Google Art Project launched this week, putting the work of art museums around the world online in a consolidated place. Using Google’s Street View technology, you can walk around the galleries and look at the art on the walls. At launch, museums include Tate Britain, MoMA, the National Gallery, the Van Gogh Museum [...]

Today, photographs are taken from devices in our pockets, then beamed to a worldwide audience in a matter of moments. At the dawn of photography, the equipment was large and cumbersome, developing glass plates to reveal images was an intense process, and color, of course, didn’t exist. To take photos required an expedition of [...]

From the moment we began pumping electricity out to homes and businesses, we chose a completely utilitarian path. The designs for cables and towers were great invention and engineering. But what they looked like was solely based on use, not the people who had to live with them. How would a mass [...]

In a post several years ago, Artist Astronauts, Artist Cosmonauts, Artists in Space, we covered a lot of history of art and artists in space. Lately this topic has re-entered the news.
History Detectives on PBS covers a story trying to prove the fabled Moon Museum true or false.

Watch the full episode. See more History Detectives.
History [...]

At this Ted Talk, Ravin Agrawai presents an overview of 10 upcoming contemporary Indian artists. Below is the talk, and more in depth information about each artist.

More about the artists

Bharti Kher at Hauser & Wirth
Alwar Balasubramaniam
Chitra Ganesh
Excerpt from Rabbithole

Jitish Kallat
Perspectives on contemporary art, interview with The Economist

N.S. Harsha
Dhruvi Acharya
Raqib Shah
A group show including the [...]

City Hostel, in the Belltown neighborhood of Seattle, features 54 rooms, each designed and decorated by 47 Seattle artists. The hostel also features a 20 seat movie theatre, with frequent art events, screenings and openings. In 2008, City Hostel was voted the top hostel in the United States by Hostelworld.com.
Artists were asked to [...]

Here is a timelapse video of cheesy art posted by Eclectic Asylum Art. The portrait is made from 4 varieties of Cheetos (much like this more traditional agriculture art is made from 4 varieties of rice), using 2,000 individual Cheeto.

Artist Charles Clary creates organic sculptures from deep layers of cut colored paper.
From Wired:
Artist Charles Clary says he wants his constructions to appear ever-expanding — overwhelming exhibition spaces like replicating viruses or reverberating sound waves. Inspired by microorganisms, anthills, and auditory phenomena, he layers colored paper to build up the variegated textures and sinewy shapes [...]

Back in 1993, people of Inakadate in northern Japan began planting four types of rice in patterns, which when mature, would form huge images when viewed from above.
Here’s a timelapse of several of the paintings growing into place.

Farmers use computer-aided plotting to design images and determine where the different varieties of rice should [...]

San Francisco Bay Area photographer Lane Hartwell gathered photographers to publish a special magazine titled Onè Respe to benefit Haiti. The images celebrate life in Haiti, all taken before the earthquake. Other participating photographers include Mary Ellen Mark, Chet Gordon and Peter Pereira. The magazine was printed through HP’s MagCloud service. [...]

Nichitsu was a mining town in Saitama Prefecture, about three hours from Tokyo. At it’s peak in 1965, there were about 3,000 people living there. Now the town is completely abandoned.
Here the Tokyo Times blog posts many Haikyo photographs (廃墟写真, usually meaning photographs of modern ruins) of the ghost town.

To the Doctor’s Office
A [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]