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.
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kottke.org posts about art
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
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)
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