You are forewarned, I am not responsible for blindness resulting from viewing of these (many NSFW) pics. LazerTits says:

For centuries the female bosom has been wrongfully held in the prison of maternal duty and manboy motor-boating … It’s time to get ZAPPED!!!!

What will YOU say when your kids ask where you were during the revolution? Don’t burn your bra, BLAST IT!!!

The object of this desirable item has melted away, but the news itself is still hot and provocative.

After Rahway, N.J., police received an anonymous complaint about “a naked snow woman,” the artistic family behind a front-yard tribute to Venus de Milo says an officer paid a visit and told them to cover up their Greek goddess of love and beauty.

The story attracted local attention this week and then popped up on the international radar.

“We had a visit from the local police who told us that a neighbor had complained about the statue and we needed to cover it up or knock it down,” Elisa Gonzalez, who sculpted Venus with her daughter and son, told Agence France-Presse. “We didn’t want to have any problem with the police so we covered it up.”

She did say the unidentified officer complimented her. “He said, ‘It’s very good.’” Gonzalez outfitted Venus with a green bikini top and blue sarong.

Read More: USA Today

Tarzan is the creation of pulp fiction superstar Edgar Rice Burroughs and the prefect blend of two archetypes the feral child and the wild man. His name means “Skin Boy” and he is the son of English aristocrats who were marooned in the jungle after a mutiny at sea. Tarzan’s mother dies from an illness and his father is killed by an ape.

The orphan seems doomed until adopted by Kala, another ape, and taught the ways of the jungle. When he matures he discovers he is John Clayton, Lord Greystoke and returns to England to claim his title only to reject his inheritance and return to his true home in the wilderness.

He joined the comic book world in 1931, having series by both DC and Marvel, and even become a manga star in Japan (not to mention his appearance in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen). Since I was kid I’ve been fascinated by him, but instead of looking towards Africa I should have focused on Australia. The real Tarzan is none other than Michael Fomenko better known as Last of the Wild White Men, the King of the Coral Sea and the Wild Man of Wujal-Wujal.

Read More: Black Sun Gazette

Banksy rat graffiti, City Road, London, UK. Photo: LoopZilla (CC)

Gabriele Steinhauser reports on a Banksy backlash in London for the Wall Street Journal:

In the predawn hours of Christmas morning, a 40-year-old shoe repairman who goes by the name Robbo squeezed his 6-foot-8-inch frame into a wet suit, tossed some spray cans into a plastic bag, and crossed Regent’s Canal on a red-and-blue air mattress.

Robbo, one of the lost pioneers of London’s 1980s graffiti scene, was emerging from a long retirement. He had a mission: to settle a score with the world-famous street artist Banksy, who, Robbo believes, had attacked his legacy.

The battle centers on a wall under a bridge on the canal in London’s Camden district. In the fall of 1985—just 15 years old but already a major player in London’s graffiti scene—Robbo announced his presence on that wall with eight tall block letters: ROBBO INC.

The work, written in orange, red and black on a yellow background, had been in good shape for nearly 25 years and was considered a local icon, surviving long after Robbo himself vanished from the scene 16 years ago.

But recently, Robbo’s work was dramatically altered by an unlikely rival: Banksy, the stealthy Bristol-born artist who has made a lucrative art of graffiti. The work of Banksy—who, like Robbo, doesn’t disclose his name—sells for big money and is widely merchandised. His first film, “Exit Through the Gift Shop,” had its premiere at the Sundance Film Festival in January and is due out in U.K. theaters this month.

In early December, Banksy did a series of four pieces along the Regent’s Canal’s walls. Inexplicably, one of them incorporated Robbo’s piece into Banksy’s own work, painting over half the Robbo original in the process. The resulting work, in Banksy’s typical stencil technique, shows a black-and-white workman applying colorful wallpaper that is, in essence, the remnants of Robbo’s piece.

Some saw Banksy’s act as self-promotion, some as a tribute, but most interpreted it as plain disrespect for a local hero. Offers of retribution reached Robbo, who has remained friendly with many graffiti writers even as he slipped into a life of obscurity as a North London father of two children, with a third on the way.

