Have you ever considered commissioning a dog portrait in uniform? Take a look at Deef the dog above. His owners really wanted an oil painting of their dog painted as the Count of Monte Cristo. And personally, I think it’s come out really well. In fact our paintings of dogs in uniform or having your dogs in costume have become extremely popular, more so than our dog artists ever thought.
London police recently responded to a report of a woman in an art gallery who appeared to be unconscious. The gallery was closed, but the non-moving woman could be seen through a window. So, "officers forced entry to the address, where they uncovered that the person was in fact a mannequin."
The mannequin was part of a sculpture by American artist Mark Jenkins depicting the time his sister had "passed out and buried her face in a plate of soup."
Vostell, an artist of international repute, has a history of casting expensive devices in concrete to "cancel their presence." Television sets are a favorite target, but he once sealed an entire Cadillac in cement in Chicago. At LAICA, some of the sets are dead or completely covered in concrete, but most have at least part of their screen exposed. They drone on and on with soap operas, talk shows and afternoon Westerns...
Vostell means to contrast the sophistication of TVs and turkeys. The birds win handily. He also feels we can learn more from reputedly stupid turkeys than from television, but the comparison may not be a fiar one. The TV drone is so familiar and the programming so low-level, we quickly accept it as easily tuned-out background noise. Turkeys, on the other hand, look downright exotic to city folks who have never encountered one off a serving dish and wearing its feathers.
Art historian Susanne Meyer-Büser argues that a 1941 work by Piet Mondrian has been hung upside-down for the past 75 years. The work, made with colored adhesive tape, has traditionally been hung with the closely-spaced bands at the bottom. Meyer-Büser says that these should be at the top, "like a dark sky." A photo of Mondrian's studio from 1944 supports her interpretation.
However, there are no plans to turn the work around, due to its fragile condition.
I recently had the chance to visit this roadside oddity in Arizona. It's located about 20 miles east of Kingman on Route 66. Artist Gregg Arnold created it in 2004, modeling it after the giant heads on Easter Island. He created it, he said, "because the place looked like it needed something like this."
1961: Artist Niki de Saint-Phalle attached bags of paint to her paintings and then shot at them with a .22 caliber rifle, causing the bags to burst and the paint to ooze down the canvas. She called these her "shooting paintings."
She explained:
I shot because it was fun and made me feel great. I shot because I was fascinated watching the painting bleed and die. I shot for that moment of magic. . . Red, yellow, blue — the painting is crying the painting is dead. I have killed the painting. It is reborn.
Paul Di Filippo
Paul has been paid to put weird ideas into fictional form for over thirty years, in his career as a noted science fiction writer. He has recently begun blogging on many curious topics with three fellow writers at The Inferior 4+1.