Your Name Here

The latest Kickstarter weirdness. In return for a $10 donation, tattoo artist Illma Gore will tattoo your name on her body. Her goal is to completely cover her body with around 2500 names. She hasn't got all those names yet, but she's already got enough donations to get her project funded.

Posted By: Alex - Thu Jan 15, 2015 - Comments (11)
Category: Art, Tattoos

Pop Art Fridges

Come to think of it, why can't you buy fridges nowadays with decorated fronts?

Original article here.

Posted By: Paul - Wed Jan 14, 2015 - Comments (18)
Category: Art, Appliances, 1960s

Lloyd Canning Update

A week ago I posted about Lloyd Canning, an artist who claimed that he had been abducted by extraterrestrials who were now beaming images into his brain, and that this served as the inspiration for his art. He's now done an about face and says that he was just joking about the whole alien-abduction thing. It was a stunt to get publicity.

I have to hand it to him that he knows how to work the media. First he gets free publicity with a crazy claim. And then he gets a second round of publicity for the hoax reveal. P.T. Barnum would have been proud.

However, since a week ago I described the alien thing as a "schtick" he was using to promote himself, I don't really consider myself fooled by this one. A schtick is exactly what it was. Just a more cynical schtick than I gave him credit for.

But it means that I'll now have to add him to the Museum of Hoaxes.

Posted By: Alex - Wed Jan 07, 2015 - Comments (1)
Category: Art

Phone Book Art

Artist Stephen Wischer has found a use for all those Yellow Pages phonebooks that still get delivered to people, even though they've long been rendered pointless on account of the Internet. (The Yellow Pages are still periodically dumped at my front door and go straight from there into the recycling bin.) Wischer has stacked up 3000 of them in a display at the Plains Art Museum titled "In Crypt: On New Worlds Re-Ordered."

Says Amy Richardson of the museum: "When people come into the museum and this is right in our entrance area they stop and they're astonished, because at first they think it's a huge wall of bricks or wood and then they realize it's phone books." [wdaz.com, plainsart.org]

Posted By: Alex - Sat Jan 03, 2015 - Comments (3)
Category: Art

Alien-Inspired Art

I think it makes sense for an artist to have some kind of schtick to differentiate themselves from the crowd. And Lloyd Canning's schtick is that he says his paintings are inspired by images that extraterrestrials project into his brain. According to him, this image projection began after the aliens first abducted him in 2005. The Mirror has more details. Also check out Canning's website.

He reminds me of Flora Marian Spore, the 1920s artist who claimed her paintings were inspired by ghosts. (See Paul's post from back in 2012.)

Posted By: Alex - Wed Dec 31, 2014 - Comments (9)
Category: Aliens, Art

The Guinness Artist

David Gilhooley is known as the Guinness Artist, because he occasionally uses Guinness beer to paint watercolors. But he now has a second reason for the name after winning the Guinness World Record for most pencil portraits drawn in 12 hours. He sketched 200 of them.

By my calculations, that means he had to complete approximately one sketch every three and-a-half minutes. [Huddersfield Examiner]

Posted By: Alex - Mon Dec 08, 2014 - Comments (5)
Category: Art, World Records

Virtual Reality Experiment

UK artist Mark Farid wants to spend 28 days wearing virtual reality goggles, and he wants all of us to pay for it. His plan is that by wearing the goggles he will "experience life through another person's eyes and ears." This person whose life he'll be experiencing is only known as "The Other."

Farid is raising money on Kickstarter to make this plan a reality, and he figures he can do it for £150,000. That's around $235,000.

Why so much? Because, says Farid, the experiment "will require a team of medically trained invigilators at all times over the course of the 28 days as well as camera men, technicians and assistants on site 24 hours a day. This means sleeping accommodation and amenities must be provided for them onsite."

Posted By: Alex - Wed Nov 19, 2014 - Comments (6)
Category: Art, Performance Art, Experiments

Tipu’s Tiger

Fascinating article here.

Posted By: Paul - Fri Nov 14, 2014 - Comments (3)
Category: Animals, Art, Death, Dictators, Tyrants and Other Harsh Rulers, Puppets and Automatons, Nineteenth Century

Okee the Painting Otter

A forgotten giant of the art world. Source: The Santa Cruz Sentinel - Apr 7, 1965.

Posted By: Alex - Tue Oct 28, 2014 - Comments (4)
Category: Animals, Art, 1960s

The Sincerity Machine

Artist Jesse England converted a typewriter to type in Comic Sans, "the most popularly despised font of modern times." He says that he hopes this will provoke thoughts about how we "create, consume, store (and fetishize) media." More info at his website.


[via Dial-a-Nihilist]

Posted By: Alex - Sat Oct 25, 2014 - Comments (2)
Category: Art