darling of nyc

david byrne seems to be having a pretty excellent year—“playing the building” was well-recieved, and is still open until the 24th of this month, and now, through a serindipitous series of events, he designed a number of metal sculptures that double as, “accidentally very useful” art: bike racks.
[nytimes]
(image from flickr)

weather report

cloudy with a 60% chance of destructive airborne dogshit

The inflatable sculpture, “escaped from its moorings at the Zentrum Paul Klee last week and brought down a power line and broke a window before landing on the grounds of a children’s home 200 meters away”
[via artinfo]

this is not my beautiful house

it’s more of a large (previously-)abandoned building in lower-manhattan, turned into a musical instrument by David Byrne. pretty much, solenoids are used to vibrate different structural elements within the building, and by playing keys on an organ set up in the center of the space, one can actually create music out of the [...]

corporate post-bankruptcy

interior landscapes of offices after their owners have gone bankrupt.  some of them are starkly tranquil, and could pass as merely an excessively minimalistic office after-hours, but others show evidence of what the photographer terms, “life, interrupted”—a room full of office chairs piled like some bizarre game of tetris, phones lined up neatly along a [...]

transatlantic periscope

the “telectroscope,” an art installation by Paul St. George, purports to be, “an extraordinary optical device … installed at both ends [of a transatlantic tunnel] which miraculously allows people to see right through the Earth from London to New York and vice versa,” using a series of mirrors to bounce the image over the three-thousand [...]

urban nesting

I don’t know his reasons, his message, his expectations. all I can say is that this is probably the silliest, freest, just plain coolest thing I’ve seen in a long time. the site’s in (dutch?) but click through the pictures and videos. really.
nest-rotterdam

okay well I’m only two years late on this

but robert polidori’s series of photos documenting the “modern pompeii” of post-Katrina New Orleans is singularly arresting and manages to show a morbid sense of humor through it all—I especially liked the camouflaged buick above, and the optical illusion in “Corner of Law and Egania Streets.”
“After the Flood”
(definitely check out the slideshow)

cheaper than the real thing

Sidewalk Psychiatry
Really, there are too many other cool things on this site, just check it out.

chopsticks, tofu, and street art

yeah that’s an installation.  I don’t know how the hell he makes them so realistic, but they’re really…unsettling.  some of them are more whimsical than others:

then he does awesome stuff with what looks like…cellophane? packing tape?

this guy is awesome.

polar opposite art

okay, I just got back from (hopefully) dominating my american studies final (three hour writing marathon, hope my TA loves to read!) and I have no segway into this update so here it is:
I would like you, dear parents wide and growing readership, to check out two artists that address subjects that couldn’t be more [...]