The street artist Jay Shells has painted a mural in Brooklyn featuring lyrics by the hip hop artist Mos Def, Complex Magazinereports. The mural is a continuation of Shells’ Rap Quotes project, in which he installed street signs with rap lyrics. In a video, Shells explains that the project “plots the…corners and very specific locations mentioned in rap songs.”
“I was always hoping that the street sign project would open the door for something more permanent,” Shells told Animal. “Although I realize it wouldn’t always be possible to do a wall or a plaque on the floor for every single [rap quote], I thought it would be great to get a good handful of them to be more permanent.”
The mural, located near the intersection of Broadway and Myrtle Avenue, says: “I’m blacker than midnight on Broadway and Myrtle,” referring to the location that Mos Def mentioned in his song Mathematics. “I have found that this is an interesting way to interact with the public, to get a message out and to hear back what the public is telling me,” Shells toldComplex.
Shells first started attracting attention with his Subway Etiquette project, in which he put up screen prints and posters in New York City’s subway stations, trains, and platforms, urging New Yorkers to be respectful to each other while using the public transport network.
Fifty artists have gathered to create an “art park” in Shunde, Southern China, which celebrates 50 years of diplomatic relations between China and France.
Inaugurated earlier this week, the 200,000 square-meter Sino-French Art Park is dotted with sculptures made from what looks like scrap metal. It’s scrap metal with a special cachet, though: it was dismantled from the Eiffel Bridge in Bayonne, Southwestern France, shipped to China, and used by the participating artists to make installations. The bridge was designed by the French civil engineer Gustave Eiffel in 1864, before he went on to create the Eiffel Tower.
“When the ruins of the Eiffel Bridge, which represent the Industrial Revolution, were transported to and rebuilt in Shunde, a modern global manufacturing and processing center, it was like a bridge was built connecting past and present,” Lu Mingjun, one of the curators for the opening exhibition, told the Global Times.
Fan Zhe, the art director of the park project, initiated the recycling of the Eiffel Bridge, hoping the metal could gain new life in the artists’ hands. Fan’s theme for the exhibition is “AA Utopia” — “AA” means to “go Dutch” in Chinese slang and refers to the idea that all parties are participating equally in the “Utopia” of the art park.
Big-name artists like Wang Guangyi, Sui Jianguo, and Xu Bing have participated in the project. French artist Catherine Val and Chinese artist Li Ming each built a sculpture of Charles de Gaulle and Chairman Mao respectively. The statues have been placed so it looks like the two figures are in conversation.
Yinka Shonibare was born in London and lived in Nigeria with his family until the age of 16, when he moved back to London for school. At age 18, he fell ill with a debilitating disease that rendered one half of his body paralyzed. With the assistance of artists, Shonibare creates paintings, sculpture, photography, and installations that explore the “artificial construct” of the Western art canon. His signature is his use of what appears to be African textiles that, with closer investigation, have cross-cultural roots—the main exporters of this type of textile are based in the UK and the Netherlands. In another cross of cultures, Shonibare uses the textiles to reenact classic scenes in art history, for instance Fragonard’s The Swing or Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper.His poignant work has been widely recognized and exhibited internationally, including at the Venice Biennale, documenta XI, and the Brooklyn Museum. In 2004, he was on the shortlist for the Turner Prize for his “Double Dutch” exhibition at Stephen Friedman Gallery and the Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen in Rottendam. He lives and works in London.
When did you know you wanted to be an artist?
When I was at school. I enjoyed art lessons and knew I wanted to carry it on as a career
What inspires you?
I am often inspired by artists and musicians who think outside the box and who are not ‘mainstream’ in their approach. I like the work of Yayoi Kusama. I like Fela Kuru, and I like the musician Tricky because he’s creative and interesting to watch.
If you could own any work of modern or contemporary art, what would it be?
It would be a James Turrell light installation because I’m going through a spiritual period, and I want something I find calm and spiritual, such as his light pieces.
What are you working on at the moment?
I have two exhibitions in New York in the spring that I am working on, and a large exhibition later next year that will tour Asia. I am always thinking toward the next exhibition
When not making art, what do you like to do?
To run a supper club, read books, and go to the cinema. I also like going to the opera, watching live music, and going to the ballet.
