An original painting done by the late Pink Floyd founder Syd Barrett that was stolen from a London art gallery over the weekend has been returned, according to The Wire magazine.

Barrett’s self portrait was from London’s Idea Generation Gallery on Saturday April 9th, right off the wall of the “Syd Barrett Arts & Letters exhibition.” The painting was a gift, done in 1961 or 62, for his then girlfriend Libby Gausden.

Gausden and the gallery offered a $2000 reward and appealed for the safe return of the painting. On the 12th of April, the painting was returned via post to the gallery in perfect condition. You can see some of the now-closed Syd Barrett exhibition online here. Reasonably priced prints from the show are also for sale. I particularly liked this one:
 

 
Below, Syd Barrett and Roger Waters try to remain polite in the face of ridiculously uptight classical music critic Hans Keller, after the band play “Astronomy Domine” on BBC’s Look of the Week.
 

 
Andy Warhol and Paul Morrissey are accused of violating child pornography laws in a 1964 film directed by Morrissey called All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo. The suit was filed in 2009 against Warhol’s Estate and Morrissey by a lawyer representing the grown children of Richard Toelk. Toelk appeared in the film when he was 14, rolling and smoking what might or might not be a joint, giving himself electrical shocks and plunging a small knife into his leg. It is strong stuff, but how much of it was staged? Toelk died in 1990 so he’s not telling.

Morrissey has said that All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo was intended to send an anti-drug message and it was made a year before he met Warhol. The title of the film came from a Shirley Temple song that he would play during the silent film’s screening.

Emily Larish of The Vanderbilt Journal of Entertainment and Technology Law doesn’t think Toelk’s children have much of a case and may actually be exploiting their father more than Warhol and Morrissey ever did:

Assuming the depiction of Toelk in All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo can be considered sexual exploitation, if the footage was filmed in 1964, then it could not have been in violation of federal child pornography laws; the first federal laws aimed at child pornography were not enacted until the late 1970s. As for the claim for negligent infliction of emotional distress for damaging the family’s image, it is hard to imagine that many people have even seen the film, certainly not in recent years. Moreover, even out of those who have seen the film, I doubt that many would be able to identify the young boy smoking pot as Richard Toelk, the father of the plaintiffs.

It seems that this family is attempting to do the very thing for which they are accusing the defendants: exploiting the images of a young Richard Toelk for financial gain.

You can read the complaint here

Watch the rarely seen All Aboard The Dreamland Choo Choo and make up your own mind…or don’t. In my opinion the self-torture looks no more real than what you’d see in a mainstream horror movie. The film seems to want to dramatize a young man’s desperate need to feel something, anything, some kind of kick. It’s certainly not porn. And the young actor doesn’t appear to be suffering the kind of pain you’d feel after plunging an Exacto knife in your leg. It looks like theater to me.
 

 
The late Belgian painter Guy Peellaert (1934-2008) was once called the “Michelangelo of Pop Art” for his amazing photo-realist style. Famous for his iconic album covers for David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs and It’s Only Rock and Roll for the Stones, Peeleart was also noted for his legendary million-selling coffee-table book, Rock Dreams, a collaboration with British rock writer writer Nik Cohn. Rock Dreams featured 125 paintings by Peellaert of rockstars ranging from Frank Sinatra to Lou Reed in (often lurid) fantasy settings. It was something you’d see often in head shops in the 1970s. Many of the paintings are owned by Jack Nicholson.
 

 
Rock Dreams is a special favorite of mine. I’ve had a copy since childhood that I got from the Columbia House Record Club when I joined for a penny. One day in the late 80s, I came across a huge pile of hardback copies at the Strand Bookstore in NYC for $1 each. I bought the entire stack and gave them out as Christmas presents that year. It’s one of the best art books I’ve ever, ever seen.
 

 

 

 
Less well-known are Peellaert’s sexy 60s posters for Paris strip club The Crazy Horse Saloon (I used to have a few, but the tube they were kept in got lost during a NYC to LA move) and his books The Adventures of Jodelle (one of my most prized possessions) and Pravda with its title character based on gorgeous Francoise Hardy. (“Jodelle” had been modeled on French pop singer Sylvie Vartan). Below a super cool “Pravda” animation that Peellaert did in 2001 featuring a soundtrack by The Rolling Stones, Missy Elliot and Joy Division.
 

 

 
Even less well-known is the animated opening credits for Peellaert did for 1967’s Jeu de Massacre. (He also did the poster, too, obviously). Revel in New York describes it like this:
 

Two cartoonists meet a playboy who lives out the fantasies created in their cartoons. He hires them to create a new comic strip. As they work on the new strip, the playboy begins to live it out. Unfortunately, the new strip deals with murder.

 
Jeff Lieberman, host of TV’s Time Warp and one of the co-directors of OK Go’s time-crunch video for “End Love” is taking advance orders for an optical illusion kinetic sculpture he designed called the Moore Pattern:

I’ve been mixing the arts and sciences for about ten years — I hosted ‘Time Warp’ on the Discovery Channel, to try to get people excited about science, I take scientifically-inspired photography exploring the limits of human perception, and I design kinetic sculptures based on perceptual and physical principles. Moore Pattern is the first piece I’d like to try to manufacture for all of you.

