When Pranks Become Works of Art

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A real funny prank, when things get reversed.

My friends were visual artists, writers, musicians, actors, and activists. Because of our lifestyles, we made the place a cool attraction for the “bridge-and-tunnel” tourists who drove through and pointed their cameras through the smoky windows of their Greyhound buses. We were the freak show, the animals they could mock. Fed up with this, I decided to take the freak show back to suburbia to ridicule the squares we had left behind: “Oh, look! They’re mowing their lawns and washing their cars!” The natives freaked when they saw us. One lady actually shrieked: “We’re being invaded!” I had no idea about the interest this satirical gesture would ignite. Carloads of journalists trailed the bus everywhere we went. Some were even on the bus.

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Joey Skaggs — Artsy

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Did brands’ faith in artists die with Campari’s posters?

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The historic body of work built by Campari across 70 years lost gusto with the arrival of television. Finding itself surrounded by more competitors than before the liqueur largely replaced poster design with cutting edge mediums of TV and photography, and lost its taste for all that was artistically new. Directors replaced artists, but brand directors replaced visionaries. Its east London pop-up Negroni bar of 2016 arguably cemented its place in the league of contrived. And now Cremonicini believes Campari to simply be “very much a brand”.

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Katie Deighton — The Drum

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Is the international art world too elitist?

Surveying the biennial circuit, the obvious conclusion is yes, the international art world is too elitist. For all the rhetorical emphasis on engaging local communities, histories, and cultures, it is populated by globetrotting curators, artists, critics, and patrons who temporarily parachute into various settings – the more obscure the better – and pat themselves on the back for their (our) worldliness and commitment to diverse publics while mostly talking to people they (we) already know. Occasionally this can tip over into outright black comedy: think, for instance, of the reports in the art press about Documenta 14 curators and staff carrying stacks of euros from Germany to Athens in their hand luggage to circumvent the cash-strapped Greek banks’ €120 cap on withdrawals (all under the auspices of ‘learning from Athens’).

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Fifty years on, Joan Bakewell remembers speaking to the pioneering artist for the BBC, shortly before his death

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Fifty years on, the interview remains a compelling watch. Duchamp’s significance was not what it is today but his reputation had risen again, after years in which it was thought he had given up art for chess. Artists like Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg and John Cage had befriended him and seen him as a mentor. They prompted a revival of interest in the 1950s that was bolstered in the 1960s by Pop artists in Britain and the US and the first stirrings of conceptualism. It was only then that Duchamp had his first retrospective, at the Pasadena Art Museum in California in 1963. That was followed by one at the Tate Gallery in London in 1966.

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Jim Kay On Drawing The Boy Who Lived

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For all Harry Potter fans from Google.

What has been the hardest thing to visualize in the project so far?

It’s always Harry, every single time. He’s based on a young boy from the Lake District, who is fantastic looking and has a really unusual face. But when you draw that truthfully, it doesn’t always look right on the page.

The fact everyone wears robes is also really difficult to draw. They’re so loose fitting, everything is a nightmare. You’re begging for someone to wear something a bit clingy. Then of course, when you draw people on brooms, it can look very rude. It’s very hard sitting someone convincingly on a broom – you just dread broomstick moments.

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Google Arts & Culture

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The Benefits of Being a Misfit

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This is an interview of Walter Issacson, who has written biographies of Steve Jobs, Leonardo da Vinci and others. He has useful suggestions for people aspiring to be more creative and innovative.

Grant: In closing, for an audience of students aspiring to be more creative, more innovative, are there any other tips that you would offer or myths to bust?

Isaacson: I’ll just tell you something small. The tongue of the woodpecker is three times longer than the beak. And when the woodpecker hits the bark at 10 times the force that would kill a human, the tongue wraps around the brain and cushions it, so the woodpecker can do woodpecking.

There’s absolutely no reason you need to know that. It is totally useless information, just as it was totally useless to Leonardo. But just like Leonardo, every now and then, it’s good to just know something for pure curiosity’s sake.

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Knowledge@Wharton

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How Prussian blue changed everything

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Not my favorite color.

The creation of Prussian blue was the result of a simple error by two German alchemists, Jacob Diesbach and Johann Konrad Dippel. While mixing a batch of cochineal red, Diesbach was alarmed to discover that his concoction had turned a deep blue. After much investigation, he determined that this was the result of a chemical reaction caused by animal blood found in contaminated potash provided by Dippel. The world’s first synthetic pigment was born.

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Christie’s

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Vivian Maier, Through a Clearer Lens

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But stories — like snapshots — are shaped by people, and for particular purposes. There’s always an angle. A new biography, “Vivian Maier: A Photographer’s Life and Afterlife,” by Pamela Bannos, strives to rescue Maier all over again, this time from the men who promulgated the Maier myth and profited off her work; chiefly Maloof, who controlled her copyright for a time. After a legal battle — “the Vivian Mire,” one critic called it — her estate passed into a trust last year, where it will be held for possible heirs and eventually released into the public domain.

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Parul Sehgal — The New York Times

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Inferior Design: Do Our Offices Inspire Creativity or Express Uniformity?

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Does your workplace inspire you?

I confess I’m no fan of the current conventions in creative office design – conventions now shared, with bigger budgets, by our Clients: the reclaimed wooden tables, the high chairs and industrial lighting; the brightly coloured walls and quirky shaped sofas; the suggestive neon words and slogans; the themed breakout areas and table football; the juice bar, coffee station and artisanal cookies; the beach-hut workstations, the meeting rooms named after Bowie songs; the climbing walls, playground slides and bouncy castles…

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Jim Carroll’s Blog

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It’s Getting Hard to Tell If a Painting Was Made by a Computer or a Human

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In all aspects of life, machines are slowly taking over. But are we losing out on the essence?

Michael Connor, the artistic director of Rhizome, a non-profit that provides a platform for digital art, agrees. He describes the gap between silicon- and carbon-based artists as wide and deep: “Making art is not the sole role of being an artist. It’s also about creating a body of work, teaching, activism, using social media, building a brand.” He suggests that the picture Elgammal’s algorithm generates is art in the same way that what a Monet forger paints is art: “This kind of algorithm art is like a counterfeit. It’s a weird copy of the human culture that the machine is learning about.” He adds that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing: “Like the Roman statues, which are copies of the original Greek figures, even copies can develop an intrinsic value over time.”

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Rene Chun — Artsy

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