JUST FOR HUE: THE QUARANTINE COLOR PALETTE IS REAL AND IT’S HERE!
As many people enter the eight consecutive month of Life in the Time of COVID and further come to terms with its norms — working from home, Zoom calls, mask wearing, social distancing, economic insecurity, and all the inherent anxieties — and cope with the chaotic social and political eventsContinue Reading
LA LA LAND: INTERACTIVE DRIVE-BY PHOTO ARCHIVE OF EVERY BUILDING ON EVERY BLOCK OF SUNSET BLVD IN L.A.!
The Getty Museum has launched a website called 12 Sunsets that is a fascinating interactive archive of 65,000 photos taken over 50 years of every building and every block on one famed Los Angeles street by one famed artist. The photo archive is the vast output of a project byContinue Reading
VIDEO REWIND: REVISITING WES ANDERSON’S FANTASTIC “RUSHMORE”
Earlier this week we re-watched “Rushmore,” the early-career Wes Anderson film starring Bill Murray and Jason Schwartzman. The movie was released in 1998. Since then we’ve seen the film three or four times. The last time we viewed it was maybe five years ago. “Rushmore” holds up exceptionally well afterContinue Reading
CURATORS GONE WILD: A SELECT LIST OF WONDERFULLY OBSCURE AND UNUSUAL MUSEUMS!
From professionally curated museums devoted to specific sub-genres of art to suburban homes-turned-museums devoted to the usually discarded ephemera of modern life, from a bullfighting museum in Seville, Spain to an Afro-Brazilian culture museum in Sao Paulo, the world is full of small, obscure museums, many in unusual locales. TheContinue Reading
CYCLICAL: BALLET MOVES ON TWO WHEELS!
Awesome short little video of a ballet-like performance on a bicycle in the ballroom of a beautiful old European castle courtesy of Viola Loves Cycling. Take a a break for a few minutes from the crazy, dumpster-fire of a year that is 2020 and enjoy the video!
THRILLS, PILLS & SHARKS: NEW DAMIEN HIRST EXHIBITION BRINGS BACK THE FORMALDEHYDE SHARK AND MUCH, MUCH MORE!
British artist Damien Hirst made a name for himself in the early 1990s with a sensational exhibition of works that included a dead shark suspended in a tank of formaldehyde. The artwork was titled “The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living” and it left an indelible,Continue Reading
DESIGNED! HEAT-ACTIVATED POSTAGE STAMPS REVEAL CLIMATE CHANGE INFO!
The Post Office of Finland recently commissioned a new set of stamps designed to reveal informative stories about climate change when activated by heat. The heat can be generated by simply rubbing the stamp with a finger. The Finnish design firm Berry Creative designed the stamps, which are beautiful andContinue Reading
HERE TODAY, GONE TOMORROW: WHAT HAPPENS WHEN ARTWORK SELF-DESTRUCTS, ROTS, FALLS APART, BREAKS, ETC.?
Museums are increasingly having to deal with works of art that require regular maintenance during periods of exhibition and throughout their ownership. Some artwork, like Maurizio Cattelan’s brilliant, cheeky, and provocative 2019 duct-taped banana (pictured above) titled “Comedian” will rot, and the banana needs to be replaced every few days.Continue Reading
KNOCK KNOCK! : PHOTOS OF STARS IN THEIR DRESSING ROOMS!
Photographer Simon Annand has had incredible access to the backstage dressing rooms of London’s theatres for decades. As the Guardian newspaper in the U.K. reports Annand has published a new photography book of 200 some images of film and theatre stars in their dressing rooms. They appears in various modesContinue Reading
DENIED! BANKSY TRIES AND FAILS TO TRADEMARK GRAFFITI ARTWORK!
As if 2020 wasn’t a weird, dumpster fire of year already, especially in the United States where political goings-ons of the past couple of weeks have dominated news headlines, there have been some weird news in the art world. As the New York Times reported the anonymous British artist BanksyContinue Reading
FAREWELL: A MASTER PAINTER OF PHOTO-REALISTIC SUBURBIA AND CARS DIES
We just learned of the passing last week of artist Robert Bechtle. If you’ve visited enough art museums and galleries around the world, but especially in America, you’ve very likely encountered one of Bechtle’s hyper photo-realistic paintings. The subject matter of his paintings were often mundane scenes of American suburbiaContinue Reading
CHILLIN’! : PHOTOS OF LIFE IN REMOTE SIBERIAN HINTERLAND ARE STUNNINGLY BEAUTIFUL!
