Can you believe this piece of land art was made entirely with footsteps? Crazy man Simon Beck makes these by walking on snow. For hours and hours.
Check out his albums on Facebook for more. There are a lot more.
A daily miasma of frivolity by two wanna-be cultural critics. Or: just, like, some good links, dude.
Tag Archives: art
The New Aesthetic (or: Drones Don’t Wear Wayfarers)
The New Aesthetic (or: Drones Don’t Wear Wayfarers)
Dan Catt on the art movement that’s known as the New Aesthetic:
The New Aesthetics, or at least the aspect I’m looking at, is inspired by computer vision. And computer vision is at the point now that computer graphics was at 30 years ago. The New Aesthetics isn’t concerned with retro 8bit graphics of the past, but the 8bit graphics designed for machines of the now.
Make sure to click through the photos — this one is my absolute favorite. I’d seen some of this NA stuff go by on Twitter but until I read this essay, I thought this stuff was yet more retro-throwback. Don’t get it twisted: I love retro things as much as other 25 year-old, but ultimately “retro-everything” doesn’t really grab me at this point — I expect that most things are going to contain some throwback to the past. (Again, totally OK with this. “Great artists steal.”)
Robots, however are different. Machines don’t care about the 1980s. Drones don’t wear Wayfarers. We’ve discovered seemingly the last agents left in our culture that haven’t been taken in by nostalgia, and they can’t even walk. And more importantly than “four wheels good, two legs bad”, robots see the world in a completely different way from us. And that’s fascinating.
If you agree, or are just curious, I recommend clicking through on all the links in the Catt piece above; but make sure you end up on the New Aesthetic tumblr at some point — great stuff.
Yayoi Kusama: “The Obliteration Room”
Yayoi Kusama: “The Obliteration Room”
This December, in a surprisingly simple yet ridiculously amazing installation for the Queensland Gallery of Modern Ar, artist Yayoi Kusama constructed a large domestic environment, painting every wall, chair, table, piano, and household decoration a brilliant white, effectively serving as a giant white canvas. Over the course of two weeks, the museum’s smallest visitors were given thousands upon thousands of colored dot stickers and were invited to collaborate in the transformation of the space, turning the house into a vibrantly mottled explosion of color.
This is pretty fantastic. Check the pictures of it at Colossal.
“I Love You” by Modeselektor.
(The dope image in the video is by Jason Chan and you can find a wallpaper-size version here.)
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Dean Walton’s poster for Blade Runner. Gorgeous. I bought this and the Fifth Element one, but check out his whole store — he’s got some great stuff there, including a series inspired by classic cars from classic movies.
This is a photograph by Chinese artist Don Hong-Oai.
Wait, did I say “photograph”? What I meant to say was… no actually, this is totally a photograph. From Utata Sunday Salon’s bio by Greg Fallis:
Long Chin-San, who died in 1995 at the age of 104, had developed a style of photography based on the long tradition of landscape imagery in Chinese art. For centuries Chinese artists had been creating dramatic monochromatic landscapes using simple brushes and ink. These paintings weren’t intended to accurately depict nature, but to interpret nature’s emotional impact. …
Long Chin-San, who was born in 1891, had been trained in this classical tradition of painting. At some point in his long career, Long began to experiment in ways to translate that impressionistic style of art into photography. In keeping with the layered approach to scale, he developed a method of layering negatives to correspond with the three tiers of distance. Long taught his method to Don. Don, seeking to more closely emulate the traditional Chinese style, added calligraphy and his seal to the image.
Here’s a Flickr set of a bunch of other photos. Here are four other of my favorites: [1] [2] [3] [4].
Here’s an uncaptioned piece of art from James Gurney’s Dinotopia: A Land Apart From Time. Appearing on page 90, it illustrates the feeding of a Brachiosaurus at the forest village of Treetown.
If you read Dinotopia as a kid but haven’t for years and years, I have excellent news for you: it is every bit as magical as you remember it being. And if you never did, then you won’t regret doing so now.
This is a sculpture of Al Khazneh at Petra carved out of a stack of books by Guy Laramee. This comes from Biblios, one of his two series of landscapes and architecture carved out of books (the other is The Great Wall). Bunch of pics on his site, check them out.
Here’s the first paragraph of his artist statement:
The erosion of cultures – and of “culture” as a whole – is the theme that runs through the last 25 years of my artistic practice. Cultures arise, become obsolete, and are replaced by new ones. With the vanishing of cultures, some people are displaced and destroyed. We are currently told that the paper book is bound to die. The library, as a place, is finished. One might say: so what? Do we really believe that “new technologies” will change anything concerning our existential dilemma, our human condition? And even if we could change the content of all the books on earth, would this change anything in relation to the domination of analytical knowledge over intuitive knowledge? What is it in ourselves that insists on grabbing, on casting the flow of experience into concepts ?
Cleaner removes ‘stain’ from acclaimed artwork
Cleaner removes ‘stain’ from acclaimed artwork
Matthew Day, the Telegraph:
A determined German cleaner destroyed a piece of art valued at £690,000 by cleaning away what she thought was an unsightly stain from the artwork.
The cleaner got to work on an installation by the late and famed artist Martin Kippenberger at a museum in Dortmund.
Entitled “When It Starts Dripping From The Ceilings” the piece comprised a tower of wooden slats with a plastic bowl at the bottom painted brown to give the impression of discolouration caused by water. The cleaner took the paint to be an actual stain and scrubbed the bowl till it looked new.
Whoops. :[
French artist and architect Serge Salat is bringing his immersive installation “Beyond Infinity” to ten cities in China, including Beijing and Shanghai. In this installation, he has created a private cosmos where visitors are invited to journey through endless layers of space mapped out using cubic shapes, panels of mirrors, shifting lights, and music. “Beyond Infinity” is a multi-sensory, multimedia experience that blends Eastern Chinese with Western Renaissance, modern, and contemporary visual culture into a singular work.
I CAN SEE FOREVER