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Costa Rican artiste Guillermo Habacuc Vargas is making headlines for tying a dog from the street in an art gallery as part of an exhibit to starve it to death. The title of his exhibit "Eres Lo Que Lee" was written across the gallery in dry dog food. The food and a bowl of water were both out of the dog's reach. Eventually the animal died of starvation. The artist claimed the dog was sick and would have died anyways. Now Vargas has been selected to represent Costa Rica in Visual Arts Biennel of Central Americas 2008. The organizers have...

Candidate-related art taking off July 20, 2008Recommend BY CHRISTINA S.N. LEWIS Last week's New Yorker magazine cover, an illustration depicting Sen. Barack Obama and his wife as fist-bumping terrorists, has been all over the news. But that isn't the only Obama-related artwork attracting attention these days. Collectors, investors and fund-raisers -- many of them looking to cash in on the candidate's popularity and place in history -- are snapping up campaign posters and other works depicting Obama.

We have had several threads on music and food but not art I thought tonight we could discuss what works of art you enjoy. Art can be very subjective what some people love other hate, what some consider a scribble a daub on a paper other consider a masterpiece. Then there are certain pieces of art that are universally accepted and admired. What are your favourite works of art or type of art? Maybe it is a sculpture or some fine art? On the other hand maybe architecture is your bent? Tonight's questions What is your favourite painting? What is...

The owners of a small South End gallery say they had the best of intentions when they commissioned a famous and often mischievous street artist to install a massive political mural on a construction wall lining one of the artiest strips of the South End. The mural, 13 feet high and nearly a block long, features multiple composite portraits of Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama and Abraham Lincoln, their faces melded together in a rainbow of colors. It is meant, the gallery said, to inspire dialogue. That it did. The morning after artist Ron English and his band of...

Can't resist it - I was raised on American culture and am all the happier for it. It formed me culturally and made me what I am. Since I come into contact with Americans professionally on a frequent basis, it's always a great pleasure to have 'common ground', so to speak. Today I started reading 'Moby-Dick' for the fifth time. And believe me, I do have an exceptional memory. But this book is so rich that you can spend a lifetime with it and still miss out on some things. The pretty pragmatic, relativistic Ishmael embarks on a boat trip...

There are times when art should be the last thing on an art critic's mind. The thunderous popularity of a number of contemporary Chinese artists compels a political analysis. Much of the work is powered by a startling and completely delusionary infatuation with Mao Zedong and the Cultural Revolution. This is more sinister than anything we have seen in the already fairly astonishing annals of radical chic. We are witnessing a globalized political whitewash job, with artists and assorted collectors, dealers, and sycophants pouring a thick layer of avant-garde double-talk over the infernal decade of suffering, destruction, and death that...

THE Rudd Government will ask the Australia Council to develop a set of protocols to cover the representation of children in art, after a taxpayer-funded magazine put a picture of a nude six-year-old girl on its cover to protest at the Bill Henson dispute. The review, which would consult members of the arts sector and the general community, was confirmed by a government spokesman yesterday, as politicians led by Kevin Rudd heaped condemnation on this month's Art Monthly Australia magazine. The work is a detail of Olympia as Lewis Carroll's Beatrice Hatch before White Cliffs, by the girl's mother, Melbourne...

LONDON. A third of the Coptic sculptures at the Brooklyn Museum of Art are modern fakes. Its collection of late Egyptian sculpture was, until now, the second largest in North America. Brooklyn curator Dr Edna Russmann, who is concluding a study of the works, warns that other museums which acquired Coptic sculptures in the past 50 years are likely to face similar problems. The unmasking of the forgeries will be revealed in an exhibition on “Coptic Sculpture in the Brooklyn Museum”, opening on 13 February 2009. The Art Newspaper can reveal that ten of Brooklyn’s 30 sculptures are now deemed...

True art vs. fame for fame's sake by The Stranger On 6/1/08, in the Sunday Times was a book review of a new bio: POSTHUMOUS KEATS, the life and work of poet John Keats who died at the age of 25, far from home, poor, in Rome. Family members were either dead, or estranged from him. The woman he loved was convinced they had no future together. He had no reputation, or success. What must it be like to die at that age, in those circumstances? The review mentions that today Keats “ranks with Shakespeare now, in talent if not...

