Earlier this week, Mark told you about a couple of the cool art projects happening on a frozen lake in Minnesota. The Art Shanty Projects are a semi-annual wintertime tradition up here. And it's a sort-of send up of a much older tradition.

Every winter, there's a lot of ice fishing that happens in Minnesota. On the smaller lakes in Minneapolis, people set up temporary tents to shield themselves from the wind while they drill through the ice and wait and drink. But out on the larger lakes, the shelters become a lot more elaborate. Ice fishing "shanties" might come with bunk beds, carpeting, satellite TV, and kegarators. They're left on the lakes—which turn into temporary neighborhoods—all season long. From the outside, some of these fishing shanties just look like a trailer camper, or a plywood box. But it's not unusual to see fishermen get creative—decorating their shanties with tropical paint jobs, designing them to be fish-shaped. There's even a fish shanty parade in a small town in northern Minnesota.

This is where the Art Shanty Projects come in. Basically, they build on things Minnesotans have been doing for years, but with the priorities flipped. At the Art Shanty Projects—which run through this weekend on Minnesota's Medicine Lake—the emphasis is on art and creativity, rather than fishing. It gives artists, makers, and groups of friends with a good idea the chance to build something wild and whimsical and wonderfully interactive.

This year, I got to follow one group of shanty builders as they built their "Monsters Under the Bed" shanty at the Minneapolis Hack Factory, and then took it out on the ice.

The discovery of Kepler 22-b, a planet that exists in the habitable zone of a star 600 light years away from Earth, lead Etsy user Alisa to curate a collection of really neat products themed around space and exobiology.

My favorite: A set of plush dolls designed to demonstrate the evolution of a fuzzy blue monster from a single-celled organism.

Roomba art —

In The Cult of Lego, my co-author Joe Meno and I devote a whole chapter to art, both works created with bricks as well as art using more traditional media featuring Lego as the subject matter.

Despite the success of museum exhibitions such as Nathan Sawaya's nationally-touring "Art of the Brick", inevitably some people claim that Lego is not a serious artistic medium. While I don't see how someone can look at Sawaya's amazing works, or those by such mainstream artists as Olafur Eliasson and Douglas Coupland which feature the bricks, and not agree it's art, nevertheless there are doubters.

Enter Lego fan and philosophy professor Roy Cook, who wrote an essay contending that yes, Lego can be art.

From The Cult of Lego:

As Lego makes its way into galleries, it’s sure to provoke a reaction from visitors who don’t think it belongs there. Conversely, the artists featured in this chapter obviously disagree. Who is right?

Unfortunately, there’s no easy answer. Scholars have debated the concept’s definition for centuries and continue to do so to this day. However, most theorists agree that art involves three criteria: form, content, and context. Roy Cook, a Lego fan and professor of philosophy at the University of Minnesota, wrote an essay arguing that Lego, by this definition, can clearly be called art. He uses the following criteria:

Form refers to the medium and the skill used to manipulate that medium, Cook’s essay explains. A work must typically display masterful technique to be considered art. Surely numerous models demonstrate a high level of skill. As with any technically demanding medium, there will always be works that stand out as being exemplary.

Content is the statement the piece makes or the meaning behind it. Even if this message is so obscure that only the artist can grasp it, there has to be some sort of thought behind the piece. It seems like a given: If artists desire to make a statement with a Lego model, they can do it.

Context refers to the culture and artistic tradition into which the work is placed. Andy Warhol’s soup cans outside the context of Pop Art probably would not have been considered art. As Cook points out in his essay, there is no widespread artistic tradition surrounding Lego. Just as novels were considered trash literature in the 18th century and graphic novels battle for legitimacy today, Lego simply doesn’t have the acceptance it needs to be considered legitimate art. That doesn’t mean that Lego can’t be art; there simply is no longstanding body of formal, accepted Lego art to place a model within.

[The photo at the top of this post depicts art by James "AME72" Ame, whose work may be found in The Cult of Lego.]

I love Thumbtack Press, because they make excellent art prints, offer high quality framing of the prints they sell, and pay their artists a very good commission. I've been offering my work at Thumbtack Press for years, and couldn't be more pleased with their service and product quality.

