Ben Davis on the fallout from his critical review of Devon Rodriguez's "Underground," and what it says about "parasocial aesthetics."

The world’s 1st museum for art born during Covid19 quarantine

All 2,242 illustrations from James Sowerby’s compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond, drawn 1802–1817 and arranged by color.

The act of writing has always been an art. Now, it can also be an act of music. Each letter you type corresponds to a specific musical note putting a new spin to your composition. Make music while you write.

I like this cute choose-your-own-adventure build-an-encouraging-frog website made with linked Tumblr posts.

JS Kid Pix / Kid Pix 1.0 was released in to the public domain and this is an HTML/JS reimplementation.

An article about art and power focused on a piece from the Mughal empire, with an intriguing layout that scrolls sentences by on the left while zooming in on different parts of the art on the right. Crosscurrents of religion and culture shaped this stunningly detailed portrait of the 17th-century Mughal emperor who built the Taj Mahal. --- Power, for the Mughals, also came from absorbing the cultural forms under their authority, then reconstituting them in their own image.

Historic Tale Construction Kit - Bayeux Two German students originally wrote the Historic Tale Construction Kit, with Flash. Sadly, their work isn't available anymore, only remembered. This new application is a tribute, but also an attempt to revive the old medieval meme, with code and availability that won't get lost.

FREE Vintage Illustrations for your creative projects! Heritage Library collects beautiful illustrations from the past which are 100% free to use. Get inspired by our free illustration bundles and create gorgeous packaging, postcards and more.

🌱 A small project by Ben Moren: gardening, but with emojis and less time 🌿

The Public Art Program promotes transit use and community pride by integrating permanent and temporary art works into the public transit system — celebrating the contributions of public transportation and recognizing the cultural richness in our region.

Today, you are an Astronaut. You are floating in inner space 100 miles above the surface of Earth. You peer through your window and this is what you see. You are people watching. These are fleeting moments. These videos come from YouTube. They were uploaded in the last week and have titles like DSC 1234 and IMG 4321. They have almost zero previous views. They are unnamed, unedited, and unseen (by anyone but you). Astronaut starts when you press GO. The video switches periodically. Click the button below the video to prevent the video from switching.

In the artwork Pareidolia* facial detection is applied to grains of sand. A fully automated robot search engine examines the grains of sand in situ. When the machine finds a face in one of the grains, the portrait is photographed and displayed on a large screen. Pareidolia was developed for Sea Art on the isle of Texel, commissioned by SEA - Science Encounters Art. The production was supported by the Creative Industries Fund NL. Photo Heleen Vink, SEA Art, church De Burght, Den Burg, Texel, 2019

Rotoscoped animations of walk cycles from video games. i love the way they move through space

When you can’t experience the forest in person, try connecting with Hawai‘i’s native species by bringing them into your digital lifestyle. With downloadable backgrounds, you can decorate your smartphone or your computer desktop. With our virtual meeting backgrounds you can invite a pueo or a hapu‘u fern to join you on your next video conference call.

All 2,242 of James Sowerby’s illustrations from his compendium of knowledge about mineralogy in Great Britain and beyond published between 1802 and 1817 and arranged by color.

This series is dedicated to the many black people that were robbed of their lives at the hands of the police. In addition to using markers and pencil, I use time as a medium to define how long each portrait is colored in. 1 year of life = 1 minute of color. Tamir Rice was 12 when he was murdered, so I colored his portrait for 12 minutes. As a person of color, I know that my future can be stolen from me if I’m driving with a broken taillight, or playing my music too loud, or reaching for my phone at the wrong time. So for each of these portraits I played with the harsh relationship between time and death. I want the viewer to see how much empty space is left in these lives, stories that will never be told, space that can never be filled. This emptiness represents holes in their families and our community, who will be forever stuck with the question, “who were they becoming?” This series touches on grief and the unknown.

Some things that Milton Glaser said to my SVA class, which I still think are good. In no particular order: - It should be impossible to be in the arts and not be generous - One of art's highest functions is to prevent ppl from killing each other. - Fame & money are corrosive, and you need to recognize this early - Art is a survival mechanism - Make ppl feel like they have something in common; that they aren't alone - Every artist should view themselves as citizens, not illustrators, designers etc. - Drawing is one of the only times he sees things that are 'real' - It's one of the rare experiences that he creates for himself. "The noise disappears" - Drawing shows your brain - Drawing expressively and evocatively is harder than drawing realistically - Artists don't say "where do I begin?" They've already began. - Drawing is in the realm of the miraculous. It's a miraculous occurrence. - The most modest of subjects can come alive in a drawing - What is the distance between what you see, and what you draw? - ALL my work is personal work. The only boundary is how I determine how it's used. - You get nothing but problems when you do work that conflicts w your integrity. - In any design problem, your client has needs, your audience has needs, but you also have needs - You attract what you do - Everything is connected and has an effect on the world. - There is no such thing as coincidence - Whether you like it or not, your work is ABOUT social responsibility - Don't overprotect. Share your vision at all times

Open source, experimental, and tiny tools roundup --- This is a list of smaller tools that might be useful in building your game/website/interactive project. Although I’ve mostly also included ‘standards’, this list has a focus on artful tools & toys that are as fun to use as they are functional. The goal of this list is to enable making entirely outside of closed production ecosystems or walled software gardens.