Vatican plea to uncover Virgin Mary and show her breast-feeding baby Jesus By Simon Caldwell Last updated at 11:09 PM on 23rd June 2008 [...] ...artists later depicted the nursing Mary fully clothed because the Protestant reformers were generally critical of "the carnality and unbecoming nature of many sacred images". But Miss Scaraffia argued that later depictions had also diminished the Madonna’ s human side "that touches the hearts and faith of the devout". Miss Scaraffia said that when the early Christian artists represented the Virgin breast-feeding they had sought to reveal the reality of God's incarnation. [...] Images of...

Alexander Stoddart unravels the relationship between art and politics ___ The great British philosopher Brian Magee, writing about Richard Wagner’s political life, points out that it is wrong to think of the Sage of Bayreuth moving to the Right in his later life. Magee’s proposal is compelling; Wagner leaves left-wing politics precisely as men who are maturing leave politics generally. They drift in middle age towards the static wasteland of metaphysics, and this is observed by those still remaining in politics as a move towards the Opposition, since they still cannot think of anything outside the political sphere. It appears...

New Haven, CT (LifeNews.com) -- The Yale University art student who caused a national uproar by supposedly making a senior art project showing her having repeated abortions is slated to unveil a new work in England. London's Tate Modern museum invited Aliza Shvarts to debut a new art project concerning culture and technology.The student, who graduated in May, supposedly repeatedly artificially inseminated herself multiple times over a nine month period and used medicinal herbs to cause early abortions. Shvarts supposedly created an art project consisting of the videos of the abortions and plastic sheets covered in her blood.Yale officials said...

When I said I would give a pleasant surprise to Brityank, I meant I would like to paint a painting for him. Because I would like to thank him for his kindness towards me. Maybe he doesn’t think its anything, But I really care. Because I think I must keep my promise, and do my best, I will do it, and I’m free now. I hope Brityank feels free about this too. Because it is just a painting, and I just need an excuse to exercise my drawing skills. I am so lazy sometimes you know, I like to relax...

Michelangelo 'hid secret code in Sistine Chapel' By Malcolm Moore in Rome 20/06/2008Michelangelo hid a secret code in the frescoes of the Sistine Chapel made up of mystical Jewish symbols... according to a new book. The Sistine Chapel was intended to be decoded, the authors believe The ceiling of the Sistine Chapel,...is actually a "bridge" between the Roman Catholic Church and the Jewish faith", according to The Sistine Secrets: Unlocking the Codes in Michelangelo's Defiant Masterpiece. --snip-- Scanning...the arrangement of figures on the...14,000 square foot ceiling, the authors have found shapes that correspond to Hebrew letters. --snip-- For example, the...

For eight years Daniel and Sharon Dixon, apartment managers in Lake City, Fla., displayed in the apartment complex's management office a stained glass depiction of flowers with the words "Consider the lilies … Matthew 6:28" written in the lower left corner – an act for which they were suddenly fired from their management jobs and evicted from their apartment. Mathew D. Staver, founder of Liberty Counsel, a non-profit organization dedicated to advancing religious freedom that is representing the Dixons, told WND that neither before nor after the incident were the Dixons charged with any wrongdoing other than protesting the removal...

"I am sorry, that with reverence I did not entertain thee as thou art" By Yervand Kochar At an early stage movies, and arts in general, were not, yet, divided into entertainment and pure art. Art for its own sake is a relatively new and in a way conventional concept. I can't imagine Leonardo DaVinci thinking about whether he should entertain or create something of an eternal value. He did what he felt doing in tune with the sensibilities of his time and people.Great art is always entertaining butentertainment, even great entertainment,cannot be art. In other words, Chaplin was entertaining...

Click on the link for a BBC News video of the event. Hundreds and hundreds of Irish folk posing nude at a castle.

On occasion in this space, I like to keep abreast of our more famous University of Northern Iowa graduates. Since I am an art aficionado, I have tried in the past to keep current on the times and career of Justin Case, UNI's most celebrated art graduate. As the regular readers of this column will recall, Case was concerned about modern art. Most of it is ugly and unskilled, but justified by the art community by three rather loose rules or constructs. First, true art must make us think. Second, true art must create emotion and challenge convention. This is...

A major New York art school is displaying sexually explicit paintings that depict a crucifix in a man's rectum and rosaries with male sex organs, among other offensive imagery, according to the Catholic League. The Cooper Union for the Advancement of Science and Art in New York City is hosting the art show, which began May 27 and runs through June 10. In the show is a series of paintings by Felipe Baeza. One painting shows a man with his pants pulled down and a crucifix extending from his rectum. Under the painting it says, "el dia que me converti...

