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You may remember Martin Klimas from his photos of shattering figurines (which I love).
His latest project involves arranging paint just above massive speakers, turning the sound up, and photographing the results. This is Steve Reich’s “Music for 18 Musicians”:
I wonder what dubstep looks like? (via @pomeranian99)
The Awl has an interview with a street artist named Hanksy, who takes images from Banksy and incorporates Tom Hanks into the mix. WIIIILLLSONNNN!!
I’ve come across comments or stories written about Hanksy saying I’m directly ripping off Banksy’s style. Like, “Where does this guy get off, stealing Banksy’s work?” They are completely missing the point. It’s a satire. My goal was never to make a profit. It came about and there was a genuine excitement around the people at the gallery and the community in general.
I’m pretty sure the interviewer, EA Hanks, is Tom’s daughter and she got her dad on the record about Hanksy:
Regarding your work, Tom Hanks sends the message, “I don’t know who Hanksy is, but I enjoy his (her?) comments via the semi-chaos of artistic expression.”
But the T.HANKS trash can remains my favorite Tom Hanks street art:
In 1930, Iowa artist Grant Wood painted American Gothic. The models he used for the painting were his sister Nan Wood Graham and his dentist, Byron McKeeby. Here they are next to the painting:
Wood made the painting after spotting a small house in Eldon, Iowa:
Restorers at the Prado Museum in Madrid, working on what they thought was a 16th or 17th century replica of the Mona Lisa, have discovered that the painting was actually done by a student of Leonardo’s at the same time as the original.
Museum experts are in the process of stripping away a cover of black over-paint which, when fully removed, will reveal the youthfulness of the subject they say. The final area of over-paint will come off in the next few days.
The original “Mona Lisa” hangs in the Louvre but the sitter looks older than her years as the varnish is cracked. The painting is so fragile that restoration or cleaning is deemed too risky. The Prado version, however, will show the sitter as she was: a young woman in her early 20s.
Korean artist Kang Duck-Bong makes PVC pipe sculptures that look like they’re moving.
(via colossal)
In a piece for Vanity Fair, Kurt Andersen argues that for the first time in recent history, American pop culture (fashion, art, music, design, entertainment) hasn’t changed dramatically in the past 20 years.
Since 1992, as the technological miracles and wonders have propagated and the political economy has transformed, the world has become radically and profoundly new. (And then there’s the miraculous drop in violent crime in the United States, by half.) Here is what’s odd: during these same 20 years, the appearance of the world (computers, TVs, telephones, and music players aside) has changed hardly at all, less than it did during any 20-year period for at least a century. The past is a foreign country, but the recent past β the 00s, the 90s, even a lot of the 80s β looks almost identical to the present. This is the First Great Paradox of Contemporary Cultural History.
Think about it. Picture it. Rewind any other 20-year chunk of 20th-century time. There’s no chance you would mistake a photograph or movie of Americans or an American city from 1972-giant sideburns, collars, and bell-bottoms, leisure suits and cigarettes, AMC Javelins and Matadors and Gremlins alongside Dodge Demons, Swingers, Plymouth Dusters, and Scamps-with images from 1992. Time-travel back another 20 years, before rock ‘n’ roll and the Pill and Vietnam, when both sexes wore hats and cars were big and bulbous with late-moderne fenders and fins-again, unmistakably different, 1952 from 1972. You can keep doing it and see that the characteristic surfaces and sounds of each historical moment are absolutely distinct from those of 20 years earlier or later: the clothes, the hair, the cars, the advertising β all of it. It’s even true of the 19th century: practically no respectable American man wore a beard before the 1850s, for instance, but beards were almost obligatory in the 1870s, and then disappeared again by 1900. The modern sensibility has been defined by brief stylistic shelf lives, our minds trained to register the recent past as old-fashioned.
Inspired by a video of a chain-smoking two-year-old from Indonesia, photographer Frieke Janssens took a series of portraits of kids smoking.
A video shows how Janssens made the photos…the cigarettes were made of cheese.
