí.
When the hologram was finally completed, it was a triumph of Dalí’s vision and Cooper’s willingness to dive headfirst into the surreal. To commemorate the collaboration, Dalí presented Cooper with a peculiar gift: a plaster cast of his brain, complete with a real chocolate éclair perched on top and ants scuttling down its sides. Cooper’s reaction was, fittingly, a mix of awe and amusement: “Wow, I never thought I’d ever get this.”
The hologram remains one of the earliest examples of art and technology merging in a way that felt ahead of its time. Today, it’s displayed at the Dalí Theatre-Museum in Figueres, Spain, with a replica housed at the Salvador Dalí Museum in Florida. But beyond the technical achievement, the meeting of Dalí and Cooper was something even greater: a fusion of two creative forces who thrived on pushing boundaries and defying expectations. It was rock ’n’ roll meeting surrealism, theater meeting fine art—a beautiful, chaotic dance that could only have happened in the swirling, glittering madness of the 1970s.
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