Tadanori Yokoo

Ok, enough with the politics. Time for a pure visual coolness break.


The Wonders of Life on Earth



Yakuza Movies (1968)



Sleep, Crime and Falling (1965)


See lots more by this Japanese poster artist at Journey Around My Skull, a great blog about avant garde books and graphic art.

J'aime Picasso!

And I especially love A Life of Picasso: The Triumphant Years, 1917-1932. This book, as with the previous two volumes, is too overwhelming to try to reduce into a pithy blog post. Read it (but start with the first volume) and love it. Just to leave you with a taste, here are a few pits I liked.

On Classicism:

Picasso saw eye-to-eye with Stravinsky, who believed "the only critical exercise of value must take place in art, i.e., in pastiche or parody." [How postmodern!] Picasso chose parody.

On Picasso's relations with other artists:

Picasso seldom put lesser artists down. Time and again, he would discreetly give them money, buy their work or get dealers interested, and even marry them off. [Juan] Gris, however, was not a lesser artist. He had absorbed the lessons of cubism at Picasso's elbow and had gone on to take cubism a stage further by dint of calculations, the like of which Picasso and Braque always distrusted. Ironically, Gris's discoveries were so impressive that Picasso did not hesitate to take advantage of them.

On being rich:

Despite the devaluation of his work, Picasso suffered little from the crash. [...] Picasso was about to buy one of the most expensive cars at the Salon de l'Automobile, a large, luxurious Hispano-Suiza coupe de ville. Picasso, who had experienced greater poverty than most of his painter friends, ejoyed driving around, to Olga's dismay, in this ostentatious chaufffeured car wearing an old suit the worse for paint stains, cigarette burns, and plaster dust. As he said more than once, "I would like to live like a pauper with lots of money."

Houses in Motion

When I was an art student, I was fascinated with graffiti and animation, and thought it would be cool to somehow combine the two. I even planned to do an animated version of a Sprawl song, "Big Ass Jewel" (with such lyrics as "Big ass jewel/it's a fascist death tool/shooting multicolored lightning into George Rupp's pool") on an 8' time 4' piece of plywood. Only a camera malfunction kept this from really coming off.

There is no way it could have been one millionth as good as the animation below. This animated graffiti is titled Muto, and is by an artist called "Blu", and was painted on public walls in Buenos Aires. It's mindblowing.


MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Eat a Botero

Hat-tip to C-Monster. One of his (her?) commenters wrote, "you eat the botero, you become the botero!"

Beautiful Cars, Ugly Cars

This is sad news. I'd call it ironic, but that seems callous. The accident didn't have anything to do with art cars at all. Just a drunk idiot behind a regular old Pontiac.

Tom Jones, the curator of the Art Car Museum, drove Swamp Mutha by Ann Harithas (below) in the Art Car parade Saturday for the last time.

Physically Transformed Books

Kingdom, 2008, altered book

Brian Dettmer makes unusually beautiful sculptures out of books.


Webster Two Point Oh, 2008, altered book


Core 6, 2007, altered book

If there were ever objects made to simultaneously horrify and thrill a book-lover, Dettmer has made them. You can see lots more here. His work is on display at the Kinz, Tillou and Feigen gallery in NYC through June 14.

Hat-tip to C-Monster.net

Hunting Prize Update

No further news about the disqualified artists, but the winner has been announced. The winner is Wendy Wagner, a multi-media artist from Houston. She won for painting, of course--that's what the prize is all about. But I'm more familiar with her as a really cool animator. You can see some of her animation on her website. I first saw them a few weeks ago at Diverse Works. Here's one of her paintings:


Perchabirdability, mixed media on birch panel, 2005.

Congratulations!