For an installation at the Gallery of Modern Art in Brisbane, artist Yayoi Kusama made a totally white room and gave colored dot stickers to all the visiting children and let them stick them wherever they wanted.
I love everything about this…I scrolled through the entire list. This one was my favorite:
(via waxy)
The Olympic Games used to include competitions in painting, sculpture, literature, architecture, and music.
From 1912 to 1948 rules of the art competition varied, but the core of the rules remained the same. All of the entered works had to be inspired by sport, and had to be original (that is, not be published before the competition). Like in the athletic events at the Olympics, gold, silver, and bronze medals were awarded to the highest ranked artists, although not all medals were awarded in each competition. On a few occasions, in fact, no medals were presented at all.
(via @itscolossal)
Since the late 1980s, Mark Landis has been donating forged paintings he’s painted to a number of museums around the country. No one really knew why…until John Gapper from The Financial Times tracked him down.
For nearly three decades, Landis has visited museums across the US in various guises and tried to donate paintings he has forged. As well as Father Scott, he has posed as “Steven Gardiner” among other aliases. He never asks for money, although museums have often hosted meals for him and made small gifts. His only stipulation is that he is donating in his parents’ names β often his actual father, Lieutenant Commander Arthur Landis Jr, a former US Navy officer.
Landis has been prolific and amazingly persistent. A few weeks before he came to Lafayette, “Father Scott” arrived at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City, Missouri, with a forgery of Head of a Sioux by Alfred Jacob Miller that he said he was giving in memory of his mother, “Helen Mitchell Scott”. Landis has so far offered copies of that work to five other museums. Yet in all this time, although curators speculate about his motives, no one has found out why he is doing it.
Update: Landis is the subject of a documentary film called Art and Craft.
Mark Landis has been called one of the most prolific art forgers in US history. His impressive body of work spans thirty years, covering a wide range of painting styles and periods that includes 15th Century Icons, Picasso, and even Walt Disney. And while the copies could fetch impressive sums on the open market, Landis isn’t in it for money. Posing as a philanthropic donor, a grieving executor of a family member’s will, and most recently as a Jesuit priest, Landis has given away hundreds of works over the years to a staggering list of institutions across the United States.
Artist Ariana Page Russell has a skin condition called dermatographic urticaria that causes her skin to become inflamed when lightly scratched. Russell uses the condition to make art on her body.
(via collacubed)
From artist Lim Heng Swee. Grab a print at Etsy while you can.
Fun fact: Tom Hanks does the voice for Woody in the movies but in most other media, he’s voiced by Tom’s younger brother Jim Hanks.
What’s this then? Jovian moon? Instagrammed photo of Earth taken from the ISS? Head of a nail?
Nope, it’s actually a well-worn frying pan from a project by Christopher Jonassen.
Ha! Evan Roth is selling a series of “multi-touch finger paintings” called Open Twitter, Check Twitter, Close Twitter. The paintings are made by placing tracing paper over an iPhone screen while he checks Twitter with a painted finger.
Artist Jonus Lund is broadcasting what he’s browsing in realtime. Each time he goes to a new site in his web browser, his site updates. When I visited earlier, he was looking at Lifehacker.
This is … well, I don’t really know what to say about it. It’s a video game version of Marina AbramoviΔ’s The Artist is Present. You buy a ticket, walk into the museum, look at some art, and then you wait in line. (via waxy)
Ursus Wehrli is coming out with a new book, The Art of Clean Up, which features pairs of photographs of different objects, in disorder and then sorted. Here’s my favorite pair:
Photos from the book are disappearing from various sites around the web as takedown notices are sent out, but you can get the gist of the book by watching this video by Wehrli about how one of the photos was made:
On Saturday night, an 11-by-6-inch Rembrandt pen-and-ink drawing called “The Judgement”, worth $250K, was stolen from the Ritz-Carlton Marina del Rey. Interestingly, Rembrandt pieces are the second most stolen pieces of art.
Art experts reached Sunday said works by Rembrandt are among the most popular targets for art thieves, second only to those by Picasso, because of the artist’s name recognition and their value. Anthony Amore, chief investigator at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston and co-author of the book “Stealing Rembrandts,” said there have been 81 documented thefts of the artist’s work in the last 100 years.
