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Sarah Trigg’s work combines geographic maps with biological forms. “The explorer system [in colonial North America] caused the Native American system to change its normal functioning, much like cancer cells do to normal cells.” More here. (via moon river)
Current world record holder for most money paid for a painting: Gustav Klimt. Prize money was accepted posthumously by Maria Altmann, an heir of the painting’s subject.
Tutorial on how to draw a photorealistic portrait using only Photoshop 6 and a mouse. Look out, Robert Bechtle.
New project from Cory Arcangel: Kurt Cobain’s suicide letter with Google AdSense ads (which are automatically generated based on the content of the page). Current ads include ones for free ringtones, techniques to end anxiety, and public speaking training.
Iconic LA mural of Ed Ruscha by Kent Twitchell painted over by unknown dumbshits. (via eclectic times)
Update: A photo of the mural from May 22, 2006. (thx, mark)
myDaVinci takes your photo and pastes your face onto the Mona Lisa. Not a fan of Leonardo? Try being the Girl with a Pearl Earring or American Gothic. (via ais)
Quite a few photographic homages to Rene Magritte. I love this updated classic.
10,000 sheep drawn by workers hired through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. Average wage for the artists? $0.69 per hour. (via waxy)
The work of Canadian artist Rob Gonsalves is part Salvador Dali, part Rene Magritte, and part M.C. Escher. This is one of my favorite images of his, called Tributaries:
I also quite like Community Portrait. Here’s some of his other stuff and a book of his images.
Artist Jeremiah Palecek has recently been painting pieces inspired by video games, including Super Mario Bros.
Plan is a photographic project by Aneta Grzeszykowska and Jan Smaga consisting of overhead views of apartments. “Such an unusual effect was achieved through the use of a special technique: the overall picture of a room is an aggregate of dozens fragmentary photographs taken from above, and then merged using a computer.” More here. A bit NSFW.
Short interview with Chris Ware upon the occasion of a show of his work at the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. “I’ve found that anything I do [to] carefully plan and pare down in advance feels utterly false and constructed once I actually do it, having nothing of the sort of accident and unevenness of real life that I hope to, at least, modestly edge towards.”
Interview with photographer Alec Soth. “I feel like a large part of photography is like a performance. And the photograph is like a document of this performance, of this encounter with the world.” Many interviews with photographers often end up sounding very similar, but I enjoy reading them anyway. (via eyeteeth)
In March of 2004, an artist named Tofu began constructing a map comprised only of the hometowns of American men and women killed in Iraq (map detail). “One of the disturbing by products of this work are the maps of various states with many rectangular pieces missing where I cut out towns.” (via moon river)
Do rich artists make bad art? “When you become as rich as [Warhol or Dali], being as rich as this becomes your story. If you don’t make art about being a multimillionaire, you are being dishonest. If you do, you can hardly claim the universality of great art.” (via rw)
Some photos and sketches of WWI ships painted with “Razzle Dazzle” camouflage. “The primary goal of dazzle painting [which took visual cues from cubism] was to confuse the U-boat commander who was trying to observe the course and speed of his target.” (via cf)
Sand animation art. Watch the videos…it’s cooler than it sounds. (thx, brock)
Wired Magazine profiles Josh Davis. Davis typically gets too much credit for being controversial and too little for his work. His speeches/appearances are well worth seeking out; they’re entertaining, informative, and inspiring.
Whitney Biennial 2006, through May 28 in NYC. NY Times review. Momus describes his first day as a performance artist at the Biennial.
The Captain of Design himself points us to the ski trail maps of James Nieuhues. Nieuhues is a prolific fellow…he’s done paintings for most of the large ski resorts in the western US.
Pruned has collected some lovely petri dish scenes full of fractal patterns.
Billions and billions of bacterial landscape architects pruning — no less in environments poisoned with antibiotics — other bacterial landscape architects, dead or alive, to form dazzling arabesque parterres. The self-organizing embroidery of organisms in constant Darwinian mode.
More here. See also ferrofluid.
A statement on art statements. “I have no way of actually proving this, but I am convinced that many photographers do not have all that stuff from their statements in their heads and then go out to shoot the photography. I have the suspicion that some of them, after having shot their photos, have a hard time writing something that can pass as a statement, because ‘I just wanted to take beautiful photos of rubble piles’ somehow doesn’t appear to be acceptable.”
Who knew David Sedaris’ family was so full of art experts? “I don’t know if you realize it, but it seems that Picasso is actually Spanish.”
A 1904 photograph by Edward Steichen was recently sold at auction for more than $2.9 million, the most anyone’s ever paid for a photo at auction. (via consc)
Dorian Lynskey “[charted] the branches and connections of 100 years of music using the London Underground map”, much like Simon Patterson’s The Great Bear. (gs)
Mark Rothko’s Seagram murals were to hang in the then-new Four Seasons restaurant in NYC. How did they come to hang instead in the Tate Modern in London?
Averaging Gradius is a movie of 15 simultaneous games of Gradius layered on top of each other. Robin says: “So what you see, instead of a single ship going at it, is a fuzzy cloud of ships — bright where strategies overlap, faint where someone does something especially daring (or dumb).” Very cool; reminds me of Jason Salavon’s amalgamation of Playboy centerfolds.
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