Great idea. English startup Moo has launch Flickr MiniCards, half-sized business cards that have your flickr photos printed on the back and your contact info on the front. You get 100 different cards for $20 –and free shipping on September orders.
To go along with the Brooklyn Museum’s exhibit Graffiti, which just closed this month, the curators invited Flickr users to upload their own photos of Brooklyn Graffiti. The exhaustive Flickr photo set now has more than 800 photos of street art in the borough of Brooklyn.
Recently smitten with the work of San Francisco artist Rachell Sumpter. Her drawings of nomadic, hipster Sami/Laplander/Sampi of Northern Europe are quiet little delicacies. And apparently the Sami subjects are accidental, because she didn’t know the people she was painting even existed. It was kind of a shock. Maybe it’s a collective unconscious thing, she says in the latest issue of Giant Robot. …I’m half Norwegian. Maybe I’m supposed to paint them. She has a great little show of paintings, prints and sculptures that just opened at Giant Robot, San Francisco.
The New York Times has launched a new Times Reader beta that will be a new software package from the Times that will let you read the entire paper online or offline in a paginated format which promises more readibility. It’s built on Windows Presentation Foundation, a platform of great contention to me lately.
You’ve got to look at ‘em all. Every one of Doug Dubois’s portrait photo series and family photos are perfect.
In his recent show at the Guggenheim in Berlin, Chinese artist Cai Guo-Qiang has filled a gallery room with 99 stuffed wolves. The bravery of the wolves is met head on by the unyielding wall. As the leading wolves go down, many more follow with force and determination. As those in the front fall and pile up, those behind take up their positions.
German photographer Thomas Weinberger takes large-format photos of landscapes that are exposed once during the daylight and once at night for a subtly eerie effect.
Texan Scott Wade draws on dirty cars.
The USBcell is a smart, simple battery that plugs into your computer’s USB port to get recharged. The batteries take 5 hours for a full charge and they come in standard AA, AAA, C/D sizes. 9 volt and mobile phone/blackberry batteries coming soon.
Death and Taxes is a visual guide to where your tax dollars go. Did you know the U.S. gave more money to the Millenium Challenge Corporation ($3.0b) than it did for all National Guard pay ($2.4b)? Did you know the U.S. gave more money to Israel last year ($2.34b) than it did to the National Parks Service ($2.15b)?
Finnish photographer Marjaana Kella takes portraits of people from behind.
…is an elephant. Nice review in the UK Guardian of Banksy’s first LA show. Brad, Jolena, Keanu, a spray painted elephant; good times. See his Punking of Paris. Y mas.
Noah Kalina takes a photo of himself everyday for 6 years.
English artist Ian Stephenson, who likes to draw on rubbish, has made done some great scribbling on the bathroom walls of the London ad agency MotherLondon. See more images in the stalls here and here. Stephenson also has some posters and prints for sale too.
Oakland artist Sarah Applebaum knits afghan/sweater installation pieces that require shoe-less luxurating by gallery-goers. In her latest show at the Michelle O’Connor Gallery in San Francisco she also offered a sweater to be worn by four at a time. See more here and phone cam photos here.
About 60 percent of the cheap oil paintings in the world –around five million oil paintings– are produced each year in Dafen, China, the world’s leading center for mass-produced works of art, reports an article in Der Spiegel. Real oil-painted reproductions of famous paintings go for between $8 and $50 each. Check out this photo essay too. When it comes to classic masterpieces, I’ll take one Madame X and one Asparagus, please. Have they done any Phillip Guston yet?
Pretty insane photo spread by Steven Meisel in the latest Italian Vogue (What, you don’t read Italian Vogue?) that apes the TSA and “homeland security.” It’s pretty and insane.
English artist Idris Khan takes photos of objects, places and artwork in a series and overlays them onto one another to create a sort of combined view of that series. Khan describes the photos as looking more like a drawing. It’s not systematic or uniform. The opacity of every layer is a different fallible, human decision. The subjects include the photographic work of Muybridge, Bernd & Hilla Becher, the sonatas of Beethoven, JWM Turner postcards and pages of the Holy Koran. Khan’s work is on view at the Victoria Miro Gallery in London.
I like photographer Michael Wolf’s images of Hong Kong buildings in his series Architecture of Density. More at the Robert Koch Gallery in San Francisco.
During spring in Denmark, at approximately one half an hour before sunset, flocks of more than a million European starlings (sturnus vulgaris) gather from all corners to join in the incredible formations shown above. This phenomenon is called Black Sun (in Denmark)