Archive for the ‘Ars Gratia Artis’ Category
Tuesday, November 30th, 2010
Logger dismantles $5,000 sculpture mistaken for wood pile
A New Brunswick logger is unrepentant after beginning to dismantle a wood pile that turned out to be a sculpture titled Deadwood Sleep.
Ron Fahey of Sackville said Monday he was granted permission in August from Mount Allison University to take the logs stacked in an area behind the president’s residence alongside a waterfowl park in the town.
“I got the okay to just take the wood and, to me, it was just a pile of wood,” he said. “If that’s art then I’m in the wrong racket. I guess I’m not cultured.”
He said he was going to use it for firewood and had started to haul some of the wood away on Saturday when the town manager came rushing over to ask if he had permission to touch it.
Mr. Fahey, 59, realized the mistake and stopped working on the pile, though he’d already pulled several logs off.
Andrea Ward, grounds manager at Mount Allison University, said there was confusion over which pile of wood Fahey was to dismantle behind the historic Cranewood residence on the campus.
“Basically we said, ‘We don’t think the wood you’re looking at is on your property, but we do have some wood on our property if you’re interested,’ ” she said.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Oops | No Comments »
Saturday, February 27th, 2010
Matt Stone & Trey Parker Are Not Your Political Allies (No Matter What You Believe):
News broke this week that a Blackwater subsidiary was arming violent drug users in Afghanistan. They took hundreds of weapons intended for the Afghan National Police and at least one of them (probably more) signed for the shipments with the name “Eric Cartman.”
When I asked “South Parks”’s creators what they thought of these men co-opting their character they were completely unfazed.
“It makes perfect sense. It’s the name I would use,” Trey Parker said.
“Our first reaction to any story is ‘How do we put this into the show?’ and the second reaction is ‘Did Cartman do that?’ because he’s so real to us it’s like ‘I bet Cartman did that.’”
“I saw that and thought, ‘Wow, Cartman did that? That’s pretty cool. Sounds like something he would do,’” Matt Stone agreed.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Concentrated Criminality | No Comments »
Friday, July 17th, 2009
Police investigate ‘Nazi’ gnome
German prosecutors have launched an inquiry into whether a garden gnome with its right arm raised in a Hitler salute in a Nuremberg art gallery breaks the law.
Salutes and Nazi symbols have been illegal in Germany since the Second World War but investigators may decide the figure is in fact ridiculing the Third Reich.
Wolfgang Traeg, a spokesman for the public prosecutors office, said: “The investigation is ongoing and people are being interviewed.
“It is also a question of art a bit,” he said. “It will also depend on what the artist and the owners of the gallery have to say for themselves about the whole thing.”
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Nazis | No Comments »
Thursday, May 28th, 2009
Dutch Artist Famous for Skinning Pet Cat Publishes Expose on Authors of Hate Mail
A Dutch artist famous for making her pet cat into a purse has launched a new controversial project: revealing personal details about everyone who has sent her hate mail over the cat “art.”
Katinka Simonse, also known as Tinkebell, has assembled the thousands of e-mails she received since twisting her cat’s neck and skinning it with her own hands in 2004, and she has published them along with the names, ages and addresses of each sender, according to the English version of the Dutch newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
The book, “Dearest Tinkebell,” is especially controversial because it also includes YouTube videos, MySpace profiles and any other embarrassing information available on the Web pertaining to the e-mail authors, NRC International reported.
Simonse was quoted in NRC as saying that “everything has been obtained legally,” and all the published information already was made accessible by the people themselves.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Modern Narcissism | No Comments »
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
Naked taoiseach paintings removed:
It could be described as oil on canvas featuring taoiseach, but the appearance of nude paintings of Irish Prime Minister Brian Cowen in two Dublin galleries has seen the police called in.
A painting of Mr Cowen holding his underpants appeared in the Royal Hibernian Academy and one of him pictured on the toilet ended up in the National Gallery.
Whether it was political subversion or artistic expression if the painter behind them comes to light they could find themselves answering questions from Irish police.
Hat tip to Una!
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis | No Comments »
Monday, November 17th, 2008
Ohio man captures commanders-in-chief in Etch A Sketch portraits:
He calls himself “Mr. Etch A Sketch.”
His motto is: “Shake my hand, not my work.”
While other Etch A Sketch artists may be more elegant, some creating sublime characterizations of famous paintings or the world around them, there are probably none more prolific than Tim George, an artist so well-known that Ohio Art sends him specially produced Etch A Sketches to preserve his works.
On Election Night, just after the returns were announced, Mr. George, a 58-year-old bank security guard, unveiled his portrait of President-elect Barack Obama, whose likeness joined those of the other 43 presidents of the United States that Mr. George drew using an Etch A Sketch.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis | No Comments »
Thursday, October 16th, 2008
Actor in mob film Gomorrah arrested
An actor who played a Godfather in a new smash Mafia movie is among seven people arrested in a police crackdown. Bernardino Terracciano, 53, plays a boss in ‘Gomorrah’, a hard-hitting blockbuster on the Naples Mafia known as the Camorra, released this week in Britain. He was seized over the weekend on suspicion of extorting protection money and having ties to the Casalesi clan, part of the Camorra mafia. The latest arrests came a month after six Africans were gunned down outside a clothes shop in Castel Volturno near Naples by the ruthless Casalesi clan.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis | No Comments »
Tuesday, August 12th, 2008
Giant inflatable dog poo wreaks havoc
A GIANT inflatable dog turd by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from an exhibition in the garden of a Swiss museum, bringing down a power line and breaking a window before it landed again.
