The Chinese artist and activist Ai Weiwei has reportedly been refused a shipment of Legos he ordered because the company “cannot approve the use of Legos for political works.”
After convincing doctors to let him keep the bone removed during his hip replacement operation, a Norwegian conceptual artist boiled it on "a whim" and then ate the flesh with potato gratin and a glass of wine. He claims the meat tasted like "wild sheep." Oh!
Nate Hill is the New York artist behind the Free Bouncy Rides, Death Bear, the dead body dead body, and other, sunnier projects. Hill is biracial, and his latest work has a racial theme: for the next several months, Hill, in whiteface, will travel to Harlem as "The White Ambassador," prowling the streets to talk about important issues such as how white people are or are not stank. In the video above, watch as absurd performance art turns into an earnest and heartfelt conversation with a man on the street.
A new biography of Vincent van Gogh, which is getting a featured segment on 60 Minutes this weekend, posits that the post-Impressionist master didn't commit suicide by shooting himself in the abdomen, as previously believed.
"You can't keep a good creative down," as the old saying goes. When pushed out of their community by covert gentrification, overt invasion, and other insidiousnesses, good creatives will simply move elsewhere and establish new, even more authentic communities. This is how the Land of NoBro came to pass.
If we didn't attend the week-long Burning Man festival in Nevada every year, we probably wouldn't be the deeply spiritual, open-minded individual that we are today. We'd just be another emotional eunuch living in America, ignorant in the ways of radical self-expression. Sadly, we and our collection of fruit-flavored body paints and hovercrafts won't be able to go hang out on the Black Rock City playa this year, because last week festival tickets completely sold out for the first time in its 25-year history.
Artist (and comedian) Charlotte Young made this hilarious video that mocks not only herself but all the art school dropouts of the world. Her "artist's statement" uses the vocabulary and buzzwords of the traditional artist's statement, but she has cleverly put subtitles across the bottom of the screen to let us know what she's really talking about.
Two and a half months after his imprisonment on charges of tax evasion, internationally-renowned artist Ai Weiwei was released by Chinese authorities because (according to state news agency Xinhua) "of his good attitude in confessing his crimes as well as a chronic disease he suffers from" (likely diabetes or hypertension).
Sucks to be a graffiti artist these days. (Not really, it's AWESOME.) On the one hand, you have the art world fawning over you more than ever, and you're in all types of museum shows and you have contracts to design sneakers and corporate America is absolutely dying to harvest a little bit of your coolness. On the other hand, you're in jail.
Last August, Tad Friend wrote an excellent article in the New Yorker about the spectacularly bizarre life of downtown New York scenester John Lurie, focusing on his weird on-again, off-again friendship with an artist named John Perry, portrayed as a moody and dangerous figure who ended up stalking Lurie and making threats against his life.
Poet Craig Moreau has made one of the most hilarious YouTube videos I've seen in awhile. It seems like a parody of a self-important gay party boy poet who has written a book of poems called Chelsea Boy. But it's not a joke at all.
You know how Gawker Artists does such a lovely job of fancying up your browser window with new art? Now you can own some of those images IRL. The brand-new Gawker Artists Shop is proud to be working with the taste-makers at Society6 in order to bring you specially curated, limited-edition prints from a few stand-out artists. Each piece is one of a special 100-edition run, and comes with a signed certificate of authenticity from the artist. For just $90, your living room can go from hobo to highbrow!
