so you know

History of the hockey mask
http://www.prohockeyfr.com/PhotosMasques/photosgardiens.htm

Santa with Butt Plug ... ?
http://www.artinfo.com/news/photos/1346/13970/

Strange statues around the world ... includes man throwing babies and a big thumbs up
http://haha.nu/funny/strange-statues-around-the-world/

Stop Motion Animation ... Her Morning Elegance ... amazing
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_HXUhShhmY&eurl=http://blakewhitman.tumblr.com/post/72940478/someone-with-a-beautiful-imagination-made-this

Martha Graham: choreographer
http://vimeo.com/2397895?pg=embed&sec=2397895

A little bit of ART LA
http://www.artinfo.com/news/photos/1443/14783/

Cones Domes and Huts ...
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/28/arts/design/20090128-moma-slideshow_index.html?partner=permalink&exprod=permalink

Antony Gormley's filter installation
http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/gallery/2009/jan/28/gallery-manchester-art-gallery-hangs-new-anthony-gormley-sculpture-filter?picture=342374396

An opera short
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/video/2009/jan/28/sam-taylor-wood-vesti-la-gubbia

Type as Image
http://www.behance.net/Gallery/Type-as-image/142738

da vinci's iphone
http://i.gizmodo.com/5141137/the-iphone-as-designed-by-leonardo-da-vinci

Wooden Vespa
http://www.carpintariacarlosalberto.com/vespa_daniela.htm

a little bit of interesting

yarnfiti ... that is, grafiti with yarn
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/uknews/4305406/Knitters-turn-to-graffiti-artists-with-yarnbombing.html

art from the middle east
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4347102/Unveiled-New-art-from-the-Middle-East-at-the-Saatchi-Gallery.html

your house ... i may have already included this in a previous post but its still cool
http://www.spaceinvading.com/entry.php?project_id=Laser-cut_art_book200901061231290535

zombies?
http://nofearofthefuture.blogspot.com/2009/01/keep-austin-zombie-free.html

HOPE
http://www.google.com/hostednews/ap/article/ALeqM5jdVzCRkO7f6e2MHJoSuhy0BDIasQD95NLRT80

nano landscapes
http://michaeloliveri.com/wp/?page_id=44&g2_itemId=5469

Vik Muniz
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/vik_muniz_makes_art_with_wire_sugar.html

WOULD YOU PAY $3,000 FOR A PAINTING BY A TODDLER? THAT'S WHAT THEY'RE CHARGING IN MELBOURNE
Germaine Greer
Monday 26 January 2009
Melbourne gallery director Mark Jamieson was putting together a group show featuring work by two photographers, Nikka Kalashnikova and Julia Palenov, last October, when Kalashnikova suggested another artist called Aelita Andre for inclusion. She showed Jamieson Andre's work, and he readily agreed. The works were vivid abstracts, full of life, movement and dazzling colour. It was only when Jamieson was putting together his press pack to promote the show, which has just opened at Melbourne's Brunswick Street gallery, that he discovered that Aelita was Kalashnikova's baby daughter - then only 22 months old.
He had accepted the work as worth hanging, so there was nothing for it but to go ahead, and headline the paintings as by the youngest artist ever to show work in a commercial gallery. The strategy paid off. Seven of the 15 works, priced between $300 and 10 times that, were sold before the show opened. Newspapers ran pictures of the toddler at work, with paint in her hair, her eyebrows and all over her clothes. Strangely, the daubs with which the child was covered were all bright, clean colours. You could have rolled her across a canvas and come up with pretty decent paintings.
The newspapers brayed in chorus: "Is this the story of a child prodigy or a joke at the expense of the art world?" It was neither. In art, what you see is what you get. What buyers of the toddler's work got was a prettily painted canvas of a convenient size. The prepared canvas had been painted with a solid colour and laid on the floor. The child had then had her hand dipped in a pot of acrylic colour and been invited to make marks on the canvas, which she was only too happy to do. Acrylic dries fast. Kalashnikova must have moved in before the child could smear her work, and cleaned off her hand before dipping it into another pot of a different colour. Aelita may have been allowed to select her colour, but it makes no odds. If she had been simply presented with opened pots of every imaginable colour and invited to make her own selections, all the colours would have been smeared together in the pots and on the canvas and on Aelita - to produce the muddy, neutral tint that is the hallmark of unsupervised finger-painting. It would have been one of her parents who decided when the work was finished and removed the canvas to a safe place.
Aelita's parents were not averse to talking up the notion that their child was a prodigy. Her father, Michael Andre, said that as soon as she began drawing in her Montessori playgroup, he could see that her production was different from the other children's: "It immediately leapt out as a defined representation of something in an abstract form." He appeared not to notice that he had defined her work as a contradiction in terms. Aelita's mother said that she wanted Aelita's work to be shown so that it could be judged "on its merits". "I wanted to get it out there and get a separate opinion. Of course, every mother is proud of their child."
Robert Nelson, art critic for Melbourne newspaper The Age, first described the work as "credible abstractions". Once informed of the truth about the "artist", he chose to hedge: "If it is a child's work, it's not a child alone. We're happy to credit the child, but it begins with a parental concept." Parental concept in this case equals parental project. Parents buy the canvas; parents lay in the ground colour; parents supply the acrylics; parents supply the child; the child does what children do. What the child did was probably better than anything either of her parents could do, simply because she was a child.
There is no reason to believe that Aelita's hand-eye coordination was better than that of other children of her age, or that she had a vision of the finished work. Her painting succeeds because the marks she places on the canvas are beyond her control. A cross mother declared in an angry blog that Aelita's parents were interfering so much in their daughter's work that they were likely to stunt the development of her creativity. They were in fact using her as a randomly programmed automatic paintbrush.
These days all our children draw and paint; nearly all of them will draw and paint progressively worse as they grow up, because they lose their excitement and become anxious, mostly about representation but also about neatness and composition. As someone who taught art to schoolchildren, I am well aware that, to get the best work out of them, I had to snatch the work away while it still carried the energy of the initial idea, before over-working had squeezed the life out of it. In a famous film of Picasso at work, we can watch him carrying out a wonderful brush drawing on the other side of a sheet of transparent perspex set up in front of the camera. In a very few minutes, the drawing is as good as a drawing can be, but the master keeps on working for as long again, until the drawing is ruined. The more prodigious the talent, the more childlike it is - and the more it needs the facilitator.
http://static.guim.co.uk/sys-images/Arts/Arts_/Pictures/2009/1/26/1232961778956/A-painting-by-the-artist--001.jpg