Dubai: Roped in for a massive project to create 99 paintings on Arab culture by Qatar royal family, eminent painter M F Hussain, in self-exile after drawing the ire of Hindu outfits for his works, insists that art is India's "soul" and has the depth that is lacked by the West which has only "junk culture" to offer. In the last 60 years, India has emerged as a major force in many fields, including art, the 92-year-old artist said after inauguration of an exhibition in Omani capital Muscat. In India, art has a unique position. "It is our soul, a...

This morning, a Boston-born performance artist, Yazmany Arboleda, tried to set up a provocative art exhibition in a vacant storefront on West 40th Street in Midtown Manhattan with the title, “The Assassination of Hillary Clinton/The Assassination of Barack Obama,” in neatly stenciled letters on the plate glass windows at street level. By 9:30 a.m., New York City police detectives and Secret Service agents had shut down the exhibition, and building workers quickly covered over the inflammatory title with large sheets of brown paper and blue masking tape. The gallery is across the street from the southern entrance to The New...

Once dismissed as imperialist fantasies about the Muslim world, British orientalist paintings are once again becoming popular. Their exotic visions tell us much about the social and cultural history of Victorian Britain A snake writhes over the desert sands that half submerge the Sphinx. A crafty merchant examines a coin presented by two anxious, veiled customers. Heavily laden camels kneel at an encampment. Bored, gorgeously clad concubines lounge in the secret depths of a harem. The British orientalist paintings of Tate Britain's forthcoming exhibition "The Lure of the East" are colourful, exotic, often technically brilliant. But they are also controversial,...

From the moment we walked into the Theatre I could feel the excitement in the air. The make up of the crowd spoke to both the extraordinary appeal of the writings of C.S. Lewis and, I would soon discover, the brilliance of this wonderful film. The Box Office results from the first weekend confirmed what I was about to experience. Prince Caspian Rules. The audience was an inter-generational sampling of every ethnic variety of family. There were grandfathers and grandmothers, mothers and fathers, children of every age, teenagers, and grandchildren. As the lights dimmed, many people were hurriedly trying to...

Jennifer Marsh was sick of paying high gas prices and bothered by the abandoned gas station that was an eyesore on the drive to her studio each day. So the aspiring artist and inspired activist came up with an idea — to cover the gas station with a colossal handmade blanket in a way that would bring greater attention to the world's dependency on oil. ''I really tried to find a good balance of art and politics. I don't want it to be just a political statement. And I don't want it to just be a sculpture,'' said the 27-year-old...

In this undated image released by France's Culture Ministry Tuesday May 13, 2008, a life size marble bust of Julius Cesar is seen. The bust, probably dated 46 BC, was discovered last year after underwater searches in the Rhone River near Arles, southern France. (AP Photo/Culture Ministry, C. Chary) Divers trained in archaeology discovered a marble bust of an aging Caesar in the Rhone River that France's Culture Ministry said Tuesday could be the oldest known. The life-sized bust showing the Roman ruler with wrinkles and hollows in his face is tentatively dated to 46 B.C. Divers uncovered the...

I still remember the day the “Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe” was released; I was the first in line, with my adult son. It was a marvelous masterpiece of a movie. I know that Prince Caspian will be even better. I told Doug during our interview, that I am so excited about seeing this film that I feel like a child again. He laughed and told me I will be thrilled. He continued “...the enemy has tried to steal the film industry, but he has not succeeded. Many in our day seem to think that it is political leaders...

In Wil Kerner's world, happiness and grief — and all the feelings that come between — are puzzle pieces as alien as the curious construction-paper characters in the art he assembles on his grandmother's living-room carpet. What the autistic 12-year-old can't express verbally or in social interaction he can show through his carefully cut out geometric shapes assembled into characters in a paper collage, a talent the staff at Seattle's Harborview Medical Center calls a rare artistic gift. Large red circles become heads, delicate strips of fringed white paper become hair, and finely cut arches are shaped into eyebrows.

Mind Your Business: You Will Lose All The Rights to Your Own Art April 10, 2008 By Mark Simon Printable Version Mark Simon. As you know, I usually handle the subjects in my articles with a sense of humor. That is not the case this month. I find nothing funny about the new Orphan Works legislation that is before Congress. In fact, it PISSES ME OFF! As an artist, you have to read this article or you could lose everything you've ever created! An Orphaned Work is any creative work of art where the artist or copyright owner has released...

BAT YAM, Israel (Reuters) - From pickled cows to elephant dung, the art world is no stranger to offbeat ideas. But a group of lice-infested Germans? Seven young artists from Berlin are trying to stretch the boundaries of art by living in an Israeli museum for three weeks with lice in their hair. "Art is no longer just a painting on the wall," Milana Gitzin-Adiram, chief curator of the Museum of Bat Yam near Tel Aviv, told Reuters. "Art is life, life is art." The exhibition has caused controversy -- unintended, the artists say -- in a country where the...

