Chinese artists responsible for 60% of the world’s oil paintings paint their self-portraits. From Self-portraiture and emerging artistic consciousness in Dafen, via Boing Boing

livejamie:

Everybody hurry and add Andy Gilmore to your feed readers. We need to get this kid on Tumblr, stat.

Wow. That stuff’s amazing.

Just another day at the office. (via io9)

The Girlfriend Experience And Why We Are All In Grave Danger →

Andrew Altschul reviews Steven Soderberg’s latest movie, The Girlfriend Experience. Beginning with a critique of the movie’s sordid and pointless plot he soars upwards to a beautiful and damning critique of so-called Realism. I don’t want to spoil the whole thing for you, but here’s just a taste:

In Reality we don’t need Laurence Olivier or Katherine Hepburn, we don’t need talented “elites” to write our scripts and shove complicated ideas about human nature down our throats. The medium is the message, as Marshall McLuhan showed us, and the message of Reality is that we are all actors, all writers, all of our opinions and abilities are as good as everyone else’s. Reality wants us to understand that the performers can’t perform, the writers can’t write, so as to better discredit and discard the function of true art and artists. They aren’t Real people: Olivier wasn’t better than you or me—just luckier; Toni Morrison’s ideas are no more important than David Duke’s.

The essay is eloquent and illuminating, and well worth the few minutes it takes to read it.

"What matters is not the perception, nor the fashion, not who’s up and who’s down, but what someone has done and if they meant it."

Dave Eggers gives a long and fascinating rant back in 2000 to a journalist asking questions about his supposed “selling out” with AHWOFG. (via matthewb)

"Hon­estly, I think the bar­ri­ers are imag­i­nary, the walls have already been breached and the key to lit­er­a­ture in the early 21st cen­tury is one of con­flu­ence. There’s not much high and low cul­ture any more: there’s just min­gling streams of art and what mat­ters is whether it’s good art or bad art. But then, I come from comics, and miss the days when it was a gut­ter art-form in which nobody was expected to make art; and think that SF was much more vibrant and rel­e­vant before they taught it in uni­ver­si­ties."

Neil Gaiman in The New Yorker’s Ask the Author. As Robin Sloan says, the most interesting part is the “confluence” of art in the 21st century: the breaking down of barriers between high and low.

How To Make An Alexander Calder-esque Abstract Mobile →

Summer project. This is so on.

Andy Warhol - Grace Kelly. If I had all the money, I would buy this for my wife. She would love it.

And yes, I do spend my time browsing art auction websites. It’s just fun.

Lynda Barry on the "biological function" of art →

A scientist named V.S. Ramachandran has done some astonishing work with neurological problems he’s actually solved with a mirror. He had a patient who had lost his hand, but the patient’s experience was that the hand was still there, and not only there, but it was in a really tight fist — you know, painfully tight. This guy was miserable; he couldn’t get away from that feeling. Ramachandran made a box, tilted the mirror in there, and then he put a hole in the other side. He asked the guy to stick his hand in the hole, the fist that was still there, and look down. So what the guy saw was his fist and then the reflection of it, which was like his other hand. Then, he told him to open his hand, and what he saw was the reflection of his other hand opening, and it solved the problem.

That’s a perfect example of what images do. My feeling is that in the course of life there are certain things for us that are like phantom limb pain, like a horrible, horrible parent who dies before you ever work things out with them. And I think the only way that those things can be worked out is through something that’s akin to that mirror box — except it may be a fairy tale, or it may be a painting, or it may be a song you can remember from when you were 14 and you had to play the same song over and over and over again, like 400 times in a row. Yeah, what are you doing there? You’re opening your fist. You’re looking at a reflection.

The arts, sadly, have kind of become separated from all the tools we use to just take care of ourselves normally. But that’s what they do. Rather than it being this acclaimed creation that you either get a prize for or you don’t, it’s more about blood sugar balancing or temperature balancing of your body.

(Source: austinkleon)

from the desk of... →

Pictures of people’s desks. And not these. Real, working desks. Here’s Maud Netwon’s.

How do you work? What about your lighting? View? Office? At home? Coordinates, please. Clean and tidy? How many hours a day? Sitting? Standing? Coffee cups? Is that tea? Minimalist? Scattered? Type A plus A plus A? A-B? What’s your equation? Creatively sprawled? Feel like you need to tidy up–maybe you shouldn’t. Map it out.

This is the blog I’ve been waiting for. (Via this tweet)

View high resolution

(via austinkleon, via jenbekmanprojects)

(via austinkleon)

“Rotations: Moore Estates,” a large-scale piece of environmental art. From the artist, Matthew Moore:

In October of 2004, my grandfather sold the first portion of our family’s land to Taylor Woodrow to build a 253-home suburban community. I acquired the company’s proposed community map from the city and used it as the template for the design of Rotations: Moore Estates. I mapped out Moore Estates at approximately one-third scale — the development site is 85 acres, Moore Estates is 35 acres — using a CAD program and a GPS surveying crew. My father and I planted 253 homes in sorghum (a grain commonly used for dairy feed) and my wife and I seeded the roads in wheat four months later, as the two grains are seasonally opposite. All the grain was harvested at the end of the project and donated to a local dairy.

"Inspiration is for amateurs; the rest of us just show up and get to work."

Chuck Close

(via Austin Kleon)

"I tell young people that the greatest paintings in museums are made with minerals mixed in oil smeared on cloth with the hair from the the back of a pig’s ear. It’s that simple."

James Rosenquist

Art is simple. So is writing.

(Source: sircle, via tobia)

"Art doesn’t have to do anything. It just has to be there for the fierce pleasure we take in doing it."

Raymond Carver (via theparisreview)