The gentlemen at Trustocorp decided to take Brooklyn’s hipster population down a peg with this sign, bolted up guerilla-style in the heart of Williamsburg. We don’t think they’re kidding.
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via Good.IsThis piece comes from the How Many Billboards project, an art movement currently taking over billboards throughout Los Angeles. This one is meant to remind Angelenos what clouds look like.
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Bogotá’s Stencil Festival is well underway, and it’s producing one of the best Flickr feeds in recent memory. At the moment, there are almost 200 pics of murals, spray-painted hand-trucks and a generally vibrant street scene. Just in case you weren’t doing anything this morning…
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If you’re not a fan of 70s baseball or psychopharmacology, you may have missed one of the crowning achievements of baseball: Dock Ellis’ 1970 no-hitter, pitched under the influence of LSD. Fortunately, you’ll have plenty of chances to brush up on your history. In November, No Mas graced us with a video reenactment, but our favorite artist’s rendering would have to be this Brad Klaussen print, courtesy of LA’s Gallery1988. From the looks of it, we’d say he was slinging a whole lot more than heat.
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We’ve never been sure how many mods there still are roaming the streets of London, but Dean Chalkley seems to have found a few.
These well-dressed young lads are part of an exhibition currently running at London’s Book Club dubbed “The New Faces”—the title came from his pal Paul Weller, of course—and seems to have been done with minimal styling. Which is to say, they walk around the street like this.
To be honest, we didn’t think there was anyone this sharp outside of Paul Smith’s showroom, but we’re happy to be wrong.
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Nobody likes a grouchy critic, but if you put those same sentiments on a tote bag, you can get away with just about anything.
Case in point: this cloth sack modeled off a John Baldessari lithograph, currently on sale at the Tate Modern. If you can’t make out the cursive, it reads “I will not make boring art,” scrawled out a mind-numbing 26 times on each side.
That should teach him…
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With both claymation and comic books safely transitioned from childhood curios to highbrow art, it’s time for a few more nostalgia pieces to make the leap. And we’ve always been partial to coloring books…
This one in particular—part of the Between the Lines series—has some serious high art pedigree, with uncolored illustrations from Takashi Murakami, Raymond Pettibon and newly minted sneaker empersario Kehinde Wiley. They’re all incomplete works…but that’s the whole point. It’s one of the smarter open collaborations the art world’s seen in quite a while. All that’s missing is a place to see the works after they’ve gotten a little crayon on them, but it’s nothing a tumblr couldn’t solve.
And if you were wondering about the $20 price tag, the proceeds go to RxArt, a non-profit dedicated to bringing art into hospital settings. Hopefully they’ll bring a few books along for the ride.
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Not many artists are suited to make the leap to sneakers, but if we had to choose, Kehinde Wiley would be at the top of our list.
He’s best known for combining a neoclassical streak with a genuine affection for street culture (his take on Ice-T is a pretty good example), but apparently he’s decided all those rococo patterns wouldn’t look bad on a pair of hi-tops either. These kicks come from Puma’s new Africa collection, with a pattern borrowed from Mr. Wiley, who borrowed the look from traditional Subsaharan textiles. There are a few track jackets and t-shirts along for the ride, but they don’t capture the “regal streetwear” vibe quite as well as these.
If he’s as marketing-savvy as the rest of the art world, they might even end up in a painting or two.
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If we have one complaint about modern art, it’s that you can’t imprint it on your bicep. Fortunately, it looks like Jenny Holzer and the Whitney have the same objection.
To coincide with Holzer’s PROTECT PROTECT show—much of which is context-free sentences on text crawls—the Whitney gift shop is offering those same phrases in temporary-tattoo form, in fonts that range from 80s metal band to 70s porn. The full set will run you $35 bucks, or roughly five bucks a day until they wear off.
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This installation piece (hat tip) piled more than a half-ton of white cardboard sheets in a gallery space, placing it somewhere between fine art and an extremely aesthetically astute prank. Hopefully there’s an art lover out there with a spare room…
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It’s time for somethin, at least according to this chunk of wood from Brooklyn’s Avoid Pi. We’re not sure what that somethin is, but it definitely looks shiny.
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Artist and pamphleteer Will Bryant just posted this helpful silkscreened one-sheet (hat tip), drawing our attention to the aquatic capabilities of the fairer sex. Take it to heart, gentlemen.
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It would appear the art world isn’t immune to a little financial chicanery. This gold brick is currently on sale at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art as a paperweight/doorstop, but if the $80 price tag seems a little low for ten ounces of gold there’s a reason: it’s gilded aluminum stamped with a few significant dates and christened as art.
Of course, you could always pick up the genuine article for a few hundred more…but you’d have to leave the museum first.
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A lot of work goes into a good graffiti mural—you just don’t see it because of the whole “rule of law” thing. Fortunately, a crew called the Central Illustration Agency was able to get together with a camera crew and a wall-owner to produce this video to show you how it’s done. Consider it a devil’s night gift.
