Jeanne-Claude, RIP

Jeanne-Claude, one-half of the art duo Christo and Jeanne-Claude, has died at the age of 74. The front page of the couple's web site has a short tribute. I loved The Gates.

Electrically conductive steak as art

For his piece Steak Filter, Noah Feehan ran a video signal of a steak cooking through the actual steak. The deterioration of the video signal becomes a sign of how done the steak is.

Quite literally, I am plugging composite video into a big steak, which is then cooked. The video signal going through the steak is the image of the steak cooking. Gradually, the steak loses moisture and signal can no longer pass.

The videos don't really show too much, but I love the idea. (via eat me daily)

Marble styrofoam skull

Fabio Viale makes unusual marble sculptures, like this skull that looks like it's made out of styrofoam.

(via this is that)

Temporarily recreating the Berlin Wall

Berliners! Artist Martin Butler is trying to find 33,000 people to recreate the Berlin Wall for the 20th anniversary of the Wall's fall.

The idea is to form on the 9th of november 2009 -- the night the Wall fell 20 years ago -- a line of people that will recreate the Berlin Wall with their physical presence, marking the path where the wall once stood. Thousands of people will form a human chain that will make its way on the 9th of november around 8.15pm. This action will last for approximately 15 minutes.

If you want to be a part of the piece, sign up on the web site. (thx, søren)

Update: A U2 concert at the Brandenburg Gate has run into some trouble after -- and I swear I am not making this up -- a huge wall has been constructed to keep non-ticket holders out of the concert. (thx, john)

Cartoon skeletons

Michael Paulus is offering new versions of his cartoon skeleton sketches at his Etsy store.

I've got a previous version of his Hello Kitty...love it.

Peter Paul Rubens, painter, designer, and diplomat

In addition to being a painter of some repute, Peter Paul Rubens was also a diplomat:

In Master of Shadows, Mark Lamster tells the story of Rubens's life and brilliantly re-creates the culture, religious conflicts, and political intrigues of his time. Commissions to paint military and political leaders drew Rubens from his Antwerp home to London, Madrid, Paris, and Rome. The Spanish crown, recognizing the value of his easy access to figures of power, enlisted him into diplomatic service. His uncommon intelligence, preternatural charm, and ability to navigate through ever-shifting political winds allowed him to negotiate a long-sought peace treaty between England and Spain even as Europe's shrewdest statesmen plotted against him.

and a graphic designer.

Moretus was Rubens's most frequent design client. To save his friend money, Rubens generally did his work for Plantin on holidays, so he would not have to charge Moretus his rather exorbitant day rate (Rubens was notorious for his high prices), and even then he agreed to be paid in books.

VC funding for 20x200

Congrats to Jen Bekman on getting funding for 20x200¹.

"I love the idea of taking the friction out of the art world," said Mr. Conrad. "A lot of people want to buy nice things, but don't know how. Jen has built a business from that, which is growing very nicely and has a lot of repeat customers."

[1] In light of the new FTC guidelines for disclosure by bloggers², a few somewhat relevent statements. 1. 20x200 has in the past paid $1200 to sponsor the kottke.org RSS feed. 2. I have linked to 20x200 and Jen Bekman's gallery several times on kottke.org, for which Jen Bekman has thanked me, which is a good feeling, to be thanked, and perhaps that subconsciously predisposes me towards future linking because who doesn't like to be thanked? 3. Jen Bekman is a friend. 4. I also know Caterina Fake, Zach Klein, and Scott Heiferman socially; they are a few of 20x200's angel investors. 5. I am a resident of New York City, in which 20x200 is headquartered. 6. I have purchased art from 20x200 in the past. 7. I may have received a 20x200 print from Jen Bekman herself, either as a straight-up gift or as a promotional item. Honestly, I can't remember if she gave me anything, what it was, or the circumstances of the giving. 8. I have received 20x200 prints as gifts from others. They are thanked. 9. I know my wife and my wife knows Jen Bekman. 10. I may have unwittingly posed for photos next to 20x200 artwork hanging in my residence or in the residences of others, giving the impression that I am endorsing said artwork. Apologies. 11. I have agreed to, at some point in the future, curating a selection of artworks for 20x200 and then chatting casually with Jen Bekman about my choices, an edited transcript of which will appear on the 20x200 web site. As far as I know, no payment for this service is forthcoming and if it was, I would refuse it politely. 12. Jen Bekman's dog's name is Ollie. So is my son's. ↩

[2] Why just for bloggers? Do New York Times book, music, and movie reviewers disclose that they received review copies for free? ↩

LAPD stolen art poster show

Stolen art in the Los Angeles area results in some unorthodox art posters. Here's a missing Warhol print of Mick Jagger:

Looks like something Warhol himself might have come up with.

The Rape Tunnel: FAKE

That's the name of Ohio-based artist Richard Whitehurst's latest work.

The artist plans to place himself in a room, the only entrance or exit being a 22 ft long plywood tunnel constructed by Whitehurst himself. Then he says that for the duration of the gallery's opening (from 7:00 p.m. to midnight) he will rape anyone who travels through the tunnel into that room.

Whitehurst prototyped the idea with a previous project called The Punch-You-In-The-Face Tunnel.

As it turns out, I ended up breaking the nose of the third person to crawl through the tunnel, an aspiring model. She went to the hospital and eventually sued me. Her modeling career was put on hold. The civil case was long and drawn out and the matter still hasn't been resolved. To this day she still has unpaid medical bills. The point of this long aside is that all this took place two years ago, and I'm still having an impact on this young lady's life, something not many other artists could claim about their work.

Rape seemed like the next logical step.

Me? I would have built The Tickle Tunnel. I guess that's why I'm not an artist. (via mxml)

Update: Oh, hell, it's fake. (thx, dozens of people who aren't saps like I am)

Uberorgan

In 2001, Tim Hawkinson created Uberorgan for the gallery at MassMOCA.

Several bus-size biomorphic balloons, each with its horn tuned to a different note in the octave, make up a walk-in self-playing organ. A 200 foot-long scroll of dots and dashes encodes a musical score of old hymns, pop classics, and improvisational ditties. This score is deciphered by the organ's brain - a bank of light sensitive switches - and then reinterpreted by a series of switches and relays that translate the original patterns into non-repeating variations of the score.

Part sculpture, part giant musical instrument, Hawkinson's installation was a loose interpretation of the human body's organ systems. Uberorgan conducted itself for five minutes every hour, on the hour. The exhibition traveled from MassMOCA to the Getty Center in Los Angeles, where it graced the museum's entrance hall during the exhibit of Hawkinson's work called Zoopsia, a name that means "visual hallucinations of animals."

You can hear a minute long sample of the Uberorgan on the Getty Center website. To me it sounds like a duet between a three-year-old jamming out on a bass saxophone and an elephant in a good mood.

Update: Tim Hawkinson and the Uberorgan are featured the Art:21 episode,"Time." Seeing and hearing the piece, even on the small screen, is impressive, and Hawkinson explains how he came about creating such a voluminous, volume-driven work of art. (thx, cliff)

Junk mail portrait artist

The art of Sandhi Schimmel Gold is junk. The artist uses junk mail to create semi-mosaic'ed handmade portraits. Using advertising ephemera and all kinds of textures and colors, she's constructed representations of Frank Sinatra, Kurt Vonnegut, Jackie O, and Audrey Hepburn, among others. She combines painting with collage to render faces that are unbelievably detailed and realistic. If you want to see what Schimmel would do with your visage you can commission a piece. I'd like to see my neighbor's mug constructed from of all of his Cabela's catalogs that find themselves in my mailbox.

The importance of being unimportant

An interesting article in The Brooklyn Rail debates the value of commercialism versus criticism in the art world. Riffing off of an essay called "Frivolity and Unction" from Dave Hickey's book, Air Guitar, writer Shane McAdams opines that art doesn't have to be "important" to be good:

"Art" can be unimportant and still allow for the experience of a work of art to be life-changing. I value the memories I have of listening to baseball games on my grandparents' porch, but Baseball, as a concept, remains entirely unimportant. Such concepts as baseball, art, and Hickey's example of rock and roll, are wholly unimportant except for the experiences they foster and the history to which they contribute.

Compubeaver

Kasey McMahon decided to combine an interest in taxidermy with her PC. Fearing that the natural world is being replaced by technology, the artist installed a working computer inside of an idle beaver. First, she crafted a computer from the motherboard up, tested it, then hollowed out a stuffed beaver and molded the two together using spandex spray, resin, and fiberglass. After three months of work, the result was Compubeaver, followed up by its accessory, Text-o-Possum, a stuffed possum that's equipped with a laser in its back leg that projects a virtual keyboard. McMahon was generous enough to provide a 29-step guide for the rest of us, in the hope that we'll each case mod a beaver and create our own animal-based data processor. Just imagine using a raccoon laptop at Starbucks. Perhaps that would inspire them to provide free WiFi.

Update: See also installing Linux on a dead badger. (thx, michael)

Cassette tape skeletons

Brian Dettmer began crafting skeletons from cassette tapes after being inspired by the relatively rapid death of analog media. The artist, whose previous work includes meticulous autopsies of books, enjoys deconstructing found objects and transforming them into complex, chimerical sculptures. His plastic bones have resulted in a series of skulls, both human and animal, crafted from tapes consistent with a musical genre, such as rock and metal. Each piece is devoid of any adhesive, and although Dettmer keeps his process a secret, it's rumored that the cassettes are welded together using heat, moulds, and his damp hands. No word yet on how they sound.

The hidden structure to Jackson Pollock's paintings

Did Jackson Pollock hide his name in one of his most well-known paintings?

Pollock's possibly writing his name in Mural testifies to an overlooked feature of his works: they have a structure, contrary to the popular notion that they could be done by any 5-year-old with a knack for splatters. In my view, Pollock organized the painting around his name according to a compositional system-vertical markings that serve as the loci of rhythmic spirals-borrowed directly from his mentor, Benton.

Try and find it for yourself.

Kazuki Takamatsu

Like Pieter says, these paintings by Kazuki Takamatsu are stunning.

Captive electricity

Dazzling work by Hiroshi Sugimoto.

Hiroshi Sugimoto uses a 400,000-volt Van De Graaff generator to apply an electrical charge directly onto his film.

See also Peter Miller's Polariod experiments.

Update: Robert Buelteman uses electricity to take photos of flowers.

A history of modern art in three paragraphs

Impressionism - painting outside of a studio with quick, loose brushstrokes to capture an evocative impression of their subject. Van Gogh was an Impressionist but wanted to express how he felt about what he saw so he distorted the subject. This helped to lead to Expressionism practised by artists from Edvard Munch through to Francis Bacon. The Fauves (wild beasts) expressed themselves by painting with bright colours. Jackson Pollock did it by throwing or dripping paint on a canvas. His paintings were abstract -- Abstract Expressionism.

Cezanne was very important. He began as an Impressionist but then started to look at a subject from two different perspectives to represent how we see. Picasso and his friend Georges Braque were very impressed and started to paint subjects from lots of different views. This is Cubism. Marcel Duchamp was a Cubist but then changed art for ever. He said the idea is more important than the medium and refused to stick with the limited choice of canvas or stone. So he chose everyday objects and called them art because he had altered their context. This led to Conceptual Art where the idea becomes the medium.

The Dadaists were very cross. They blamed the horrors of the First World War on the Establishment's reliance on rational and reasoned thought. They radically opposed rational thought and became nihilistic -- the punk rock of modern art movements. Dada plus Sigmund Freud equals Surrealism. The Surrealists were fascinated by the unconscious mind, as that's where they thought truth resided. Piet Mondrian thought he could paint everything he knew, felt and saw by using two lines placed at rectangles and three primary colours. This was called Neo-Plasticism and was inspired by Cubism. So was Futurism, which is Cubism with motion added. Vorticism is the same as Futurism, but British. The Minimalists might represent the real truth because they weren't trying to represent anything. Performance Art is Dada live.

