If you live or find yourself in Paris this holiday season, you must visit the first big Paris show of artist Paul Laffoley at the Palais de Tokyo through Jan 17, 2010. There is also a new Laffoley poster from the event and it’s amazing, I got mine in the mail yesterday. Proceeds from the poster sales are 100% dedicated to the costs of completing photography and printing of the Paul Laffoley Catalogue Raisonne currently being put together by Douglas Walla at Kent Gallery in New York. There is a lot of work so it’s a huge undertaking that will be spread across several volumes. I think it’s what’s needed before the public at large finally catches on about what a genius we have in our midst.

You can buy a Paul Laffoley poster here. Makes a great Christmas present!

Paul Laffoley in Paris.

The gallery at Palais de Tokyo.

Flickr user mleak stands next to her full-size sculpture of Wonder Woman, made from 11 (only 11?) bags of Wonder Bread. Slightly less hot than Lynda Carter… slightly. ComicsAlliance reports:

Somewhere on the grain-based Earth-9, the rolls and croissants of Breadmerica cried out for a vitamin-enriched warrior of peace and “Wonder?Ǭ

 

 
Here are some clever album cover collages by New York artist, DJ and composer Christian Marclay.
 
See more over at ignant

 
Artist Remus Grecu was asked by Ogilvy & Mather to paint the Contemporary Beauty Ideal in the manner of the Old Masters to show how standards of beauty have changed. Drastically. The work is being showcased at the St?ɬ

 
The big new Tim Burton retrospective opens at MOMA on November 22nd.  Consisting of both a gallery exhibition and a film series, the show considers:

Burton’s career as a director, producer, writer, and concept artist for live-action and animated films, along with his work as a fiction writer, photographer and illustrator.  Following the current of his visual imagination from early childhood drawings through his mature work, the exhibition presents artwork generated during the conception and production of his films, and highlights a number of unrealized projects and never-before-seen pieces, as well as student art, his earliest non-professional films, and examples of his work as a storyteller and graphic artist for non-film projects.

The opposing themes of adolescence and adulthood, and the elements of sentiment, cynicism, and humor inform his work in a variety of mediums?

 
I know we’re all making “walk on the ‘mild’ side” cracks right now, but the Velvet Undergrounder’s been snapping photos since the ‘60s, and is an admitted Leica-geek.  These two images have been culled from Reed’s new book of photographs (his third), Romanticism, a series of landscapes shot exclusively in black and white.

Finding just the right sequence for the photos, Reed says, was really no different than sequencing an album, “The response is emotional.  That’s all I want; they are taken with emotion and put together with emotion, equal emotion.”  And while the quality of Reed’s light looks stunning,

Rarely is there a human mark on the scene; for the most part, his photographs are of nature untouched: woods leading down to the edge of the sea, a layer of thick mist covering the earth.  The branches of a tree are abundant with fruit, another tree is dead; the trunk splinters as it disintegrates.  “I have never seen a tree that is not graceful,” he says.

Only one photograph, towards the end of the book, shows a human form (see above).  It is an androgynous gray figure, with short hair, facing away from the camera and outlined with light.  Light ripples across the top of the scene, suggesting water, and the rest is a mass of gray.  The figure is Reed’s wife, the musician and artist Laurie Anderson.

 
In The Independent: Lou Reed: Photographer

Weird illustrator John Coulthart reports on the Ballardian, dead-America landscapes of http://www.alexisrockman.net/. Of course you can put “Ballardian” before anything and I’ll look at it, but this is particularly good stuff.

Alexis Rockman?

Maxim posted this funny piece titled 11 Awesomely Bad Pieces of Kenny Rogers Art. Maxim says, “He may not have had a hit in over a decade, but you’d be hard-pressed to find someone who doesn’t think Kenny Rogers is a beloved cultural icon, not to mention a flat-out badass. Hell, after Elvis and Tony Montana, Kenny gets the velvet painting treatment the most often. Some of these attempts have turned out better than others, so with that in mind, here are 11 pieces of Gambler tribute art - velvet and beyond - that prove you gotta know when to walk away ... and when to run.”
 
11 Awesomely Bad Pieces of Kenny Rogers Art
 
(via Presurfer)

 

 
Super blog Pink Tentacle has a delightful collection of classic Japanese movie monsters painted on black velvet. The paintings are by artist Bruce White and can be viewed here.
 
(via Pink Tentacle)

 
New work from Jeff Koons will be on display at the Gagosian Gallery in Beverly Hills from Nov. 14 through Jan. 9, 2010. The gallery?