I’ve had friends who collected Star Wars toys and kept them in the original packaging to protect their value. This certainly protects the monetary value, but doesn’t it deprive you of getting everything out of that toy it was created for? If you want to spark your imagination, have a fun afternoon, and [...]

Conceptual Art relies on ideas (concepts) and audience participation for it’s effectiveness, where many other kinds of art rely more on the object, and the skill the artist used to create it.
The New York Times asks Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark?
…conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes [...]

For about a year now, as many stories have covered, painter David Hockney’s new medium is the Brushes application on his iPhone. He’s had a gallery show with this work, with more scheduled. He is certainly not the first. For painters he has this advice: use your thumb, not your index finger.
The [...]

This is a post for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change.
A few years ago, I wrote a post for Blog Action Day presenting ideas for creating art in more environmentally friendly ways – Making Art Without Unmaking the Environment. Art supplies and other byproducts of our work is notoriously toxic. Just like businesses [...]

In live sand animation, sand is lit from underneath using a lightbox and manipulated by an artist in real time to create images. This performance can be projected for a live audience or filmed.
Many commercials have been popping up lately which use sand animation. Who are these artists? There are four well-known [...]

This great animation, by the artist Blu, is drawn and erased frame by frame on real walls and buildings in Baden and Buenos Aires.

Visit the artist Blu’s web site.

In these recently uncovered fake letters, imagined to have come from the archives of the fake University of Italy School of the Arts at Florence (UISAF), the Minister of Medici Bank, Francesco Sassetti, pleads with the head of the Medici Family and defacto ruler of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to stop spending the [...]

The artist Blue Sky came to national attention with his illusion artworks, starting with Tunnelvision, a trompe l’oeil painting on the side of a building which appears to be pierced by a long tunnel, overlooking the setting sun. (The sun actually sets at the time of the real one. The artist is tight-lipped [...]

Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn based artist, illustrator of numerous books, who recently began illustrating Craigslist Missed Connections. One example:
m4w (Harlem)
Remember? Uptown A train. Sunday at around 9pm. I was the black dude reading Bukowski’s Post Office. You were reading the Arts and Leisure section. You passed wind rather loudly and started chuckling. I’d [...]

In a series of short flashes, either by flashlight or hand signals or other means, Yoko Ono would like you to flash in this sequence: 1 flash. 2 flashes. 3 flashes. Which now means I Love You. Flash it from rooftops, from ships at sea, at parties and clubs, across a shop, to [...]

As a fan of Haikyo photography (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin), this photo essay by Ransom Riggs excites me at the same time it creeps me out.
Last year, while scouting for a short film that never came to fruition, some friends and I talked our way inside an empty, run-down hospital in Boyle Heights. The short was [...]

Chuck Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, teamed up with musician David Tele to compose music specifically for tamarin monkeys. The music is based on the note patterns, dissonance and timing of tamarin vocalizations and the emotional states these vocalizations produce, much like some believe human music evolved from human vocalization. This [...]

In all the news reports of record-breaking crowds gathering to recreate Thriller’s signature dance sequence from beginning to end, I’ve heard no mention of Michael Peters, who choreographed Thriller with Michael Jackson.
Michael Peters was an award winning choreographer, winning Tonys and Emmys for his work, including choreography for Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, [...]

The Computer Chronicles series ran for 20 years, covering the new and ever-changing world of computers for a broad audience.
In 1987, they presented a show titled Computers and the Arts.

The New York Times explores the “global movement is hacking, subverting and critiquing the hardware, software, content, visuals — even the philosophy of the wired world.”
This work is created using and hacking the very same technologies and methods it is often commenting on.
Examples include

Hacking Nintendo cartridges to create new games, music and video art
Subversion and [...]