The Superest is a never-ending game of one-upmanship illustration. “Player 1 draws a character with a power. Player 2 then draws a character whose power cancels the power of that previous character. Repeat.”
Category: art
Now here’s some graffitti I can appreciate: roadside storm drains made into little cartoons. Highlights include a mouse eating cheese, an illustration of a smoking guy, and a tv and vcr. If I’m reading the Portugeuse right, it’s the work of Leonardo Delafuente and Anderson Augusto.
“With pre-production topping out at somewhere over 500 years, BibliOdyssey might well be the slowest book ever published.” Looks like a winner.
This Sarajevo Siege Map literally took my breath. Spectacular.
Photos of people and their breakfast. Some of them are just perfect. [via kottke]
A couple artists are selling paintings of things they want. The price of the painting is the same as the item itself. The Wii painting cost $270.92.
I really like this painting of Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird by Viktor Vasnetsov. It’s the carpet that really got my attention. You can see that it’s floating and rippling in the air currents, but it still looks thick and heavy like a rug should. It looks like something you’d actually use on your floor. Ivan Tsarevich and the Firebird are Russian folklore characters. I don’t usually explore Russian art, but I found my way over there because lately I’ve been listening to Stravinsky‘s ballet, The Firebird.
The Elements of Style (review: 3/5)
I’m not sure what all the fuss is about. The Elements of Style is a handy little guide, sure. Brief, pithy. I suppose I’ve just heard it mentioned so many times that I was expecting a bit more. Honestly the best part of this particular edition of Elements was the illustrations by Maira Kalman. (Kalman has done a year-long illustrated story in the New York Times, which will soon be released in her book The Principles of Uncertainty.)
Elements didn’t earn a place on my shelf. It touches on some of the nuts and bolts of writing, and some of the philosophy, but none of the sections really feel complete. If you’re looking for clinical advice on commas and grammar, you’re probably better off with a dedicated grammar book or style guide. And if you’re looking to seriously clean up your text, and to apply some thought and reason to your writing, for my money the better choice is something like Joseph Williams’ Style: The Basics of Clarity and Grace.
Alec Soth Lecture at the High Museum
Tonight I heard photographer Alec Soth speak at the High Museum, a guest of this month’s Atlanta Celebrates Photography events. It was incredibly cool. It was a walk through his career so far, his major projects and commissioned work, and what he’s been learning. I took several pages of notes in the Moleskine… and now to decipher my handwriting and share a bit. I don’t want to make a transcript, so I’m skipping around and weaving together some of the things he talked about.
Take a look at his big projects: Portraits, Sleeping by the Mississippi (“the 3rd coast”), Niagara, Fashion Magazine, and Dog Days, Bogot?°.
Here are a few of my favorite photographs, matched with Soth’s words that may or may not have been uttered around the time the slide was up:
- In Europe a lot of the Mississippi photographs are thought of as a critique of America. For him, it was about the excitement of travel and discovery. “For me, it’s Huck Finn’s raft.”
- “I’m not good at photographing a contained thing.”
- “I really aim to be empathetic.”
- “Simple often makes a better picture.”
- “You can’t trust new passion.”
Back in his high school days, Soth was a painter, but “wasn’t comfortable in the studio.” Too antsy, too fidgety. It was a Joel Sternfeld photo in particular that turned him to photography, one that showed the photographer’s own car in the distance as just another part of the scenery. Like Sternfeld, Soth “wanted to be out in the world.” He was painfully shy when he first got started (“I was shaking, sweating”), but yet he was drawn to portraiture. And the portraits aren’t just snapshot candids—they often take some awkward negotiation with a stranger and time to fiddle with gear and set up the shot. So the photo is not only about the person but also about “the space between us.” The irony is that Soth wanted to be out in the world, drawing on the passion and energy and intimacy, but a lot of his work touches on the desire for withdrawal and evasion and anger and disconnection and decline and violence. So there’s this internal artistic tension.
Soth said, “One of the frustrating things when I show my pieces is people searching for little clues.” So he started taking on specific project themes for his work, one of the first of these was the Mississippi project. In a way, the theme serves as another sort of evasive maneuver—it relieves some of the artistic pressure, the self-consciousness. “I don’t always know what I’m doing at the beginning… it evolves over time.”
Some interesting quotes on his craft, out of context:
- “For me, photography is not like storytelling… It’s evocative, you make these connections… That’s the poetic model: people respond in their own way.”
- “A list gets you focused, and then it leads to something else.”
- “Because I’m a stranger, I can ask a question and get an intimate response.”
- “I’m trying to please myself… my audience is me.”
And, lastly, Soth’s three levels of artistic achievement:
- Entertainment
- Information
- When the work causes the audience to reconsider their life
Something I learned today: I was reading this NYT article about fashion, and I discovered that if you double-click a word in an NYT article, it will make a pop-up with a little dictionary/ reference search for you. Doesn’t look like it works on the home page, but that’s pretty cool. Am I the last person to learn about this?
The Museum of Reading has the entire Bayeux Tapestry online with explanatory notes. And on YouTube there’s a pretty sweet semi-animated version that scrolls across the latter half of the 230-foot tapestry.
A slideshow essay on Slate asks, What’s the point of public sculpture?
Mozart once wrote a little party song titled Leck mick im Arsch. Here’s the score. [via passionate geek]
One of the latest Art House projects is the Pen Pal Painting Exchange. Six bucks lets you swap a canvas with ten other people (brush buddies?).
It’s October, which means it’s time for Atlanta Celebrates Photography. Of particular interest to me is the Alec Soth lecture at the High Museum and the film series.
Today’s Layer Tennis match between Kevin Cornell and Shaun Inman has been a ton of fun. Volley 9 just went up, I’d say Kevin has the upper hand. Can’t wait to see how it ends. And I wonder if Kevin and Shaun have had any offline trash-talking in the background…
I’d never heard of Gustave Caillebotte until a couple days ago, when I was floored by The Floor Scrapers. That painting has some wonderful attention to light and texture.
Meredith Gran, creator of the Octopus Pie webcomic, has a time-lapse video of her cartooning process. [via crushing krisis]
A cool project from the mind of Jen Bekman: 20×200 is “a place to buy editioned prints and photos at ridiculously affordable prices.”
Brian Dettmer dissects books, as you can see in this gallery and another gallery. Pretty cool work. The technique is all scalpels and tweezers, only removing and digging deeper, never re-arranging. [via deeplinking]
Mark Larson 