The art work, titled Complex Shit, is the size of a house.
The wind carried it 200m from the Paul Klee Centre in Berne before it fell back to Earth in the grounds of a children’s home, said museum director Juri Steiner.
The inflatable turd broke the window at the children’s home when it blew away on the night of July 31, Mr Steiner said.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Oops | Comments Off
Friday, July 4th, 2008
Faceless ‘aliens’ spotted in crowd at Wimbledon
With the blankest of blank expressions on their faces, these mysterious figures have been popping up in the most unlikely of places.
The faceless mutants have a penchant for A-list celebrity bashes and have been spotted at Elton John’s White tie ball and Harrods summer sale, opened by Sex and the City star Kim Cattrall.
With a membrane of skin stretched tightly over their eyes, noses and mouths, the alien-like figures were most recently snapped ‘watching’ a match perched on Murray Mount at Wimbledon.
Posted in Aliens, Ars Gratia Artis, Most Mysterious | Comments Off
Thursday, April 17th, 2008
For senior, abortion a medium for art, political discourse
Art major Aliza Shvarts ‘08 wants to make a statement.
Beginning next Tuesday, Shvarts will be displaying her senior art project, a documentation of a nine-month process during which she artificially inseminated herself “as often as possible’ while periodically taking abortifacient drugs to induce miscarriages. Her exhibition will feature video recordings of these forced miscarriages as well as preserved collections of the blood from the process.
The goal in creating the art exhibition, Shvarts said, was to spark conversation and debate on the relationship between art and the human body. But her project has already provoked more than just debate, inciting, for instance, outcry at a forum for fellow senior art majors held last week. And when told about Shvarts’ project, students on both ends of the abortion debate have expressed shock, saying the project does everything from violate moral code to trivialize abortion.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Modern Narcissism | Comments Off
Saturday, February 23rd, 2008
Did Adolf Hitler draw Disney characters?
The director of a Norwegian museum claimed yesterday to have discovered cartoons drawn by Adolf Hitler during the Second World War.
William Hakvaag, the director of a war museum in northern Norway, said he found the drawings hidden in a painting signed “A. Hitler” that he bought at an auction in Germany.
He found coloured cartoons of the characters Bashful and Doc from the 1937 Disney film Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, which were signed A.H., and an unsigned sketch of Pinocchio as he appeared in the 1940 Disney film.
Hitler tried to make a living as an artist before his rise to power. While there was no independent confirmation yesterday that the drawings were the work of the Nazi leader, Hitler is known to have owned a copy of Snow White, the classic animated adaptation of a German fairy tale, and to have viewed it in his private cinema.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Crazed Dictatorships, Historical Oddities, Nazis | Comments Off
Saturday, August 4th, 2007
An Artist and His Sub Surrender in Brooklyn
At slack tide off Red Hook, Brooklyn, there are usually lots of things floating in the water, most of which you would not want to touch without the help of a good hazmat suit. But just after sunrise yesterday, something truly strange was bobbing there in the shallows near Pier 41: a submarine fashioned almost completely from wood, and inside it a man with an obsession.
The man, Duke Riley, a heavily tattooed Brooklyn artist whose waterborne performance projects around New York have frequently landed him in trouble with the authorities, spent the last five months building the vessel as a rough replica of what is believed to have been America’s first submarine, an oak sphere called the Turtle, said to have seen action in New York Harbor during the Revolutionary War.
Hat tip to Steve!
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Wunderwaffen | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 30th, 2007
Process this: A kaput-critter computer
With more and more companies allowing employees to bring their pets to work these days, it’s not unusual to find a furry animal occupying a cubicle near you. And now an artist/inventor has taken this idea to a new high-tech level by putting a personal computer inside a dead beaver.
The Compubeaver, designed by Los Angeles resident Kasey McMahon, took three months to build and is literally stuffed full of the latest computer technology, including an Intel Core Duo processor, 160 gigabyte hard drive, and even a DVD burner so you can record your favorite TV programs off the National Geographic channel.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis | 1 Comment »
Sunday, May 20th, 2007
Meatball art made from human fat
Last year, Chilean-born artist Marco Evaristti mixed fat removed from his body by liposuction with ground beef to make meatballs, which he fried in olive oil and displayed in a public gallery.
This year, he plans to climb Western Europe’s highest mountain, Mont Blanc on the French-Italian border, color the summit pink and declare it an independent state, with himself as president.
His work has been slammed as disgusting, publicity-seeking and immoral but Evaristti says he is simply trying to highlight some of the double standards he sees in the world around him.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis, Cannibal Update | No Comments »
Tuesday, May 8th, 2007
Student tries to make roadkill pretty
For the past several weeks, drivers near Southern Illinois University-Edwardsville have been noticing odd things about some of the roadkill on the sides of the area’s highways.Some of the dead possums and raccoons have been dressed in pet or human baby clothes and have had their claws painted with nail polish. The carcass of a deer has been adorned with gold paint.
Posted in Ars Gratia Artis | No Comments »
