sundance

It’s you, perfected!

There are many reasons not to read women’s magazines. One of the biggies? All the retouched photos. The genetic mutants we call models and celebrities can beat the shit out your average Jane’s self image, but Photoshop can chop it up with chainsaw. This before and after cover of Red Book from a few years ago thanks to Jezebel.com says it all. In fact, Jezebel has made one of their crusades exposing the evils of Photoshop (here’s their most recent “unveiling”). One of the funniest commentaries on how fucked up Photoshop is when it comes to setting impossible beauty standards is this recent parody of a beauty product commercial by Jesse Rosten on Vimeo: “Just one application of Fotoshop can give you results so dramatic, they’re almost unreal…istic.”

Creating spaces: Rolex mentor and protege Anish Kapoor & Nicholas Hlobo

Both Anish Kapoor and his Rolex Arts Initiative protégé Nicholas Hlobo had big years in the art world. Both mounted large-scale, interactive sculptures at the Venice Biennale in addition to solo exhibitions around the world. But the two artists still found time to meet at Kapoor’s London studio to develop the trajectory of Hlobo’s work.

Kaleidoscopic Manhattan

I’m really digging the new video kaleidoscopic works from artist Anne Morgan Spalter. She captures video footage of urban landscapes such as Rockefeller Center or Fifth Avenue in New York City and then digitally transforms them using a decidedly 19th century concept. The resulting view is a constantly shifting but rigidly geometric patterned series of images as you can observe in the video above (my fave!), which I think is an interesting juxtaposition with the inherent symmetry of Manhattan’s streets. If you are around the Big Apple you should check out her debut NYC show at the Stephan Stoyanov Gallery.

Art Buzz: Freaky rhyming couplets & a farewell to the New Museum slide

The Syphilis of Sisyphus: Now on view at Fredericks & Freiser gallery, Mary Reid Kelly’s newest video installation, “The Syphilis of Sisyphus,” portrays the artist (with ping pong ball eyes) as a pregnant French bohemian reciting twisted rhyming couplets. Her keenest words of wisdom: “My blistering wit and its deep lacerations are signs of advanced forms of Syphillization.”

Dali illustrates “Alice in Wonderland”

A couple decades after the initial 1865 publication of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, my favorite mustachioed, anteater-walking surrealist, Salvador Dalí, took a crack at illustrating the 1969 Random House edition with an image for each of the twelve chapters. Dali is always so predictable and yet paradoxically so unpredictable. Children be damned, you know he’s going to create something that can only be the product of hallucinogenic drugs (or so I’ve heard)…

Fucking James Franco

For those who don’t follow our Monday Kickstarter best-of’s, Kickstarter.com is a funding platform for music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative projects. If a project doesn’t reach its stated funding goal before time runs out, no money changes hands. One art project that just met its $2,000 goal before its closing date this coming Saturday, thanks to over 100 backers, is “Fucking James Franco,” a collection of erotic fantasies about the art world’s golden boy (read: annoying dude) “that the world desperately needs,” produced by Portland-based Social Malpractice Publishing and Container Corps Art Press.

Art Buzz: Buy art on your iPhone & real bullet holes from Iraq

Geert Goiris: For his latest photo series, “Resonance,” Belgium-born photographer Geert Goiris offers up seemingly benign snapshots which, upon closer inspection, reveal uncanny, or off-putting elements. Most peculiar of all is an image of plastic office chairs arranged AA-style around an unremarkable wood table (which, you soon realize, has no legs)…

Opening night of Diego Rivera at MoMA

I felt lucky to attend the opening night party for the Diego Rivera exhibition “Rivera: Murals for The Museum of Modern Art” last Tuesday. The (always welcomed) open bar aside, I was excited to get a preview of some of the works of an icon like Rivera, an artist for whom I also have a sort of nostalgic attachment; his relationship with Frida Kahlo was the focus of one of my earliest group projects as a freshman at Brown. In tribute to their mercurial relationship, I tried to convince my friend to show up with a unibrow. Alas, she refused…