That's from Will Gompertz in the Times. (via sippey)

Cory Arcangel's atonal YouTube cat video mashup

Drei Klavierstücke op. 11 is a set of pieces written for the piano by Arnold Schoenberg in 1909, some of the first western music to written in an atonal style. Cory Arcangel took a bunch of YouTube videos of cats playing the piano and fused them together into a performance of op. 11.

This project fuses a few different things I have been interested in lately, mainly "cats", copy & paste net junk, and youtube's tendency in the past few years to host videos that are as good and many times similar to my favorite video artworks. I think all this is somehow related.

Cory's no-bullshit statements about his art are just as entertaining as the work itself:

So, I probably made this video the most backwards and bone headed way possible, but I am a hacker in the traditional definition of someone who glues together ugly code and not a programmer. For this project I used some programs to help me save time in finding the right cats. Anyway, first I downloaded every video of a cat playing piano I could find on Youtube. I ended up with about 170 videos...

You can catch Cory's project in-person at Team Gallery in NYC and at Kunsthaus Graz in Austria.

Why are famous paintings worth more than famous houses?

David Galbraith calculates that if buildings by famous architects were priced like paintings, a Le Corbusier building would be worth more than the entire US GDP.

The top floor of Corbusier's Villa Stein (one of perhaps the top 500 most important houses of the late 19th/early 20th centuries - i.e. a Van Gogh of houses) is for sale for the same price per sq.ft. (approx $1400) as buildings in the same area of suburban Paris, designed by nobody in particular. Meanwhile, Van Gogh's Portrait of Dr. Gachet sold for an inflation adjusted price of $136 million yet a poster of similar square footage and style costs around $10.

In terms of signaling, it's difficult to hang a house on one's parlor wall...buying a Corbusier means living in it wherever it happens to be located, at least part of the year.

More on van Meegeran by Errol Morris

Errol Morris follows up on his recent series about Dutch forger Han van Meegeren by addressing some of the comments he received. Here's Morris on the interaction of historical research and modern content management techniques.

The first version of the Time article that I saw was the "electronic" version from the Web. It is particularly strange, if only because the text (from 1947) is surrounded by modern information, including contemporary advertisements for Liberty Mutual, teeth whitening preparations, wrinkle-cream, and most e-mailed articles. Emmy Göring and Henriette von Schirach complaints are directly adjacent to "Will Twitter Change the Way We Live."

I also enjoyed the discussion of "Hitler-soup" at the end.

Global Street Food

Global Street Food is an exhibition the various contraptions people use to make and sell food on the street.

"Global Street Food" is dedicated to the fascination with improvised kitchens in public places. Urban fast food stations navigating the contrast between pragmatic dilettantism and complexity in the smallest of spaces. Mike Meiré will be presenting several objects and street kitchens from different parts of the world in the Buckmneister Fuller Dome. An exhibition depicting the sculptural quality of authentic objects and their cultural identity

(via today and tomorrow)

The Museum of Bad Art

The recent acquisitions should give you some idea of the curatorial vision of the Museum of Bad Art. (thx, joe)

Errol Morris series finished up

Over on his NY Times blog, Errol Morris finishes up his excellent seven-part series on Vermeer forger Han van Meegeren. Here are the links to all seven parts: one, two, three, four, five, six, and seven.

Chris Burden's Big Wheel

In a piece from 1979 called Big Wheel, artist Chris Burden took a massive 19th century iron flywheel and set it spinning with the rear wheel of a small motorcycle. The flywheel spins for *three hours* on a single charge.

A description of the work from the NY Times:

Several of his larger works present a characteristic blend of purity, violence and monumentality now aimed at demonstrating simple principles of motion or mass in breathtakingly sculptural ways. In "The Big Wheel," Burden uses a motorcycle's rear wheel to set a three-ton iron flywheel, the survivor of a 19th-century factory, into a fast and furious spin that lasts about three hours. The contrast is wonderful: this old, simple Goliath of a wheel, man's first "machine," powered by a modern David -- small, complex and delicate.

Seedbomb

A project from Jin-wook Hwang:

Seedbomb is a non-military bomb that protects earth from worsening desertification and lessens sandstorms. [...] When a Seedbomb is released from an airplane, Seedbomb is disassembled in the air and seed capsules inside of the bomb spread out widely and fall on the ground.

As individual seeds grow into plants, the case surrounding each seed breaks down due to the moisture generated by the plant through transpiration.

Khaaan!

Artist Daniel Martinico took William Shatner's finest moment as an actor and stretched it out into a 15-minute video.

You'll notice the crowd gets quiet after the first few seconds. It draws you in, forces you to pay attention, even if it's just staring at the back and forth eye tics on Shatner's face for a minute at a time. "In that moment everyone responds to it," Martinico says. There's laughing at first, but then people get into the rhythm of it and study the various little muscles as they pull and twitch on Kirk's face. "It's a phenomenal range in just a few seconds."

Here's the first two minutes of the video.

It's pretty mesmerizing, even small and at poor quality. (via greg)

Growing into womanhood

For his The Girl Studies project, Charlie White paired photographs of two groups of people becoming women in very different ways: teen girls and adult male-to-female transsexuals.

In the images in White's series, both figures are blossoming into womanhood, though each along a different path. As observers, however, we have been taught to view the subjects in much the same way: with sheer terror.

These are fascinating. (via bygone bureau)

Finding the present in the past

From part three of Errol Morris' investigation into Dutch forger Han Van Meegeren, here's art historian Jonathan Lopez:

Forgery is about the way the present looks at the past. The best forgeries may imitate the style of a long dead artist, but to appeal to people at the moment that they're being tricked, forgeries must also incorporate some of the aesthetic prejudices of the moment. When fakes work well, they give us a vision of the past that seems hauntingly up to date. And that's one of the things that makes forgery so seductive.

Errol Morris on art forgeries

Errol Morris posted the first part of a seven-part series of posts about Han van Meegeren, art forger extraordinaire.

To be sure, the Van Meegeren story raises many, many questions. Among them: what makes a work of art great? Is it the signature of (or attribution to) an acknowledged master? Is it just a name? Or is it a name implying a provenance? With a photograph we may be interested in the photographer but also in what the photograph is of. With a painting this is often turned around, we may be interested in what the painting is of, but we are primarily interested in the question: who made it? Who held a brush to canvas and painted it? Whether it is the work of an acclaimed master like Vermeer or a duplicitous forger like Van Meegeren -- we want to know more.

Morris ends the post with a cliffhanger that, if I didn't know any better, was written specifically for me: "The Uncanny Valley."

Update: Part two has been posted.

The Slow Inevitable Death of American Muscle

A metaphor for the current state of the American auto industry: two cars in an art gallery crashing into each other over a period of six days.

(via today and tomorrow)

Update: This exhibit is currently on display at The Boiler in Brooklyn. (thx, jeff)

Update: See also Chris Burden's Samson.

A museum installation consisting of a 100-ton jack connected to a gear box and a turnstile. The 100-ton jack pushes two large timbers against the bearing walls of the museum. Each visitor to the museum must pass through the turnstile in order to see the exhibition. Each input on the turnstile ever so slightly expands the jack, and ultimately if enough people visit the exhibition, Samson could theoretically destroy the building.

Here's a video. (via things)

You don't have to be a Rockefeller to collect art

The trailer for Herb and Dorothy, about a pair of unlikely art collectors. From a 1997 article in the Austin Chronicle:

She was a librarian. Her husband was a postal worker. They lived on his salary and bought art with hers. Both are now retired. They have no children. "We bought art we could afford and that would fit into the apartment," they say. Water from the fish tank once splashed a Warhol they owned. It later had to be restored.

Much of their collection has passed to the National Gallery of Art.

Folding pictures

Simon Schubert creates 2-D scenes by folding paper slightly. Only slightly...this isn't origami.

See also one of my favorite things at the Met, the studiolo from the Ducal Palace in Gubbio. (via today and tomorrow)

Update: See also these intricate etchings in aluminum foil by Marco Maggi. (thx, mike)

Gaussian goat!

Some days I feel just like a gaussian goat.

This is perhaps what the world would look like if human vision could perceive all of an object's possible quantum mechanical states at the same time. (via today and tomorrow)

The Factory in a box

So, this happened: video of Andy Warhol painting Debbie Harry on an Amiga computer.

Update: AmigaWorld did an interview with Warhol about his Amigas (he owned two at the time).

The thing I like most about doing this kind of art on the Amiga is that it looks like my work.

(thx, paul)

Chino Otsuka

Imagine Finding Me is a project by Chino Otsuka where she inserts her adult self into photos taken of her as a child. More examples at Wallpaper. See also Ze Frank's Youngme / Nowme and those neat half-kid, half-adult photos that I can't find a link to right now...little help? (via waxy)

Update: Age-maps! (thx, cindy)

The theft of the Mona Lisa

This is an odd little excerpt from Vanity Fair of a book about the 1911 theft of the Mona Lisa and other art in Paris.

The shocking theft of the Mona Lisa, in August 1911, appeared to have been solved 28 months later, when the painting was recovered. In an excerpt from their new book, the authors suggest that the audacious heist concealed a perfect -- and far more lucrative -- crime.

Expecting new revelations, I read on but it was the same story told in previous books. Regardless, it's a great story and worth the read but nothing new if you've heard it before.

Update: Someone's doing a documentary. (thx, rakesh)

Lucas Monaco

A sampling of art by Lucas Monaco, whose work deals with maps, flows, and overlaps.

I really love that last one. (via moon river)

Josh Poehlein

Josh Poehlein's Modern History project takes screen grabs from YouTube videos and assembles them into collages.

These are wonderful. And he's giving them away.

I am offering large printable files to anyone interested at no cost. Computer files are the most easily reproducible information on the planet. In this particular case I see no reason to imbue a false sense of preciousness on the work. The information I gathered to create the collages is publicly availaibe, and the collages themselves are no different.

(via conscientious)

Kamrooz Aram

Whoa. I'm a sucker for art that punches you in the face like this.

This particular image is trapped in the permalink-unfriendly JavaScript interface of Aram's gallery...it's the 4th image if you want to click through to see it larger.

Aram's piece reminded me of John Maeda's Amber Waves, available as wallpaper here. (via moon river)

Thomas Broome

[Ok, I'm gonna try not to mention The Matrix here.]

Thomas Broome makes paintings where words that describe the objects comprise the objects themselves. The effect looks sorta like The Matrix. [Dammit!]

Update: See also the visual effects by H5 in this Alex Gopher video. (thx, tom & philip)

Guest of Cindy Sherman

Trailer for a new film called Guest of Cindy Sherman. It's a documentary about a man who becomes romantically involved with the famous artist, only to find that his ego can't handle her fame. I wonder if we actually get to see the real Sherman in the film...the trailer is very teasing about it.

Update: Unsurprisingly, Sherman's not happy about the film. (thx, paul)

If you sprinkle

A collection of quirky toilet signage. And for what to read after you've latched that door, there are several sites dedicated to writing found on the walls of bathroom stalls. (Warning: most of it does contain language that falls soundly in the "potty mouth" category.)

Please Do Not Throw Toothpicks in The Urinals The Crabs can Pole Vault.

I wonder if they frisk for pens and markers before allowing admittance to the Art Museum Toilet Museum of Art.

