The history of art forgery is often just as interesting as the history of original art. While artists may paint in order to challenge long-standing aesthetic, political or social norms, forgers paint for much less evident reasons. Their identities are never as well known as original artists; and yet in the back rooms of even the most lofty and discerning of art galleries and with art connoisseurs right across the globe their names are remembered as a source of shame and failure. Infamy is infinitely sexier than good, clean, old-fashioned fame.

The above clip is a promotion for a competition being run by Melbourne’s Art Series Hotel Group. If you stay a night at one of their three hotels — each designed around and some featuring work by a famous Australian artist — you have the chance to look at ten paintings and guess which one is an authentic Warhol. If you guess correctly, you can keep it. If not, you’ll end up with one of the nine remaining paintings, each being a fake created by master forger Tony Tetro.

That Art Series bunch certainly work their marketing team hard. Last year they had a competition challenging people to Steal a work by Banksy that they hung in a hotel corridor. It must have worked — we’ve written about them twice now! The problem is that there is lingering feeling of being violated. This hotel group is raising seriously interesting ideas about authenticity and fakery in the art world — and yet, how serious is it? How much do they care about the ideas and how much of it is just a stunt to promote the boutique artsiness of their company?

Perhaps I am old-fashioned. I relish public debate and I believe it should be protected against business interests and economic exploitation. I’d much rather sit in the local park and ask everyone who passes about their opinions on authenticity and fakery than sit in a forum funded by a private company who’s paid a forger to create a bunch of art that I can only access if I can afford the cost of a one-night stay in a boutique hotel.

They do raise an interesting issue, one that has plagued the art market world for decades. And yet, I can’t help but feel like I’m taking a sticky walk of shame after watching this latest venture.

Art usually only becomes news if large sums of money are involved. It is a great shame that art isn’t reported on for challenging aesthetics, or revolutionary approaches to form. Nope, only controversies and million dollar gallery deals are the order of the day in the popular press. This is why every report on artist Chris Burden’s Metropolis II will allude to the cost that art investor Nicolas Berggruen was willing to pay for it.

The 20′x30′ sculpture is currently on loan to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art for the next ten years. It took Burden and his chief engineer Zak Cook four years to build and comprises 18 roads including a six-lane highway, several train tracks, buildings made from Lego, Erector Sets and Lincoln Logs, and 1100 custom-built toy cars with an average speed of 230mph. It only runs for 90 minutes three days a week and each run requires two staff members watching it constantly for glitches in the system.

If all the figures boggle your mind, you’re not alone. In essence, Metropolis II is big. It took a long time to make, there are a lot of cars and someone paid a lot for it; it’s about size, it’s about scale and it all comes down to figures. So why do we only talk about Metropolis II in this way? There is no doubt that this sculpture required a hell of a lot of dedication and time. Burden must have put his heart into making it. But technical skill seems to have taken precedence over concept. It’s artfully made, but what is the purpose of making it?

The novelty of the sculpture is evident. It cleverly uses childhood toys and challenges the definition of the museum space and subverts ideas of art and sculpture as static. The music in the film — created by Christopher Hirsch — also focuses on the piece as a novelty. But why this form? What does using these kinds of materials mean for a broader concept? Burden told Co.Design;

“It’s modeling something that’s on the twilight of extinction: the era of the ‘free car’. Those days are numbered, but think it’s a good thing. The upside is that cars can be faster and safer, and you don’t have to worry about drunk drivers. Think about it: The cars in Metropolis II are going a scale speed of 230mph. That’d be great to do for real in L.A.”

Did Burden create this kinetic sculpture because he wanted cars in L.A. to go faster? A massive technical achievement seems to have overridden the importance of conceptual innovation. While doubtlessly Metropolis II will be a major drawcard for LACMA, scale and novelty seem to have won out over intellectual debate.

The words ‘eerie’ and ‘scary’ aren’t really how you want to be described by your friends — unless you’re an artist, of course. Or, should that be, unless you’re David Flinn. The New York artist experiments with sculpture, installation and organic elements, all of which is embodied in his latest work, The King is Dead.

Having spent most of his life between NYC and Turin, Italy (oh, how terrible!), this twenty-something creative is inspired by his “dual lifestyle”, and the binary oppositions of the manmade and the natural.

“I’m heavily influenced by spaces both architectural and organic and having to always adapt to my surroundings,” he said.  “I really try and empathize with a space and create a dialogue with it which manifests itself in my work.”