If you ever wanted to see ...

A Flooded McDonalds:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4227474/Flooding-McDonalds.html

3D ABC book
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnZr0wiG1Hg

just how much pink little girls own and blue for boys ... eww.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4239262/The-Pink-and-Blue-Project.html

some things that need a redesign
http://designobserver.com/archives/doentry38869.html

Different ways to see a webpage load
http://www.prettyloaded.com/

A book titled "The Recently Deflowered Girl" ... with illustrations
http://www.joeydevilla.com/2009/01/10/the-recently-deflowered-girl-1965-illustrated-by-edward-gorey/

The impossible project ... restart production of the polaroid by 2010
http://www.the-impossible-project.com/

paper art
http://www.designboom.com/weblog/cat/10/view/5120/paper-art-by-peter-callesen.html

the microscopic obama family
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/telegraph/multimedia/archive/01242/willard_1242719c.jpg

underwater portraits ... aka people that look dead
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4290438/Underwater-Portraits.html

the most disgusting thing ever ... make a pet hair sweater
http://www.inhabitots.com/2009/01/14/sustainable-cat-hair-sweaters/

beauty, beheld
http://www.nytimes.com/slideshow/2009/01/23/arts/20090123_PHOTO_SLIDESHOW_index.html

$5000 home meade from recycled paper
http://www.inhabitat.com/2009/01/22/5000-dollar-recycled-paper-house-by/

or perhaps a sliding house
http://www.dezeen.com/2009/01/19/sliding-house-by-drmm-2/

In case you were bored and wondering ...

WHITE HOUSE OFFICE OF THE ARTS? The transition team of President-elect Barack Obama is keeping a firm hand on any appointment news, but the buzz in art-and-politics precincts has the new administration seriously considering the idea of an official White House Office of the Arts, overseeing all things having to do with the arts and arts education. The new arts czar wouldn't be a cabinet-level position -- too complicated and too limiting, say insiders -- but rather a liaison with the president with real access to funds and power. Who might fill the post, which would be a CEO kind of job? One possible candidate could be Agnes Gund, former president of the Museum of Modern Art and founder of Studio in a School. The idea of such a position has been floating around for some time. In its 2008 "10-Point Plan," for instance, the U.S. Conference of Mayors suggested the establishment of a cabinet level secretary of culture and tourism. And though the Obama campaign didn't specifically mention such a post, it was the first to have an in-depth arts platform (developed in consultation with Americans for the Arts), which actively painted the candidates as "champions of arts and culture," urging the creation of an "artist corps" trained to work in low-income schools, among other projects. Stay tuned. _artnet
NOTE TO OBAMA: HOW ABOUT A SECRETARY OF THE ARTS? Last November, music producer and songwriter Quincy Jones mentioned to John Schaefer during an interview on the New York radio program "Soundcheck" that he thought President-elect Barack Obama should create a Cabinet-level position of secretary of the Arts. "One of the next conversations I have with President Obama is to beg for a secretary of the Arts," he told the WNYC talk-show host. Jaime Austria heard about Jones' comments and thought that was a great idea. So Austria launched an online petition <http://tinyurl.com/55jl4l>. So far, more than 63,000 people have signed, with "spread the word" e-mails recently making the rounds on the Left Coast._LATimes