Mimic gimmick

Designer Naoto Fukasawa has designed juice boxes that both look and feel like their juices' fruits of origin. That newly-reinstated orange on Tropicana cartons is turning green with envy.

Tilt-shift my heart

Peculiar little video by Keith Loutit for a song called "Clementine." Utilizes tilt-shift photography to achieve its miniature look.

via Nothing for X

Typo/graphic posters

A directory of typographic and graphic posters.

via Arkitip

Stargazing

An excerpt from one of Galileo Galilei's letters to Don Virginio Cesarini:

Long experience has taught me this about the status of mankind with regard to matters requiring thought: the less people know and understand about them, the more positively they attempt to argue concerning them, while on the other hand to know and understand a multitude of things renders men cautious in passing judgment upon anything new.

Want more Galileo? The Istituto e Museo di Storia della Scienza in Florence is loaning out their exhibit, Galileo, the Medici and the Age of Astronomy to The Franklin in Philadelphia. It features one of the last two telescopes belonging to the astronomer, as well as his notes, paintings, and other instruments, including the cylindrical sundial and Michelangelo's compass.

Art made from old cassette tape

Ian Curtis is as haunting made of tape as he is on tape.

The artist, known as iRI5, is in her mid-twenties and lives in Georgia. Her work features found objects like old magazines, books, playing cards, and trash that she turns into treasure.

via Noise Addicts

Staring contest

Love at first sight apparently applies to men only:

Researchers believe that this difference between men and women can best be explained by the fact that the former use eye contact to seek fertile and fit mates. Meanwhile, the latter shy from making eye contact or drawing unwanted attention onto themselves for fear of unwanted pregnancies and single parenthood, it has been said.

The same study found that it takes approximately 8.2 seconds of eye contact for a man to decide if a woman is attractive. It's hard not to stare at the eyes of photographer Rankin's hypnotizing Eyescapes for a whole lot longer, but that's a different type of beauty.

Crayon compendium

From a post that includes all 120 crayon names, codes, and trivia:

The name Crayola was coined by Alice Binney, wife of company founder Edwin, and a former school teacher. She combined the words craie, which is French for chalk, and ola, for oleaginous, because crayons are made from petroleum based paraffin.

I don't remember ever having scribbled with sticks of Manatee or Jazzberry Jam, but I do distinctly recall meticulously practicing my hearts and starts with the dulled point of Carnation Pink.

via Colour Lovers

Playing with food

Biogen is an art installation by Hanna von Goeler that's inspired by the genetic engineering of tomatoes. Consisting of oil paintings, sculptures, a mobile made of tomato skin, and a model of a "tomato six pack," von Goeler's work is striking, and notably unappetizing.

Food Fray offers an equally fascinating, though less creative case against GM fruits and veggies. Both the art and the argument raise questions about the dangers of chewing with an open mind.

Coloring without the lines

Brooke Inman's Everything Color Circle is mesmerizing. As somebody with limited organizational skills, I find it mind-boggling that she was able to put this together. And to think that it could be destroyed in a nanosecond if a sugar-addled kindergartner armed with construction paper wandered into the room.

[via Design Milk]

Noriko Ambe

Noriko Ambe cuts marvelous shapes into books and stacks of paper. This particular image is gonna stick with me.

The eyes! (via today and tomorrow)

Michael Kontopoulos

From artist Michael Kontopoulos, a video of machines that almost fall over.

A system of sculptures that is constantly on the brink of collapse. My intention was to capture and sustain the exact moment of impending catastrophe and endlessly repeat it.

I do this too, only I use chairs and my own body and frequently tip over and hurt myself. Anything for my art.

Kontopoulos also did something called Conversation Piece, inspired by legendary film editor Walter Murch.

Film editor Walter Murch, who edited many of Francis Ford Copolla's films, developed a theory about edits while working on The Conversation (1974). He noticed that in many cases, the best place to make a cut was when he blinked. Subsequently, Murch wrote about the human blink as a sort of mental punctuation mark: a signifier of a viewer's comfort with visual material and therefore, a good place to separate two ideas with a cut.

Fascinating. (via this is that)

Subway art gallery opening

Improv Everywhere turned the 23rd Street C/E subway platform into an art gallery opening, complete with a cellist, sparkling drinks, signs explaining the "art", and a coat check. An explanatory sign placed near a drain read:

Drain (1975)
MTA and unknown artists
Mixed Media on Metal and Concrete

Describing the irresistibility of natural urges, and situated thematically near the restroom, this drainage grate offers deliverance. Consequently, here lies an indeliable yellow nitrogen stain, as evidence of the passings of hundreds, if not thousands of strained commuters. Each straphanger, surreptitiously seeking relief, has helped create this totally organic, revolutionary art piece.

Only portrait of Shakespeare found

A painting that has been hanging in the home of the Cobbe family for 300 years is now believed to be the only portrait of William Shakespeare painted in his lifetime.

For many people he is the round-headed bald man seen on the First Folio of his collected works but evidence was presented yesterday arguing that we should rethink this. Instead we should visualise Shakespeare as a rosy-cheeked, long-nosed man who was something of a looker.

The portrait appear to be in good condition and Shakespeare looks a lot like Joseph Fiennes, who played the Bard in Shakespeare in Love.

Lizzie Buckmaster Dove

I love these two pieces by Lizzie Buckmaster Dove: Cacophony: Rip Rack Roar Rumble and Cacophony: Toot Tweet Twitter Trill. (via this is that)

Art and Fear by David Bayles and Ted Orland

On the long list of books I would read if I had the time for such a thing, reading, is Art & Fear. Ted Orland, one of the authors and a working artist himself, describes the book thusly:

This is a book about the way art gets made, the reasons it often doesn't get made, and about the difficulties that cause so many artists to give up along the way.

Kevin Kelly called the book "astoundingly brilliant" and pulled this excellent excerpt from it.

The ceramics teacher announced on opening day that he was dividing the class into two groups. All those on the left side of the studio, he said, would be graded solely on the quantity of work they produced, all those on the right solely on its quality. His procedure was simple: on the final day of class he would bring in his bathroom scales and weigh the work of the "quantity" group: fifty pound of pots rated an "A", forty pounds a "B", and so on. Those being graded on "quality", however, needed to produce only one pot -- albeit a perfect one -- to get an "A". Well, came grading time and a curious fact emerged: the works of highest quality were all produced by the group being graded for quantity. It seems that while the "quantity" group was busily churning out piles of work - and learning from their mistakes -- the "quality" group had sat theorizing about perfection, and in the end had little more to show for their efforts than grandiose theories and a pile of dead clay.

Special heads-up to Merlin Mann: the first book in the Customers Who Bought This Item Also Bought list for Twyla Tharp's The Creative Habit that you've been going on and on about is, bum bum bum, Art & Fear. You should maybe 1-click that sucker right into your book-hole. (via modcult)

Is this painting art?

The interior walls of the Whitney Museum were painted by the Frank Painting Company in 1966. The company painted the wall again 40 years later, this time as part of artist Jordan Wolfson's unusual contribution to the Whitney Biennial. (via reference library)

Art history online

smarthistory is a fantastic substitute for that art history class you never took in college.

smARThistory.org is a free multi-media web-book designed as a dynamic enhancement (or even substitute) for the traditional and static art history textbook.

This looks like a great resource.

The mystery of the Obama Hope photo

For all of the talk that Shepard Fairey is just a plagiarist, I think that the clearest indication that his art is above board and adding something new to the world is that until a few days ago, no one knew who had taken the photo of Obama that became the basis of the iconic Hope poster, not even Fairey or the photographer who took it.

Reuters are understandably somewhat put out on their own and Young's behalf, but like it or not, Fairey's use of the picture are well within the parameters of "fair use". His transformative use of the image - both in flipping and re-orienting it, adding jacket and tie and the "O" Obama logo, and converting it to his block print style make it consistent with all legal precedents for use.

Update: But, but ,but, not so fast. It looks like Tom Gralish has found the actual photo that Fairey used; it was taken by AP's Mannie Garcia at a National Press Club event in April 2006. (thx, ryan)

60 Noses

A neat poster of 60 Noses by Shawn Feeney.

A collection of sixty female and male noses, arranged chronologically from people ages 16 - 90. The original pencil drawings (based on arrest photos) are faithfully reproduced on beautifully textured, 100% cotton Hahnemühle paper.

Feeney drew the noses while working as a forensic artist.

Willard Wigan, micro sculptor

Video of Willard Wigan's work. Wigan makes exceptionally tiny sculptures that fit on pin-heads or within eyes of needles. He once lost a sculpture of Alice in Wonderland:

I think I inhaled her.

Some of the parts of his sculptures are no bigger than human blood cells and to steady his hands, he works in between the beats of his heart.

The stillness of it is very important -- you have to control the whole nervous system, you have to work between the heartbeat -- the pulse of your finger can destroy the work.

(thx, alex)

Obama campaign art exhibition

The Danziger Projects gallery in New York is running an exhibition called Can & Did, a collection of art, graphics, and photography from the Obama campaign. The opening party is on Inauguration night (Jan 20) and it runs through the end of February. All details in the press release.

Dog pee mystery

Ortho at Baudrillard's Bastard found a bunch of Revolutionary War era prints featuring dogs peeing on various things (ministers, maps, tea accessories, etc.) and asks why are these dogs peeing on things?

Update: Seventeenth-century Dutch artist Emanuel de Witte painted peeing dogs in his paintings as well. (thx, pb)

I Am Sitting in a Room

I Am Sitting in a Room is a piece by composer Alvin Lucier. It consists of an audio recording of Lucier sitting in a room reciting a few lines. That recording is played in the same room and recorded. Then that recording is recorded. And so on.

I am sitting in a room different from the one you are in now. I am recording the sound of my speaking voice and I am going to play it back into the room again and again until the resonant frequencies of the room reinforce themselves so that any semblance of my speech, with perhaps the exception of rhythm, is destroyed. What you will hear, then, are the natural resonant frequencies of the room articulated by speech. I regard this activity not so much as a demonstration of a physical fact, but more as a way to smooth out any irregularities my speech might have.

Here's an mp3 of the original performance. Listening to it, I wonder how much of the distortion at the end is due to the "resonant frequencies of the room" and how much is just artifacts of the rerecording process. (via djacobs)

Upgrade: It's the Larsen effect in action.

The frequency of the resulting sound is determined by resonant frequencies in the microphone, amplifier, and loudspeaker, the acoustics of the room, the directional pick-up and emission patterns of the microphone and loudspeaker, and the distance between them.

(thx, eric)

Scooters

Top: The Jackson 5, Encino, CA, 1970. Photographed by John Olson for Life Magazine.

Bottom: "Bad Route" by Miguel Calderon, 1998. Featured in Wes Anderson's The Royal Tenenbaums.

Mona Lisa, evolved

Leonardo da Vinci was a polymath and all that but this would have blown his tiny mind: the Mona Lisa "painted" using just 50 semi-transparent polygons. (via waxy)

Star Wars: A New Heap

On Stanley Kubrick, George Lucas, Robert Morris, Robert Smithson, Jane Jacobs, 2001, Star Wars, and minimalism: Star Wars: A New Heap.

Kubrick's film presented a future of company men moving with assurance and clear intention toward a godlike minimalist object. Lucas, on the other hand, gave us a slapdash world of knuckleheads pursued by industrial-scale minimalists. Visually, Kubrick's film is as seamless and smooth as the modernist authority it mirrored. Like the mid-century modernists, 2001 associated abstraction with the progressive ideals of the United Nations as embodied by its New York headquarters. Lucas, on the other hand, was a nonbeliever. Even the initially smooth and unitary form of the Death Star was shown, as the rebel fighters skimmed its surface, to be deeply fissured with an ever-diminishing body of structural fragments. These crenulated details suggested a depth and complexity to modern life that modernism's pure geometries often obscured.

