Maps as metaphor
What a great way to start off this morning: a new series of map-based illustrations by Christoph Niemann. Reserve Battery Park is a favorite. So is this omelet recipe:
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kottke.org posts about art
Living still lifes
Remember the painting or reality post from a couple of weeks ago? Alexa Meade’s living still lifes are like that except better.
Shaq: the big art curator
Shaquille O’Neal curated an art exhibition that opened this weekend at Flag Art Foundation in Chelsea.
Do you ever get time to visit museums?
I used to go a lot with my kids. Donald Trump is a great friend, and he has four or five Picassos on his plane. And that’s where I would look at them. One time, I was at a museum and tried touching a Picasso. You break it, you buy it, they said. I was told it would cost $2 million.
Overcoming creative block
A number of designers, artists, and photographers share how they combat creative block. One solution begins:
Slice and chop 2 medium onions into small pieces.
Put a medium sized pan on a medium heat with a few glugs of olive oil.
Add the onions to the pan, and a pinch of salt and pepper.
Timeline paintings
Ward Shelley paints these wonderfully intricate timelines of different things…his life, Frank Zappa’s career, and the history of the avant garde.
Super Bowl art bet
The Indianapolis Museum of Art and the New Orleans Museum of Art have a Super Bowl bet…the loser loans a significant piece of art to the winner for three months. The directors of the two museums trash talked back and forth via email and Twitter before agreeing on the paintings to be loaned.
“Max Anderson must not really believe the Colts can beat the Saints in the Super Bowl. Otherwise why would he bet such an insignificant work as the Ingrid Calame painting? Let’s up the ante. The New Orleans Museum of Art will bet the three-month loan of its Renoir painting, Seamstress at Window, circa 1908, which is currently in the big Renoir exhibition in Paris. What will Max wager of equal importance? Go Saints!”
(thx, stuart)
Henri Cartier-Bresson retrospective at MoMA
Upcoming at MoMA: a retrospective of the work of Henri Cartier-Bresson.
For more than twenty-five years, he was the keenest observer of the global theater of human affairs — and one of the great portraitists of the twentieth century. MoMA’s retrospective, the first in the United States in three decades, surveys Cartier-Bresson’s entire career, with a presentation of about three hundred photographs, mostly arranged thematically and supplemented with periodicals and books.
After MoMA, the exhibition will visit Chicago, SF, and Atlanta. Quite excited for this one.
Motoi Yamamoto’s salt labyrinths
Artist Motoi Yamamoto creates intricate large scale mazes using salt. I love this one, an installation at the Sumter County Gallery of Art in South Carolina:
His Utsusemi installations are worth checking out as well.
American Pixels
American Pixels is a project by Joerg Colberg that uses jpeg compression algorithms to create compelling images. From the technical notes:
ajpeg is a new image compression algorithm where the focus is not on making its compression efficient but, rather, on making its result interesting. As computer technology has evolved to make artificial images look ever more real - so that the latest generation of shooter and war games will look as realistic as possible - ajpeg is intended to go the opposite way: Instead of creating an image artificially with the intent of making it look as photo-realistic as possible, it takes an image captured from life and transforms it into something that looks real and not real at the same time.
Modern fossils
Artist Christopher Locke makes fossil sculptures of extinct technology, including cassette tapes, rotary telephones, and boom boxes.
3-D effect in CSS
Roman Cortes took Diego Velázquez’s Las Meninas and applied a pseudo 3-D parallax effect to it using only CSS. Awesome. Now redo The Kid Stays in the Picture entirely in CSS.
Selling Wants to buy Haves
I love this project: a couple of NYC artists do paintings of items that they want and sell the art to buy the items.
Each painting shows one thing we want, and sells for the price of the real item. So you can buy A Slice of Pepperoni for $3.00 or Dinner at Nobu for $152.00. When the painting sells we use the money to go out and buy that thing.
The other half of the project is the documentation of the purchase/enjoyment of the item; here’s the outcome of “Custom Adidas”. (via clusterflock)
Update: C.J. Cubitt reminded me of J.S.G. Boggs, an artist who draws realistic-looking money and trades it for goods and services…the goods, receipt, and any change become the artwork. Here’s one of his hand-drawn bills:
Update: Dorothy Gambrell of Cat and Girl solicits donations and then draws the stuff she buys. (thx, sean & seth)
Update: The same artists also do Needs for Sale…the sales benefit charities.
Iron Maiden mp3 compressed 666 times
An oldie but goodie from Cory Arcangel: an mp3 of Iron Maiden’s The Number of the Beast compressed 666 times. (via lined and unlined)
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