kottke.org posts about art
Speaking of Benito Mussolini and fascism, the excellent Poster House museum in NYC has a new exhibition on for the next few months: The Future Was Then: The Changing Face of Fascist Italy. It features “some of the best posters produced during the worst period in modern Italian history”.
In a fascist movement inspired by art, how does the fascist government influence the artists living in its grasp? This exhibition explores how Benito Mussolini’s government created a broad-reaching culture that grew with and into the Futurist movement to claw into advertising, propaganda, and the very heart of the nation he commanded.
That Lubrificanti Fiat poster is incredible. The Future Was Then is on view at Poster House until Feb 22, 2026.
A few days ago, I linked to a NY Times piece about the V&A’s 90,000-piece archive of David Bowie stuff — costumes, photos, drawings, lyrics, etc.
The David Bowie Centre is a working archive with new reading and study rooms. The archive contains over 80,000 items, including 414 costumes and accessories, nearly 150 musical instruments and other sound equipment, designs, props and scenery for concerts, film and theatre. Bowie’s own desk is part of the archive, alongside notebooks, diaries, lyrics, correspondence, fan mail and over 70,000 photographic prints, negatives and transparencies.
The Centre is brought to life with a series of small, curated displays. Highlights include 1970s Ziggy Stardust and Aladdin Sane ensembles designed by Freddie Burretti and Kansai Yamamoto, a film showcasing performances from Bowie’s career, and an installation tracing his impact on popular culture.
Last week, Open Culture linked to this video tour of the Bowie collection by Jessica the Museum Guide:
I imagine it’s not quite like being there in person, but still. (via open culture)
Bisa Butler makes quilted portraits and recently debuted a show with some of her newest work called Hold Me Close. From her artist’s statement:
This body of work is a visual response to how I am feeling as an African American woman living in 2025. We lived through COVID and witnessed the uprising of the Black Lives Matter movement, only to arrive at a time when many of the civil rights I grew up with are being challenged and reversed. Protections and programs for non-white Americans, women, queer people, poor people, and people with disabilities are under attack, and it has left me feeling destabilized. Watching immigrants being hunted, chased down, and kidnapped by masked men horrifies me. The thought of people being gunned down and starved for political agendas is the stuff of nightmares. I’ve been looking for solace and turned to my work like a visual diary.
Colossal has a good gallery of images from the show and Butler did a video tour where you can see how shiny & glittery some of the pieces are:
Hold Me Close is on view from September 13 to November 1, 2025 at Jeffrey Deitch in Los Angeles.
Artist and composer Matthew Wilcock looks for patterns in the everyday and creates music from them. It’s easier to quickly watch an example than to explain:
Instantly thought of the video for Star Guitar by The Chemical Brothers, directed by Michel Gondry. They also seem like the sort of videos you would have found on Mister Rodgers’ or Sesame Street back in the day.
In addition to traffic, Wilcock has made music with people on escalators:
Each escalator and path is assigned three notes and they alternate between those as the person’s head breaks the line. Lowest note closest to camera, highest furtherest away. I love the idea of involving all these people unknowingly in an artwork. Recorded in Liverpool St. station, London.
And a bird eating:
Factory workers:
Bees:
You can find more of these video compositions on Wilcock’s YouTube channel and Instagram. He’s most active (and popular) on Insta; check out his Tour de France and swingset videos there. (thx, andy)
I had a lot of fun playing around with this collection of generative design tools, especially the textual ones. I wore out the “randomize” button on each of these. (via sidebar)
Enigmatriz uses ASCII art to punch up and blow out public domain photos and illustrations — I love their style. From It’s Nice That:
Using the Image to ASCII tool available online, Enigmatriz found a new way to play with digital assets. “Everyday, I sit on my computer and browse through hundreds of images in the public domain to find things that catch my attention and feel are worth shining a new light on them,” says Enigmatriz. “When working with ASCII, what I like and find particularly interesting is the blend between hundred old paintings, photographs etc. and modern technologies.” Enigmatriz creates unique contrasts between images — historical paintings are overlaid with spatterings of text, ASCII renders are layered on top of playing cards or archival imagery.
