art

In 1997, the Minneapolis College of Art and Design held an art sale to give student and alumni artists an opportunity to offer their creations to art collectors. They offered around 1,000 pieces by 86 different artists, including prints by photographers. Since then, the MCAD Art Sale has exploded in popularity.

This year the organizers are hoping to sell thousands of artworks by hundreds of artists at a rate of 7 pieces per minute. The sales will add to the $1,875,000 that has been paid out to artists through the sales over the years.

The debate rages on: should appropriated Google Street View photographs be considered art? There are quite a few artists and photographers out there who think it should be. Photographer Michael Wolf was awarded Honorable Mention for his curated screenshots at the World Press Photo 2011. Photographer Aaron Hobson takes screenshots and turns them into gorgeous panoramic photos. Jon Rafman's screenshots were picked for an exhibition at London's Saatchi Gallery.

Now here's another case that might cause a lot more head-scratching: photographer Doug Rickard's Street View screenshots have been selected for the permanent collection at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art.

"BYOB" is an initialism that's readily understood by college students who party. To artist Rafaël Rozendaal, however, it means something entirely different. In 2010, Rozendaal launched Bring Your Own Beamer, a series of novel "open source" art exhibitions in which participants were asked to bring their own beamers (AKA projectors). The recipe for the concept is extremely simple: find a venue with plenty of wall space (and outlets), invite a bunch of artists and art-lovers, and have images projected all over the walls for everyone to enjoy.

A brief exchange during a passing conversation a few days ago got me thinking. Someone said something about how lucky I was to make a living as an artist. I immediately corrected them; while immensely thankful for my career, a job where I get to wake up every day and make images, I felt obligated to point out that most of the time I am not, in fact, an artist at all.

At best, assignment photographers are craftsmen, not artists, solving other people’s problems and putting other people’s ideas into effect in the most timely and cost-effective way possible; to think otherwise is delusional.

If you're a photo enthusiast who uses Pandora for personalized music listening, you'll feel right at home using Art.sy. Just as Pandora uses the Music Genome Project to offer automated music recommendations, Art.sy has an Art Genome Project through which 20,000 images of art from 275 galleries and 50 museums have already been digitized, analyzed, and stored.

Yep, you read that title correctly. Vegetable Weapons is a photo project by Japanese photographer Tsuyoshi Ozawa. Since 2001, Ozawa has been traveling to various countries around the world, photographing young women holding make-believe firearms constructed using vegetables and other foods.

Google's Street View imagery features plenty of photographs of people, but they're often distorted and almost always feature blurred faces. Street Ghosts is a project by artist Paolo Cirio that reintroduces these distinctive portraits back into the real world. After choosing a particular photo containing a person in Street View, Cirio prints it out as a life-sized print on thin paper, cuts out the person, and then uses wheat-paste to affix the giant person photo onto the exact location where the photo appeared in the virtual world.

Using a novel technique he developed himself, artist Christian Faur turns photographs into giant prints created by using crayons as pixels. When exhibited, the size and three-dimensional nature of the work make for an interesting viewing experience for visitors. The space appears to be full of photographs, but the images turn into abstract and colorful sculptures as the visitor gets closer. Each piece is composed of hundreds of crayons of different colors.

Satellite photographs of Earth are often abstract and artsy, filled with strange colors, shapes, and textures. Some resemble the paintings of old masters, while others look like microscopic slides studied in biology classes. NASA's LandSat has snapped images from space for 40 years now, with many of the images going into a special collection by the U.S. Geological Survey called "Earth as Art". NASA recently decided to run a photo beauty contest to find out which of the satellite images in its collection are the most artistic.

Over 14,000 people ended up voting on the collection of 120+ images. The image above came in at number 5. It's titled "Lake Eyre Landsat 5 Acquired 8/5/2006".

Here’s an interesting TED audition by artist Phil Hansen, who speaks on embracing …

In 2011, photographer Michael Wolf was awarded Honorable Mention in the World Press Photo 2011 contest for …

The "Smashing Booth" is a contraption that shatters objects and snaps photographs at the moment of impact. It was created by designer Henrietta Jadin, who created it as part of a school project titled "Breaking Point." The wooden device catapults an object at the back wall of its box, and a photo is captured by an open shutter, sound sensor (made from an Arduino controller), and strobe.

McLean Fahnestock of Long Beach, CA took high definition video of all 135 …

Filmmaker Ian Gamester created this video of moments collected over the course of several years, inspired by artist David Hockney's photocollages, his famous "joiners."

Here’s a tutorial by Elizabeth Giorgi of Being Geek Chic on how you …

Brazilian artist André Feliciano creates beautiful gardens that look rather ordinary from afar, but step a little closer and you'll notice that each individual flower is quite peculiar: it's shaped like a camera. Feliciano's colorful displays feature hundreds or thousands of tiny plastic cameras.

Artist Rodrigo Torres creates amazing 3D topographic sculptures of landscapes using a stack …

The Portrait Project is a series of 10 stitched portraits by London-based artist Evelin Kasikov. Each portrait is created with an actual Polaroid picture as the starting point, and is based on the same grid. The idea is similar to pointillism, but instead of dots she uses squares, crosses, and lines of different colors and weights. 10-15 feet of cotton thread does into each piece, and stitching them takes between two days and a week to complete.

