Once we were great, then we committed some unnameable sin and now we endure eternal punishment, fallen from grace. Proof: this long-departed Master of the Universe wrapping paper, the pinnacle of the great Earl Norem's career. (via Super Punch) Read the rest
The story of Santa Fe art collective Meow Wolf is being told in a new documentary. It's called Meow Wolf: Origin Story and it opens nationwide in theaters November 29th. Can't wait!
Read the restWhen a group of young DIY artists in Santa Fe can’t find a door into the art world, they blow open an entirely new portal with their grit, passion, and tenacity. Within just a few short years – and with a little help from George R.R. Martin – this group called Meow Wolf ultimately hits a cultural nerve and garners massive, unexpected success with their exhibit, House of Eternal Return.
The Hands Resist Him has nothing on this strange painting, said to be by Édouard Manet, of a bone-white youth clutching a staring, mouthless mystery mammal. You had a chance of buying it at Sothebys, too, but it was withdrawn from auction at the last minute. Sadly, it's not because anyone who touches it has a sudden memory of touching it, a memory of sudden heat and formless whispers and of the places left empty after unspeakable events. Apparently there's an ownership dispute.
Initially, Sotheby’s said in a statement that the “proceedings pending on a very limited number of lots” had been “fully resolved” and all of those lots were to be included in the evening sale on 30 October. However, the 19th-century painting was later withdrawn “at the request of the consignor”, according to Sotheby’s.
According to a report in the French edition of The Art Newspaper, lot 544, presented as a “favourite” of Bergé, was at the centre of the litigation. The dispute reportedly relates to an agreement between Bergé and his fashion designer partner Yves Saint Laurent and an anonymous party, signed in the early 2000s, that entitled the anonymous claimant to a share of the profits should the painting ever be attributed to Manet.
The full canvas:
Boing Boing friend Cosey Fanni Tutti of pioneering experimental/electronic/art groups Throbbing Gristle, Chris & Cosey, and Coum Transmissions will release a new solo album, Tutti, in February. This is her first solo record since Time To Tell in 1982. Above is the title track, a pulsing (throbbing?) soundscape of electronic rhythm, noise, and Cosey's glorious trumpet. Cosey composed these new tracks as the soundtrack to her autobiographical slideshow Harmonic COUMaction, part of last year's COUM Transmissions retrospective in Hull, England.
"Working on the COUM Transmissions exhibition also coincided with writing my autobiography - collating archive material and re-engaging with my past," Cosey told The Quietus. "My work is a continuum, the past feeding the present and vice versa. The album is an interpretation of my past and present, of my understanding the shifting perceptions of how they inform one another. One form creating another through a metamorphic process."
A gentle reminder about a not-so-gentle book: Cosey's 2017 memoir "Art Sex Music," is a must-read for anyone interested in the history of avant-garde music, performance art, underground culture, radical living, and female empowerment.
Clothing brand Supreme and artist Richard Prince created "18 & Stormy," a new t-shirt design emblazoned with the composited face of Stormy Daniels and eighteen women who have accused Donald Trump of sexual misconduct. The proceeds from the t-shirt benefit Downtown for Democracy, "a political action committee founded by creative people to transform cultural influence into political power."
Chris Fitzgerald writes, "Faced with the complexity and horror of mass shootings, and the helplessness I feel to make any sort of positive change, I tried to channel that energy into an art project that explored non traditional organic materials in the construction of projectiles." Read the rest
Surrealist art/fashion duo Hannah Rose Dalton and Steven Raj Bhaskaran (aka Fecal Matter) designed these deeply bizarre "skin shoes" as part of a Photoshopped image for a Vogue profile on their work last year. After the manipulated photo caused a stir, the artists have now made the shoes real and (sort of) walkable. From Vogue:
Each part was made out of silicon that was shaped and molded to match Dalton’s leg. Skin hue, dents, moles, the arch of the foot, and even the hair mimics Dalton’s actual leg. (“There are little hairs!” she says.) The duo worked with the artist Sarah Sitkin, who specializes in creating replicas of bodies and body parts...
The shoe is like when you are going to Chanel to get a wedding dress. You get the fittings and the customizations. For even me to get the shoe, I have to stand and each of my legs have to be perfectly molded,” says Dalton, while Bhaskaran adds, “It is like creating a custom art piece that is wearable.” The shoes, like anything Chanel, come with a hefty price: The starting rate for the thigh-high is $10,000.
Fecal Matter’s philosophy behind the footwear reflects what they think humans will eventually look like as a result of body modification, social media, and advances in technology.
View this post on InstagramRead the rest
This blurry portrait of a man may not look like much but it just sold at auction for $432,500, nearly 45 times its high estimate. What makes it so special? The Portrait of Edmond Belamy is the work of Artificial Intelligence and it's the first of its kind to sell at a major auction house.
Read the restThis portrait, however, is not the product of a human mind. It was created by an artificial intelligence, an algorithm defined by that algebraic formula with its many parentheses. And when it went under the hammer in the Prints & Multiples sale at Christie’s on 23-25 October, Portrait of Edmond Belamy sold for an incredible $432,500, signalling the arrival of AI art on the world auction stage.