You can't replace Pookie's Toons, but here's a collection of some of my own recent ONLINE COPYRIGHT FREE cartoons and paintings. Enjoy: my cartoon is way too inappropriate to ever see syndication. I've pretty much become Catholic oriented and non-partisan now, although I turn out enough conservative-friendly stuff to put together a thread here every month or so. Again, you can't replace Today's Toons, but it's something. Revision of a cartoon from 2005, in response to the recent story about Planned Parenthood clinics saying they accept race-targeted abortion donations. My 'Memories Of Barack Obama's Breakfast' oil painting, which made the...

"Close to Siena station there is a very modern bridge over the road. For a few minutes, in the morning, if one looks at the protective netting against the light, one sees that the sun adorns it with a geometric charm in the shape of little stars. Those stars are very similar to Romanesque, Gothic and Late Gothic decorations. On that bridge there is already the phantasmal projection of an art work. This gift of God that is light strikes an anonymous industrial product. Precisely at this time of paroxistic bombardment with images those stars are a very great clue...

Yale University followed through on its warning Tuesday and banned a student's "abortion art" project from the opening of a campus exhibit after she continued to deny that she fabricated shocking stories of multiple inseminations and self-induced miscarriages. Senior Aliza Shvarts' controversial piece still could be included in the student show, which runs through May 1, Yale officials indicated. "Her exhibit is not on display, but it's unresolved as to whether it will be," said Yale spokesman Tom Conroy, suggesting discussions were in progress between the university and Shvarts. Shvarts kept mum through the weekend and early this week despite...

Harvard looks to Yale as arts model A team of Harvard officials looked to Yale as a model for the arts in a visit to campus on Monday. Several members of the Harvard Task Force on the Arts, including students and faculty, traveled to New Haven to examine up-close Yale’s way of organizing and supporting the arts on campus. Task Force members, who toured Yale facilities and met with graduate and professional school deans Monday, said the visit highlighted the differences between the arts at the two universities, particularly in how they are financed and divided between undergraduate and graduate...

Yale Art Student Claims She Used Blood Samples, Video of Self-Induced Abortions for Senior Project Thursday, April 17, 2008 By Catherine Donaldson-Evans A Yale student who claims she artificially inseminated herself "as often as possible" and then took drugs to induce miscarriages for her senior art project says she will showcase the stomach-turning display next week — complete with her own blood samples and videos from the terminated possible pregnancies. The story of art major Aliza Shvarts' upcoming exhibit, which the Yale Daily News broke Thursday, has sparked widespread disgust and outrage. "It’s clearly depraved. I think the poor woman...

Beginning next Tuesday, Yale senior 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

Sometimes in the history of art everything seems to be happening everywhere, all at once. The 16th century was like that. It was a grand global burst of lights. The Ming dynasty in China; the Renaissance in Europe; Islamic empires in India, Iran and Turkey were all burning at high incandescence. Visitors traveled from one to another, buying, selling, making plans, taking notes, amazed. Then, as also happens, there were slowdowns; dimmings, even blackouts here and there. Such shifts in energy form the background to “Re-Orientations: Islamic Art and the West in the 18th and 19th Centuries,” a superb small...

Iran's Hidden Treasures Take a rare look at one of the most important and secret art collections in the world in Tehran. An incredible collection hidden away in the basement of the Tehran Museum of Contemporary Art. (video runs 2 1/2 mins)

ROME -- Italian police have recovered a rare statue of a Roman emperor who co-ruled alongside Marcus Aurelius and was known for his reluctance to sit for portraits. Police said Friday that the marble head of Lucius Verus was the most spectacular find among more than a dozen looted ancient artifacts hidden in a boat garage near Rome. The bearded visage of Lucius Verus is believed to have been secretly unearthed at a site in the Naples area and was probably destined for the international market, said Capt. Massimo Rossi of a special police unit that hunts down archaeological thieves....

After nearly seven years on the Strip, the Guggenheim Hermitage Museum in the Venetian will close its doors May 11. Guggenheim officials made the announcement Wednesday and said the museum will continue to partner with the Venetian on “a number of projects,” but wouldn’t elaborate. The museum will offer free admission beginning Friday until it closes in May. With the closure — and Steve Wynn’s dismantling of his own fine arts gallery — the only remaining Strip art gallery is at the Bellagio, where the effort to bring fine art to the Las Vegas masses began in 1998. The Guggenheim...