Photogapher Alexey Vasilyev’s images of the Sakha (a.k.a., Yakutia) area of Siberia are a fascinating look at the locales, people and culture of Russia’s largest region. It’s place of weather extremes and isolated living. Winters are brutally cold (temperatures remain below zero for more over half the year). Summers areContinue Reading
FONTASTICAL: HOW THE “GENTRIFICATION FONT” BECAME SO! SECRETS REVEALED!
You’ve seen it. You know it. It’s a typeface used across all types of media. But when deployed for street-address numbers, it’s visual shorthand. This typeface is a denotation of a certain type of taste and style. And it suggests something expensive. Though it’s not ostentatious or “fancy” or traditionalContinue Reading
LOVIN’ IT: TRAVIS SCOTT AND MCDONALDS JOIN FORCES IN LIMITED-TIME COLLABO!
. . . . . For the past two years the tune “Sicko Mode” by rapper Travis Scott has occupied a prominent spot on a few of my Spotify playlists. This has meant that I’ve listened to the song almost every day, if not multiple times a day, for theContinue Reading
APOCALYPSE NOW NOW! VIDEO OF SAN FRANCISCO SHROUDED IN SMOKEY ORANGEY LIGHT DUE TO CALIFORNIA WILDFIRES!
. . . . . . If you live in California, you might say it’s been “a little hot” lately. Between record-shattering heatwaves that saw 121-degree Fahrenheit (49.44 Celsius) temperatures in the Los Angeles suburb of Woodland Hills to the record-shattering wildfires ravaging the state from north to south, itContinue Reading
WHIPLASH: LOOKING BACK AT THE “COOL” CARS OF THE 1980s!
Did you live through the 1980s and now pine for the cars of yesteryear in some mid-life crisis-induced reverie of New Wave-era nostalgia? Yes? Ok, then the Car & Drive magazine list of the “30 Coolest Cars of the 1980s” is for YOU! It’s a visual trip down memory laneContinue Reading
VIRULENT: ARTIST AI WEI WEI RELEASES DOCUMENTARY FILM ABOUT CORONAVIRUS OUTBREAK IN WUHAN, CHINA
. . . . . Chinese artist Ai Wei Wei has produced a documentary film about the early days of the coronavirus in Wuhan, China. The film is called “Coronation” and can be viewed on demand on Vimeo, among other outlets. The film (see ominous trailer above) appears to documentContinue Reading
IN IT FOR THE MONEY: ARTIST PAINTS PORTRAITS OF CELEBS AND POLITICAL FIGURES ON U.S. DOLLAR BILLS!
Los Angeles artist Claire Salvo has a new series of portraits that she’s painted on United States dollar bills. The portraits are of celebrity women from the worlds of entertainment and politics. Pictured in this post are Grammy award-winning musician Billie Eilish and U.S. Vice-Presidential nominee Senator Kamala Harris. SeeContinue Reading
RISE AND SHINE: ARTIST-DESIGNER PAINTS SUNRISE VIEWS FROM HIS APT. ON N.Y. TIMES COVERS, HONORS JACOB BLAKE!
The artwork is part of a series by New York City-based artist and designer Sho Shibuya, who paints sunrise view from his apartment on the front page of the New York Times. He recently painted one with seven holes in it in honor of Jacob Blake, who was recently killedContinue Reading
DESIGNED! SWEDISH FURNITURE AND MEATBALL JUGGERNAUT IKEA UPLOADS 72-YEARS WORTH OF PRODUCT CATALOGS!
Here’s a bit of Swedish you can bust out at cocktail parties (remember those?) when the global COVID-19 pandemic ends and social gatherings become a thing again: The word is ” överväldigad!”* Roughly translated it means “mind blown!” And that’s what we uttered, dare we say “exclaimed,” when we heardContinue Reading