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Behold the deeply, deeply unsettling (and NSFW) stop-motion videography of artist Monica Cook (NO RELATION AT ALL WHATSOEVER), featuring animatronic-looking sweaty weirdos giving birth to horrible misshapen babies with outsized genitalia and then turning into werewolves. The video is from March; Cook has a new show at Postmasters Art Gallery in New York featuring, in the words of Animal NY's Marina Galperina, "humanoid, cave-dwelling monkeys, loving in efflorescent goo, conceiving, birthing, mothering, and dying… all while you can see their insides working through their transparent, ripping skin. It's all shiny fluid and dripping flesh, sequins, pipes, teeth and peeled glittered bones." It's also "very touching," she says. Sweet dreams. More »
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Like any plutocrat worth his salt, Mitt Romney makes sure to get all painted up in portrait form every few years. More »
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Long story short, British artist Damien Hirst has been doing these "spot paintings" for a while—they are, literally, paintings of spots; also, technically they are "done" by his assistants—and now he's retrieved them all from collectors and distributed them among 11 Gagosian Galleries in eight countries, and is offering a free art to anyone who goes and sees every single spot painting. In all eight countries. So this is officially a "thing," because it is [whatever word adequately communicates an aggravated eye roll], and since we have nothing of value to say about it really, we will defer to Sister Wendy's spiritual successor Hennessy Youngman, who previously taught us so much about poststructuralism and relational aesthetics on his wonderful show Art Thoughtz. More »
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Everyone's a critic! Especially Carmen Tisch of Denver, who really does not like abstract expressionist Clyfford Still very much, and expressed that displeasure by punching his painting "1957-J no.2." And also rubbing her butt on it. More »
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Helen Frankenthaler, the great abstract painter (and legendary party-thrower) died today "after a long illness." She was 83. Frankenthaler's big abstract paintings—made by staining canvas with thin paint—were among the best-known of the "second generation" of abstract expressionism. And even if you don't like them (which, hey, whatever, "art"), you will probably appreciate this story from the Times obit: More »
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Steve Jobs could fairly be remembered as either a madman or as a business deity. If this seven-foot-tall, 485-pound bronze statue out of Hungary is any indication, he'll be worshipped as the latter rather than mocked as the former. More »
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There is only one accepted portrait of Jane Austen, sketched by her sister in 1810, in which the author of Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice looks to be extremely pissed off. But Austen scholar Dr. Paula Byrne, who is working on a definitive biography due out some time in 2013, has discovered a portrait in auction, and thinks there is an excellent possibility that the woman in it daintily holding a quill and staring out a window pensively — which, coincidently, is precisely how I look at this exact moment — could be Austen herself. More »
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Baldessari turns a billboard into a bill board. See what he did there? More »
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"I'm not afraid of death," Woody Allen famously said. "I just don't want to be there when it happens." Of course, that's the one experience we all get to share, and artists of all stripes have offered their commentary on life's impermanence. To wit: Mathieu Lehanneur, whose "Tomorrow Is Another Day" is a weather-station terminal that projects a video image of tomorrow's forecast, allowing the viewer to jump ahead in time. More »
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Michigan State art professor Danny Guthrie recently just finished an art project where he photographed himself in varying states of undress, caressing the naked bodies of "former and current students." Time to rev up the ol' campus controversy machine! More »
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Nate Hill is the New York artist behind the Free Bouncy Rides, Death Bear, the dead body dead body, and other, sunnier projects. Hill is biracial, and his latest work has a racial theme: for the next several months, Hill, in whiteface, will travel to Harlem as "The White Ambassador," prowling the streets to talk about important issues such as how white people are or are not stank. In the video above, watch as absurd performance art turns into an earnest and heartfelt conversation with a man on the street. More »
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Jay-Z's Man of the Year profile in the latest GQ extols the rapper's appreciation for art. Still, he probably won't want to add sculptor Daniel Edwards' latest work to his collection. As a response to Hova's recent Occupy Wall Street Rocawear T-shirt debacle, Edwards has created this rendering of Jay-Z with a big dollar-sign medallion around his neck and the heads of Mr. Burns, Scrooge McDuck, and Richie Rich stacked on top of him. More »
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Artists come up with some twisted stuff, but this project by Dutch visual artist Willem Popelier might be the creepiest project ever. He essentially cyberstalked two 14-year-old girls whose photos he found on a showroom laptop. More »
