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 [...]

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 [...]

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.

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

In all the news reports of record-breaking crowds gathering to recreate Thriller’s signature dance sequence from beginning to end, I’ve heard no mention of Michael Peters, who choreographed Thriller with Michael Jackson.
Michael Peters was an award winning choreographer, winning Tonys and Emmys for his work, including choreography for Donna Summer’s Love to Love You Baby, [...]

For The Wall Street Journal, David Byrne talks about his version of a perfect city.
There’s an old joke that you know you’re in heaven if the cooks are Italian and the engineering is German. If it’s the other way around you’re in hell.
Read more from The Wall Street Journal: A Talking Head Dreams of a [...]

The New York Times explores the “global movement is hacking, subverting and critiquing the hardware, software, content, visuals — even the philosophy of the wired world.”
This work is created using and hacking the very same technologies and methods it is often commenting on.
Examples include

Hacking Nintendo cartridges to create new games, music and video art
Subversion and [...]

Seed Magazine investigates the blind spots of science’s latest frontiers, and how the limits of scientific method and unbiased observation are holding us back.
…before we can unravel these mysteries, our sciences must get past their present limitations. How can we make this happen? My answer is simple: Science needs the arts. We need [...]

This isn’t intended to be a partisan blog… I wanted to link to each of the candidate’s positions on The Arts. I could only find a position on Barack Obama’s site, so that’s what I’m linking to. If anyone has links to information about Hillary Clinton’s or John McCain’s positions on the [...]

In this post I pondered whether dolphins blowing bubble rings were a form of art.  After all they serve no purpose except aesthetic ones – the dolphins are having fun and stare at them.  So now we have this video of an elephant painting a self portrait.
Whether methodically trained to do this or not, how is it [...]

Heidelberg University in Germany has solved the long asked question “who is the Mona Lisa?”
In margin notes of a book by Cicero, Florentine city official Agostino Vespucci, a friend of Leonardo Da Vinci, Mona Lisa was identifiend as Lisa Gherardini del Giocondo, the wife of a wealthy silk merchant.
More from The New York Times and ABC News.

In Bethlehem, artists from all over the world, including local artists, have been making art on the barrier wall separating Israel and Palestine.
Video from the BBC:

Read more from
The Washington Times
National Public Radio