“They was all offering to do it for me,” says Robbo in an interview. But he decided: “I’ve got to do it myself.”

So on Christmas morning—praying he wouldn’t wind up in jail even as his children were opening their presents—Robbo slipped back onto the canal and reclaimed his turf. Instead of applying wallpaper, Banksy’s workman now is seen painting two words: KING ROBBO…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

We were somewhere around Barstow on the edge of the desert when the drugs began to take hold. I remember saying something like “I feel a bit lightheaded; maybe you should drive…” And suddenly there was a terrible roar all around us and the sky was full of what looked like huge bats, all swooping and screeching and diving around the car, which was going about a hundred miles an hour with the top down to Las Vegas. And a voice was screaming: “Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?”

— Hunter S. Thompson, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas

See more fun things on All That’s Interesting

Alex Castañeda hasn’t had much luck selling his oil-on-canvas paintings of police officers or old men playing guitars. But when he painted corpulent female nudes on the bottom of skateboards, they sold out at a local gallery near his home in Lima, Peru. And he received multiple orders from the U.S. and Canada through the Internet.

“I was pretty shocked,” says Mr. Castañeda, a 24-year-old recent art-school graduate who is not a skateboarder. “They just went like that.”

The lowly skateboard, toy and transport of adolescents and the adolescent-minded, has found a second calling as a platform for art.

This April, a San Francisco art gallery will host a show called “Skate This Art,” featuring works from some 100 local artists hand-painted on skateboards. This past holiday season, an Art + Design Collective retail store in Los Angeles was selling $1,000 skateboards featuring images of stylized puppies painted by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami.

Mass retailers have caught on, too: Among the striped comforters and pink lounge chairs sold in the PBTeen catalog are wall-mounted skateboards and skateboard-shaped shelving.

“Skateboards are one of those unique things where it’s a canvas, it’s a lifestyle, and there is a culture around it,” says Mark Schmid, a former professional skateboarder who has founded several skateboard-related companies. “Artists, musicians, they all want a piece of that.”

Skateboards aren’t the only pop-culture item that has morphed into artwork. Guitars, shoes and snowboards are all sold with hand-painted illustrations and used to decorate walls in homes. Mr. Schmid has one company that specializes in selling the mountings needed to hang skateboards on walls, as well as other gear used to display sunglasses, records, and soon, baseball caps…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

So actually, even though Shepard Fairey’s Obama art is legally problematic, I do wonder if Beck can do this under “fair use.”

Legal scholars, your opinion is welcome. (And those who have something to say about Glenn Beck…)

P.S. Glenn Beck “paints”?!?

His debut full-length album RETURN TO THE WASTELAND, a collection of dark ambient soundscapes and simultateously soothing and haunting drones, may conjure up vague memories or invoke a sense of deja vu in listeners as it takes them on a journey through mental spaces most people would rather forget.

Full article at Grey Lodge.

Every year, farmers in the rural town Inakadate, Japan create rice field art by using red rice in with their regular rice in special patterns. A few others fields in rural Japan also followed the trend of this beautiful rice field art.

See More photos on Hemmy.net

Immediately following a 1965 episode of Bewitched, Design Crimes HQ’s switchboard was overloaded with mysterious distress calls. Many consisted only of whimpering. In the background of some, faint yet hypnotic chimes could be heard. Responding officers found children cowering behind the La-Z-Boy, or hiding in the broom closet, inconsolable. No record of assailant(s) reported. Televisions showed only Peyton Place. Over the next decade, similar distress calls were received, but without hard evidence of design assault, case was closed in 1974.

Now, independent paranormal graphics researcher Rodney Ascher has re-opened case with conclusive proof, unveiled at the Sundance Film Festival, of the graphic’s existence, and recently declassified eye-witness reports of its demonic effect on children in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Assailant now understood to be Screen Gems Logo, comprising animated bars of light that appeared to reach out of television screens, drawing unsuspecting children into alternate dimension through hypnosis and creepy music.

