Scanning artists de-loot stolen Egyptian treasure from a German museum

2024-04-11T00:01:05+00:00February 23rd, 2016|Tags: , , , , , , , , , |

Nora Al-Badri and Jan Nikolai Nelles, an Iraqi/German artistic duo, covertly scanned a famous looted Egyptian treasure, the Bust of Queen Nefertiti, from its contested perch in Berlin’s Neues Museum.

The hi-rez 3D file is now free to download and print – the artists have printed their own full-size epoxy resin replica.

The original is the crown jewel of the Neues Museum, but Egyptian curators have long agitate for its repatriation to Egypt – it was looted from an Egyptian site in Amarna in 1912 by German archaeologists. The artists have donated their replica bust to the Cairo museum.

The Neues Museum is believed to have made its own scan of the bust, but it does not share 3D models of its collection as a rule, and has a generally guarded posture towards such »

2018-03-27T08:15:24+00:00March 2nd, 2015|Tags: , , , |

Setting aside camera exposure, and white balance issues, I strongly suggest anyone who’s curious to understand more about color to look into Josef Albers. He did a lot of amazing work and research that explored all of these ideas, about 100 years ago.

2018-03-27T08:19:09+00:00December 16th, 2014|Tags: , |

npr:

American painter Richard Estes has made a career out of fooling the eye. His canvases look like photographs — but they’re not.

“You can’t see my paintings in reproduction,” the 82-year-old artist says. That’s because, in reproduction, the paintings — especially his New York cityscapes from the late 1960s — look like photos. He’s called a photo-realist, or hyper-realist — an intense observer of the built environment. But he doesn’t paint the view from his apartment window.

“His window is a photograph,” says Jessica May, co-curator of Estes’ current show at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C.

Estes uses photography as a starting point for painting. He goes out and takes dozens of photographs of the same thing from different angles — street corners, diners, reflections on plate glass windows — then he cuts, pastes and manipulates »

2014-07-10T17:36:08+00:00July 10th, 2014|Tags: , , |

All art to me is about problem solving. So I’m obsessed with problem solving. Somewhere someone discovered something or somebody was tasked to figure something out and they did. What did they figure out and how? One of the things that I believe is true is the art model of problem solving is incredibly efficient because ideology has no place there. There’s only the thing and what the thing needs to be. When I look around the world and think why is everything working or not working, it’s because it’s entrenched ideology. You can’t solve a problem if you’re sitting down with people who say, “All these ideas are off the table because of what I believe.”

Steven Soderbergh

2014-07-10T17:23:00+00:00July 10th, 2014|Tags: , , |

I think about art a lot only in two contexts. One is narrative. That we’re a species that’s wired to tell stories. We need stories. It’s how we make sense of things. It’s how we learn. When we look at what’s going on in the world and we see the immense level of conflict that seems to always be happening — you can always trace it back to competing narratives. What’s going on in Ukraine right now is that Vladimir Putin has a narrative of himself and his country that he’s so passionate about that he’s willing to make a move like that. This is about a story. His story of himself and him trying to restore his country to the glory he thinks it should have. It’s that elemental.

Steven Soderbergh

Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album

2014-03-26T18:35:26+00:00March 26th, 2014|Tags: , , |

Why Wu-Tang Will Release Just One Copy Of Its Secret Album

Wu-Tang’s aim is to use the album as a springboard for the reconsideration of music as art, hoping that the approach will help restore recorded music to a place alongside visual art—and change the music business in the process.
“The idea that music is art has been something we advocated for years,” says RZA. “And yet its doesn’t receive the same treatment as art in the sense of the value of what it is, especially nowadays when it’s been devalued and diminished to almost the point that it has to be given away for free.”

Hot Topic: Lady Gaga’s SXSW Keynote and Selling Out.

2014-03-18T19:32:03+00:00March 18th, 2014|Tags: |

Hot Topic: Lady Gaga’s SXSW Keynote and Selling Out.

lilithfilm:

My first trip to SXSW (‘South by Southwest’ for the uninitiated) was in 2004, when I was invited by the organizers. Ten years ago, the festival was a bustling confluence of independent film, indie rock and fringe hip-hop, and a burgeoning interactive / new media sector. It was grassroots, all…

A lot of wisdom in here about what it means to be an artist in the crazy world we live in.

Being Open

2013-08-02T22:39:33+00:00August 2nd, 2013|Tags: , |

I’m going to shift into an even more pretentious-sounding gear here, but I think of creative acts as having a source somewhere outside our minds, and I think that what we call “making something" is actually us being “open to something that made itself.“  Please forgive me, anyone reading this, I’m just being honest about how I feel.  Anyway, the act of “being open” to these things it’s our job to channel is the agonizing part.  You can open yourself to a single idea but as soon as you have one, your ego starts going “okay I’ll take it from here" and the channel closes.  Staying open beyond a certain point, keeping your ego from spasming, is like standing on one foot or sustaining a fake yawn for 8 hours.

Dan Harmon dropping some great knowledge on the act of creativity.

2018-03-27T09:11:27+00:00May 23rd, 2013|Tags: , |


Among the dark news of environmental disasters, corruption, and human tragedy, I write to share that thiscoming Saturday more than 100 Afghan artists will give away 10,000 pink balloons to the citizens of Kabul. 
The artists—filmmakers, painters, musicians, photographers and crafters of traditional arts— are preparing to take part in the largest public art installation to ever take place in Afghanistan.  This coming Saturdaymorning (May 25) they will be arming 10,000 citizens in the heart of the capital with pink balloons.  Our headquarters will be the historic Park-e-Timur Shahi in the heart of the city.  
The orchestration has already taken place in India, Japan, and Kenya. Every city has been selected for its rich cultural history and its current state as a hive of creativity.  Furthermore, in each location the project has »

2012-08-07T21:06:04+00:00August 7th, 2012|Tags: , , |

I think Warhol’s films are the last thing that will be discovered and will be even as big as his other art. That’s still to come, when people finally have in their homes a way to display video art seamlessly, like they would a painting. The Warhol films did that style of video art first, and they’ll be there forever.

…

It’s not important to scare people. I want to surprise way more than to scare. Scary would be, like, me in skinny jeans. A 65-year-old man who’s angry is a loser. A 20-year-old angry man is a sexy leader. Nothing makes me angry anymore.

John Waters in The Wall Street Journal (via bbook)

65 years old and still as smart as ever about art and culture. <3 John Waters

2018-03-27T09:51:32+00:00October 2nd, 2011|Tags: , , , , , , , , |

thepoliticalnotebook:

Kansas. Across from the Federal Reserve Bank of Kansas City, artist John Salvest has used 117 shipping containers to create a 65’ high structure reading “IOU”. On the other side, not shown here, it says “USA”. The installation piece has generated a lot of discussion, resonating with many people and angering others. The bank is not commenting. (Photo Credit: Orlin Wagner/AP)

[via MSNBC]

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