Don't mess with Marc Jacobs. That's the lesson graffiti artists should take from a teensy little altercation between Marc Jacobs and the infamous graffiti artist Kidult. When Marc Jacobs employees awoke to a vandalized Soho boutique the morning after the Met Ball, they snapped a few photos before starting to clean it up. But instead of just stopping there and moving on, Marc Jacobs decided instead to turn the whole thing on its head, slap the photo on a t-shirt, and sell it with the caption "Art by Art Jacobs."

Tim Noble and Sue Webster are a London-based artist duo that creates amazing shadow art installations using carefully arranged objects. They use everything from trash to metal cans shot with BB pellets, arranged to cast shadows of people and skylines on the wall when a light is shined from a certain direction.

Artist Alan Belcher is known for pioneering a genre of art known as …

Artist Maarten Baas has a project called "Real Time" in which he creates one-of-a-kind clocks using a video camera and boatloads of patience and dedication. He creates 12-hour-long loops of people manually setting the time on various clocks... in real time. The video above shows his grandfather clock exhibit in which the hour and minute hands of the clock are painstakingly drawn in every minute of every hour for twelve hours.

Hyperallergic has published an essay about a project titled …

"The Collective Snapshot" is a series by Spanish photographer Pep Ventosa (previously featured here) that consists of abstract images of famous landmarks created by blending together dozens of ordinary snapshots. His goal is to "create an abstraction of the places we've been an the things we've seen", and to create images that are both familiar and foreign at the same time.

Last month we reported that 36 digital pigment prints of photos by William …

JR (the TED-winning photographer who uses giant photos as street art) and Liu Bolin (the Chinese artist who photographs himself blending into scenes) recently got together to collaborate on a photograph taken by Liu Bolin in which JR blends into one of his large scale installations. The giant photograph that Liu Bolin helped blend JR into is a photo of Liu Bolin's eye, created by JR. Can you say "photo inception"?

A fascinating story from the art world: back in 2010, British businessman Andy Fields purchased a collection of 5 …

Here’s a great 6-minute video in which PBS Off Book examines the impact three Internet phenomena — …

Last week, a collection of 36 prints by William Eggleston was sold for $5.9 million at auction.  The top ten list of most expensive photographs ever sold doesn't contain a single work worth less than a cool million. Just a few months ago, Andreas Gursky's 'Rhine II' became the world's most expensive photograph, selling for $4.3 million.

36 of American photographer William Eggleston's digital pigment prints were auctioned off at Christie's on Monday, fetching a whopping $5.9 million -- far more than the $2.7M they were expected to sell for. Eggleston is credited with helping making color photography a legitimate artistic medium for galleries, which had previously favored B&W prints. A print of Eggleston's "Memphis (Tricycle)" (shown above) was the top seller after being snatched up for $578,500.

"Global Rainbow" is an outdoor art installation by Yvette Mattern that consists of seven high powered lasers projecting a bright rainbow across the night sky. The rainbow was originally displayed in New York in 2009, but has since appeared in cities across the UK. If you're lucky enough to see the project in real life, be sure to take some photographs -- it's not every day you get to enjoy rainbows at night.

Here's an awesome TED lecture in which digital artist Erik Johansson discusses creating realistic "photographs" of impossible scenes.

Erik Johansson creates realistic photos of impossible scenes -- capturing ideas, not moments. In this witty how-to, the Photoshop wizard describes the principles he uses to make these fantastical scenarios come to life, while keeping them visually plausible.

Here’s an interesting 12-minute video that offers one explanation into how the world of art works. Even if you …

Walter Mason of Berlin, Germany shot these beautiful photographs of land art he created. Land art is abstract artwork created using natural materials found outdoors.

Fatescapes is a series of images by visual artist Pavel Maria Smejkal consisting of iconic photographs with their subjects Photoshopped out of them. The New York Times writes,

[...] Pavel Maria Smejkal goes a step further and forces us to reconsider the veracity of historical images and the photographer’s role by digitally removing the people that made these images resonant. What is left is the scene as it might have looked just minutes before or after the photographer passed by. These images are reminiscent of a time, before Photoshop, when photographs were believed to be a reflection of reality. Mr. Smejkal’s alterations question whether photographs should be viewed as accurate representation.

See if you can recognize each of these famous historical photographs. The answers are at the end of the post.

For his project titled "Unrealistic Scenes", photographer Nathan Spotts composited his own landscape photographs with digital artwork of planets floating in the starry night sky.

I've always been captivated by the beauty of our world, and often dream of the things that lay just beyond what we can see. I wanted to create images of scenes that are not-quite real, but that almost could be.

Check out these gigantic backlit Polaroid-style photographs, called Polaboys, by Jirko Bannas and …

For a fine arts project at his university, art student Joel Brochu spent a whopping 8 months meticulously recreating a photograph using tiny nonpareils (the tiny sprinkles used on cakes and donuts). 221,184 individual sprinkles were placed on the 4-foot-wide board, which was covered with double-sided tape and a thin layer of glue. Each sprinkle was placed by hand using jewelry tweezers.

We never thought we'd say it, but someone finally found a DSLR that makes Pentax's limited edition models look bland. Erle Kaasik was walking on a sidewalk in Seattle when she walked past a woman using this eye-popping Canon DSLR and 28-135mm lens that a local artist had decorated. It looks like someone mistook the camera for a cupcake or something.

Ken Murphy has completed his ambitious “A History of the Sky” project, which …