Research now reveals a rash of similar attacks throughout that era. Assailants include PBS and Walt Disney, heretofore considered wholesome and immune to such witchery. A Design Crimes case squad has been formed to examine all reports of attacks. If you or someone you love were or are suspected to be a victim, post a comment below. Following video footage not recommended for children. View at your own discretion.

Just before the country’s most prestigious art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, opened in December, an energetic 70-year-old man named Asher Edelman marched through the local convention center to the booth of a Zurich gallery. He was accompanied by a dozen U.S. marshals. As onlookers whispered, the marshals seized four paintings by Yves Klein, Fernand Léger, Joan Miró and a racetrack scene by Edgar Degas worth around $15 million.

Mr. Edelman goes to great lengths to protect his art interests. He had gotten a federal court order to confiscate the Zurich gallery’s inventory as potential compensation for a $750,000 Robert Ryman painting that the gallery, called Gmurzynska, had borrowed from him and, he says, accidentally damaged months earlier.

Within 48 hours, Mr. Edelman got his money and the gallery got back its art. Peter R. Stern, a lawyer for Gmurzynska, says that the gallery’s insurer had been in the process of disputing the claim for the damage and the gallery didn’t know that a court order had been issued for the work in the meantime. “Asher uses unusual tactics, but he gets it done,” Barrett White, director of New York gallery Haunch of Venison, says of the incident.

Mr. Edelman, the former corporate raider who helped inspire the character of Gordon Gekko in the 1987 film “Wall Street,” has taken up a new position: art financier. After navigating the art world for decades as a collector, museum director and gallery owner, Mr. Edelman recently set up his own firm, Art Assured Ltd., to arrange art investments.

The field of art backing is a financial Wild West these days…

[continues in the Wall Street Journal]

Hunter S. Thompson (1937–2005): Everything

“I wouldn’t recommend sex, drugs, or insanity for everyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

The infamous street artist Banksy premiered Exit Through The Gift Shop at Sundance last night, which was part of Sundance’s “Secret Spotlight” series. In short, we enjoyed it, but there’s a lot to say about it this movie, so check back later for our review. The title itself refers to Disneyland and Disney World’s engineered design of having guests exit attractions right through the gift shop, so as to better serve all of their merchandising needs.

Banksy, whose real identity is an extremely well-kept secret, may or may not have been at the screening last night (how would we even know?), but he did send a letter which Sundance Director of Programming John Cooper read aloud to the audience. Read on for the full text of the mysterious letter, keep your eyes peeled for our reviews … and for more mysterious street art to appear.

Al Qaeda and the myriad groups that seek to emulate it are evil, without question. But they also happen to be modernizing their public face, at break-neck speed, translating their message to the Web and to magazines. What they’re running into–in addition to annoyances with Photoshop and Pagemaker–are stereotypically Western middle-management questions of marketing and tone. And you can see that tension in the design of their materials.

Kuang illustrates the last five years or so of Jihadi design with some well chosen images. Here’s just one, with Kuang’s commentary below:

Usually, Jihadist imagery is gritty and terrestrial. Here, we get Jihadis IN SPAAAAAAACE. The poster praises Imam Anwar Awlaki, the “Osama of the Internet,” who reportedly had ties to Fort Hood mass murderer Army Major Nidal Hassan, “underwear bomber” Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab. It also praises Photoshop Elements, which provides those snazzy lens flares.

[view the rest of the slideshow]

It is well known that lot of celebrities have problems with using drugs. American artist Jason Mecier decided to speak about this problem in his own way. He created a number of celebrity mosaic-portraits out of colored prescription pills.

There you can find portrait of Heath Ledger who has lost his life because of drugs overdose. The Michael Jackson portrait is pretty interesting too. If you look those photos from a distance or resize them to a tiny images, you’ll see that those portraits are pretty realistic.

Jason Mecier is a mosaic portrait artist who has worked for a years in creation of amazing mosaic portraits using beans, noodles, yarn and similar inexpensive materials. He claims that there’s no any ‘fooling’ about his artworks and that he is not using any trick shots or studio touch ups to create his artworks.