Art Buzz: Getty’s massive LA art project & Tokyo’s squished subway riders

Pacific Standard Time: “Pacific Standard Time,” the Getty-funded series of exhibitions throughout LA county, draws together tons of museums, private galleries, homes and commercial spaces in a crazy, semi-random celebration of creativity. There’s literally no way you’ll get to all of the featured exhibits, but Angelenos should try and swing through a handful this week…

The art of the baseball bat

Vincent Kohler interprets the art of baseball literally with his series of 30 unique and intricately carved baseball bats…

All the crazy things you can do Carsten Höller’s New Museum “Experience”

If you’re in the NYC area and want to check out the Carsten Höller exhibit at the New Museum this weekend, here’s a word of advice: You should walk outside, hail a cab and get in line, because otherwise you won’t be in the building before Monday morning. I’m only slightly exaggerating, but after two attempts at “beating the crowd,” I found myself shivering in the cold on both occasions, defeated by 2 hour + wait times. So no, I haven’t yet had the pleasure of riding Höller’s 2-story slide (which required serious renovations to the SANAA-designed structure to install), but as soon as I do, I’ll amend this post with a description of exactly how afraid I was. In the meantime, here are a few of the “sensory experiences” we can get excited about together:

“52 bunches of flowers I bought myself”

Julia Schauenburg’s photo series “52 bunches of flowers I bought myself” is one of the saddest art projects I’ve ever seen. This German-born, Australian-based photographer bought flowers for herself each week for an entire year and photographed them as they wilted and died. This project reminds me of something Liz Lemon might do if she was an artist instead of a lead writer for a fictional TV show. You can purchase these photos as a limited edition postcard set if you feel like sending your depressing thoughts around or, as an antidote, I recommend this photograph of a flower that might be the most joyous ever.

Tens of thousands donate to Ai Weiwei’s tax bill

It’s been a tumultuous year for one of our favorite artists, Ai Weiwei who, after his 81 day long detention, was slammed with a punitive $2.4 million tax bill from the Chinese government. In a testament to his wide appeal and support, The New York Times reported that “thousands of people have responded by contributing money in a gesture that is at once benevolent and subversive” and “more than 20,000 people have together contributed at least $840,000.” This is unsurprising to any student of history or political movements…

Art Buzz: Hear 35,000 heartbeats, see painted people & a look back at 1980′s pomo

Heartbeat Island: French artist, Christian Boltankski, has recorded the heartbeats of over 35,000 people and stored them on a tiny Japanese island for his project, “Les Archives du Coeur.” His touring booth is slated to come through Finland in 2012, so you romantic types should probably start booking tickets for Valentine’s Day…

Remember the (crocheted) Alamo

Previously spotted covering the Wall Street Bull, Olek created buzz once again by wrapping another iconic New York City sculpture, Tony Rosenthal’s Astor Place Cube with her trademark pink and purple camouflage yarn, as seen in the picture above. Here’s a video of her in action installing this piece over the cube, or the “Alamo” as it’s officially named. If you walk around New York City long enough you’ll eventually stumble upon her smaller, guerrilla pieces like…

Music for my funeral

David Kraftsow, an artist and programmer based in Brooklyn, has made waves on the Internet for his various projects that blur the line between culture jamming and art on the web, most notably his YooouuuTuuube.com (rearranges any YouTube video into a sequential series of images) and First Person Tetris (playable version where instead of moving and rotating the blocks, you rotate the entire screen) earned him quite a bit of buzz even with the mainstream press…

Full scale paper Mustang

Photo by Laura DeSantis-Olsson

Hosfelt Gallery in New York recently hosted Jonathan Brand’s exhibition “One Piece at a Time.” The undeniable star of the show was the Brooklyn-based artist’s full scale replica of a 1969 Ford Mustang constructed entirely from paper. As the exhibit’s title suggests (it was inspired by the Johnny Cash song of the same name), Brand recreated everything about the iconic American muscle car by hand, “right down to the nuts and bolts, displaying it as the individual collected parts, rather than as a single object.” The papercraft nature gives the installation an almost Americana-kitsch quality that appeals broadly, which is fitting, considering the role of the Ford Mustang in the construction of the modern American myth of muscle and might. However this was also a deeply personal project…

