An 80 year-old Italian lady is in a bit of trouble with her local church after it would appear she ruined one of it’s 19th-century paintings. “The Fresco” – painted by Elías García Martínez, is a valuable oil painting of Jesus, staring off the edge of the painting wearing a crown of thorns.
He may not be competing in the Olympics, but based in London, you can be damn sure that street-artist Banksy will have something to say about the Games. His two latest stencils, “Hackney Welcomes the Olympics” and “Going For Mould” are unfortunately struggling to win favour with British authorities, who have not taken his artwork lightly.
You remember that painting, don’t you? Well, Brett Murray’s Hail to the Thief exhibition remained up, right up until last month. When he moved out, it was naturally time for a new artist. This time around, Kendell Geers has moved in, with a tribute to the controversial penis painting.
Archaeologists, working in Florence, are convinced that they have uncovered the remains of the woman believed to have posed for Leonardo Da Vinci’s famed Mona Lisa portrait.
Buyer of $120 million ‘The Scream’ revealed. Armstrong has a friend in congress. SA government PR disaster. Tom Cruise sues tabloid. Did London billionaire lie dead for a week?
In a move that makes the defacing of Brett Murray’s painting look quite low-key, an alleged young Mexican-American artist has stencilled over Pablo Picasso’s “Woman in a Red Armchair” at a Houston art museum.
This past weekend marked the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, 60 years of politely smiling, waving and occupying an ultimately powerless position. In celebration, renowned street artist, Banksy, created an exclusive piece, which can be yours for free! Click through for cultural enrichment.
Residents and art lovers in a suburb of Melbourne, Australia are up in arms this week as a local work of street art by world-renowned graffiti artist Banksy was inadvertently destroyed by a building contractor installing plumbing into a wall of a café. Full story and video after the jump.
Canvasses by lauded South African artists such as Irma Stern, William Kentridge, Gerard Sekoto and Francois Krige fetched over R3.5 million at an auction at Bonhams of London last week, highlighting a significant appreciation of interest in work by South African artists. We’ve got the full list of big sellers after the jump!
Hoo-ha. That teaser trailer for the new Die Antwoord album, Ten$ion, got pulled from the internet (which means they’ve officially taken it down – obviously it’s still around) because artist Jane Alexander, whose anti-apartheid sculpture the trailer strongly references, told them to. They’re in legal discussions presently.
Steal Banksy from Art Series Hotels on Vimeo.
The Melbourne-based Art Series Hotel chain is holding an art-stealing competition, starting this Thursday. For the next month, a signed print of Banksy’s “No Ball Games,” worth ZAR 125 500, will be hidden in different locations throughout the chain’s hotels. If people can find and steal it without getting caught, they get to keep it.
This afternoon, Nairobi commuters sitting in their cars on their way home from work will notice thousands of yellow balloons floating over the Kenyan capital city. The objective of the spectacle? Simply to put a smile on locals’ faces following two recent grenade attacks in Nairobi. Cool idea.
A pregnant American performance artist is planning to have her baby in an art gallery in front of an audience as part of a piece examining childbirth. She will also live in the gallery until the baby arrives. Her “artwork” is called “The Birth of Baby X”.
Recently I was knocking back Meerlust’s new releases at a lunch. Drinking these rather scrumptious wines, we began to discuss some incredibly important issues. The things one discusses at a wine lunch – among other winos – are, of course of world importance. They solve world hunger, the middle-east issues, America’s debt, Malema, Greece, and hint toward what 42 actually means. To be honest, if it wasn’t for conversations such as these, the world would be in a worse place than it is. So on this blustery day in Stellenbosch, the question that arose was, “Can wine be art?” As I said, vital stuff.
Chris Anderson, graphic design student, is installing 1 000 broken surfboards in the sands of a Sydney beach to inform people of the unsustainable practices in surfboard manufacturing. I’m not sure how breaking a thousand surfboards helps this problem, but the installation looks pretty cool.
Next time you’re on the beach (and frankly, given the current weather in Cape Town, that may be later today), bear in mind that there’s more to the scenery than meets the eye. Sand is ba-yoodiful, too – beyond what our human eyes can perceive. Have a look at these shots of tiny grains of sand magnified to 250 times their real size.
8 bit Invader (maping) from Darkfejzr on Vimeo.
A projection mapping by the Czech designer Pavel Novák turns the façade of a university building into a mash-up of 80’s video games – running the gamut from Pac-Man to Space Invaders. It’s called 8-bit Invader. The initial screening was for the 5th anniversary of Tomas Bata University’s department of visual arts in Zlín, Czech Republic.
Perspective-based art is usually a little lame – ‘look, guys, I’m holding up the Leaning Tower of Pisa!’ – but this dude pulls it off. Erik Johannson, Stockholm street artist, set up this bottomless pit illusion called ‘Mind Your Step’ in Sergels torg, and let passers-by play around with it. It’s cool.
Hemingway drank cocktails. I’m just saying that now so that any concerns about masculinity and ‘girly drinks’ are shelved from the get-go. Multimedia artist Marcos Lutyens has set up an installation that projects arsty scans from EEG headsets worn by people drinking Absolut vodka, and if boozey brain-waves isn’t art then I don’t know what is.
Hey, you guys know that photo, right? The one with the tennis-playing girl lifting up the back of her skirt in a way that’s sort of sexy but also obliviously enough for people to call it art, rather than sexy-tennis-photography? It’s by Martin Elliot, who died recently, so the model’s decided to let us know who she is.
According to a leading Italian art historian, the model used for the ‘Mona Lisa’ was in fact a man. Apparently, the man in question was da Vinci’s apprentice and possibly even his lover. What, da Vinci could have been a gay artist? How shocking.
A judge put his foot down and ended the trial between the Associated Press and Shepard Fairey, the artist who painted 2008’s most famous image. The AP said the dead beat (their words) artist took their photograph and copied it with crayons and pens and things. He said are you crazy, it’s art. They said are you crazy, it looks exactly the same. I don’t think the judge had a choice.
The other day, while I was busying myself writing articles about men who use Gumtree to swap citizenship for sex, a German artist was doing something infinitely more radical.
As part of an a contemporary art exhibition in London called Drift, Frank Bölter created an enormous paper boat and sailed the Thames in it.