And this:

A flying saucer had never been a slum before. The immaculate silver sheen of the saucer was reinvented as a dingy Dumpster full of boiler parts, dirty dishes, and decomposing upholstery. Lucas's visual program not only captured the stark utopian logic that girded modern urban planning, it surpassed it. The Millennium Falcon resisted the modernist demand for purity and separation, pushing into the eclecticism of the minimalist expanded field. Its tangled bastard asymmetry made it a truer dream ship than any of its purebred predecessors. It is the first flying saucer imagined as architecture without architects.

(thx, matt)

Painted hands

Photographs of a series of elaborate hand paintings. (via yokiddo)

The UN's new stalactite painting

Spanish artist Miquel Barcelo spent more than a year painting the recently unveiled ceiling in the UN's Geneva offices. Check out the larger photos at Artdaily and USA Today. The painting isn't exactly aesthetically beautiful, but I love its scale and power. Wonderful.

Cory Arcangel, Adult Contemporary

Cory Arcangel has a new show opening tonight at Team Gallery in Soho called Adult Contemporary. I got a peek at it last night and my favorite piece is called Photoshop CS: 110 by 72 inches, 300 DPI, RGB, square pixels, default gradient "Spectrum", mousedown y=1098 x=1749.9, mouse up y=0 4160 x=0. It's easy enough to whip up your own by following those instructions in Photoshop but the print itself is gorgeous. When you get up close to it, there is no discernible gradation between the colors and, because it's so uniform and smooth and glossy and big, you lose your sense of depth perception and you don't really know how close you are to it. I almost fell over looking at it because I was so disoriented.

Meta YouTube art

A collection of meta YouTube video art.

132 drawings of birds

20x200 has a really nice special edition print by Jason Pollan of 132 drawings of birds from the Museum of Natural History. There's something very old school about this print, like it's the work of an obsessed 1870s ornithologist.

Spend the night at the Guggenheim in NYC

Thanks to artist Carsten Holler, you can spend a night in the Guggenheim Museum in Manhattan.

Revolving Hotel Room is an art installation comprising three outfitted, superimposed turning glass discs mounted onto a fourth disc that all turn harmoniously at a very slow speed. During the day the hotel room will be on view as part of the Guggenheim's theanyspacewhatever exhibition, which runs from October 24, 2008-January 7, 2009. At night, the art installation becomes an operative hotel room outfitted with luxury amenities.

The view from the rotating bed.

Holler was previously responsible for the seriously fun-looking slides in the Tate Modern's Turbine Hall a couple of years back.

Mirrors turning to look at you

The mirrors in rAndom International and Chris O'Shea's Audience project chat amonst themselves until something catches their collective eye.

When members of the audience occupy the space, the mirrors inquisitively follow someone that they find interesting. Having chosen their subject, they all synchronise and turn their heads towards them. Suddenly that person can see their reflection in all of the mirrors. They will watch this person until they become disinterested, then either seek out another subject or return to their private chatter. The collective behaviour of the objects is beyond the control of the viewer, as it is left entirely to their discretion to let go of their subject.

This Vimeo video is a good look at how the project works. (via sippey)

Update: New from O'Shea is Hand From Above.

Unsuspecting pedestrians will be tickled, stretched, flicked or removed entirely in real-time by a giant deity [on a large screen].

Gladwell on early- and late-blooming geniuses

Now that he has a book coming out on the subject of genius and high achievement, the New Yorker finally lets Malcolm Gladwell write about David Galenson's work on age and innovation. (A previous effort was Gladwell's first article to be rejected by The New Yorker.) For an overview of Galenson's work, check out my post from August.

The most interesting bit of Gladwell's piece is his discussion of the economics of the two different types of artist. The conceptual artist's talent is noticed and rewarded immediately. But conceptual innovators need more help to reach their full potential.

Sharie was Ben's wife. But she was also-to borrow a term from long ago-his patron. That word has a condescending edge to it today, because we think it far more appropriate for artists (and everyone else for that matter) to be supported by the marketplace. But the marketplace works only for people like Jonathan Safran Foer, whose art emerges, fully realized, at the beginning of their career, or Picasso, whose talent was so blindingly obvious that an art dealer offered him a hundred-and-fifty-franc-a-month stipend the minute he got to Paris, at age twenty. If you are the type of creative mind that starts without a plan, and has to experiment and learn by doing, you need someone to see you through the long and difficult time it takes for your art to reach its true level.

Gladwell discusses the article in a podcast and will be answering reader questions about it later in the week.

Kate Moss art

A collection of artworks featuring Kate Moss, including a self-portrait drawn with lipstick.

TSA Communication Plates

Evan Roth has been putting metal plates with messages and symbols cut into them into his carry-on luggage when he goes through security at the airport.

Here's Roth's idea, which he calls "TSA Communication" and tells me has already made it through three trial airport runs: Take a metal plate, stencil and cut out a message -- words or an image -- place the plate at the bottom of your carry-on bag, and watch what happens as the TSA employee operating the airport X-ray machine notices ... or doesn't notice.

So far, he's used plates with outlines of the American flag, a "NOTHING TO SEE HERE" message, and something he calls The Exact Opposite Of A Box Cutter, a plate with a box cutter shape cut out of it.

Balanced shelves

Daniel Eatock's counterbalancing shelves.

5 pine planks (each 6 feet), 5 metal brackets, tools and materials from the gallery utility closet or found on the gallery grounds. Each of the five shelves that comprise this work is balanced on a single bracket. All maintain their level balance by the precise placement of the objects they bear.

With a little more conceptual work and product placement, he could have turned this into a piece about consumerism and the collapse of the networked global economy blah blah blah.

Artist Tara Donovan

Why have I not heard of artist Tara Donovan before...her stuff is great.

Though Ms. Donovan's new prints won't be on view, her glass-shattering talents will be: she intends to recreate "Untitled (Glass)," a process-oriented sculpture that she first made in 2004. It involves stacking sheets of tempered glass into a perfect cube, then working carefully one by one from bottom to top, striking a single corner of each pane with a hammer. As with the print, Ms. Donovan will contain the glass with a wooden frame while she works. Once the mold is removed, the cube "stays in place," she said. "You can still see the layers, but everything's really broken into itty-bitty teeny-weeny shards."

Donovan is one of the 2008 MacArthur genius fellows. (via delicious ghost)

Night colors of Van Gogh

Color palettes taken from a MoMA exhibition of nighttime paintings by Vincent van Gogh. Review of the show by the NY Times.

Grand Theft Festal

This year's harvest of crop art from the Minnesota State Fair included Grand Theft Festal, a mashup of Grand Theft Auto and Festal-brand canned corn done in millet, alfalfa, canola, and white clover seeds. The artist recorded a timelapse video of its construction. (via mark simonson)

Rothko remembrance

Mark Rothko's daughter Kate remembers her father nearly 40 years after his death.

Rothko may have been depressed at the end of his life, he may not have been as clear as he should have been when it came to writing a will; but with regard to his work, and where it might end up, he had long held strong views. While selling to private individuals from his studio, he would scrutinise their reactions to paintings; they had to pass a test they did not know they were taking. If they failed, they went home empty-handed, irrespective of the size of their wallets. Lighting, on which wall of a gallery a painting might hang; these things obsessed him.

I saw Rothko's Seagram Murals at the Tate Modern in May.

What is new media art?

How to identify interactive or new media art.

7. Someone in your audience wearing a Crumpler bag, slinging a fancy digital SLR and/or standing with their arms folded smugly says, "Yeah..yeah, I could've done that too..c'mon dude..some Perlin Noise? And Processing/Ruby-on-Rails/AJAX/Blue LEDs/MaxMSP/An Infrared Camera/Lots of Free Time/etc.? Pfft..It's so easy..."

(via russell davies)

Andy Warhol's Blow Job

Short film: Blow Job by Andy Warhol. Mostly SFW...it's just the face of the recipient. Here's some info on the film.

When Andy Warhol decided to shoot Blow Job, he rang Charles Rydell and asked him to star in it, telling him that "all he'd have to do was lie back and then about five different boys would come in and keep on blowing him until he came," but that the film would only show his face.

Charles agreed, but when he didn't show up for the following Sunday afternoon shoot, Andy reached him at Jerome Hill's suite at the Algonquin and screamed into the phone "Charles! Where are you?" Charles responded: "What do you mean, where am I? You know where I am - you called me," and Andy the said "We've got the camera ready and the five boys are all here, everything's set up!" Charles's shocked reply was: "Are you crazy? I thought you were kidding. I'd never do that!"

Computer paint gun draws Mona Lisa

In order to explain serial computation vs. parallel computation, the Mythbusters guys pit two paintball guns against each other in a art contest...one shoots one ball at a time and the other very much doesn't. (thx, steve)

Hipster anatomical drawings

Anatomical drawings that are part medical and part American Apparel advertisement. (via clusterflock)

How to draw

How to draw anything in one step: Draw a dog covering the thing you can't draw. The examples are hilarious. (via waxy)

Arty bathroom tiles

Christoph Niemann has used some unusual image sources to tile his bathrooms. For the shower, an appropriation of Warhol's Brillo box. For the kids bathroom, a NYC subway map.

Movies families, painted

Paintings of notable movie families, including the Clark W. Griswolds and the Jack Torrences from The Shining.

Old Masters and Young Geniuses by David Galenson

This short NY Times profile of economist David Galenson reminded me that I never shared Old Masters and Young Geniuses with you. The book was recommended to me by Malcolm Gladwell -- which means that many of you can now form your opinion of it without even reading it -- through a talk that he gave a couple of years ago. Gladwell also wrote an article for the New Yorker about Galenson's work but it was rejected:

When Mr. Gladwell submitted an article about Mr. Galenson's ideas to The New Yorker, he suffered his first rejection from the magazine. "You buy this Galenson stuff?" Mr. Gladwell recalled his editor saying to him. "What are you, crazy?"

But never mind all that, Old Masters and Young Geniuses is one of the most interesting books I've read in the past few years. I haven't studied enough art history to know if Galenson's thesis is correct, but the book presents an interesting framework for thinking about innovation and how to best harness your own creativity.

The main idea is this. Instead of people being super creative when they're young and getting less so with age (i.e. the conventional wisdom), Galenson says that artists fall into two general categories:

1) The conceptual innovators who peak creatively early in life. They have firm ideas about what they want to accomplish and then do so, with certainty. Pablo Picasso is the archetype here; others include T.S. Eliot, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Orson Wells. Picasso said, "I don't seek, I find."

2) The experimental innovators who peak later in life. They create through the painstaking process of doing, making incremental improvements to their art until they're capable of real masterpiece. Cezanne is Galenson's main example of an experimental innovator; others include Frank Lloyd Wright, Mark Twain, and Jackson Pollock. Cezanne remarked, "I seek in painting."

Galenson demonstrates these differences through analysis of how often artists' works are reproduced in textbooks, auction prices, and museum shows. The pattern is clear, although the method is less than precise in some cases and Galenson has since backed off his thesis somewhat. But the compelling part of the book is what the artists themselves say about how they work. The text is littered with quotes from painters, poets, writers, sculptors, and movie directors about how they perceived their own work and the work of their peers and predecessors. Their thoughts provide ways for contemporary creators to think about how their creativity manifests itself.

The transcript of Gladwell's talk is a good introduction to there ideas. Galenson's next book, And Now for Something Completely Different, appears to be available online in its entirety in a preliminary form. Much more information is available on his web site.