You can find more of their work on Instagram.
The style of ShouXin’s drawings is a perfect match for their subject matter — cats are simultaneously wild and carefully composed. (via colossal)
These are some of my favorite portrait illustrations from Sofia Bonati.
In her art you’ll find female portraits that invite you into a dreamlike world where the woman and her surroundings intertwine, connect. They are women with deep, mysterious looks, who want to tell us something.
I especially like the more geometric ones that radiate. Prints and original works are available in her shop. (via colossal)
Christian Marclay debuted his 24-hour film The Clock 15 years ago. The film is made up of thousands of clips from movies and TV shows that show timepieces or otherwise make reference to the time of day. I’ve seen chunks of it in a few museums & galleries and it’s wonderful.
Using this extraordinary minute-by-minute timeline of nearly all the scenes that make up The Clock, one person is attempting to reverse engineer the entire film. It’s not The Clock, but it’s A Clock. Here are a couple of excerpts:
Says the creator:
So, when I stumbled upon this Fandom Wiki, where the mysterious user ElevenFiftyNine had seemingly started the task of listing all the movies in The Clock, I couldn’t help myself; I started remaking the whole thing from scratch.
So, since I can’t really say this is The Clock, it is my best attempt at making a Clock, by following the excellent effort by ElevenFiftyNine.
A ten-minute excerpt is free on the website but you need to join the Patreon to watch the entire work-in-progress. According to their most recent update, the film is finished but the final version isn’t online quite yet; October 15th is the release date.
BTW, here’s the creator’s definition of “finished”:
I spoke some months ago about what 100% means for this project, and it is not that it is a fully perfect copy of Marclay’s work. The information available online is incomplete, and new information might appear in the future. For now, 100% means that all available information, is in a Clock.
And incredibly, they have never actually seen The Clock in person:
Unfortunately I have never had a chance to see The Clock, as it is only visible when exhibited at a museum. This is increasingly a rare occurrence, and even then, apparently the queues when it is on show, are monstrous. Never mind that it might be anywhere in the world!
Aside from the clips, I haven’t watched any of this yet, but it is a very tempting alternative to waiting for a rare showing somewhere I happen to be.
A gem of a find by The Public Domain Review of a collection from the Rijksmuseum: photographs of plaster models of the Moon’s surface that were made from observations of the Moon through a telescope.
Peering through a self-made telescope, James Nasmyth sketched the moon’s scarred, cratered and mountainous surface. Aiming to “faithfully reproduce the lunar effects of light and shadow” he then built plaster models based on the drawings, and photographed these against black backgrounds in the full glare of the sun. As the technology for taking photographs directly through a telescope was still in its infancy, the drawing and modelling stages of the process were essential for attaining the moonly detail he wanted.
These are incredible; I love them so much. While Nasmyth’s models were spikier than the Moon’s actual surface, they still look amazingly realistic for something produced in the 1870s. (The 1870s!)
The book from which these were taken also contains this page, where Nasmyth seems to hypothesize that certain mountain ranges on the Moon (and Earth?) are formed by “shrinkage of the globe”:
You win some, you lose some. 🤷♂️
See also Henry Draper’s photographs of the Moon from the 1860s and 1870s.
Artist and poet Marcus Merritt draws objects from films — the TV above is from E.T. and the payphone is from Terminator 2.
I very much dig the spare illustration style here. (via waxy)
Dan Sinker recently visited an arcade full of old school vintage arcade games and documented some of the wonderful typography and design of the game cabinet marquees.
After a while though, I became captivated not by the games themselves but by the incredible art on the cabinets and specifically the marquee, the sign set above the screen, tempting a kid from 1983 to spend their hard-earned quarters. The marquee back then had to do a lot of work, because the games themselves were all low resolution and blocky affairs. The marquee had to sell the idea of the game, the excitement around the concept and the story because the on-screen graphics alone weren’t going to do it. So you made sure that your marquees did the job, filling it with exquisite hand-lettered logos, art borrowed from the pages of fantasy novels, sci-fi, and comics, and vivid color palettes that would shine out into the dark arcade.