Paula Duță is an interior designer from Romania . Who loves to draw.
Here is one work that she is fond of. The Steampunk Lion is a 100/70 cm drawing on which different markers, pens, watercolors and a lot of other materials were used .
Culled from Bored Panda , Read Original Article Here
With a never ending procession of distressing events in the news lately, you might be in need for a substantial dose of something absurdly happy. If so, this new music video for Cameroonian singer-songwriter Irma will surely fit the bill. The video was created by French design house SuperBien and directed by Xavier Maingon and Marc-Antoine Hélard who opted to shoot the entire piece on a single sound stage with the use of 7 digital projectors. The shoot must have been a Herculean effort on behalf of the kids who had to rock it out for 20-25 takes before getting the final version. The song is “Save Me” off her 2014 album Faces. (via Motionworks,Booooooom,
With a neverending procession of distressing events in the news lately, you might be in need for a substantial dose of something absurdly happy. If so, this new music video for Cameroonian singer-songwriter Irma will surely fit the bill. The video was created by French design house SuperBien and directed by Xavier Maingon and Marc-Antoine Hélard who opted to shoot the entire piece on a single soundstage with the use of 7 digital projectors. The shoot must have been a Herculean effort on behalf of the kids who had to rock it out for 20-25 takes before getting the final version. The song is “Save Me” off her 2014 album Faces. (via Motionworks,Booooooom, and Jeff is right, this wins the award for most-fun-being-had-in-a-video)
Give it Up is a new track released by Israeli musician and composer Kutiman. The song was created entirely using vocal and instrument tracks lifted from 23 different YouTube videos of mostly amateur musicians, credited here. This is just the first track off his upcoming album Thru You Too which the artist says will be comprised entirely of unrelated YouTube videos.
“The Writing’s on the Wall” filled with optical illusions, OK Go are back with yet another meticulously choreographed dance video for “I Won’t Let You Down.” Filmed in Japan, this new clip features more than a few umbrellas, Honda UNI-CUB personal vehicles (a kind of tiny robo scooter), and a cast of hundreds. Make sure to stick around for the final shot, hard to believe it’s even real, but knowing OK Go, it certainly is.
The renowned street artist Stik has completed the tallest piece of street art in the UK: a 125-foot mural covering the side façade of a soon-to-be demolished block of council flats in the London area of Acton. The enormous work is “aimed at raising awareness about the lack of social housing in the area,” the Independent reports.
The piece, entitled Big Mother, depicts a mother and child in Stik’s signature stickman drawing style. It took a year of planning and one month of painting to execute, much of which Stik spent perched on a crane, 38 meters (125 feet) above the ground.
“The mother and child symbol are a representation of the families that live in this block,” Stik told the Independent. “The figures that I have painted are looking down sadly at their neighborhood which is being developed with luxury apartments and this building is being demolished.”
The mural can be viewed across west London, and is visible from planes departing and arriving at Heathrow Airport. “It’s great that as people arrive in the country they can see the mother and child looking across the expanse of private development,” the artist remarked.
Stik painted Big Mother for free, as part of a project “to get local street artists to brighten up the area,” explained Rachel Pepper, project manager for Acton Arts Forum. “There are some dark and dingy parts on the estate and we now have about 15 or 16 pieces of artwork that people come to see especially,” she told the Independent.
In an interview with Dazed, the actor says that a woman ‘whipped my legs for ten minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me’ during his silent performance art work #IAMSORRY.
The actor Shia LaBeouf has claimed a woman raped him during the performance of his one-man art piece #IAMSORRY earlier this year.
Speaking to Dazed magazine in an email interview, he wrote: “One woman who came with her boyfriend, who was outside the door when this happened, whipped my legs for 10 minutes and then stripped my clothing and proceeded to rape me.”
#IAMSORRY consisted of LaBeouf sitting silently with a paper bag on his head, bearing the legend “I am not famous anymore” – members of the public queued to be able to sit in front of him in the one-on-one piece. It ran for five days in February at a Los Angeles gallery.
LaBeouf said that news of the incident “travelled through the line” of people waiting, and reached LaBeouf’s girlfriend. “When she came in she asked for an explanation, and I couldn’t speak, so we both sat with this unexplained trauma silently. It was painful.”