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Today San Francisco's public art commission will decide whether to rescind the city's contracts with artist Tom Otterness, who in 1977 shot and killed a shelter dog "for art," then stopped shooting dogs and became a world-famous sculptor. Even though he only shot a poor, defenseless dog that one time, many San Franciscans don't want to fund his work. More »
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Last week, auction house Christie's sold the above photo by Andreas Gursky for $4.3 million, setting the record for all-time most expensive photo (the previous record was set by Cindy Sherman's "Untitled #96," which sold for $3.89 million). More »
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Sexological tabloid hate columnist Andrea Peyser (pictured, on left) is fighting a war for your very soul on many fronts. Not only is Andrea ably covering the heathen War on Christmas; she keeps her beady eyes open for any indications of a greater War on Christianity. And for hot teen sexxx! But today, War on Christianity. More »
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A cleaning woman who really gets into her job accidentally erased part of a work of art valued at $1.1 million during her nightly duties at Berlin's Ostwall museum, the AP reports. Martin Kippenberger's "When it Starts Dripping from the Ceiling" is a multimedia sculpture that incorporates a "painted puddle beneath a rubber trough placed under a stacked tower of wooden slats." The cleaning woman thought the patina, meant to look like a patch of dried rain, was a stain, and went to work scrubbing away at it until it disappeared. The work was on loan by its owner, who instructed them to leave it where it is while insurers calculate its depreciated value. More »
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Live-streaming? Boring. Live-Tweeting? Laaaame. Live-sketching is where it's at, kids! Christoph Niemann, who draws a fantastic column for The New York Times Magazine, just finished live-sketching the New York City Marathon as he ran it—meaning that he's both a more talented artist than you and in better shape. You can take a look back through his marker—and, for the last couple miles, paint—renditions at his Twitter accounts @AbstractSunday and @AbstractSunday1. Neimann didn't stop to do these drawings (though we bet he slowed down for the hard stuff)—we're told he was practicing for months to get the hang of sketching and running simultaneously. (We've been practicing for years and we can barely run, period, so we're in awe). [NYTM, @AbstractSunday] More »
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Does C. Stephen Eckel's artistically rendered penis—which, until recently, one could view on his website—makes him unfit to serve Rochester, N.Y. as a county legislator? Republicans who live in his area certainly believe so! They keep all of their sepia-toned naked self-portraits to themselves. More »
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For their project "Super Rat," the members of the Japanese performance art collective ChimPom ran around the streets of Tokyo catching gigantic, poison-immune rats, took the rats home, then stuffed them and painted them up to look like the Pokemon character Pikachu. Art! It's a living. More »
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The enlightening Tumblr Teenage Mutant Ninja Noses reveals a fact heretofore unknown to us: that every nose has the power to become a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle head. Your nose, my nose, Justin Bieber's nose, and Usher's nose—everybody's nose. Together we are one. More »
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JeJu Love Land is a "whimsical erotic sculpture park" on an island in South Korea. It's been around for years, but we hadn't heard of it until Laughing Squid brought it to our attention. More »
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A new biography of Vincent van Gogh, which is getting a featured segment on 60 Minutes this weekend, posits that the post-Impressionist master didn't commit suicide by shooting himself in the abdomen, as previously believed. More »
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Here's the director of parks and recreation in Prescott, Arizona (pink suit) telling college student/artistic person Kristin Anthony (brown-haired woman on the right) why she had to stop work on her senior project—a community park bench and mosaic created by park users under Anthony's supervision. It's because some of the symbols people have chosen to decorate the bench with are "un-traditional" and therefore unacceptable. More »
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Speaking of the laughable campaign to make breakfast cereals like Lucky Charms "healthy," here's a nice selection of revamped cereal boxes that guerrilla-ish artist Ron English left on a shelf at a grocery store in Venice, California. Kellogg's really should release "Sugar Frosted Fat." More »
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In perhaps the most exciting display of obstetrical performance art since Karen Finley birthed a yam back in the early '80s, Brooklyn-based artist Marni Kotak is letting a gallery audience observe the delivery of her first child. More »
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The New Museum is on an inner-kid-friendly roll this year, first with worms and now with a slide. A 102-foot-long plastic tube, to be precise, connecting the fourth floor of the SANAA-designed museum to the second. Visitors can do more than touch the Carsten Höller artwork-they can suit up in helmets and pads and take the three-story slide for spin. More »