Today, they introduced my latest print, Flower, Daughter of Googam, which is based on a painting I did for a Jack Kirby Museum benefit art show. You can buy the print in a variety of formats and sizes, including stretched canvas, which looks very much like a painting.

Flower, Daughter of Googam on Thumbtack Press

The Fire Fly has landed! On November 10, “Randy Regier: H. Maxwell Fisher’s Underground Toy Emporium and Spaceship Parking” opened at Jim Kempner Fine Art, 501 West 23rd Street, NYC, where it remains on view through December 23.

According to the gallery’s press release, “Jim Kempner Fine Art, in collaboration with Mr. Fisher’s eldest son, H. Maxwell Fisher II, is pleased to announce the estate sale of the toy store’s entire remaining – and for that matter, what was indeed the store’s opening day – stock.” Apparently, the basement of the building the gallery currently occupies was, many years ago, the site of Fisher’s stillborn toy store.

One a recent art crawl in St. Paul, Minnesota, I ran across the work of Michael Bahl.

Dressed in a white lab coat, Bahl bills his work as "post-osteological interpretation." Basically, he's built both skeletal monsters, and an ostensibly real research history to go with them. This creature, for instance, is a Chalicotherium laurentian. She is an adult female, part of a trio of fossil animals that includes an adult male and a juvenile. Here's Bahl's statement on the C. laurentian family.

Discovered in 1887 by Harold Vanselow, a maverick dinosaur hunter and at one time a member of the Othniel Charles Marsh team from the Yale Peabody Museum, this Chalacothere was named appropriately enough after the Laurentian Divide in Northern Minnesota where tributaries of the St. Lawrence River divide and flow in two directions.

Dating from the Miocene era, the bones of these creatures retain the rich, deep color of the Iron Range where they once roamed in large herds. The purpose of the male's secondary head has been much debated, some experts believing it to be fully functional while others maintain it was most probably used in the mating ritual.

Research indicates that the family grouping seen here was first exhibited in the late 19th Century at a private museum in London and assembled by Walter Vernon, the well-known enfant terrible of those early years of prehistoric osteological display. Vernon's philosophy was explained in a lengthy article which appeared in 1901. He stated that he felt his specimens acknowledged not only the accurate presentation of a skeleton, but the millions of years that the bones had been part of the earth itself and the impact the internment had on them. "Tribute must be paid to the beauty given to these beasts by the greatest of artists -- time."

The exhibit caused a furor in scientific circles largely because no other specimens or even fragments had been unearthed. It was both hailed as a work of art and villified as "expressionistic". Matters were complicated further by the disappearance of Vanselow's notebooks and meticulously detailed maps. The exhibit vanished in 1904 after fire destroyed the hall in which it was housed, and as if by unspoken agreement it was quietly forgotten.

Then, in 1994, the bones were rediscovered embedded in the foundation of a home in South St. Paul, Minnesota. They had been packed in crates originating in Prague circa 1914 and, since the house had been built in 1939, it is not known where the remains of this might species had been kept. Although some structural repairs were necessary, the specimens are otherwise presented here in the splendidly ancient condition in which they were found.

This amazing shot was taken in Norway by Ole Christian Salomonsen. It's one of the many photos featured in National Geographic's upcoming photo book, Visions of Earth. You can check out a video preview of some of the other photos on YouTube.

At the Atlantic, science historian Suzanne Fischer has a really interesting post up about the development of pointe shoes. In the early 20th century, at a time when all sorts of technologies were remaking the way people lived, worked, and played, pointe shoes were doing the same thing for ballerinas.

In particular, Fischer writes, pointe shoes were almost the dance equivalent of Henry Ford's assembly line—they standardized bodies and turned dancers into a sleek, modern commodity.

... the new shoes forced dancers' bodies to move in new ways. Dancers on this pointe regimen developed characteristically long, lean leg muscles. Balanchine also encouraged dancers to let the shoes remake their bodies, including developing bunions that gave the foot just the right line. And as their bodies were remade, dancers became "like IBM machines," modern and indistinguishable. This had consequences for labor, too. For one, stars became a less central feature of dance companies as dancers became more interchangeable, and second, dancers came to spend hours working on their shoes -- altering, gluing, and caring for them. In fact, in 1980 dancers threatened to strike -- not over hours or pay, but for better pointe shoes, and better management of them.