Read and see more art on IncredibleWorld.net

A devious device looking suspiciously like the pain box from Dune — or a minimalist sculpture from the ’60s — is now selling on eBay. In fact, that’s all it does. This robot sells itself on eBay every week.

Called “A Tool to Deceive and Slaughter (2009),” by the artist Caleb Larsen, the imposing cube has a mind of its own, literally:

Hooked up to the internet, it will put itself up for sale every seven days. Right now — the auction lasts until Thursday — you can land it for just north of four grand. But a week later, the cube will offer itself up for sale again.

It seems to be for real: That is, this thing comes with a legal contract binding the collector to facilitating the sale, and apparently this robot artwork is supposed to change hands every week — forever. Is the how AI begins? With a self-selling bot?

Read More: io9.com

A significant Pablo Picasso painting was damaged after a woman attending art class lost her balance, fell into “The Actor” and tore it, The Metropolitan Museum of Art said.

The unusually large canvas, measuring 77.25 by 45.38 inches (196 by 115cm), sustained a vertical tear of about six inches (15cm) in the lower right-hand corner in the accident on Friday. The museum, located on the eastern edge of New York’s Central Park, did not elaborate on why the woman fell.

Painted in the winter of 1904-1905, the work hails from Picasso’s critical Rose Period, when the artist shifted from the downbeat tones of his Blue Period to warmer, more romantic hues.

ABSTRACT: A CRITIC AT LARGE about recent books on Andy Warhol. After Warhol graduated from the Carnegie Institute of Technology (now Carnegie Mellon), in 1949, he moved to New York where he found work as an illustrator. By 1960, Warhol had become one of the most successful commercial artists in New York. But he had fine-art aspirations. Warhol’s break finally came in 1962 with a one-man exhibition at the Ferus Gallery in Los Angeles. This was “32 Campbell’s Soup Cans.” A New York show soon followed, and by 1964, the year he exhibited the “Brillo Soap Pads Box” sculptures, he was being written up in Time. Warhol had already begun making movies. He also produced the Velvet Underground. In the mid-nineteen-sixties, his studio, on East Forty-Seventh Street, known as the Factory, was a center of avant-garde activity. Within the Factory, Warhol was known as Drella, after the two sides of his personality, Dracula and Cinderella. Then, in 1968, a paranoid schizophrenic named Valerie Solanas shot Warhol and nearly killed him. Although he returned to painting and a jet-set social life, his work was never again on the leading edge of the contemporary arts. He died in New York Hospital, after a routine operation, in 1987. He was fifty-eight. There are some terrific books about Warhol, including Warhol’s own wonderfully funny and clever memoir, written with Pat Hackett, “POPism.” “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol” by Tony Scherman and David Dalton, is, basically, the familiar story. It is not as richly informative as Steven Watson’s “Factory Made,” or as critically imaginative as Wayne Koestenbaum’s “Andy Warhol,” but it is knowledgeable and smart, and it’s a lot of fun to read. Discusses two problems faced by anyone writing about Warhol. First, it should be a rule when writing about Warhol never to take anything he said completely seriously. Second, there is the significance of the iconography. Soup cans, Coca-Cola bottles, grocery cartons, movie stars. Did he paint this stuff because he thought it was great or because he thought it was junk? Mentions Gary Indiana’s book “Andy Warhol and the Can That Sold the World.” Discusses the opposing theories about Pop Art put forward by Arthur Danto and Clement Greenberg and considers Warhol’s place in relation to other twentieth-century artists, such as Marcel Duchamp and Jasper Johns.

Ridgecrest, Calif. — We were inside Restricted Area R-505 of the Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, rolling in a minivan across the vast salt pan of an extinct Pleistocene lake on our way to see a renowned collection of ancient rock art. On the console between the seats was a long-range two-way radio. It was there so that our escort, a civilian Navy public affairs officer named Peggy Shoaf, could keep abreast of where and when any bombs would be dropped — or launched, or whatever — so that we wouldn’t be there when it happened.