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This hilariously weird object is the latest random thing investigated by Portland's overzealous bomb squad. (The last was a tennis ball, which they detonated.) If you're wondering what it is, it's "a makeshift diorama containing a packet of tomato seeds, a flannel shirt and a computer mouse" that was spotted just sitting around on the street. Duh. More »
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At last, evidence of Washington, DC's newfound young, hip vibe that does not immediately inspire peals of derisive laughter. Meet Milbanksy: unshackling DC's reputation from hackery since 2011! More »
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Back in 1977, Brooklyn-based artist Tom Otterness made a film of himself shooting and killing a dog he'd adopted from an animal shelter. It's art! But it's also evidence of an act of animal cruelty, which is why some San Francisco residents don't want Otterness to receive $750,000 in public funds to make statues for a local subway station. More »
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Famous pancake artist Dan Lacey has rendered this realistic work in which President Barack Obama cures his depression by having sparkly thoughts of naked Scarlett Johansson photos. In the bottom-left corner is Bo the Dog, wearing a lei (but not his right eye???!!) in honor of the Hawaiian continent. Currently on sale at eBay. Would look great in your bathroom, or your tent. More »
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Jay Shells is the New York guerrilla artist famous for his unofficial subway etiquette posters. For his latest project, he's put up urban etiquette signs across the city. Got himself an interview on Fox News today! You'll want to watch all the way through to the end of this clip, when he tells the Foxbot about his aborted plans for a "Fox News Lies" sign. She is miffed! Jay, how could you?? More »
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Alex Schaefer, an artist in Los Angeles, just sold this painting of a burning Chase bank branch on eBay for a cool $25,000. Great imagery! It helped that he got a shitload of publicity, from two(!) police investigations. More »
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If your weary and weepy eyes need a brief respite from all the 9/11 picture retrospectives and falling-tower video replays, check out these sculptures that Sotheby's just installed in the backyard ("the gardens") of Chatsworth House—the stately abode of Britain's Duke of Devonshire. That's the duke in the picture, along with his wife and their new pet monster, Brad. More »
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Not all of the vehicles present at last week's Burning Man Art Conference and Business Workshop were RV campers inhabited by radical CEOs. Some of the things-on-wheels that people drove around the desert were actually quite artistic and inspired! This fire-shooting steampunk octopus, complete with moving arms and eyes that pop out, is one such example. Needs a few additional safety features, but it's still probably safer than a Pinto. More »
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There's a bit of an art world brouhaha unfolding right now, and, not surprisingly, Banksy is at its center. The controversy surrounds works created at the tail end of 2007, during a project called Bethlehem Santa's Ghetto in which the famed, anonymous graffiti artist left his mark upon several public surfaces in the West Bank. More »
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If there's one thing you do not mess with, in Russia, it's Vladimir Putin's image as an International Man of Sexiness. But that's what a group of anarchists in Siberia did by adding a picture of a sickly Putin, as well as President Dmitry Medvedev and several other politicians, to an ad about gonorrhea and other STDs that asks, "Do you need such companions?" This happened back in February but is still being investigated, which probably isn't a good sign for the alleged anarchists. Police arrested three men and conducted raids, where they found "extremist literature" and other anarchy-causing tools. If convicted, they could face seven years in a gulag for "hooliganism." If there is a bright side, at least they're already in Siberia. More »
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Renowned Syrian political cartoonist Ali Ferzat was found severely beaten early this morning on the Damascus Airport road, apparently by plain clothes government thugs, or shabiha. A picture from the hospital today shows both of his hands appearing to be severely injured. Long critical of the Assad family, Ferzat was nonetheless tolerated and, as the Guardian notes, even respected by Bashar al-Assad at one point. Ferzat told the paper in 2001 about an encounter he had with Bashar the aspiring opthamologist: More »
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Artist Todd White is famous for designing characters who live in a pineapple under the sea. But did he also design an elaborate kidnap and art theft caper in Huntington Beach? Gallerist Margaret Howell has filed a $7.5 million lawsuit accusing "agents of Mr. White" of imprisoning and assaulting her for several hours, stealing $1 million in artwork, forcing her into "reciting a rehearsed and scripted 'consent' into a voice recorder," and then defaming her to associates. More »
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Remember Susan Burns, the woman "from the American CIA" who in April tried to beat up a Gauguin hung at the National Gallery of Art? Well, she got back inside the gallery somehow, and this time allegedly went nuts on a Matisse. More »
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