Gdansk UFO

Video of a UFO flying over Gdansk, Poland. I'm probably not spoiling anything by telling you that the saucer is actually an art project by Peter Coffin with an SMS-controlled light show. (via greg)

Hidden van Gogh

X-ray analysis has revealed a van Gogh painting underneath another van Gogh painting. (via clusterflock)

Raw materials for 3-D modelers

A collection of the often banal and artless images used in the development and testing of 3-D modeling technologies and digital imaging.

While the "end user" rarely sees any of these images or objects, a handful of them (Lena, the mandrill, the Utah Teapot, the Stanford Bunny and the Cornell Box) are well known to the point of being iconic within the digital imaging research community. They have even become the subjects of inside jokes between programmers and animators: 3D models of the Utah Teapot are hidden in Pixar's Toy Story, a screensaver that comes as part of Microsoft Windows, and the Simpsons episode where Homer stumbles into a computer-generated "Third Dimension".

Art to last 10,000 years

In order to create art for the 10,000-year Clock chamber, Edward Burtynsky has been investigating how to make photographic prints that last a long time.

Burtynsky went on a quest for a technical solution. He thought that automobile paint, which holds up to harsh sunlight, might work if it could be run through an inkjet printer, but that didn't work out. Then he came across a process first discovered in 1855, called "carbon transfer print." It uses magenta, cyan, and yellow inks made of ground stone-the magenta stone can only be found in one mine in Germany-and the black ink is carbon.

On the stage Burtynsky showed a large carbon transfer print of one of his ultra-high resolution photographs. The color and detail were perfect. Accelerated studies show that the print could hang in someone's living room for 500 years and show no loss of quality. Kept in the Clock's mountain in archival conditions it would remain unchanged for 10,000 years.

Interview with Hilla Becher

A year after her husband died, photographer Hilla Becher was interviewed by a German magazine about her work and her husband.

SZ: Why was your husband not interested in such photos?
HB: He rejected them because he was not interested in taking them. Actually, he was never interested in photography.

SZ: That is an unusual statement about a man who spent his whole life on it.
HB: Originally, Bernd did sketches. In the beginning, he sketched industrial landscapes. But he never managed to finish his work, because he was so precise. Often the object was demolished right in front of his eyes, back then heavy industry in the Siegerland was being abandoned for good. The demolishing, the decay happened faster than he could sketch it.

SZ: So then he took photos?
HB: Right. He borrowed a 35mm camera and took photos, to use them for his sketches. That's how it started, photography as the means to an end.

The Bechers worked tirelessly to photograph all kinds of industrial machinery.

Barnaby Furnas, Antietam

I love this painting by Barnaby Furnas but I doubt Meg would let me hang it anywhere in the house. Perhaps if we had a dungeon.

Furnas has done several paintings in this style, including one I saw at the Whitney in aught-four.

Hey jealousy

In an attempt to make Billy Bob Thornton jealous, artist Jillian McDonald pasted herself into movie scenes kissing several well-known actors, including Thornton's former wife, Angelina Jolie.

Abstract satellite photos

An amazing collection of abstract satellite photos, demonstrating the "impressionist, cubist and pointillist" side of the earth's landscape.

The images you see below were taken at the turn of the Millennium, when NASA's scientists had a brilliant idea: to scan through 400,000 images taken by the Landsat 7 satellite and display only the most the most beautiful. A handful of the best were painstakingly chosen and then displayed at the Library of Congress in 2000.

You must see these. Bonus: all the images are available in wallpaper size for your computer desktop.

Moving art

Video of a kinetic sculpture from the BMW museum in Munich. It starts doing cool stuff about 45 seconds into the video. (via cyn-c)

Martin Creed's Tate runner

Martin Creed's Work No. 850 features a runner sprinting through an empty gallery at the Tate Britain every 30 seconds. (via buzzfeed)

Thumber

Thumber is a OS X app that screencaps one-second intervals of movies and stitches the results together into one big image. Inspired by one of my favorite art projects, Cinema Redux by Brendan Dawes.

William Lamson videos

Video art by William Lamson. The banana firecracker, the balloon duel, and the balloon box pop are my favorites.

Liquid Time Series

Camille Utterback's Liquid Time Series project modifies the playback of a video according to a person's motion in front of the screen. The closer a person is to the screen, the faster the video plays in that area. Kinda hard to explain...just check out the video. See also yesterday's time slicing Processing video.

Conceptual art race

This is still one of my all-time favorite paragraphs that has ever appeared in the NY Times. It concerns the captain of a tugboat that was towing a piece of art by Robert Smithson.

It's enough to give a tugboat captain angina. So when Bob Henry, captain of the Rachel Marie, who is in charge of towing Smithson's island, looked out across the East River Thursday afternoon and saw another piece of conceptual art gaining on him, he did not view the development kindly.

Remixed album covers

CandyKaraoke, a bunch of album covers reimagined by Irish artists. (via ffffound)

The Waterfalls

Olafur Eliasson's NYC Waterfalls starts today in NYC. The project consists of four huge waterfalls erected in the East River. NYC Waterfalls is the new The Gates.

Three things I saw at the MoMA today

1. Perhaps the most playful art I've ever seen in a major museum is Olafur Eliasson's Ventilator, a fan hung on a long cord in the main atrium in the museum. Watching it blow around the huge room, chased by children, is hard-to-beat fun.

2. The rest of Eliasson's show on the third floor. His art seems so conceptually and constructurally simple yet, I dunno, I just wanted to hang out in the gallery all day, like I was required to remain part of the experience. Left me wishing I'd made it to London to see The Weather Project.

3. The typology photos of Bernd and Hilla Becher. Recommended if you like photography and multiples of things.

Irritated that I missed: van Gogh's Starry Night (out on loan to Yale until Sept...I've seen it 20 times at least but still like checking it out whenever I'm there), the exhibition of George Lois' Esquire covers, and lunch at Cafe 2.

The "american gothic" tag on Flickr is

The "american gothic" tag on Flickr is quite interesting; I like the ketchup and mustard one myself.

Moving Mario

Moving Mario: imagine Super Mario Bros as created by Michel Gondry. Check out the video to get the gist.

Horror vacui

Any Wikipedia entry that references Adolf Wolfli is a friend of mine. Horror vacui:

Horror vacui is the filling of the entire surface of an artwork with ornamental details, figures, shapes, lines and anything else the artist might envision. It may be considered the opposite of minimalism.

(More of my friends here, apparently.)

Chris Gilmour

Chris Gilmour makes intricate life-sized art entirely out of cardboard. Bikes, microscopes, cars, typewriters, wheelchairs, etc. (via fire wire)

At the Tate Modern

I very much liked Gerhard Richter's Cage paintings on display at the Tate Modern.

Part Pollack, part Rothko, part glitch art. From the Financial Times:

The six paintings are composed in his characteristic swiping, blurred style of over-painted and obliterated layers, fine-tuned nuances of grey and white worked through with coruscating colours -- carmine, emerald, turquoise, cadmium yellow, fiery orange -- dragged across the canvas, smeared, wiped, leaving fragments of beauty on cool but sensuous surfaces. They suggest rain and mist, instability and displacement, absence and endings, classical rigour and postmodern ruin. They echo the northern European palette of earnest darkness and piercing brightness that goes back to Grunewald and Caspar David Friedrich, but Richter is also a minimalist, a denier of meaning, ideals, personal signatures. He has named the works in honour of composer John Cage, in reference to his Lecture on Nothing -- "I have nothing to say and I'm saying it."

Three other things I found interesting there:

1) Miroslaw Balka's 480x10x10, a sculpture consisting of used bars of soap held together by a stainless steel rope hanging from the ceiling. It's not often that contemporary art smells Zestfully Clean.

2) Jean Dubuffet's The Exemplary Life of the Soil (Texturology LXIII). The online image doesn't do it justice...the painting looked just like a slab of rock hanging on the wall.

3) The Turbine Room is an amazing, amazing space...I could have spent hours in there. I took this photo of Ollie attempting to take his first steps in the Turbine Room. Oh, and they've patched the cracks from Doris Salcedo's Shibboleth. The patching is shoddy...I wonder if that's on purpose as a permanent aftertaste of the artwork.

Drawing all of NYC

Artist Jason Polan (he of the The Every Piece Of Art in The Museum Of Modern Art Book) is on a mission to draw every single person in New York City. If you'd like to be drawn, drop him a line on where you'll be, and he'll show up and sketch you.

Love = Love, Kent Rogowski

Opening tonight at Jen Bekman: Love = Love by Kent Rogowski. Rogowski takes pieces from different puzzles and assembles them into new images.

Larry Gagosian profile

Longish but interesting profile of Larry Gagosian, the world's foremost art dealer.

Gagosian attracts artists and collectors alike because he understands the intense coupling between art and money. In 2004 the top price for a painting by Takashi Murakami at auction was $624,000. Since then, Gagosian has sold Murakamis to Cohen and others, and in November one was auctioned for $2.4m. He has repeated that trick time after time. Not long after joining his stable in 2003, the painter John Currin made his auction record of $847,500; his highest price before joining Gagosian was a little over half that. Recently Adam Sender, the head of the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, reportedly sold a Currin painting through Gagosian for $1.4m. Before Glenn Brown began showing with Gagosian, in 2004, his top price at auction was $46,000; in June 2007, a painting of his made $969,000. In May, when Anselm Reyle was still represented by Gavin Brown, his work was fetching at most around $200,000 at auction. In October, after he had joined Gagosian's stable, a work of his made nearly four times that amount

Francis Bacon documentary

Great 60-minute documentary on English painter Francis Bacon in six parts: one, two, three, four, five, six. The production is inventive and I've never seen someone answer so many seemingly penetrating questions so quickly and fluidly, save for the one he has to read off of a card produced from his pocket. (thx, dean)

Update: The program is available in one part here. (thx, marissa)

For her Mended Spiderweb project, Nina Katchadourian

For her Mended Spiderweb project, Nina Katchadourian found spiderwebs in need of repair and fixed them with a needle and thread.

All of the patches were made by inserting segments one at a time directly into the web. Sometimes the thread was starched, which made it stiffer and easier to work with. The short threads were held in place by the stickiness of the spider web itself; longer threads were reinforced by dipping the tips into white glue. I fixed the holes in the web until it was fully repaired, or until it could no longer bear the weight of the thread.

The spiders didn't think much of her handiwork:

The morning after the first patch job, I discovered a pile of red threads lying on the ground below the web. At first I assumed the wind had blown them out; on closer inspection it became clear that the spider had repaired the web to perfect condition using its own methods, throwing the threads out in the process. My repairs were always rejected by the spider and discarded, usually during the course of the night, even in webs which looked abandoned.

(via 3qd)

The One Day Poem Pavilion uses the

The One Day Poem Pavilion uses the sun to display a poem one line at a time over the course of an entire day. (via stingy kids)

James Danziger on the photographs of the

James Danziger on the photographs of the Florida teens accused of beating a classmate and filming it for YouTube.

The pictures of the accused are startling in the banality of the faces. (While the spelling of many of the names -- April, Britney, Brittini, Cara, Kayla, Mercades, Stephen, Zachary bring to mind a revived Mouseketeers.) A number of the girls look surprisingly similar, but minus the prison garb, they could just as easily be reacting to a berating for poor schoolwork. The boys, who were posted as lookouts while the girls carried out the beating, look a little more ready for jail.

The pictures are fascinating in the narrow range of emotion they convey, from self-pity to sullenness, but to my mind all stop before genuine contriteness. (I'm reading this in, of course, but I have a hunch I'm right.) Yet there's an all-American look to these kids that can only remind us how narrow the line is between good and evil.

The original photos are here.