For those that would prefer to have pictures included when looking things up in the dictionary:
http://www.thephotographicdictionary.org/home.html

Fat Cars ... in case all the obese people weren't enough:
http://www.geekologie.com/2009/01/bigger_the_better_artist_makes.php

Snowflakes under a microscope:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/gallery/2009/jan/07/1?picture=341408044

Catch of the Day ... trash collected from the beach and packaged like food ...
http://shapeandcolour.wordpress.com/2009/01/07/surfrider-foundation-catch-of-the-day/

I think someone forgot to use the instructions to put that chair together:
http://www.dezeen.com/2009/01/08/cozy-furniture-by-hannes-grebin/

bored? got jury duty? create art!
http://jurylaw.typepad.com/photos/juror_art/index.html

from books to sculpture ... a good way to recycle those old math, science, and history books:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturepicturegalleries/4209077/Book-sculptures-by-photographer-Cara-Barer.html

house plan cut out:
http://curbed.com/archives/2009/01/07/olafur_eliasson_wrote_the_book_on_crazy_floorplan_porn.php

Billboards, those ugly things that canvas the roads ... at least these make you do a double take:
http://www.toxel.com/inspiration/2009/01/05/clever-and-creative-billboard-advertising/

An old art and culture magazine from the 90s makes a comeback via the internet:
http://www.indexmagazine.com/

Typing, working, typing, reading, reserching, typing, working more ... apparently it creates hostility towards the computer:
http://i513.photobucket.com/albums/t335/ubermnd/seehowhardIwork-1.gif

acrobats of the urban circus:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t1vDPcXTRIs

mathematical roots of architecture anyone?
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/greg_lynn_on_organic_design.html

Polo(d)roid your digital photos ... coolest thing ever:
http://poladroid.net/index.php

Why do I have barely any time to do art and some people can make models of a city out of jell-o?
http://www.mymodernmet.com/profiles/blogs/stunning-models-of-san

please don't take art away

WHERE'S A BAILOUT FOR THE ARTS? By Michael Kaiser

While government bailouts are being offered or considered for financial institutions, the auto industry, homeowners and so many other needy and worthy sectors, one group is quickly and rather quietly falling apart: our nation's arts organizations. In the last few months, dozens of opera companies, theater companies, dance organizations, museums and symphonies have either ceased operating or suffered major cash crises.As someone who has made a career out of fixing troubled organizations, I know that the problems faced by arts groups are often related to poor management and governance. I also know that the difficulty in improving productivity in the arts is central to our financial challenges: It takes as much time to play Beethoven's Fifth Symphony today as it did when the piece was composed, and the same number of actors are required for "Hamlet" as when Shakespeare wrote it. Unlike other industries, the arts cannot cover the cost of inflation by improving worker productivity.This is why subsidies -- in the form of government grants or private contributions -- have long been required to help arts organizations balance their budgets. Well-managed groups have typically been able to find the money required to operate if they create interesting programs, market them aggressively and build strong donor bases.But these times are different.Many organizations that spent years building large endowments to provide more stable sources of support have seen them decimated. A number of our most loyal donors have watched their own investment portfolios be depleted and cannot provide their traditional funding. Our audience members cannot buy as many tickets as they have in the past.This perfect storm has already weakened our nation's arts ecology. Over the last several months, the Baltimore Opera Company, the Santa Clarita Symphony, Opera Pacific, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art and others have called it quits or come close to it. There probably will be a torrent of additional closures, cancellations and crises in the coming months.We are losing the entertainment and inspiration we need more than ever during this terribly scary time. As we try to rebuild America's image abroad, we are losing our most potent goodwill ambassadors. As we reshape our economy, we are losing the organizations that teach our children to think creatively. And as we celebrate the diversity of our nation, we are losing the voices that have traditionally helped change society's thinking.The arts have historically received short shrift from our political leaders. But the arts in the United States provide 5.7 million jobs and account for $166 billion in economic activity annually. This sector is at serious risk. Because the arts are so fragmented, no single organization's demise threatens the greater economy and claims headlines. But thousands of organizations, and the state of America's arts ecology, are in danger.We need an emergency grant for arts organizations in America, and we need legislation that allows unusual access to endowments. Washington must encourage foundations to increase their spending rates during this crisis, and we need immediate tax breaks for corporate giving.As President John F. Kennedy said, "I am certain that after the dust of centuries has passed over our cities, we too will be remembered not for our victories or defeats in battle or in politics, but for our contribution to the human spirit." As we print billions of dollars in bailout money, isn't it time to ensure that we are saving our soul as well as our economy?_LATimes