Established in the summer of 1943 in the heat of Allied offensives in the Pacific, China Lake is the Navy’s premier weapons testing range and its largest real estate holding. “Every weapon being used overseas right now was tested here,” Ms. Shoaf said. The property comprises 1.1 million acres of Mojave Desert north of Los Angeles and west of Death Valley, including the Coso Mountain range and an active volcanic field that is one of the largest producers of geothermal electricity in the country.

The base is a haven for wild horses, burros, rattlesnakes and scorpions. It is also home to a complex of remote canyons holding the greatest concentration of ancient rock art in the Western Hemisphere, known as the Coso Petroglyphs.

With us rode David S. Whitley, an archaeologist and expert on prehistoric rock art and iconographic interpretation. Having visited hundreds of sites all over the world, including Lascaux and Chauvet in France and the Côa Valley in Portugal, he believes the Coso Petroglyphs to be one of the most important rock art sites on earth.

Mr. Whitley estimated that there may be as many as 100,000 images carved into the dark volcanic canyons above the China Lake basin, some as old as 12,000 to 16,000 years, others as recent as the mid-20th century…

In our age of rational science the occult has never been more in demand: Angels and demons are popular, the Da Vinci code and lost symbols fascinate audiences worldwide and Hollywood is eager to turn out more movies with a paranormal theme.

So why is it that so many of these stories seem flat, and fail to reach the level of insight into hidden structures of the world true esoteric adventures are supposed to promise?

Perhaps the answer has to do with the failure of gifted directors to come to grips with the enormity of the unknown issues of human destiny, or to pose the fundamental questions their esoteric subject would demand.

We go away charmed by artistic visions, dazzled by the pageantry of cardinals in red capes and titillated by women in black garters but the Illuminati only scare us because of the blood they spill, not the existential issues they should transcend. They behave like any other gang of thugs, even if they utter their rough curses in Latin rather than street slang, cockney or modern Italian.

The circumstances that made this point clear to me arose when I watched again two movies within a few days, namely Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut and Roman Polanski’s The Ninth Gate.

Read More on BoingBoing

For twenty years, the cartoonist R. Sikoryak has been creating parody strips of literary masterpieces, casting familiar cartoon characters in classic roles — Little Lulu as Pearl Prynne, Little Nemo as Dorian Gray, Charlie Brown as Gregor Samsa. If you’re like me, and you sometimes like your serious literature with a side of Beavis and Butthead (see Sikoryak’s take on “Waiting for Godot”), you will probably laugh out loud over Masterpiece Comics, a collection of thirteen of these strips, just out from Drawn & Quarterly.

Here is R. Sikoryak’s take on an existentialist superhero:

Check out the The New Yorker link for a Kafkaesque Charlie Brown tale.

These nine drawings were done by an artist under the influence of LSD — part of test conducted by the US government during it’s dalliance with psychotomimetic drugs in the late 1950s.

The artist was given a dose of LSD 25 and free access to an activity box full of crayons and pencils. His subject is the medico that jabbed him.

Read/See More: MINDFVCK

Cliff Maynard of Pittsburgh has blazed a unique trail on the stoner art scene. The 37-year-old creates amazing mosaics using the humble medium of used roach papers from smoked joints.

Amazingly, this is just something Cliff does in his spare time. He’s one of Pittsburgh’s finest tattoo artists at his day job. But it’s his roach paper Chronic Art that has captured the imagination of folks nationwide.

As a student at the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, Cliff had the opportunity to take inspiration from the great mosaics of the past. “I was studying mosaics in school,” Maynard remembers. “I just remember sort of making this connection in my head between the tiles and roach papers.”

His roach paper portraits include iconic rock star stoners like Jimi Hendrix, Jerry Garcia, and John Lennon, and hemped hop rap stars like Snoop Dogg and Method Man.

Read More: Toke of the Town

I recently re-watched the show that started an international phenomenon. The original version of The Office has spawned many imitators, but never any that live up to the original. This is the fifth or sixth time that I’ve watched the series in its entirety. While upon first viewing the series can be seen as a brilliant piece of British comedy- and it is- it is only with this viewing that I realized what the show really is. The Office is an amazing dramatic piece that lays bare the crushing ennui that effects men and women in contemporary society.

Full Article at Black Sun Gazette