It is a simple play on words: originally made as a wedding gift for my friend Jordan Moore and his wife Emilie, a moiré pattern is a type of interference pattern, generated here by two of the same shape placed backwards and rotating in opposite directions. When seen from far away, it looks as if one shape is moving in an impossible way. Trust me, the video helps…

I find it a meditative and relaxing piece in my apartment, where my test prototype has been running smoothly and continuously for about 5 years; and so I figured some other people might want one as well. Either for yourself, or someone you care about. For a more meditative video of the piece, check the original video.

The entire project is open source. You can see a spreadsheet of all of my expenses, download the 3d drawings, or even the 3d model to make or modify the design yourself.

If I’m going to work on something, I don’t want to artificially limit the number of people that can enjoy it. So, instead of doing a limited edition of a certain number, check this new type of limited edition:

I will make as many as you guys pre-order in the next 60 days, as long as at least 100 of you want one (that’s when the economics become viable). If not, no biggie. They each cost $150. I’d love to make 1000 or 10,000 or 100,000 of em, whatever people want. Let’s do it!

By donating $150 to the campaign you are pre-ordering one Moore Pattern sculpture to be delivered to your door, ready to run in less than 10 minutes.

This work was inspired by the wonderful works of David Roy and Arthur Ganson. More pictures and info available on my site.

This would certainly look good in most homes, he’s quite right. Order yours here.
 

Thank you, Chris Musgrave!

 

 
Holy moly! These Luchador skateboard decks by illustrator and graphic designer Chris Parks are fantastic! Brilliant detail and color.

‘The Last Fiesta’ is my 12-skateboard deck shout-out to Leonardo da Vinci’s ‘The Last Supper’ with Jesus Christos and his 12 Luchador apostles getting down one last time. This piece was created for my solo exhibit Saints & Sinners, here at the Pale Horse Studio. Hand-made shadow box by Casey Paquet.

 

 
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Miles Davis Quintet Skateboards

(via Super Punch)

 

 
Incredibly detailed hand-stitched Vogue covers by Inge Jacobsen. These are pretty terrific.

(via TDW)

Spotted in Soho, New York

Clever. It reminds me a lot of the Tom Hank’s trash can.

(via Wooster Collective)

 
There’s a fascinating article in the New York Times, That Noisy Woodpecker Had an Animated Secret, about Shamus Culhane, a pioneer of modern animation, who slipped homages to avant-garde artists into several Woody Woodpecker cartoons in the 1940s.

Sixteen years ago Tom Klein was staring at a Woody Woodpecker cartoon, The Loose Nut, when he started seeing things. Specifically, Mr. Klein watched that maniacal red-topped bird smash a steamroller through the door of a shed. The screen then exploded into images that looked less like the stuff of a Walter Lantz cartoon than like something Willem de Kooning might have hung on a wall.

“What was that?” Mr. Klein, now an animation professor at Loyola Marymount University, recalled thinking. Only later, after years of scholarly detective work, did he decide that he had been looking at genuine art that was cleverly concealed by an ambitious and slightly frustrated animation director named Shamus Culhane.”

Culhane was an admirer of experimental film makers, Eisenstein in particular, as well as abstract painters and managed to work some of his artistic obsessions into his commercial work.

High art meets popular art inThe Loose Nut when Woody “is blown into an abstract configuration…a convergence of animation and Soviet montage.”
 

 
In lowbrow mode, Culhane enjoyed pranking Universal Studios and Walt Lantz by throwing not-so-subtle sexual imagery into his cartoons. In The Greatest Man In Siam, Culhane’s libido goes nuts in a veritable onslaught of genitalia. You don’t need to be Freud to notice the erect phalluses and vaginal doorways. At the 4:36 point in the clip, there’s a glimpse of a pink passageway that incorporates both yin and yang.
 

Above, artist Kembra Pfahler and friend.

Glamorous new video from Dangerous Minds pal Kembra Pfahler, it’s The Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black’s new song “Bring Back the Night.” Directed by Bijoux Altamirano. Might be NSFW.
 

 
Particles is an “illumination installation” by Japanese artists, Daito Manabe and Motoi Ishibashi, which presents:

...seemingly floating lights that create a fantastic afterimage, this work centers around an organically spiral-shaped rail construction on which a number of balls with built-in LEDs are rolling while blinking in different time intervals, resulting in spatial drawings of light particles in all kinds of shapes. The illumination’s three-dimensional design, achieved through a fusion of the rail construct’s characteristic features and communication control technology, takes on various appearances depending on the viewer’s position. Look forward to an exciting new work that combines generally entertaining ideas and sophisticated information technology in everything from LED devices and other hardware to programming.

Particles is currently on display at the Yamaguchi Center for Arts and Media, Japan.