It is these architectural and organic spaces and objects that form the basis of The King is Dead, and David’s work as a whole.  The installation was a part of the Spring/Break New York Art Show last month, and David works closely with Evnoy Enterprises gallery that represents him. The confinement of the wood and nature within infrastructure and this closed space is somewhat stark — with the natural elements paired with mass produced industrial hardware.

This short, but surprisingly potent, film collaboration with Nicolas Mezger has strong sense of foreboding, and emanates that eerie feeling.  I know he’s only using that chainsaw to chop some wood but, man, it may as well be a body!  David says that he immediately felt comfortable with the director transposing his work into film.

“I really wanted him to follow me in my creative and work process while he worked in his own giving each other no direction or input,” Flinn said. “When he sent the final cut, all I wanted to know was ‘how long have you been stalking me’.”

“He really captured the work and my process with no filter or angle.”

In the “harmonious dialogue between two opposing forces”, David explained that he physically and conceptually — as you can see in the video — creates the prominence of the force of gravity, with a 700 lbs log bearing above your head. Yet the strength of the chains holding it up creates an energy and a tension within the space — hence giving it life.

“I have a great respect for nature and art and in the same way nature elegantly pushes itself around and moulds our surroundings, I think art needs to be something beyond ‘human’ as well,” David says. “A psychological shape shifter, and if you remain in the ‘cube’, how will you ever evolve?”

“So I look to nature — in comparison we are nothing.”

Your sister’s mindless conversation is boring you and you look up at the sky. Radiant sun right above you, glistening blue all around. Your mind wanders and out of the corner of your eye, you notice a white rabbit, running in the distance; a welcome distraction. Before you know it, you’ve arrived somewhere you’ll have trouble getting back from. The rabbit is nowhere to be seen. All of a sudden, you trip and start falling… until eventually you stop. You get up and look around. Everything is different; upside down and twisted. Your name isn’t Alice, but it might as well be.

This story reminds most of us of a fictional fairy tale; a collection of surrealist impossibilities sewn together with words. Japanese artist Yayoi Kusama is unlike most of us, because she has special hallucinatory powers that allow her to see in polka dots, a surrealist vision like the ones Alice was privy to in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. It is with this ability that Kusama can make art absolutely unique. It is also with this ability that she is so perfectly suited to illustrate such a classic children’s book. So Penguin Books made it happen. The pages of Alice are richly colorful and vivid with imagery, not to mention intricately sprinkled with polka dots. Copies are already sold out, which only further proves this edition’s special factor.

[via Huffington Post]

An artist’s ability to succeed is measured by their originality and potential for mass appeal: a tricky combination. Every artist has his or her own vision for a particular style or work; a vision that should never be compromised because it’ll make them uniquely worthy of recognition. Canadian artist David Altmejd‘s color approach to sculpture is just one example of an artist sticking to their creative guns.

“Boundaries,” an episode of Art 21‘s PBS series, Art in the Twenty-First Century, highlights Altmejd’s approach to sculpture-making, and his take on colors: “I’m extremely attracted to pastel colors, but they have to be dirty in some way.” He goes on to mention the aesthetic appeal he finds in lavender, pink, and mint green and how the inherent “prettiness” in these colors needs to be counteracted by ugliness: a dark brown or green. It’s with this color combination that he finds the perfect balance.

[via Art 21]

“Life just isn’t a sequence of waiting for things to be done”;  wise words that may induce sickening bouts of clichéd eye-rolling if uttered by anyone else but Ze Frank.

Blithely defending his comb-back as a wretched indicator of his age in the opening seconds of his latest Youtube video, Ze Frank returns after a 6 year hiatus with An Invocation For Beginnings, a thrice-weekly web program specifically created to enthuse those who feel stuck in a rut with a show Frank describes as, “fun, fun good times,” and, “same same, but different,” compared to his previous show, The Show With Ze Frank.

In the 3 minute episode, the the digital performance artist, highbrow comedian and cognoscente advocates the pursuit of courage and creativity with his soothing full-tone voice that speaks of embracing a “Fuck It Let’s Do It” a.k.a. the FILDI mentality and the need to beware the malcontent Cheese Monster. Why?  Because the Cheese Monster is never satisfied with simply cheddar, the monster is only satisfied with the cheese of accomplishment and that hunger for indeterminate success never fades regardless of odds, past failings and critics.

Launched on Kickstarter, the world’s largest funding platform for creative projects on February 27 the project has raised $146, 752 to date, far exceeding the funding goal of $50, 000.

And to repay his keen followers and financial backers in return for such glorious support, Ze Frank has promised the following: If fundraising efforts hit $150 000, Ze Frank will pay a visit to 3 audience members’ homes and discuss with them the most interesting person they know as the basis for a future episode.

