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kottke.org posts about art

Pixelated animal prints

Laura Bifano is selling prints of pixelated animals in her Etsy shop, like this honey badger one:

Pixel Honey Badger

(via colossal)

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Mona Lisa in 140 dots

This is pointillism taken to its limit.

Mona Lisa in dots

Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Mona Lisa’ reduced & remixed down into 140 exact circles of colour. Makes no sense close up. Makes every sense from the other side of the room.

Prints are available.

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Intentionally flawed goods

Artist Jeremy Hutchison commissioned a series of intentionally incorrect products from factories around the world.

“I asked them to make me one of their products, but to make it with an error,” Hutchison explains. “I specified that this error should render the object dysfunctional. And rather than my choosing the error, I wanted the factory worker who made it to choose what error to make. Whatever this worker chose to do, I would accept and pay for.”

Hutchison received a comb without tines, the ordering of which prompted a letter from the confused factory rep:

I have read your email, which makes me confused. As you know, combs shold be fabricated correctly and customers should like to buy combs which can comb hair. However, from your words, it seems you need us to fabricate combs incorrectly and combs can not comb the hair. I can not understand this well. Pls kindly explain detailedly.

There is also a Magritte-esque pipe with no place to put tobacco, and these impractial sunglasses:

Incorrect sunglasses

(via @kevmaguire)

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A “new” Leonardo painting

Art scholars have authenticated a painting by Leonardo da Vinci that has been lost for centuries.

New Leonardo

Simon brought the panel to the Metropolitan Museum of Art about two years ago to have it examined by several curators and conservators. “It was brought in for inspection in the conservation studio,” said a person close to the Metropolitan who asked not to be identified. “The painting was forgotten for years. When it turned up at auction, Simon thought it was worth taking a gamble. It had been heavily overpainted, which makes it look like a copy. It was a wreck, dark and gloomy. It had been cleaned many times in the past by people who didn’t know better. Once a restorer put artificial resin on it, which had turned gray and had to be removed painstakingly. When they took off the overpaint, what was revealed was the original paint. You saw incredibly delicate painting. All agree it was painted by Leonardo.”

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Kind of Bloop album postered on Jay Maisel’s building

A pair of fair use crusaders hired some “street art underground” friends to place several posters of the Kind of Bloop album cover on the building that Jay Maisel owns in Manhattan as payback for Maisel threatening to sue Andy Baio over using a representation of Maisel’s photo of Miles Davis for Bloop’s cover.

I hope that every time Jay leaves the house, he sees these posters — and as he looks at them or tries to tear them down he thinks about how evil what he did was. Maybe he’ll realize that at some level all art borrows from other art, and suing another artist for fair use appropriation undermines all artists. Maybe he’ll feel guilty about being such a thief. And then maybe he’ll think about giving that money back — or donating it to charity or something. But probably not.

Something tells me this isn’t going to end well. (via @jakedobkin)

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Colossal

Can’t remember who tipped me off to this (Cederholm? Hoefler? Pieratt?), but Colossal is a top-notch visual art/design blog. There are a dozen things on the first two pages that could slide right into kottke.org quite easily. He’s on Stellar too!

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Mobius ships

Artist Tim Hawkinson makes model boats twisted into mobius strips.

Mobius Ships

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ASCII pointillism

Textify.it is a web app that uses text to make alphabetic pointillist representations of images. I turned a photo of the Most Photographed Barn in America into this:

ASCII pointillism

It’s also available as an iOS app. (via prosthetic knowledge)

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Olafur Eliasson’s rainbow panorama

Olafur Eliasson’s latest project is now on display at the ARoS Aarhus Kunstmuseum in Denmark…it’s a circular viewing platform with rainbow-hued glass.

Olafur Eliasson Rainbow

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Disposable portraits

I love Idan Friedman’s profiles project…he hand-embosses the profiles of everyday people into disposable aluminum pans.

Idan Friedman

Idan Friedman

Royals and world leaders are forever immortalized on coins and normal people get disposable pie tins. Makes sense. (via ★feltron)

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Noisy fruit and veggies

Synesthesia is a short film by Terri Timely that attempts in an artful way to give the viewer a sense of what synesthesia (“the blending or mixing of senses”) is like.

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Cory Arcangel exhibition at The Whitney

Cory Arcangel has a solo exhibition coming up at The Whitney.

Cory Arcangel: Pro Tools, an exhibition of new work, revolves around the concept of “product demonstrations.” All of the works featured in the exhibition — ranging from video games, single channel video, kinetic sculpture, and prints, to pen plotter drawings — have been created by means of technological tools with an emphasis on the mixing and matching of both professional and amateur technologies, as well as the vernaculars these technologies encourage within culture at large.

Opens May 26 and runs through September. Interview Magazine has a recent profile and interview.

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The original design of Mount Rushmore

Original Mount Rushmore design

The presidents were to be depicted from head to waist, but the sculpture was scaled back due to insufficient funding.

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Machine paintings

In the late 70s, Anton Perich built something resembling an inkjet printer to make large-scale paintings like this:

Anton Perich

The photography section of Perich’s web site is also worth a look…lots of photos of the Warholish NYC scene in the 70s and 80s: Warhol, Jagger, Mapplethorpe, John Waters, etc. (via today and tomorrow)

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Paris in logos

Logo Tourist is a project by Risto-Jussi Isopahkala that depicts cityscapes and famous Parisian landmarks made up of famous logos. Here’s the Arc de Triumph (sponsored by Pepsi and Adidas):

Arc De Branding

See also Logorama.

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