As part of the the Takashi Murakami

As part of the the Takashi Murakami show at the Brooklyn Museum of Art, the artist is collaborating with Louis Vuitton to station street vendors -- who typically sell counterfeit merchandise -- outside the museum selling real LV bags designed by Murakami himself.

For scientist Dr. Anne Adams (and composer

For scientist Dr. Anne Adams (and composer Maurice Ravel), a rare disease called frontotemporal dementia caused a burst of creativity.

The disease apparently altered circuits in their brains, changing the connections between the front and back parts and resulting in a torrent of creativity. "We used to think dementias hit the brain diffusely," Dr. Miller said. "Nothing was anatomically specific. That is wrong. We now realize that when specific, dominant circuits are injured or disintegrate, they may release or disinhibit activity in other areas. In other words, if one part of the brain is compromised, another part can remodel and become stronger."

Some of Adams' work can be seen here...her portrait of pi contains a touch of synesthesia. (thx, cory)

Gorgeous maps and infographics by Stefanie Posavec

Gorgeous maps and infographics by Stefanie Posavec that map the literary geography of Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

The maps visually represent the rhythm and structure of Kerouac's literary space, creating works that are not only gorgeous from the point of view of graphic design, but also exhibit scientific rigor and precision in their formulation: meticulous scouring the surface of the text, highlighting and noting sentence length, prosody and themes, Posavec's approach to the text is not unlike that of a surveyor. And similarly, the act is near reverential in its approach and the results are stunning graphical displays of the nature of the subject. The literary organism, rhythm textures and sentence drawings are truly gorgeous pieces.

The sentence drawings are really worth checking out.

Regal

Top: Leslie Hall by Noah Kalina.

Bottom: The Rainbow Portrait of Queen Elizabeth I by Isaac Oliver. (thx, adriana)

Delicately knit human organs (brain, heart, intestines)

Delicately knit human organs (brain, heart, intestines) by Sarah Illenberger. See also the Brain Bag. (via this is that)

Anders Weberg makes true P2P art.

Anders Weberg makes true P2P art. Weberg shares his videos on Bittorrent until a single other user downloads them. Then he stops sharing it and...

After that the artwork will be available for as long as other users share it. The original file and all the material used to create it are deleted by the artist. [...] Feel free to don't or download the film, watch it and share it for as long as you like. Or delete it immediately.

Permanent Vacation, a piece by Cory Arcangel

Permanent Vacation, a piece by Cory Arcangel consisting of "two unattended computers send endlessly bouncing out-of-office auto-responses to each other". (via vitamin briefcase)

The world's 50 best works of art and

The world's 50 best works of art and where to go to see them. Random Knowledge has links to all the art so you can check them out virtually in less time and for less money.

An article in the Times about the

An article in the Times about the transition of sales in high-end galleries to the web.

Mr. Gupta said about half of his sales take place without the presence of the buyer. "Being in Chicago, without the walk-in traffic of a gallery in New York or even L.A., I can't imagine working without digital images," he said. "We have a ton of European collectors, and we reach them through art fairs and digital images, a combined effort."

(via ev +/-)

Did you know that there's a teensy

Did you know that there's a teensy museum on the moon?

Now I find out there was already an entire Moon Museum, with drawings by six leading contemporary artists of the day: Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, David Novros, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, Claes Oldenburg, and John Chamberlain. The Moon Museum was supposedly installed on the moon in 1969 as part of the Apollo 12 mission.

I say supposedly, because NASA has no official record of it; according to Frosty Myers, the artist who initiated the project, the Moon Museum was secretly installed on a hatch on a leg of the Intrepid landing module with the help of an unnamed engineer at the Grumman Corporation after attempts to move the project forward through NASA's official channels were unsuccessful.

Scott King: How I'd Sink American Vogue.

Scott King: How I'd Sink American Vogue. His approach would include stories like "How To Dress Angry", "635 Poor People Upside Down!", and "Karl Lagerfeld Discusses Various Cancers", as well as a 14-page advertisement-free issue.

Why does the woman depicted in the

Why does the woman depicted in the Mona Lisa appear to be both smiling and not smiling at the same time? The smile part of the Mona Lisa's face was painted by Leonardo in low spatial frequencies. This means that when you look right at her mouth, there's no smile. But if you look at her eyes or elsewhere in the portrait, your peripheral vision picks up the smile. (via collision detection)

Proust Was a Neuroscientist by Jonah Lehrer

Proust Was a Neuroscientist is the story of how eight writers and artists anticipated our contemporary understanding of the human brain. From the preface:

This book is about artists who anticipated the discoveries of neuroscience. It is about writers and painters and composers who discovered truths about the human mind -- real, tangible truths -- that science is only now rediscovering. Their imaginations foretold the facts of the future.

I enjoyed the book quite a bit so I sent the author, Jonah Lehrer, a few questions via email. Here's our brief conversation.

Jason Kottke: Your exploration of the intersection of neuroscience and culture begins with Proust; you were reading Swann's Way while doing research in a neuroscience lab. Where did the idea come from for a collection of people who anticipated our modern understanding of the human brain? How did you find those other stories?

Jonah Lehrer: The lab I was working in was studying the chemistry of memory. The manual labor of science can get pretty tedious, and so I started reading Proust while waiting for my experiments to finish. After a few hundred pages of melodrama, I began to realize that the novelist had these very modern ideas about how our memory worked. His fiction, in other words, anticipated the very facts I was trying to uncover by studying the isolated neurons of sea slugs. Once I had this idea about looking at art through the prism of science, I began to see connections everywhere. I'd mutter about the visual cortex while looking at a Cezanne painting, or think about the somatosensory areas while reading Whitman on the "body electric". Needless to say, my labmates mocked me mercilessly.

I'm always a little embarrassed to admit just how idiosyncratic my selection process was for the other artists in the book. I simply began with my favorite artists and tried to see what they had to say about the mind. The first thing that surprised me was just how much they had to say. Virginia Woolf, for instance, is always going on and on about her brain. "Nerves" has to be one of her favorite words.

Kottke: Which of your characters did you know the least about beforehand? Even a seeming polymath like yourself must have a blind spot or two.

Lehrer: Definitely Gertrude Stein. I actually found her through William James, the great American psychologist and philosopher. She worked in his Harvard lab, published a few scientific papers on "automatic writing," and then went to med-school at Johns Hopkins before dropping out and moving to Paris to hang out with Picasso. So I knew she had this deep background in science, but I had only read snippets of her work. I then proceeded to fall asleep to the same page of "The Making of Americans" for a month.

Kottke: Are there other characters that you considered for inclusion? If so, why weren't they included?

Lehrer: Lots of people were left on the cutting room floor. I had a long digression on Edgar Allen Poe and mirror neurons. (See, for instance, "The Purloined Letter," where Poe has detective Dupin reveal his secret for reading the minds of criminals: "When I wish to find out how wise, or how stupid, or how good, or how wicked is any one, or what are his thoughts at the moment, I fashion the expression of my face, as accurately as possible, in accordance with the expression of his, and then wait to see what thoughts or sentiments arise in my mind or heart, as if to match or correspond with the expression.") I also had a chapter on Coleridge and the unconscious, but I think that chapter was really just me wanting to write about opium. But, for the most part, I can't really say why some chapters survived the editing process and others didn't. I certainly mean no disrespect to Poe. If they let me write a sequel, I'll find a way to include him.

Kottke: I noticed that three out of the eight main characters in the book are women. Surveying the usually cited big thinkers of the 19th and 20th centuries, it would have been easy to write this book with all male characters. Is there an implicit statement in there that science would be better off with a greater percentage of women participating?

Lehrer: While I certainly agree with the idea that the institution of science would benefit from more female scientists, I didn't choose these female artists for that reason. I don't think you need any ulterior motive to fall in love with the work of Virginia Woolf and George Eliot. Their art speaks for itself. That said, I think the psychological insights of women like Woolf were rooted, at least in part, in their womanhood. Woolf, for instance, rebelled against the stodgy old male novelists of her day. Their fiction, she complained, was all about "factories and utopias". Woolf wanted to invert this hierarchy, so that the "task of the novelist" was to "examine an ordinary mind on an ordinary day." There's something very domestic about her modernism, so that the grandest epiphanies happen while someone is out buying flowers or eating a beef stew. Women might not be able to write novels about war or politics, but they could find an equal majesty by exploring the mind.

Plus, I think Woolf learned a lot about the brain from her mental illness. As a woman, she was subjected to all sorts of terrible psychiatric treatments, which made her rather skeptical of doctors. (In Mrs. Dalloway, she refers to the paternalistic Dr. Bradshaw as an "obscurely evil" person, whose insistence that the mental illness was "physical, purely physical" causes a suicide.) Introspection was Woolf's only medicine. "I feel my brains, like a pear, to see if it's ripe," she once wrote. "It will be exquisite by September."

Kottke: Are there other books/media out there that share a third culture kinship with yours? I received a copy of Lawrence Weschler's Everything That Rises: A Book of Convergences for Christmas...that seems to fit. Steven Johnson's books. Anything else you can recommend?

Lehrer: I've stolen ideas from so many people it's hard to know where to begin. Certainly Weschler and Johnson have both been major influences. I've always worshipped Oliver Sacks; Richard Powers has more neuroscience in his novels than most issues of Nature; I just saw Olafur Eliasson's new show at SFMOMA and that was rather inspiring. I could go on and on. It's really an exciting time to be interested in the intersection of art and science.

But I'd also recommend traveling back in time a little bit, before our two cultures were so divided. We don't think of people like George Eliot as third-culture figures, but she famously described her novels as a "a set of experiments in life." Virginia Woolf, before she wrote Mrs. Dalloway, said that in her new novel the "psychology should be done very realistically." Whitman worked in Civil War hospitals and corresponded for years with the neurologist who discovered phantom limb syndrome. (He also kept up with phrenology, the brain science of his day.) Or look at Coleridge. When the poet was asked why he attended so many lectures on chemistry, he gave a great answer: "To improve my stock of metaphors". In other words, trying to merge art and science isn't some newfangled idea.

--

Thanks, Jonah. You can read more of Lehrer's writing at his frequently updated blog, The Frontal Cortex.

This portrait of Homer Simpson painted in

This portrait of Homer Simpson painted in the style of Rembrandt is strangely mesmerizing. Can't look away from those giant eyes.

The Adam Baumgold Gallery is currently showing

The Adam Baumgold Gallery is currently showing a series of drawing by Chris Ware, Drawings for New York Periodicals. His series that ran in the NY Times and his Thanksgiving New Yorker covers are included. Feb 1 - Mar 15, 2008. (thx, evan)

Jason Polan, who you may remember from

Jason Polan, who you may remember from the series of drawings he did of every piece of art in the MoMA, has a unique 20x200 offering available. The larger editions are drawings and copies of his hand while the $2000 edition of 2 is described thusly:

I will come to your house and shake your hand. Two of these interactions will be available. After I meet you I will give you a certificate, to be signed by both you and me, stating the authentification of the encounter. This artwork is a collaboration between you and me. You will also receive a photograph that is taken the moment of our meeting.

20x200 curator Jen Bekman has more on this offering.

Jason's work is about a lot of lofty ideas, but those ideas are grounded in the most mundane of media and happenstance. The ideas center around his ambitions to interact authentically with both the media he chooses to work in and the collectors who buy his work.

The true meaning of George W. Bush's

The true meaning of George W. Bush's favorite painting. Quoting Inigo Montoya, "I do not think it means what you think it means". (via conscientious)

Art Grand Slam would be the perfect

Art Grand Slam would be the perfect name for a web site showcasing the tennis-related art of Martina Navratilova. And so it is.

Almost 20 years since her last grand slam singles title, Martina Navratilova is back in action on the circuit -- only this time she is turning tennis strokes into brush strokes as she helps to create a new form of contemporary art.

