Link Banana

(via MeFi, where the early comments are uniformly bitter)

Though I think giving Nigeria’s active but low-budget film scene an “-ollywood” is tacky, these are some interesting (and graphic) photos of it.

(via Boing Boing)

An intelligent-sounding explanation of Lia Holleran’s Dark Skate photographs:

The works blur the boundaries of photography and become self-portraits and drawings as well as records of performances. Light is used to form the drawing line while HALLORAN skateboards at night through different venues. The resulting images are each a trajectory of the artist’s movements over time. The photographs pair urban environments with lines of light which behave as physical objects or break apart into flurries of abstraction.

A less intelligent-sounding explanation: awesome.

(via The Daily Dish)

The Daily Mail believes it has discovered the identity of the famous and anonymous graffiti artist:

It is hard to imagine Banksy, the anti-authoritarian renegade, as a public schoolboy wandering around the 17th Century former monastery, with its upper and lower quadrangles and its prayers in the ancient cathedral.

But we then found a school photograph, taken in 1989, of a bespectacled Robin Gunningham in which he shows a discernible resemblance to the man in the Jamaica photograph.

Indeed, fellow pupils remember Robin, who was in Deans House, as being a particularly gifted artist.

But to that first quoted paragraph I must say: no, it’s really quite easy.

(via Waxy)

Rather than painting on walls, Paul Curtis cleans them.

(via PSFK)

This has circulated a lot, but I just noticed that the artist’s site is actually back online. Korean artist Yeondoo Jung offers real-life recreations of the often-misproportioned childrens drawings.

Metafilter user Artw explains it better than I can:

Jake and Dinos Chapman have bought a stack of Adolf Hitlers paintings for £115,000 and defaced them with rainbows and butterflies for their new show, “If Hitler Had Been a Hippy, How Happy Would We Be”. The show also recreates “Fucking Hell”, a huge swastika shaped diorama of tiny plastic nazis torturing and killing each other, which had been destroyed in a fire.

An example of their modifications to the painting. I’m honestly unsure if this is an act of historic vandalism or legitmate art.

By now, everyone’s probably seen this. But We Made This’s theory that it was actually viral marketing is interesting enough to note:

A lot of people are saying that either the GPS signal wouldn’t transmit through the metal exterior of a plane, or that the flight plan would simply be too damned expensive, even if DHL are footing the bill. So did it actually happen, or is just a (rather finely crafted) viral? The site seems oddly free of the expected background to the genesis of the project, and Nordenankar seems to have very little web presence before doing it… though he did win a D&AD student award in an advertising category last year…

UPDATE (5/27/2008): The page has been changed to refelct that it is, indeed, a work of fiction. More at The Telegraph. (via waxy)

An interesting concept: Emily Jo Cureton draws pictures inspired by a few words in that day’s New York Times crossword.

(via Gems Sty)

On a related note, Rex Parker Does the NYT Crossword Puzzle is interesting.

This one’s been making the rounds. Stop motion animation made by careful graffiti is a fascinating thing to watch.

I’m not quite sure how to explain twistori without all the magic escaping. Just go give it a look.

(via Magnetbox)

It sounds frivolous but that’s doesn’t mean it’s not beautiful. In fact, that may make it more so.

(via kottke)

This is the most troubling art project I think I’ve ever heard about:

Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible” while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.

(via Ross Douthat, in whose comments I expressed my opinion)

EDIT (4/17/2008): The NY Sun is reporting this is a ruse.

EDIT (4/18/2008): I feel obligated to note that Ms. Svarts is still insisting that she may have done it.

The artist explains:

Last year I redrew my mother’s entire high school yearbook from 1968—over a thousand heads. Good cartooning, to me, is all about simplification, and this was a fun experiment in distilling each person’s likeness down to a simple cartoon version and learning to draw efficiently, with both speed and as few details as possible.

I’ve published the project as a book called Excelsior 1968, which I debuted at last summer’s Toronto Comic Arts Festival. You can buy the book from my new online shop, and you can see entire thing over at Flickr.

(via Boing Boing)

I’m not that big a fan of art museums, but I think I’d have to go the new exhibit “Design and the Elastic Mind” at the MoMA were I anywhere nearby. Two would-be highlights are victimless leather:

“I FELT cruel when I turned it off,” says Paola Antonelli, senior curator at New York’s Museum of Modern Art. The “it” in question is a tiny coat that has been grown in a test tube using cells around a biodegradable polymer structure. The coat had flourished to such an extent that its “life support” system had to be switched off to stop it getting too big.

And this:

Most entertainingly, however, the exhibition illustrates this theme with a screen-based system that projects silhouettes of visitors and then mutates them into sci-fi monsters. This is hugely popular with children (and journalists) and if nothing else would make a perfect executive toy.

If you’re interested, Popped Culture assembled (for last year) a pretty interesting run down of pop-culture takes on da Vinci’s infamous last supper.

(via Neatorama)

The New York Times has compiled some interesting details and sketches from various illustrators. Nothing they say is terribly insightful, but it’s still interesting to see their takes — both political and artistic — on the candidates.

Neatorama’s got some pictures of the amazing practice of “oragamic architecture.” There’s no good way to describe it beyond that.