The piece was part of a wider series of performance art events by the actor, triggered by what he calls a “genuine existential crisis” after he was accused of plagiarism when he lifted portions of a Daniel Clowes short story for a film he was working on. LaBeouf wrote streams of bizarre tweets, quoting notorious apologies from famous individuals, and hired a skywriting plane to etch an apology across the Los Angeles sky. He also wore a paper bag to the Berlin premiere of Lars Von Trier’s film Nymphomaniac, and said he would be retiring from all public life.
Shia LaBeouf at the premiere for Nymphomaniac.
In the Dazed interview, LaBeouf seems to regret some of these responses, saying: “I am a deeply ironic, cynical person. I was raised on The Simpsons and South Park, it’s my default setting… [our generation] want to change things, we want to have hope, we just don’t know how or where to look.”
Of the assertion he would withdraw from public life, he explained: “The 80s and 90s fucked us; our culture became a product to be sold, and anyone in a tabloid is a product – an object. American culture is just about blowjobs and golf. I wanted to take back ownership. Fuck the money, that was never the impetus. I wanted purpose.” His initial cynicism dissipated, and he began performance art in earnest – projects included writing #STARTCREATING with further skywriters, and running 144 laps around an Amsterdam museum. Following the Dazed email interview, he and journalist Aimee Cliff’s face-to-face interview was conducted in silence, with each filming the other.
In the emails he also skirts further controversy in a discussion of masculinity centred around his current second world war film Fury. “Every primitive culture has a puberty ceremony where children become men. Jews still have it, but it’s all religious nostalgia,” he says. “I think the withholding of a puberty ceremony from young men in our society is a scheme which has been cunningly devised to make young men go to war.”The actor is currently undergoing treatment for addiction, following his June arrest for disorderly conduct and harassment after he interrupted a performance of Cabaret with obscene language.
The actor, known for Smokey and the Bandit and Boogie Nights, is selling off over 600 personal memorabilia items in a Las Vegas auction
Burt Reynolds in 1977 as Bo ‘Bandit’ Darville, in Smokey And The Bandit.
The actor Burt Reynolds is having to sell off hundreds of items of personal memorabilia in an attempt to pay outstanding mortgage payments.
The items, being auctioned at The Palms hotel in Las Vegas on 11 and 12 December, include two Golden Globes, a red leather jacket he wore in Smokey and the Bandit II, and – perhaps most kitsch of all – the pair of cowboy boots he wore in Striptease.
Earlier this year, Reynolds attempted to throw out a lawsuit from Bank of America who are trying to foreclose his Florida home, but he was unsuccessful. The bank claims Reynolds hasn’t made any payments on his £700,000 mortgage since 2010, one of three loans held on the property. Reynolds has unsuccessfully tried to sell it, slashing the price from £9m to £2.9m.
With his rich tan, burly frame and impeccable moustache, Reynolds was the epitome of 1970s manhood, becoming a huge box office draw following his breakthrough in Deliverance. He won a Golden Globe in 1998 for his comeback performance as porn director Jack Horner in Paul Thomas Anderson’s debut film Boogie Nights. Divorces and ill-starred business ventures, like failed restaurant chains and American football teams, have however taken their toll on the fortune he amassed.
One of the lots from Burt Reynolds’ auction.Photograph: Julien’s Auctions
He is putting a positive spin on the auction, writing in its catalogue : “I’ve collected so many things that I truly adore but at this stage in my life I find it very difficult to manage them all. The fact of the matter is that it truly is the time to downsize and for these items that I have loved over the years find new homes where they can be cared for and appreciated.”
Other lots include items signed by sportsmen like Muhammad Ali, Wayne Gretsky and Jack Nicklaus, gifts from Elizabeth Taylor and Jimmy Stewart, paintings and drawings by Henry Fonda and James Cagney, artworks of Native Americans (including one of himself dressed as a Navajo), a stuffed brown bear, a Smokey and the Bandit go-kart, tens of firearms, law enforcement badges, and one of his old American Express cards.
“The Writing’s on the Wall” filled with optical illusions, 
ArtRubic 