Super intense animated music video for Takayuki Manabe and directed by Sugimoto Kousuke. I dig it.
 
(via 42 blips)

 
Bleak images from photographer Timothy Briner:

Boonville connects six American small towns, their diverse landscapes, and unique individuals, into one unifying view of America.

Timothy Briner
 
(via Lost at E Minor)

 
Another sort of art forgery is being investigated by British police, but there’s a twist: someone is impersonating Turner Prize-winning artist Tracey Emin in a mass mailing sent to her neighbors “explaining” her supposed plans for a swimming pool to be constructed inside of a building in Spitalfields she acquired in 2008 for ?Ǭ

 
A head-scratching controversy has been brewing in the art world of late over a 1964 self portrait of Andy Warhol. Or more accurately put, a series of ten self portraits of the artist that used to be by the artist, but now aren’t, so they’re not self-portraits anymore, they’re just portrait portraits not by Warhol anymore despite being signed by him. Got it?

Maybe I should explain a little bit better: Warhol’s iconic Red Self Portraits (as the suite is known) have been decreed fakes by The Warhol Foundation, the New York-based body that declares Warhols authentic or not. Clearly there are a lot of Warhol forgeries floating around in the art world and let’s face it, a Warhol would be rather hard for the layman to authenticate.

With Warhol there is also the the issue of “who” actually painted the work or who pulled the screens for the serigraphs. In the 1960s it was just as likely to be studio assistants Gerard Malanga or Billy Name as Warhol himself. In the 1970s, it would have likely been Ronnie Cutrone. Everyone knows that when Warhol produced work at his “Factory” it was with a mechanical process, done by others and only supervised by the artist, who for the most part, only touched his pieces to sign them. This is a fairly well-established fact! (Malanga has long held that he painted the electric chairs series and few would dispute this claim).

However, due to a set of criteria that I find difficult to fully understand (read more about it below) somehow, someway this rather well-known Warhol self portrait became persona non grata to the Warhol Foundation and the owners are fighting back at what they consider an arbitrary and unjustifiable call, rendering once incredibly valuable—and signed!—Warhols absolutely worthless.

From The New York Review of Books “What is an Andy Warhol?” by Richard Dorment:

[O]ne picture in the series, now owned by the London collector Anthony d’Offay, is signed and dated by Warhol, and dedicated in his own handwriting to his longtime business partner, the Zurich-based art dealer Bruno Bischofberger (“To Bruno B Andy Warhol 1969”). Since the Renaissance, a signature is the way artists such as Mantegna and Titian acknowledge the authenticity of their work.

As if this were not enough to authenticate the work, the Bischofberger self-portrait appeared in Rainer Crone’s 1970 catalogue raisonn?ɬ

 
Curious animated gifs titled “Boys” by Elizabeth Heppenstall.
 
(via everlasting blort)

 

 

 
Artist Ran Hwang creates these giant wall installations by using a gazillion buttons and hammering pins. Ran Hwang says:

My immense wall installations are extremely time consuming and repetitive manual work. This is a form of meditative practice that helps me to find inner peace. Typical materials related to the fashion industry are used to create conceptual icons such as Buddha or traditional vase. Works are divided into two groups.

For the first type of work, pins are used to hold the buttons onto the surface to form silhouetted image, or to disintegrate such image. No adhesive is used so that buttons are free to stay and move, which implies the genetic human tendency tobe irresolute. I use buttons, because they are common and ordinary, like the existence of human beings. The second group of work consists of connecting a massive number of pins with yards of thread to occupy a negative space of the presented image. Here, threads serve as metaphor for connection and communication between unlinked human relations. Fulfilled negative space and absence of the image formed by positive space suggests deeper understanding of the image. I believe mortal essence in the heart of self recognition.

(via Dude Craft)

 
According to artist Erial Ali’s website: “I am proud to offer the unique *magical* service of Erial Ali creating a Celestial Soul Portrait of YOU!”

Erial also creates “magical” versions of family portraits from photographs. His prices range any where from $150 to $250.

Visit Erial’s website to view more Celestial Soul Portraits.
 
(via J-Walk Blog)

 
From Austrian Times:

Kung fu master Chen Pengxian wasn’t just winging it when he claimed he could create the smallest carving in the world.

So Chen, 42, carved an entire sentence in Chinese characters on a fly’s wing to prove his ability.

The sentence - which translates as ‘I am at the bottom of her valley of no love’ - was taken from his favourite martial arts novel.

“I have studied king fu for 20 years and I used the breathing techniques I had learned to stop my hands from shaking because one slip would have torn the wing to pieces,” he explained from his studio in Taipei, Taiwan.

Austrian Times: Wing and a hair

 

 

 
Here are some absolutely amazing sculptures made from recycled materials by artist Michael Ferris Jr.

Artist’s statement for sculptures:

My intent is to render an accurate likeness of my subject however what I find more compelling is communicating the sitter?

 
(via Wooster Collective)