Brian Dettmer carves into books revealing the artwork inside, creating complex layered three-dimensional sculptures.

See the amazing picture by an autistic artist who drew London from memory after a single helicopter trip  This picture depicting the London skyline in fine detail was drawn after just one flight over the city and purely from memory.  Stephen Wiltshire, who was diagnosed with autism at the age of three, memorised the appearance and position of hundreds of London's buildings in exact scale during a helicopter ride along the Thames.  Over the next five days, the 33-year-old drew the seven-square mile panorama, including landmarks such as the Swiss Re tower, and Canary Wharf, on a 13ft curving canvas....

VIENNA, March 26, 2008 (LifeSiteNews.com) - The Dommuseum in Vienna, the art gallery attached to the historic Catholic cathedral of St. Stephen, is running an exhibition of works by a self-avowed Marxist atheist, titled "Religion, Flesh and Power", that includes depictions of explicit homosexual sex acts in "religious" themed art. Prominent among the works is a rendition of the Last Supper with Christ and His Apostles depicted as homosexuals engaged in an orgy. Another work depicts Christ on the cross without a face but with uncovered genitals. The Last Supper rendition is displayed in a prominent place near the entrance...

D.C. Fire Hazmat Teams responded to an apparent suicide in the District after fire officials said the man may have killed himself using cyanide. Police got a call around 4:30 p.m. on Monday for an unconscious male at a house in the 4300 block of 36th Street. Two officers responded and found a man laying next to a small vile of cyanide. Immediately, fire officials said police left the home and called in the hazmat crew, which is standard procedure. -snip-

...Sure enough, that's what Body Worlds is all about. The cadavers, (relatively) whole or in parts, are fascinating, sometimes beautiful and inspiring, and remarkably low in ick factor. They could be plastic or ceramic; when you see them, you have to keep reminding yourself that they're dead people, and then you get to pat yourself on the back for how well you're taking this. A practically skinless man is leaping over a hurdle, though given the lack of clearance, he is perpetually headed toward really hurting his private parts. His aerodynamically sliced brain, however, seems like overkill. There's no apparent...

I remember years ago reading about the strange goings on behind the building and the subsequent images/artwork inside the Denver Airport. I found this on you tube, a very good presentation on the subject. Denver Airport

After Heath Maddox's father died unexpectedly in 2006, Maddox was clearing out his dad's belongings when he found a surprise: a U.S. military-issued .45-caliber handgun wrapped in a towel and tucked into a kitchen drawer. Maddox vaguely recalled a story about his grandfather owning the gun, but he wasn't sure why, or how, it turned up in his father's kitchen. Yet on a recent Friday evening, two years after the discovery, Maddox stood inside artist John Ricker's San Francisco studio, ready to smash the gun flat with a sledgehammer.

Older than the pyramids, buried for centuries – found by an Orkney plumber Tristan Stewart-Robertson A RARE piece of Neolithic art has been discovered on a beach in Orkney. The 6,000-year-old relic, thought to be a fragment from a larger piece, was left exposed by storms which swept across the country last week. Local plumber David Barnes, who found the stone on the beach in Sandwick Bay, South Ronaldsay, said circular markings had shown up in the late-afternoon winter sun, drawing his attention to the piece. Archeologists last night heralded the discovery as a "once-in- 50-years event". But they warned...

Imagine 99 identical Barbie dolls in green Army fatigues and boots arrayed in parade rank before a crimson backdrop. It's an image of militaristic, monolithic power that pretty much sums up artist Mina Cheon's decidedly dim view of totalitarian rule. But in 99 Miss Kims (2005), on view at C. Grimaldis Gallery in the exhibit Mina Cheon: Addressing Dolls, Cheon marshals nearly 100 smaller-than-life doll figures as surrogates for the tense, larger-than-life human drama unfolding on the Korean peninsula. The piece is a not-so-veiled reference to the ideological and cultural regimentation imposed by North Korea's leader, Kim Jong Il, and...

DALLAS — Artwork depicting the Virgin Mary as a stripper stirred trouble while on display at a small Catholic university before the piece was apparently stolen. The print was part of an exhibit last month at the University of Dallas that featured the work of students at Murray State University in Kentucky. Joanna Gianulis, a senior art major at Murray State, said she was trying to raise questions about perceptions of saints and sinners and didn't intend to be sacrilegious. "How do we know that an exotic dancer is sinful?" she said. "What if she has the best intentions and...