A teapot or a watering can with the spout pointing at itself. A one-inch-long ruler. A door with three doorknobs. is a collection of deliberately inconvenient everyday objects by Athens-based architect Katerina Kamprani.

Background art for video conference calls on Zoom, Google Meet, etc. An ever growing collection of virtual backdrops for use in video call apps. Expressions of optimism and art by the world's best designers, illustrators, animators, photographers, filmmakers and artists.

Browse 676,693 works of art.

When The Met was founded in 1870, it owned not a single work of art. Through the combined efforts of generations of curators, researchers, and collectors, our collection has grown to represent more than 5,000 years of art from across the globe—from the first cities of the ancient world to the works of our time.

Welcome to Smithsonian Open Access, where you can download, share, and reuse millions of the Smithsonian’s images—right now, without asking. With new platforms and tools, you have easier access to nearly 3 million 2D and 3D digital items from our collections—with many more to come. This includes images and data from across the Smithsonian’s 19 museums, nine research centers, libraries, archives, and the National Zoo.

Paris Musées is a public entity that oversees the 14 municipal museums of Paris, including the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris, Petit Palais, and the Catacombs. Users can download a file that contains a high definition (300 DPI) image, a document with details about the selected work, and a guide of best practices for using and citing the sources of the image. “Making this data available guarantees that our digital files can be freely accessed and reused by anyone or everyone, without any technical, legal or financial restraints, whether for commercial use or not,” reads a press release shared by Paris Musées.

With her first album in eight years, Fetch the Bolt Cutters, singer-songwriter Fiona Apple reached into the past to confront her rapist, middle-school bullies, and herself.

A Tumblr full of screenshots from classic adventure video games.

Xavi Bou focuses on birds, his great passion, in order to capture in a single time frame, the shapes they generate when flying, making visible the invisible. […] Technology, science and creativity combine to create evocative images which show the sensuality and beauty of the bird’s movements and which are, at the same time, clues for those wishing to identify or recognize them.

Art, commerce, and the battle for the soul of My Little Pony. --- Branded toys routinely make more money than the films and cartoons on which they are based—sometimes a lot more—so it’s logical in a way that yes, children’s television shows and movies are basically long, elaborate toy commercials. If they are to provide something, anything, more interesting or positive for children than a siren call to the toy store, any other potential motives—humor, pleasure, an observation on human nature or a philosophical or moral lesson—are incidental to the prime directive of selling toys, lunchboxes, T-shirts, and all the other branded merchandise known in the trade as “CP,” or consumer products. […] In effect, it’s no longer possible to produce mass-market children’s entertainment outside the parameters of “selling out.” […] All the bronies I have met share this effortless camaraderie; some are shyer than others, but basically they are twenty-somethings with the simple, unaffected friendliness of 5-year-olds. […] There’s a temptation to reckon the attempts of artists like Lauren Faust to create entertaining and meaningful shows within the straitjacket of corporate commerce as entirely futile, hopeless. A mug’s game. But then I remember the Grand Galloping Gala in full swing. In time the techno music was blasting and a throng of kids massed together in the center of the dancefloor, dressed in cosplay pony ears and swishing tails and all sorts of homemade cartoon finery, pogoing, and suddenly it became clear that they were all chanting together. Evan, I said. Are you hearing what they’re chanting. He’s all, What is it? It was this: “Friendship! Friendship! Friendship!”

For years, the elusive singer-songwriter has been working, at home, on an album with a strikingly raw and percussive sound. But is she prepared to release it into the world? --- When you tell people that you are planning to meet with Fiona Apple, they almost inevitably ask if she’s O.K. What “O.K.” means isn’t necessarily obvious, however. Maybe it means healthy, or happy. Maybe it means creating the volcanic and tender songs that she’s been writing since she was a child—or maybe it doesn’t, if making music isn’t what makes her happy. Maybe it means being _un_happy, but in a way that is still fulfilling, still meaningful. That’s the conundrum when someone’s artistry is tied so fully to her vulnerability, and to the act of dwelling in and stirring up her most painful emotions, as a sort of destabilizing muse.