I promise this will be my last Cheetos-themed post for a while. But for some reason, I've been coming across a lot of weird stuff about Cheetos recently.
The latest is Cheetos pareidolia, which is the phenomenon of Cheetos that look like things. Often these unique Cheetos end up on eBay, where they command high prices. For instance,
right now, for only $650, you can buy a Cheeto shaped like a shrimp.
In 2017,
a man found a Cheeto shaped like the Virgin Mary, and he promptly put it up for sale.
Also in 2017,
a Cheeto shaped like the gorilla Harambe almost sold for $100,000.
And some, such as photographer Andy Huot, find inspiration in the many shapes of Cheetos.
Huot has an Instagram page dedicated to what he calls 'cheese curl art'. Below is his version of the
March of Progress, rendered in Cheetos.
Its creator is almost as disturbing.
Full story here.
In 1966, the art group
Art & Language (which, at the time, was Terry Atkinson and Michael Baldwin) debuted the
Air-Conditioning Show. This consisted of an air conditioner in an empty room. The only vaguely art-like part of the exhibit (in a conventional sense) was ten sheets of paper pinned to the wall by the door, on which were written line after line of cryptic sentences, such as, "It is obvious that the elements of a given framework (and this includes the constitution of construct contexts) are not at all bound to an eliminative specifying system."
This exhibit is now regarded as a significant moment in the development of modern art. One art historian noted that what made it original was that, "the body of air in a particular gallery space was singled out for art-status."
Another says:
Art & Language’s ‘Air Conditioning Show’ (1966-67) was seen as an exploration of our understanding of art institutions and their exhibition spaces; specifically 'the desire to show institutions’ internal mechanisms, here the thermal regulating system for an exhibition space, left empty.’
In a 2012 article in the Independent, Charles Derwent singled it out as, "the moment when the visual arts in Britain were beginning to turn un-visual, when mere visuality was becoming suspect."
The sheets of paper
are now preserved at the Tate Museum of Modern Art.
The strange tale of
Stéphane Breitweiser, arguably the world's greatest art thief, who managed to steal hundreds of works valued, in total, at well over one billion dollars.
His success was largely attributable to a a loophole in the world of art security: that there's not much security on the front-end (in the museums). Instead,
as Michael Finkel notes in a Feb 2019 article in GQ, "art crimes are typically solved on the back end, when the thieves try to sell the work."
And that's why Breitweiser managed to get away with his thefts for so long, because he never tried to sell anything. He stole because he loved the art and wanted to have it for himself, accumulating it all in his mother's house, where he lived.
His case reminds me of
Joseph Feldman, who stole over 15,000 books from the New York Public Library, simply because he loved books. It suggests a recurring weird-news theme: thieves who steal not from a profit motive, but instead to indulge their obsessive collecting.
Stéphane Breitweiser
Created by Finnish artist Erkki Pekkarinen. There's not a lot of info to be found about him in English on the Internet.
But Finland's Contemporary Folk Art Museum offers some:
Pekkarinen has bent bark to make both the largest birch bark shoes in the world (2.7 metres) and the smallest (3.8 millimetres). He is, however, best known for his all-bark ”forest-folk national costume”, which became the emblem of the 2001 ITE exhibition at Meilahti Art Museum in Helsinki. Pekkarinen has given his unfeigned performance in the same suit at many an ITE exhibition opening, wearing bark shoes, bark Stetson and carrying a bark briefcase. He always brings along a collection of smaller bark shoes in a tiny portable showcase.
His giant birch-bark shoes