In its crudest and, perhaps, most joyful expression, it involves the player hitting paint-covered tennis balls at a canvas, usually marked with court lines and prepared to resemble a playing surface: clay, grass or artificial.

(via quipsologies)

Will Ashford takes used books and creates

Will Ashford takes used books and creates art and new meanings out of them.

At some unpredictable point along the way, in my mind, the images start to invent themselves. Using colored vellums, graphite and or India ink to highlight or obscure my words; I create the image of that invention. Though I strive to make each document visually engaging I find it is the words that I value most.

(via monoscope)

Update: Ashford's work is quite similar to Tom Phillips' A Humument, which was first published in 1970. (thx, joel)

Long-exposure photo of two people having sex

Long-exposure photo of two people having sex on a bed. (It's mostly safe for work, believe it or not.) This reminds me of two things: the timelapse threesome scene in A Clockwork Orange and Jason Salavon's work, specifically 76 Blowjobs and Every Playboy Centerfold. Those last tow links probably NSFW. (via the h line)

Update: Atta Kim's work is similar too, particularly his "Sex Series". (thx, jeff)

This summer's big public art project in

This summer's big public art project in NYC: 4 large waterfalls falling into the East River and New York Harbor, including one falling from the Brooklyn Bridge. Olafur Eliasson is the responsible party...he's done a couple previous waterfall pieces.

Update: Eliasson's work will also be on display at MoMA and P.S. 1 this summer, April 20 through June 30, 2008. (thx, praveen)

MoMA's "Multiplex"

So I ditched out of "work" early yesterday for MoMA, because it was the last day of the Martin Puryear show. (This is why everyone everywhere should quit his job!) Elsewhere in the museum—on view through July—is a sprawling collection show called "Multiplex," which is apparently about art since 1970 and, according to the opaque curator's text, the flowering of, um, a "complicated artistic terrain." (Yeah. Well, it's been almost 40 years, go figure.) There are three groupings of work: abstraction, mutability, and provocation. (I dunno either!) There's a Gursky that's really one of the worst, an incredible Tacita Dean painted photograph, and a Julie Mehretu painting that is just wowza. (Seriously, you should go see that one.) Also, I'd never seen this Clemens von Wedemeyer video "Big Business," a two-channel wingding that's technically a remake of a Laurel and Hardy film, but which, more importantly, stars two really hot German guys destroying a house. It is all kinds of awesome! I wanted to watch it twice more! But that (and some other nice items) doesn't mean this show isn't a bizarro mess. There's a whole lotta wall text to make their gussied up case. And the tiny end section, "provocation," contains some of the least provocative contemporary art going. (There's a mild Philip Guston painting from 1972! Huh?) Is it that MoMA's collection just doesn't have work down in the basement that could deliver some incitement?

Lawyer-Dance

Dying to see this video now showing in Chelsea of a dance performed by lawyers, including John Sloss, a film attorney, and Scott Rosenberg, who I think is with Legal Aid. It's playing with another video, of four day laborers hired to create an earthwork on the beach; both are by Ann Carlson and Mary Ellen Strom.

Cherry Blossoms is a project by Alyssa

Cherry Blossoms is a project by Alyssa Wright:

Cherry Blossoms is a backpack that uses a small microcontroller and a GPS unit. Recent news of bombings in Iraq are downloaded to the unit every night, and their relative location to the center of the city are superimposed on a map of Boston. If the wearer walks in a space in Boston that correlates to a site of violence in Baghdad, the backpack detonates and releases a compressed air cloud of confetti, looking for all the world like smoke and shrapnel. Each piece of confetti is inscribed with the name of a civilian who died in the war, and the circumstances of their death.

Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias

Really interesting interview with artist/designer Tobias Wong by Rob Walker.

That question hits an important point in my work (and pet peeve), because many people are always interested in how I get work out there, financially. And it's quite simple. If there's something I really believe in, I just find a way to make it happen. No daily Starbucks (US$4) or cigs ($8) or dining out ($20), and before you know it you've got the money to do something.

God's Eye View presents four important Biblical

God's Eye View presents four important Biblical events as if captured by Google Earth, including The Crucifixion, Noah's Ark, and Moses parting the Red Sea.

Liquidated Logos by French street artist Zevs.

Liquidated Logos by French street artist Zevs.

Re-painting the logos in their own colours, the artist pours paint over them, liquidating one logo after another.

I am a sucker for dripping paint.

Eric Gill was a respected British artist

Eric Gill was a respected British artist and typographer -- Gill Sans is his most famous typeface -- but according to his diaries, he also regularly engaged in sexual relations with his sisters, his daughters, and the family dog.

For some of Gill's fans, even looking at his work became impossible. Most problematically, he was a Catholic convert who created some of the most popular devotional art of his era, such as the Stations of the Cross in Westminster Cathedral, where worshippers pray at each panel depicting the suffering of Jesus.

These details of Gill's private life were revealed in a 1989 book by Fiona MacCarthy...here's a NY Times review of the book soon after it was published.

Hand-painted Toilet Seats

The hand-painted toilet seats featured on this artist's website make me wonder if anyone has ever answered Duchamp by using a urinal as a canvas. (via cynical-c)

Update: Kohler (the Toilet People) has its own take on toilet seat art. (thx, Sadie)

Stuff I want to see in NYC soon

I'm writing these down in the hope that doing so will motivate me to actually get out of the apartment to check these out.

- Paula Scher: Recent Paintings at Maya Stendal. Through January 26, 2008.

- Gustav Klimt: The Ronald S. Lauder and Serge Sabarsky Collections at Neue Galerie. Through June 30, 2008.

- Edward Burtynsky: Quarries at Charles Cowles. Though December 1, 2007.

- This Is War! Robert Capa at Work at ICP. Through January 6, 2008.

- Georges Seurat: The Drawings at MoMA. Through January 7, 2008.

Did I miss anything? (Besides Jill Greenberg's bear photos at Clampart?)

Related to Jason Salavon's work from last

Related to Jason Salavon's work from last week is Brian Piana's work, the layouts and colors of web sites with all of the text and graphics stripped out. For instance, Barack Obama's Twitter page. The flowchart stuff is lovely...reminds me a bit of this page from Jimmy Corrigan. (thx, jonathan)

Jason Salavon's Field Guide to Style &

Jason Salavon's Field Guide to Style & Color, a reproduction of the 2007 Ikea catalog with everything but the structure and color excluded. You may remember Mr. Salavon from his composite photographs and videos of blowjobs, late night talk show hosts, and Playboy centerfolds.

I can't see how on earth Julie

I can't see how on earth Julie Jackson's Subversive Cross Stitch didn't make it into the Museum of Arts & Design show on Extreme Embroidery. Maybe it's too straightforward but still...

Blendie is a blender built by Kelly

Blendie is a blender built by Kelly Dobson that only works when you growl at it.

People induce the blender to spin by sounding the sounds of its motor in action. A person may growl low pitch blender-like sounds to get it to spin slow (Blendie pitch and power matches the person) and the person can growl blender-style at higher pitches to speed up Blendie. The experience for the participant is to speak the language of the machine and thus to more deeply understand and connect with the machine.

Check out the movie to see Blendie in action. Dobson's other projects include Machine Therapy (therapy sessions with people and their machines) and ScreamBody (a portable vessel in which to put your screams). (via core77)

I went to a mini conference put

I went to a mini conference put on by Core77 on Friday and I'll post a bit more about a couple of the participants in a day or so, but if you were in attendance, you may not have noticed that the person onstage claiming to be artist/designer Tobias Wong was not actually Tobias Wong (more).

The setup was an art project on Tobias's part, they practiced together for some time to make it work. There were a lot of little jokes in fake Tobias's talk for people who knew what was going on. Tobias was in the audience, actually answered a question for fake-Tobias during his talk.

Frida Kahlo at The Walker

It's something of a Minneapolis-New York-World week here at kottke.org. As if I needed an excuse to post about Peter Schjeldahl's write-up of the new Kahlo exhibit at the Walker in this week's New Yorker:

...her pansexual charisma, shadowed by tales of ghastly physical and emotional suffering, makes her an avatar of liberty and guts. However, Kahlo's eminence wobbles unless her work holds up. A retrospective at the Walker Art Center, in Minneapolis, proves that it does, and then some. She made some iffy symbological pictures and a few perfectly awful ones—forgivably, given their service to her always imperilled morale—but her self-portraits cannot be overpraised.

Iconic Moments of the 20th Century

Euro art collective Henry VIII's Wives recreate iconic 20th century photographs using Glaswegian pensioners as models, all posed outside their housing complex in Glasgow. A real glaswegian kiss to the complacent gaze with which the original photos are too-easily met.

(thx, joseph)

FFFFOUND!, art curating for the masses

Alexander Bohn wrote a glowing review of FFFFOUND! at Speak Up the other day. My FFFFOUND! fandom is documented elsewhere, so I'll comment instead on an observation Bohn made in his initial paragraph:

Graphic design might not work in the white cube, but it flourishes on a white background. A new mutated strain of design blog has evolved: The Randomly Curated Other People's Images White Background Site, or RCOPIWS. Sites like Manystuff, Monoscope, Your Daily Awesome, and VVORK (among countless others) offer designers and design aficionados a constant flood of typographic morsels, interesting photos, arresting new art, and the like. One such site sets itself apart, notably, from the other RCOPIWSes: the collaborative image-bookmarking site ffffound.com — allegedly, but unconfirmed, initiated by online fiend Yugo Nakamura.

Among the many things that the internet has democratized is curating, a task once more or less exclusive to editors (magazine, book, and newspaper), art gallery owners, media executives (music, TV, and film), and museum curators. They choose the art you see on a museum's wall, the shows you see on TV, the movies that get made, and the stories you read in the newspaper. The ease and low cost of publishing on the web coupled with the abundance of sample-ready media has made the curating process available to many more people. Smashing Telly is David Galbraith's rolling film festival (or TV channel). By simply listening to the music that you like, Last.fm allows anyone to put together their own radio station to share with others. kottke.org is essentially a table of contents for a magazine I wish existed. Shorpy has freed old photography from the nearly impenetrable Library of Congress web site and presented it in a compelling blog-like fashion.

In the case of FFFFOUND! and other RCOPIWSs, I would argue that these sites showcase a new form of art curating. The pace is faster, you don't need a physical gallery or museum, and you don't need to worry about crossing arbitrary boundaries of style or media. Nor do you need to concern yourself with questions like "is this person an artist or an outsider artist?" If a particular piece is good or compelling or noteworthy, in it goes. The last week's output at Monoscope would make a pretty good show in a Chelsea art gallery, no? It'll be interesting to see how this grassroots art curating will affect the art/design/photography world at large. Jen Bekman, who has roots in the internet industry, is already exploring this new frontier with her nimble gallery and the Hey, Hot Shot! competition. Others are sure to follow.

Ursine is a new series of photos

Ursine is a new series of photos by Jill Greenberg, who previously did monkey portraiture and crying children, the latter of which provoked some controversy in the blogosphere.

I was going to shoot grizzly bears because they're safer than bloggers.

A complete series of photos are available on Greenberg's web site, sadly buried in an inscrutable Flash interface.

A pair of Lego skyscrapers (made from 250,000

A pair of Lego skyscrapers (made from 250,000 pieces and inhabited by 1000 Lego people) are on display at the Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC through November 24. Dennis Crowley's got some pictures and a short movie. Details include a wee Banksy piece on the side of the building and tiny iPod ads. Here's a timelapse video of the construction. (thx, dens)

Cool anatomical drawing of a balloon animal.

