via Co.Exist

via Digiday

The social media platform is not only launching the career of under-the-radar artists, it is providing the world with an entirely new way to access art. Where artists once had to first get support of the art world elite–critics, galleries and big name collectors, which would eventually lead to museum shows–before reaching the monied masses, today artists use Instagram as their own virtual art gallery, playing both dealer and curator while their fans become critics and collectors, witnessing the creative process in real time.
Vogue

—Saul Bass
via Bombtune and Geisha

Over the weekend I found a book on cartoonist Chris Ware for $2.76 in the discount bin of a bookstore. After flipping through the book for a few seconds, I realized I recognized Ware’s work when it was featured in the The New York Times Magazine (back when I used to buy the print edition on Sundays!).
The essay by Daniel Raeburn at the beginning of the book reveals Ware to be a fascinating artist:

In sum, comics are a map of the fourth dimension, composed not only of the intersection of words and pictures but also of words that act like pictures and pictures that act like words, with color and composition shaping the map with their own structure and emotional meaning. This requires Ware to be not only a writer, drawer and painter — an illustrator if you must — but a calligrapher, typographer and, to tie all the arts together, a graphic designer. When we extend the demands of comics from actuality to analogy and consider for a moment that Ware must create a world and portray convincingly every character who inhabits it, it is fair to say that Ware’s chosen art also requires him to be a casting agent, wardrobe artist, set designer and actor. In short, Ware has to work like a theatre director. Given that he also has to frame and crop our every view of this world, he also has to work like a cinematographer. He has to be a control freak.

One has to wonder why people shrugged off this confounding art as kid’s stuff. One also has to wonder why Ware stuck with it. For 40 to 50 hours a week, every week, for nearly 20 years. Ware has sat at his scarred drawing table composing one page additions to this most disrespected of all mediums. He has done this work in relative isolation, a part of no movement, no school and, until recently, for almost no money. When we consider this grind it is impossible to overestimate the role of grit in Ware’s honing of his art. As early as 1990. Ware was bucking himself up with these exhortations: “DON’T GET BITTER”, “DON’T STAGNATE”, RESPECT YOUR OBSESSIONS” and the quintessentially Wareian war cry, “VALUE YOUR WORTHLESSNESS”. Under these dictums he added, “READ A VARIETY OF THINGS” and, as a final commandment, “DON’T JUST READ COMICS!” This he added, Keep making stuff, too! Or the above will no be able to happen.” Ware’s latter two pronouncements and his postscript are a key to his art. By working on arts and crafts that would appear to have nothing to do with his art, Ware enriched not only his own comics but also our understanding of what comics require.
The book is called Chris Ware by Daniel Raeburn.

“I like to think the same words that hurt can heal. It’s a matter of how you pick them.”
—George Carlin


Taken from The Combustion Chamber

From The Verge:

Your work could be at the heart of one of the largest digital art exhibitions the world has ever seen, thanks to a collaboration between London’s Barbican Centre and Google.

The exhibition is called Digital Revolution, and from July 3rd to September 14th it will explore the impact of technology on art over the past 40 years. It will feature artists, designers, musicians, architects, and developers to reveal the artistry that’s all around us, from the films that we watch to the games that we play. DevArt, its final act, will showcase three large-scale, “magical” works of art from established artists, and one that’s yet to be announced. That’s where you come in.
This show looks interesting, but to be clear, art + code is nothing new.
When I started my career as a web designer, guys like Joshua Davis, James Paterson, Robert Hodgin and Erik Natzke were creating amazing interactive art with code (and still are).
Go back farther and you’ll find all the things John Maeda was experimenting with in the 90’s.

Groundhog Day show at Super Precious Art Gallery
via Quipsologies

From the gorgeous portfolio of Tony Rodriguez

—Chuck Close (American, b. 1940). Self-Portrait (Black on White), 1977. Hard-ground etching with aquatint.
(Taken at the de Young Museum, San Francisco, CA)

Bernie Fuchs

This is so much better if I withhold any context.

5Pointz, a Graffiti Mecca in Queens, Is Wiped Clean Overnight:

By Tuesday morning, the work of some 1,500 artists had been wiped clean, the Brobdingnagian bubble letters and the colorful cartoons spray painted on the building’s brick walls all covered in a fresh coat of white paint.

“We are supposed to be the vandals, but this is the biggest rag and disrespect in the history of graffiti,” said Marie Cecile Flageul, an unofficial curator for 5Pointz.
Boo-hoo.
Some might think this is unfortunate for graffiti artists, but the truth is, the artists who tagged up the surfaces of 5Pointz were allowed to by the owners of the building.
Anyone who really knows NYC knows the only thing constant in the city is change.
Or to remix Heraclitus, you cannot tag the same wall twice.

Fresh from The Combustion Chamber: I ♥ NY and CALI posters.