Art Here and Now
Daring creativity happening now around the world
Categories: Japan, PhotographyComments Off

Nichitsu was a mining town in Saitama Prefecture, about three hours from Tokyo. At it’s peak in 1965, there were about 3,000 people living there. Now the town is completely abandoned.
Here the Tokyo Times blog posts many Haikyo photographs (廃墟写真, usually meaning photographs of modern ruins) of the ghost town.

To the Doctor’s Office
A [...]

Categories: Conceptual Art, Controversy, Featured, Galleries, Installation Art, Multidiscipline, Museums, Performance Art, PhilosophyComments Off

I’ve had friends who collected Star Wars toys and kept them in the original packaging to protect their value. This certainly protects the monetary value, but doesn’t it deprive you of getting everything out of that toy it was created for? If you want to spark your imagination, have a fun afternoon, and [...]

Categories: Art Life, Conceptual Art, Featured, Installation Art, Multidiscipline, Performance ArtComments Off

Conceptual Art relies on ideas (concepts) and audience participation for it’s effectiveness, where many other kinds of art rely more on the object, and the skill the artist used to create it.
The New York Times asks Has Conceptual Art Jumped the Shark?
…conceptual art after Duchamp reminds me of paging through old New Yorker cartoons. Jokes [...]

Categories: Drawing and Illustration, Featured, Painting, TechnologyComments Off

For about a year now, as many stories have covered, painter David Hockney’s new medium is the Brushes application on his iPhone. He’s had a gallery show with this work, with more scheduled. He is certainly not the first. For painters he has this advice: use your thumb, not your index finger.
The [...]

Categories: Controversy, Environmentalism, Featured, Government, Multidiscipline, Performance, Resources, Science, Technology, The WorldComments Off

This is a post for Blog Action Day 2009: Climate Change.
A few years ago, I wrote a post for Blog Action Day presenting ideas for creating art in more environmentally friendly ways – Making Art Without Unmaking the Environment. Art supplies and other byproducts of our work is notoriously toxic. Just like businesses [...]

Categories: Animation, Featured, Hungary, Israel, Performance, UkraineComments Off

In live sand animation, sand is lit from underneath using a lightbox and manipulated by an artist in real time to create images. This performance can be projected for a live audience or filmed.
Many commercials have been popping up lately which use sand animation. Who are these artists? There are four well-known [...]

Categories: Art Life, Big Business, Controversy, Economics, Marketing, PhilosophyComments Off

Most people have no idea what it takes to make good art, whether it’s music, film, painting or anything else. They don’t know how much training and study has gone into building the artist’s skills, and how much practice of that skill it took to allow them to make something, especially if it’s great. [...]

Categories: Animation, Argentina, Germany, Graffiti, Short FilmsComments Off

This great animation, by the artist Blu, is drawn and erased frame by frame on real walls and buildings in Baden and Buenos Aires.

Visit the artist Blu’s web site.

Categories: Economics, Featured, Government, Italy, Painting, Public Art, Sculpture, SocietyComments Off

In these recently uncovered fake letters, imagined to have come from the archives of the fake University of Italy School of the Arts at Florence (UISAF), the Minister of Medici Bank, Francesco Sassetti, pleads with the head of the Medici Family and defacto ruler of the Florentine Republic, Lorenzo de’ Medici, to stop spending the [...]

Categories: Magic and Illusion, United StatesComments Off

The artist Blue Sky came to national attention with his illusion artworks, starting with Tunnelvision, a trompe l’oeil painting on the side of a building which appears to be pierced by a long tunnel, overlooking the setting sun. (The sun actually sets at the time of the real one. The artist is tight-lipped [...]

Categories: EnvironmentalismComments Off

Blog Action Day harnesses the power of thousands of blogs to simultaneously address a single important issue on one day. This mass attention, from the many different vantage points and passions bloggers write from, gives the issue new resonance with readers, and can spark discussions about the importance of the issues and actions we [...]

Categories: Drawing and Illustration, United StatesComments Off

Sophie Blackall is a Brooklyn based artist, illustrator of numerous books, who recently began illustrating Craigslist Missed Connections. One example:
m4w (Harlem)
Remember? Uptown A train. Sunday at around 9pm. I was the black dude reading Bukowski’s Post Office. You were reading the Arts and Leisure section. You passed wind rather loudly and started chuckling. I’d [...]

Categories: Performance Art, Poetry, Short FilmsComments Off

In a series of short flashes, either by flashlight or hand signals or other means, Yoko Ono would like you to flash in this sequence: 1 flash. 2 flashes. 3 flashes. Which now means I Love You. Flash it from rooftops, from ships at sea, at parties and clubs, across a shop, to [...]

Categories: Photography, United StatesComments Off

As a fan of Haikyo photography (廃墟写真, Haikyo Shashin), this photo essay by Ransom Riggs excites me at the same time it creeps me out.
Last year, while scouting for a short film that never came to fruition, some friends and I talked our way inside an empty, run-down hospital in Boyle Heights. The short was [...]

Categories: Animals, Music & Sounds, ScienceComments Off

Chuck Snowdon of the University of Wisconsin, Madison, teamed up with musician David Tele to compose music specifically for tamarin monkeys. The music is based on the note patterns, dissonance and timing of tamarin vocalizations and the emotional states these vocalizations produce, much like some believe human music evolved from human vocalization. This [...]