I’ve been to Funspot in New Hampshire a few times and it’s so fun to walk around and marvel at all of the 70s, 80s, and 90s graphic design — to see what the past thought the future was going to look like.
In the aftermath of the 2016 election, British American artist Jo Hay began a series of engaging portraits called Persisters “that depict contemporary, trailblazing women in pursuit of civil rights and justice”. Pictured above are her paintings of Letitia James, Elizabeth Warren, Greta Thunberg, Christine Blasey Ford, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Marie Yovanovitch. The portraits are quite large, as you can see in this photo of AOC’s painting.
I also quite like Hay’s other portraits, including this poignant one of Anne Frank.
In the mid-70s, Mike Mandel traveled around the United States photographing photographers as if they were baseball players, capturing the likes of Imogen Cunningham, Ed Ruscha, William Eggleston, and Ansel Adams.
I photographed photographers as if they were baseball players and produced a set of cards that were packaged in random groups of ten, with bubble gum, so that the only way of collecting a complete set was to make a trade. I travelled around the United States visiting about 150 photographic “personalities” and had them pose for me. I carried baseball paraphernalia: caps, gloves, balls, a mask and chest protector, a bat, as well as photographic equipment, and made a 14,000 mile odyssey. Out of this experience came 134 Baseball-Photographer images. I designed a reverse side for the card which would allow for each photographer to fill in their own personal data that in a way referred to the information usually included on real baseball cards: Favorite camera, favorite developer, favorite film, height, weight, etc. I used whatever information each photographer provided me.
You can hear Mandel talking about the project in this SFMOMA video — the gum he included in the packages of cards was donated by Topps:
You can find some of the cards on eBay for around $10-50 apiece and a complete set, signed by Mandel & Imogen Cunningham, can be had for $3,650. (thx, duncan)
Now showing at the Brooklyn Museum (through April 2026) and the ICA in Boston (until Spet 1, 2025) is Christian Marclay’s Doors. Like his masterpiece The Clock, Doors is a film montage, this time of people in movies opening and closing doors.
In Doors (2022), Marclay stitches together hundreds of short film clips featuring the opening and closing of doors. More than a decade in the making, the moving image collage draws from nearly all genres of narrative cinema ranging from French New Wave to Hollywood blockbusters. Carefully edited by Marclay, the visual narrative follows actors entering new spaces, with each door marking an editing point and transitioning between films and soundscapes. The work suggests a labyrinthine journey where protagonists get lost and found again. Marclay describes the video as sculptural – a “mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in.”
The film is 54 minutes long but runs in a continuous loop. These videos feature some footage from the film; this one shows five minutes and this one four minutes:
Here’s Marclay on the process of making the video:
It’s quite difficult to find scenes in cinema showing an actor entering a space and then going into another space. I needed two doors: The actor enters one space and then leaves through another door — so it’s one room to the next room to the next room to the next room, and every time a different actor in a different film. It’s a strange choreography to edit. The door has to be opened in a similar way and at the same speed to make it believable. If someone is running and then you see them peek slowly through the door on the other side, it doesn’t look realistic. I also had to match the motion of pulling or pushing the door. To make things even more complicated, that door is hinged on one side and that has to match, the hinge and the door handle. If done well, the viewer gets sucked in and fooled by these editing tricks. So you see an actor in color in the ’80s entering a black-and-white film from the ’50s, and you know it’s not the same actor, but your mind wants to believe that it is. The trick is to create a flow, an illusion of continuity.
Doors brings to mind Christopher Nolan’s Inception (“a mental architecture that the viewer might or might not follow and get lost in”) and the doorway effect (“The doorway effect or location updating effect is a replicable psychological phenomenon characterized by short-term memory loss when passing through a doorway or moving from one location to another.”)
P.S. The Clock is showing at the Neue Nationalgalerie in Berlin, starting at the end of November and running through Jan 18, 2026.
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