It’s like I always say: When I edit Kottke, art gets stolen.
Update:
That was fast. The drawing has been recovered. Thanks, Patrick.
By Sarah Illenberger, who does many other things in a similarly playful style. Print is available. And now that I’m looking, I think I’ve seen her Soft Brain piece before. (Hey, I have!)
I posted about Chris Burden’s Metropolis II a few months ago. The artist is almost set to deliver the piece to Los Angeles County Museum of Art and there’s a proper preview for it:
My favorite line of the interview with Burden that runs over the video:
The idea that a car runs free, those days are about to close.
(via sippey)
Thomas Pavitte designed and then solved the world’s largest connect-the-dots puzzle (of the Mona Lisa). It took him 9 and 1/2 hours.
A time lapse video of Pavitte solving the puzzle is up on Vimeo. (via colossal)
Jae Rhim Lee is growing mushrooms that will eat her body after she dies. She has also designed a special suit that will house the mushrooms as they do their work.
I am interested in cultural death denial, and why we are so distanced from our bodies, and especially how death denial leads to funeral practices that harm the environment β using formaldehyde and pink make-up and all that to make your loved one look vibrant and alive, so that you can imagine they’re just sleeping rather than actually dead. The US government recently upgraded formaldehyde from a probable carcinogen to a known carcinogen, so by trying to preserve the body we poison the living.
So I was thinking, what is the antidote to that? For me the answer was this mushroom - the Infinity Mushroom. It is a symbol of a new way of thinking about death.
Laura Bifano is selling prints of pixelated animals in her Etsy shop, like this honey badger one:
(via colossal)
This is pointillism taken to its limit.
Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Mona Lisa’ reduced & remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.
Prints are available.
Artist Jeremy Hutchison commissioned a series of intentionally incorrect products from factories around the world.
“I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”
Hutchison received a comb without tines, the ordering of which prompted a letter from the confused factory rep:
I have read your email, which makes me confused. As you know, combs shold be fabricated correctly and customers should like to buy combs which can comb hair. However, from your words, it seems you need us to fabricate combs incorrectly and combs can not comb the hair. I can not understand this well. Pls kindly explain detailedly.
There is also a Magritte-esque pipe with no place to put tobacco, and these impractial sunglasses:
(via @kevmaguire)
Art scholars have authenticated a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has been lost for centuries.
Simon brought the panel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art about two years ago to have it examined by several curators and conservators. “It was brought in for inspection in the conservation studio,” said a person close to the Metropolitan who asked not to be identified. “The painting was forgotten for years. When it turned up at auction, Simon thought it was worth taking a gamble. It had been heavily overpainted, which makes it look like a copy. It was a wreck, dark and gloomy. It had been cleaned many times in the past by people who didn’t know better. Once a restorer put artificial resin on it, which had turned gray and had to be removed painstakingly. When they took off the overpaint, what was revealed was the original paint. You saw incredibly delicate painting. All agree it was painted by Leonardo.”
A pair of fair use crusaders hired some “street art underground” friends to place several posters of the Kind of Bloop album cover on the building that Jay Maisel owns in Manhattan as payback for Maisel threatening to sue Andy Baio over using a representation of Maisel’s photo of Miles Davis for Bloop’s cover.
I hope that every time Jay leaves the house, he sees these posters β and as he looks at them or tries to tear them down he thinks about how evil what he did was. Maybe he’ll realize that at some level all art borrows from other art, and suing another artist for fair use appropriation undermines all artists. Maybe he’ll feel guilty about being such a thief. And then maybe he’ll think about giving that money back β or donating it to charity or something. But probably not.
Something tells me this isn’t going to end well. (via @jakedobkin)
Can’t remember who tipped me off to this (Cederholm? Hoefler? Pieratt?), but Colossal is a top-notch visual art/design blog. There are a dozen things on the first two pages that could slide right into kottke.org quite easily. He’s on Stellar too!
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