Cool anatomical drawing of a balloon animal. See also: drawings of skeletal systems of cartoon characters by Michael Paulus, which are available as prints. (via ffffound!)

Aleksandra Mir's Newsroom 1986-2000 project features huge

Aleksandra Mir's Newsroom 1986-2000 project features huge hand-drawn reproductions of tabloid front pages. Show is up through Oct 27 in NYC. (via quipsologies)

Photograph of the graves of Vincent and

Photograph of the graves of Vincent and Theodore van Gogh in Auvers-sur-Oise, France. (Don't quite know why I'm posting this...it just struck me is all.)

Processing: A Programming Handbook for Visual Designers and Artists by Casey Reas and Ben Fry

Casey Reas and Ben Fry, inventors of the Processing programming language (that's Proce55ing to you old schoolers), have just come out with a book on the topic that looks fantastic. In addition to programming tutorials are essays and interviews with other heavy hitters in the programmatic arts like Golan Levin, Alex Galloway, Auriea Harvey, and Jared Tarbell. The site for the book features a table of contents, sample chapters, and every single code example in the book, freely available for download. Amazon's got the book but they're saying it's 4-6 weeks for delivery so I suggest hoofing it over to your local bookstore for a look-see instead.

Fritz Kahn's Man As Industrial Palace.

Fritz Kahn's Man As Industrial Palace.

Kahn's modernist visualization of the digestive and respiratory system as "industrial palace," really a chemical plant, was conceived in a period when the German chemical industry was the world's most advanced.

Be sure to check out the larger version.

Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts?

Is lazy reporting hurting the visual arts? Jonathan Jones argues that almost all reporting about art takes one of six forms: expensive art, graffiti, plagiarism, earth-shattering discoveries, and restoration. Looking back through kottke.org's art tag page, I am guilty of linking to stories of all those types. Eep.

Hoax or art? Or both? Artist Xu

Hoax or art? Or both? Artist Xu Zhen climbed Mt. Everest and shaved off almost 2 meters of the top of the mountain, the literal peak of Everest, and is displaying it as art.

Audiences may not believe that this is real, which is similar to how people rarely question whether the height of Everest truly is 8848 meters. This relationship between belief and doubt has to deal with questions of standard, height, reality, and borders.

(via daily awesome)

Justin Quinn's wonderful typographic art (more here).

Justin Quinn's wonderful typographic art (more here).

Jessica Lagunas' Return to Puberty, an artwork

Jessica Lagunas' Return to Puberty, an artwork consisting of a "video close-up of my pubis in a static single shot, in which I depilate most of my pubic hair with a pair of tweezers continuously for one hour". It's like the female version of Empire. NSFW.

Get Lost is a collection of maps

Get Lost is a collection of maps of downtown Manhattan drawn by a variety of artists.

Impressionism, Realism, and blogging

I'm intrigued by Marc Hedlund's differentiation of Impressionist bloggers from Realist bloggers. My interpretation of this difference (which might not be what Marc meant by it) is that Realist blog posts are self-contained, -explanatory, and -evident entities while a post on an Impressionist blog serves to complement the whole, much like the dots making up a Seurat painting aren't that interesting until you stand back to see the whole thing.

The downside for Impressionist blogs is that their individual posts don't work that well outside of their intended context. If you run across a single post from an Impressionist blog in your River of News, a remixed Yahoo Pipes RSS feed, in del.icio.us, or an item in a Google search results set, it might not make a whole lot of sense. Impressionist blog posts are less likely to get Dugg or bookmarked in del.icio.us or linked around much at all. Fewer incoming links, big or small, to individual pages means fewer pageviews, which makes it more difficult to run an Impressionist blog as a business that relies on advertising revenue. If you look at most of the big blog sites, they're all non-Impressionist blogs. All the sites whose posts are featured on the front page of Digg are non-Impressionist...those posts/articles are designed to float self-contained around the web. The blogosphere is dominated by non-Impressionist blogs and the sort of content they produce...which is sad for me because, like Marc, I value Impressionism in a weblog.

Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting

Tauba Auerbach: startling starting staring string sting sing sin in i. More of her typographic work here.

Photographs of girls with meat hair. No

Photographs of girls with meat hair. No further description needed, I trust. See also the meat-themed art of Victoria Reynolds.

Update: More meat art from Pinar Yolacan. (thx, jen)

Metropolis magazine profile of designer/programmer/artist

Metropolis magazine profile of designer/programmer/artist Jonathan Harris, creator of such projects as Word Count, Daylife Universe, 10x10, and Seed magazine's Phylotaxis. More of Harris' work is available on his web site.

The American Sign Language alphabet made from

The American Sign Language alphabet made from matchbooks...think of the matches as fingers.

Remember the Splasher/graffiti/defacing business from

Remember the Splasher/graffiti/defacing business from last week? The group of people collectively know as the Splasher is back with a manifesto: "if we did it, this is how it would've happened". Not the most succinct, these art school revolutionaries.

A fellow named the Splasher has been

A fellow named the Splasher has been splashing paint on street art around NYC over the past few months. Here's some of his, er, work. Well-known street artist Shepard Fairey (the Splasher has targeted several of his pieces) opened a show last night in DUMBO and two guys tried to set off a homemade smoke bomb at the opening, leading to speculation that one (or both) of them was the Splasher. Gothamist has more. Jake Dobkin has photos from Fairey's show, which looks pretty nice.

Update: The Brooklyn Paper is reporting that DJ 10 Fingers subdued the suspected Splasher before he could light his stink bomb. (No, seriously!) The would-be stink bomber is facing a possible 15 years in jail.

Regarding Eve Mosher's project to draw a

Regarding Eve Mosher's project to draw a flood line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan, here are a couple of related projects. Ledia Carroll's Restore Mission Lake Project outlined the shore of an historical lake which used to sit in the midst of San Francisco's Mission neighborhood. Under The Level explores the possibility and consequences of Katrina-level flooding in NYC. (thx, kayte and dens)

Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk

Artist Eve Mosher is drawing a chalk line around Brooklyn and lower Manhattan that denotes the encroachment of the ocean if it were to rise 10 feet above the current sea level. There's a web site for the project, including a progress blog. See also Flood Maps.

Regarding my post about Tim Knowles' work,

Regarding my post about Tim Knowles' work, Greg sent in a couple of links to similar projects. Olafur Eliasson created these drawings much like Knowles did with his Vehicle Motion Drawings, except he used the motion of his father's fishing boat. William Anastasi has done drawings for almost 40 years by letting his pen drift on a piece of paper while riding the subway.

Oliver Herring's photo sculptures. Reminds me of

Oliver Herring's photo sculptures. Reminds me of David Meanix's work for Six Feet Under (if you remember Claire's photo masks in season 4). (via moon river)

Tim Knowles

I just stumbled upon the work of Tim Knowles, whose art explores the mostly hidden, obscured, or otherwise unnoticed motion of objects. One of his projects is Tree Drawings:

Drawings produced by pens attached to the tips of tree branches, as the branches move in the wind the tree draws on to a panel or drawing board on an easel. Like signatures the trees drawings tell of the tree's character; a Hawthorn producing a stiff, scratchy & spikey drawing an Oak a more elegant flowing line.

Here's the oak at its easel and the resulting art:

For Vehicle Motion Drawings, he constructed an apparatus to capture the motion of a car being driven...the turns, stops, and starts of the vehicle move the pen over the paper. His postal projects capture the motion of packages through the postal system, both with drawings and photography. (Knowles' Spy Box reminds me of Kyle Van Horn's cameramail.)

Love his stuff. (via waxy)

A blog of bad drawings of Star

A blog of bad drawings of Star Trek's Mr. Spock. Khaaan! (thx, david)

Martin Klimas' captured moments of shattering statues

Martin Klimas' captured moments of shattering statues is an interesting form of photographic sculpture. (via daily awesome)

Opening Friday, June 22 at jen bekman gallery

Opening Friday, June 22 at jen bekman gallery in NYC: A New American Portrait, "a group exhibition of photographs featuring artists at the vanguard of contemporary portraiture in America". Curated by Jen Bekman and Joerg Colberg, one of my favorite bloggers on the topic of photography.

Fun letterhead cartoons drawn by Saul Steinberg

Fun letterhead cartoons drawn by Saul Steinberg in 1967 when he was artist-in-residence at the Smithsonian for a brief period. (via daily awesome)

Video of women depicted in Western art

Video of women depicted in Western art morphing into one another. Belongs in the seamless mesmerization category of videos along with Noah Kalina's everyday and 787 Cliparts. (thx, robin)

Decisions, Decisions: a nice looking hand-drawn flowchart poster.

Decisions, Decisions: a nice looking hand-drawn flowchart poster.

Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project, photographs of

Nina Katchadourian's Sorted Books project, photographs of book spines arranged to tell short stories.

Hair portraits, including those of Star Wars

Hair portraits, including those of Star Wars and Guns n Roses.

My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate

My wife Meg makes A Mean Chocolate Chip Cookie. That is to say, she asked her readers for their best chocolate chip cookie recipes, averaged the ingredient amounts, baking times, chilling times, butter consistencies, and other various techniques and baked according to the resulting recipe (which she includes so you can bake up your own batch). Some of the ingredients: "2.04 cups all-purpose flour; 0.79 tsp. salt; 0.79 tsp. baking soda; 0.805 stick unsalted butter, softened to room temperature; 0.2737 stick unsalted butter, cold; 0.5313 stick unsalted butter, melted." Reminds me a bit of The Most Wanted Paintings project by Komar & Melamid, who averaged aesthetic preferences and taste in painting to produce works of art that appealed to everyone (to hilarious effect). (digg this?)

Interview with artist Kristan Horton, whose project

Interview with artist Kristan Horton, whose project Dr. Strangelove Dr. Strangelove recreates scenes from the movie using everyday household objects.

Why are most artists liberal? "In conclusion,

Why are most artists liberal? "In conclusion, then, you don't have to be a liberal to be a good storyteller. But the better your story is, the more of a liberal you are." (via 3qd)

Street artist Banksy gets the New Yorker

Street artist Banksy gets the New Yorker treatment with a profile in this week's issue. "The graffitist's impulse is akin to a blogger's: write some stuff, quickly, which people may or may not read. Both mediums demand wit and nimbleness. They arouse many of the same fears about the lowering of the public discourse and the taking of undeserved liberties." Complex tracked down the alleged photos of Banksy mentioned in the article. Print magazine recently wrote a piece on Banksy as well.

Analysis of a recent New Yorker cover,

Analysis of a recent New Yorker cover, the one with the guy and girl standing in front of an abstract expressionist painting. "Rather than a couple in love with each other, with art, and with technological possibility, I see a boy with a toy, and a girl with patience. He is much more engaged with the devise; she curves demurely away." The phrase "boy with a toy, and a girl with patience" describes many American relationships, I think. (thx, david)

Update: The NYer cover is a reference to this Jan 1962 Saturday Evening Post cover by Norman Rockwell. (thx, maciej)

Clever technique for pinching the colors from

Clever technique for pinching the colors from famous paintings using the Match Color tool in Photoshop. "The Old Masters of painting spent years of their lives learning about color. Why let all their effort go to waste on the walls of some museum when it could be used to give you a hand with color correction?"

Typographic map of London. That is, a

Typographic map of London. That is, a map made of type (like Paula Scher's paintings) not a map of typography in London. (via moon river)

What kind of art is film? High

What kind of art is film? High art? Mass art? Photographic art? Narrative art?

Photographer Cara Barer creates twisty, rumpled sculptures

Photographer Cara Barer creates twisty, rumpled sculptures out of damp books...the results are beautifully fractal in nature. (via your daily awesome)