The painting, if that is the right term, is one of a group of portraits of the fictional Belamy family created by Obvious, a Paris-based collective consisting of Hugo Caselles-Dupré, Pierre Fautrel and Gauthier Vernier. They are engaged in exploring the interface between art and artificial intelligence, and their method goes by the acronym GAN, which stands for ‘generative adversarial network’.
‘The algorithm is composed of two parts,’ says Caselles-Dupré. ‘On one side is the Generator, on the other the Discriminator. We fed the system with a data set of 15,000 portraits painted between the 14th century to the 20th. The Generator makes a new image based on the set, then the Discriminator tries to spot the difference between a human-made image and one created by the Generator.
This is as thrilling as when I learned to draw a dog face in third grade! (via r/intereatingasfuck)
David Irvine (AKA gnarledbranch) sent us a selection of photos of his delightful Halloween ornaments painted on salvaged lightbulbs. Read the rest
Today marks the publication of the $100 Dungeons and Dragons Art and Arcana box-set, which contains a 400-page retrospective of the classic art of D&D, a reprint of the notoriously hard Tomb of Horrors module (designed by Gary Gygax to challenge the most overpowered characters), and frameable lithos. Read the rest
In a video released Wednesday, Banksy revealed the "Girl With Balloon" shredding stunt malfunctioned at Sotheby's, noting that it "worked every time" in rehearsals.
Also revealed: the mechanisms inside the frame that supposedly shredded the art were more complicated than the originally shown X-acto blades.
Its new owner, a woman in good standing with the auction house, paid £1.04m for the pre-shredded work and will keep it. The ribboned piece is now called, "Love Is in the Bin."
Previously: Myth-busting the self-shredding Banksy painting Read the rest
Boing Boing pal Dustin "UPSO" Hostetler has published the fifteenth issue of his long-running print 'zine Faesthetic, the exquisitely-produced visual wunderkammer of art/illustration/design. Faesthetic #15 is themed "Convergent Visions" and I was delighted to contribute an essay about the Voyager Golden Record as an iconic artifact of futures thinking. The issue features work by all of these incredible creators: Christan Mendoza, Jon Contino, Adam Griffiths, Adrian Cox, Alex Barrett, Caitlin Russell, Chris Nickels, Dang Olsen, Elaine Miller, Gabrielle Rosenstein, Janne Iivonen, Prate™, Jeremyville, Jim O’Boyle, John Szot, Josh Row, Julian Glander, Justin Harris, Karen Ingram & Nicola Patron, Kyle Knapp, Leanna Perry, Loc Huynh, Maggie Chiang, Marta Piaseczynska, Max Löffler, Okell Lee, Pedro Nekoi, Tara McPherson, Thayer Bray, Bryan C. Lee Jr, and Alison Conway.
Buy Faesthetic for just $10. Here's the story behind this edition:
Read the restThe idea for “Convergent Visions” took root in the halls of South By South West in 2017. After a mind-boggling keynote delivered by biochemist Jennifer Doudna, Faesthetic publisher Dustin Hostetler and creative director Karen Ingram bumped into Hugh Forrest, Chief Programming Officer of SXSW. This chance meeting sparked a conversation between Karen and Dustin that became a collaborative effort with the 2018 SXSW Art Program.
“Convergent Visions” probes various areas in science and technology through an artistic lens. Overarching themes include Design, Health and Wellness, Social Impact and the Intelligent Future become realized through the creativity vibrating and flowing from the minds and fingers of 30 international artists and designers.
With a nod to Donna Haraway’s characterization of the emerging and many-tentacled epoch of the Chthulucene, “Convergent Visions” showcases the visions of these talented creatives.
Chris Veltri, proprietor of San Francisco's legendary Groove Merchant record shop, posted this astounding artifact to his Instagram wunderkammer of outré culture paper ephemera @collagedropoutsf! It's a poster for a lecture by artificial intelligence pioneer Herbert Simon that took place at UC Berkeley in 1974. The speech was titled "How Man and Computers Understand Language."
Far fucking out. Read the rest
Andy Thomas, the artist who creates wonderful paintings depicting historical presidents from each party hanging out, has updated The Republican Club to include Donald Trump. It was spotted on the White House wall during an interview with the president on CBS News.
The artist, who lives in Missouri, United States, was "ecstatic" to discover his art displayed in the White House, he told Time. Republican congressman Darrell Issa reportedly gave it to the President.
"A lot of times gifts aren't really hung up, they're just pushed into a closet somewhere," Mr Thomas said.
Shortly before Trump's election, I'd painted Trump into an earlier variant of Thomas's painting (below; and made a few other tweaks) in expectation of the big win. Folks were mad that I'd called it but such is life in the death of the Republic. Why don't you get grandpa a jigsaw puzzle or something [Amazon].
The University of Michigan's library recently acquired a copy of American Cheese, 20 Slices, by Ben Denzer, a book made from shelf-stable, plastic-wrapped slices of American cheese. Read the rest
Japanese artist Miyu Kojima's dayjob is cleaning up apartments whose occupants have died "lonely deaths" (kodokushi/孤独死), where someone socially isolated declines unnoticed for months or years; the scenes of their death are both sad and grisly, as often they lie dead behind closed doors for a long time before they are missed. Read the rest