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Unless you’ve got an unusually thorough sports calendar, you may have missed one of the most important boxing anniversaries on the books. 35 years ago today, Muhammad Ali and George Foreman converged on Zaire for the Rumble in the Jungle—cementing Ali’s legend and unleashing Don King on a more or less unsuspecting public.
In honor of the occasion, New York’s No Mas is taking a break from their usual diet of vintage-styled tees to produce a trio of animated shorts about the Rumble, including a spirited faceoff between Ali and a jumpsuited James Brown. Using live radio transcripts, audio collage and oil paints, it might be as close to the feeling of the real thing as we can get…at least on the internet.
Sad news today: Bravura lensman Irving Penn has ascended to the great lightbox in the sky. Whether you recognized them or not, you’ve seen dozens of Penn snaps in museums and magazines over the past few decades—a tip: look for the billowy backdrop—and at least that many from photographers directly in his shadow. We imagine the staffers at Vogue have other things than history on their mind at the moment, but Penn’s career is a reminder of what fashion photography is capable of when it’s given the chance. Fare thee well, sir.
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Anyone wondering what Takashi Murakami would be up to next should start booking a flight. In Paris on the 15th, he’ll be exhibiting his first show of new work since a slew of retrospectives last year. There won’t be any Louis Vuitton, but Kanye should be well represented: out of 17 works, three will be statues of Kanye’s notorious bear figure. Well played, Mr. West.
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This in-room installation piece just debuted at The White Hotel in Brussels, making for one of the more hallucinatory hotel stays in Europe. There’s a microphone just off-camera, and any sound it picks up gets translated into colored bubbles, which projected onto the wall above the bed. The result is a cascade of Technicolor circles, which bounce over the headboard, the night table and (eventually) the ground. It looks pretty good…but for the sake of our sleep cycle, we hope there’s an off-switch.
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The Sartorialist has spent the past few days recounting a few of his favorite photographers, and it’s surprisingly far from the usual glossy editorial crowd.
Today, Mr. Schumann singled out the Weimar-era lensman August Sander, and while you won’t find his books in any fashion shops just yet, he makes a lot of sense as a proto-Sartorialist. For one, the poses are just about dead on.
Of course, instead of Italian businessmen and West Village doyennes, Sander’s lens seeks out carnival folk and country brass bands. But as luck would have it, they’ve got a pretty decent style of their own.
Street art isn’t known for its sentiment, but it can get plenty sappy when you give it a chance. Exhibit A: a twenty-block-and-counting multi-artist project currently making its way across the brick walls of Philadelphia. The sentimental part? Well, it’s called the Love Letter Project…
PSFK checked in recently to celebrate the twentieth mural, but there’s still plenty to be done. All told, the group is planning to end up with 50 murals, two books, a sign language school and a documentary film…so they’ve still got quite a bit of work ahead of them. In the meantime, anyone stopping through the city of Brotherly Love should consider taking a ride on the Market Street elevated line to see all the murals in succession. And bring a date.
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Via NotCotWeb-based culture criticism usually specializes in subculture mining or and oh-so-thinly veiled contempt, so it was only a matter of time before someone combined the two. This chart splits the art world’s nooks and crannies into two camps—stoner and douche—providing you with a handy excuse to snootily ignore just about anything. N.B.: By douche, we think they mean pretentious gallery-hoppers not clubrats…but we’re not sure which of the two is into Thomas Kinkade.
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This bifurcated gentleman is currently residing at Brooklyn’s English Kills, as part of a gallery-wide collaboration between two artists known as J & J. They each contributed half their face, along with a fair amount of woodworking know-how, and ended up with a remarkably unsettling sculpture. Call it an ode to the creative process?
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It’s a sign of the times: Where Monet had water lilies, we have internet detritus.
Sophie Blackall (via CoolHunting) takes inspiration from the thousands of missed connections posted on craigslist every day. The accompanying Gorey-esque drawings create likenesses based on the provided description, but we’re guessing they’re all a lot less whimsical in person.
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As tech trends go, Twitter is unusually ripe for conceptual art—in fact, is @barbarakruger taken yet? This one is dubbed Murmur Study #1 (via NotCot), and it plants 20 receipt-style twitter tickers at the top of a wall, letting the tweets pile up on a bench below. By the end of the day, gallery-goers should be facing quite a pile…especially if anything happens to Jeff Goldblum.
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We can never see enough Hollywood and rock photography, especially when it comes from the sweet spot between the mid 60s and the mid 70s, when just about everyone was young, attractive, and wearing corduroy.
So we were glad to run across Terry O’Neill’s latest exhibition, double-posted at GQ UK and CNN. Our favorite shot is this windy snap of Brigitte Bardot, but there are plenty more of Brian Jones, an aquatic Raquel Welch, and the underrated style icon David Hemmings. Consider it your morning inspiration.