Wim Delvoye’s X-rated, X-rayed stained glass

Artist Wim Delvoye plays the trompe l’oeil card with visuals that prudes might find perverse, like his scatological ceramic tiles or pigs tattooed with the Louis Vuitton logo. The pigs earned him quite a buzz online along with the ire of animal rights activists earlier this year. And the blogosphere is buzzing once again over one of his installations in a Gothic-inspired building. What, at first glance, appears to be the kind of kaleidoscopic stained glass found in old towering cathedrals throughout Europe are actually anatomical X-rays. And Delvoye really puts the “X” in X-ray – many of these macabre designs are pretty racy…

12,235 tin soldiers

On display at this year’s Istanbul Art Biennale 2011, an event on par with Venice and São Paulo (or so says The Guardian – someone needs to send me there so I can judge for myself!), is this sensational, politically-charged installation by Kuwaiti artist, Ala Younis. Younis neatly arranged a total of 12,235 toy tin soldiers hand-painted in the military uniforms of Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Turkey…

The uncanny world of Philipp Igumnov

I want to highlight Russian artist Philipp Igumnov and his intriguing collection of collages. His dream-like landscapes are oddly familiar; He takes an image as common as a family posing in a field and imbues it with a certain uncanny quality. My favorite is the one pictured above of a child leaping out of the back of a C-130 transport plane. It captures what it feels like to be a child joyously jumping into a pool, but Igumnov ups the stakes by launching the kid out the back of a plane.

The Virginity Project: a blog, a book, a play

We first heard from Kate Monro a few years ago from across the pond when her Virginity Project was just a fledgeling little baby blog. Today, that blog, which collects and publishes first time tales of all sorts from all over the world, is shortlisted for the UK Cosmoplitan Blog Awards 2011. She’s also got a book out now based on the blog, ”First Times: True Tales of Virginity Lost and Found,“ and this month her blog/book is being turned into a play at the…

Art Buzz: Warhol gets his own app and Tom Sachs goes to Mars

No time to scan all the blogs in your Google Reader? Never fear! We’ve rounded up the five art world happenings that have bloggers and gallery-goers buzzing this week.

Tintype Photography: San Francisco photographer Michael Shindler is reviving the lost art of tin-type photography with his new portrait studio, Photobooth. Charging just $50-$80 a pop, subjects have to sit perfectly still while…

Men-ups!

We once did a photo shoot for The Sun, the super trashy but widely popular UK newspaper (you know, the one with the “Page 3 girl”). We were promoting the British edition of our book, The Big Bang. We were young and naive, the photographer was old and pushy, and as he gradually encouraged us to get into sillier and sillier poses, our publicist was there pressing us on. We felt like Coco in the original “Fame.” Don’t get us wrong: we were dressed. But at one point we reluctantly ended up on a bed with one of us holding the other’s bare leg straight up in the air like a lightening rod. It was not what we’d consider sexy, feminine, or us. Fortunately, our inner horror must have radiated out of every pore, because they ultimately ran the article without the pics. (There was a God that day.)

Reinterpreting of the $100 bill

I’m really digging Make Your Franklin, an online community art project featuring a variety of creative reinterpretations of the $100 dollar bill, which the website’s French creators call “a symbol of modern society.” Many of the designs are overtly, and understandably political, reflecting the current state of affairs and the world’s complex and dysfunctional relationship with the United States. Some took their cues from pop culture icons while others are just straight up hilarious and, at times, even sublime.

Illustrated missed connections

Since 2009, artist Sophie Blackall has been illustrating very artful and charming depictions of submissions on Missed Connections, one of my favorite time-wasting features of Craigslist. If you aren’t familiar with this subsite because you’ve been quarantined from the Internet in the past decade, it’s basically a message board for the hopeless romantic-optimists who were too shy to ask out a person when they initially saw them. Or as Sophie poetically describes: “Every day hundreds of strangers reach out to other strangers on the strength of a glance, a smile or a blue hat. Their messages have the lifespan of a butterfly. I’m trying to pin a few of them down.” This is nicer than what I like to tell them, “You’ll all be FOREVER ALONE!” Kidding.