And if fundraising efforts reach $1 Billion, Ze Frank will buy Greece and install Sea-to-Sea carpeting.

Much to the delight of avant-garde art lovers, pioneering performance artist Marina Abramović is back. In her first work since the 2010 MoMA retrospective, Abramović has utilised the space of the PAC Contemporary Art Pavilion in Milan to produce performance art that is idealised as quiet and contemplative.

Entitled The Abramović Method, this piece involves a series of chairs, table-like beds and wooden poles around which people are directed to sit, lie or stand accordingly. There are noise-cancelling headphones, telescopes, minerals and white lab coats for participants, all of whom seem very Zen in this short film produced by Cool Hunting. Abramović says of her new work, ”The performance has no meaning without the public because, as Duchamp said, it is the public that completes the work of art. In the case of performance, I would say that public and performer are not only complementary but almost inseparable.”

Forming a relationship with the public is essential to art. Performance art is the primary area that enables audience participation beyond the act of looking, thus enabling a democratisation of the medium and the reduction of the cult of auteur. Getting the public involved is a potentially great way of taking the art in unexpected directions, allowing the space for subversions to occur. Of course, relinquishing control of your idea to others is no easy task. However, it becomes more and more necessary as new media and new ways of interacting come to prominence.

The issue then with Abramović’s new work is how dictatorially people are moved through the art space. There seem to be very strict guidelines as to how you can interact, including where you stand, where you sit and your behaviour during participation. How does this then define the kind of relationship the art and the artist has to the public? It becomes a one-way street; like a mother to a newborn, the provider to the passive consumer.

“The Abramović Method” is on show in Milan until 10 June 2012.

[via Cool Hunting]

Blood red roses in a white room, cold with an isolation and distant longing, an organic sense of consuming despair; possibly some of the most baring, hardest emotions to portray on screen—yet this melancholic experimental piece from Spanish filmmaker Diego Barrera seems to do it perfectly.

The piece was produced with Barrera’s production company CELESTIAL TWINS, in which he collaborates with Julieta Triangular to create art-driven short films, among other projects.  Organic Love Synthesis explores the consuming and unsatisfying love of a young couple, and the emptiness of  another woman.  In their separate worlds they suffer, and when they happen to all meet at an important tree they find the source of their organic love or tragic end.

Binary oppositions are deconstructed as they bleed together to create the haze of emotion and melancholia of the characters, who encounter an almost out-of-body experience.  Terror and desire; sadness and beauty; death and the living; confinement and freedom—everything is consuming, nothing is clear.  The roses are constantly shedding their petals, the strange impulses continue until one has no choice but to die.

The New Yorker is one of the most iconic magazines of all time, but that doesn’t mean we can bring ourselves to read it each week. The Tyranny of The New Yorker Magazine, a new stop-motion video by Yuli Zalkow, captures that exact moment when the pleasure of reading it becomes a guilt, when you evolve from a simple bachelor life to a one more complicated and you have to start commiting to other things than your weekly habit of reading it cover to cover. And here’s where you reach the tipping point and your beloved magazine doesn’t fit in your life.

The New Yorker begins to stack up in some forgotten corner of  your room because you no longer have time to read it. Kids, wife, work, study, and at the very end of the list of priorities, there’s your stack of New Yorkers waiting patiently to be read. When you find a bit of spare time, you see the magazine, now a “symbol of all your failures as a productive reader”. And you pick it up, and you skim through it finding some fiction articles to read—you are a grown up, you have a family, you have a job, you NEED to prioritize–and then so much prioritizing leads you to eventually end up reading just the cartoons while you take a crap in the bathroom. The sad but common ending of subscription magazines just before you stop subscribing to them, and they die.

If you happen to be feeling this guilty, stop feeling bad about it. The magazine can stop being a tyrant in your life,  you just have to watch this video for the solution.

via swissmiss.

Skateboarding can be seen as quite the artistic sport: gliding about with enough style and grace to conjure an idea of urban dance. London-based animator and graphic designer Matt Box takes this notion one step further and creates literal art out of the stealthy skate movements in the Vimeo web series Acid Drops, an Unreal Estate production.

The first episode shows a hand-painted watercolor animation of skater Jason Dill and the second episode, featured above, highlights the movements of pro skater Dylan Rieder. The episodes are short and sweet, lightly scored to underline the art animation. Episode two features a musical collaboration between Box and Chris Moorcraft while the first is scored by Tom Waits.

The movements are fluid in life and much more so in these animations. Elegance, style, and grace are all abundantly present in Acid Drops, turning skateboarding into something otherwise unrealized: beautiful.

via huh.