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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In this video of dolphins blowing rings and playing with them, you can’t help but notice they themselves look at them in wonder like some people look at art, and interact with them in interesting ways that lack any real purpose.  Some definitions of art boil it down to objects or performances created with no [...]

I’ve noticed for quite some time that most media web sites and newspapers do not have an Arts section. The closest you find is Entertainment. The meaning of these two is of course very different, not because art can’t be entertaining, it can be. But art often has more purpose to it [...]

John Hodgeman appears to discuss art authentication.

In the late ’80s, Czechoslovakia became a democratic state, and in 1993 peacefully separated into two countries – the Czech Republic and Slovakia. With democracy came capitalism and advertising, and with capitalism and advertising came The Hypermarket. Hypermarkets are the world’s superstores, selling shoes and spinach, pipe wrenches and pumpkins, all you would [...]

Montreal artist Cesar Saez is creating a 300 meter banana, with a bamboo skeleton and helium bladders, which he intends to launch into geostationary orbit over Texas. It is launching from Baja, Mexico. It will appear in the sky 10-20% the size of the moon.
Just to be clear, 300 meters is over twice [...]

I went to an afternoon of flat track roller derby, and even though it’s a sport, I could care less who won or lost. A lot of us were there to be entertained. Roller derby is dramatic and theatrical. Lots of players and whole teams have strong characters (whether real or mythical), [...]

I’ve been trying to learn Japanese this year. I’m making progress but it’s definitely slow. While I took Spanish in high school, my brain didn’t shift the way it is now. As I started to write and learn these brand new characters, I started noticing all the things I take for granted, [...]