A Portrait of the Artest as a Young Man

A small art gallery in Toronto recently devoted a night to Ron Artest. The results were fantastic. Here's a slideshow of the works on display.

The Basketball Jones, an NBA podcast and blog, sent an intrepid reporter to check out the scene. Stick around for the end: Artest shows up.


TBJ: Ron Artest crashes Ron Artest exhibit from The Basketball Jones on Vimeo.

There is No Away

I stumbled across an interesting public art project, located just down the block from my apartment. It's called The Landscape of No Away: A Community Eco-Art Project, with the subtitle "You cannot throw anything away. There is no away," created by Keesje Fischer and Patricia Eakins. The arresting display consists of fake plastic flowers hanging on a fence near the 190th Street A Train station, fake plastic flowers constructed from recycled beverage bottles and other such plastics which, as the artists state, are the least biodegradable materials. Take a look:

I especially like this part of the artists' statement, even if it uses too many dashes:

When a flower, a leaf, or a vine, has been created from objects ordinarily thrown in the trash--a plastic juice or soda bottle, a grocery bag, the plastic shells that encase many objects we buy in a store--the mystery of transformation that is central to art is glossed with playful irony--trash that mimics nature--yet it contains within it the seeds of hope: the least biodegradable materials, like plastic bottles, that persist in the eco-system and smother it, have the potential for change into art that honors the natural world.

Judging Books By Their Covers

After determining through trial and error that seemingly every movie even remotely worth seeing in NYC was sold out, I stopped by a local neighborhood Barnes & Noble retail store. I collected about half a dozen books to purchase, carried them all over the shop, and settled on three that I would take home. (I sometimes feel bad buying new books because I usually have a healthy stack of books that I have not yet read. Including last night's troika, I now count ten: six novels, two memoirs, one short story collection, and one anthology. I justified the new three by their official B&N Bargain Priced stickers.)

In between the collection of six books and the selection of three, a small end-of-aisle section caught my eye. These books all belonged to a series called Penguin Classic Deluxe Editions, and deluxe they are. In addition to the jagged page construction, these books also include French flaps. But by far the coolest thing about these titles is the cover illustration.

Here's one as an example, drawn by Ruben Toledo, an artist who works most regularly in fashion.


I love the extension of the scarlet theme to the Prynnes' hair color.

It's not quite my favorite book cover ever, but this--and two others that Toledo designed, in addition to the other titles of the series--do a great job at making a classic more accessible. Toledo, in fact, identifies this as the goal of his project:

My only command from Penguin was to make art that would make youngsters want to read — to introduce these stories to a new public no matter what age. That’s why I think the fact that I had never read them was an asset, [combined with] the fact that they are all period stories, clearly set in another time and ruled by the mode of their time in history, yet are totally relevant to this Twitter world we live in.

I like how Twitter now defines our era. But besides for that, I'd say that Toledo succeeds.

iPhone Art

This week's The New Yorker features a really cool cover titled "Finger Painting," made by an artist on his iPhone. The best part: the video, showing how this thing was done, conveniently embedded right here:

Art Controls Your Brain

Oscar Wilde's wonderful essay "The Decay of Lying" takes a really interesting look at the importance and functions of art. It's a short piece, and certainly well worth reading. Wilde understands that art, in its truest sense, occurs in the theater of the mind. My favorite line, oft-selected as my google-message for the world to see, goes a little something like this:

Things are because we see them, and what we see, and how we see it, depends on the Arts that have influenced us.

There are a bunch of different ways to think about this sentence but probably my favorite is the direction Wilde takes later in the essay, as he explains that, sure, the clouds over the Thames in London existed well before the painters started depicting this cloud/river scheme. But this landscape was perceived by people (and remember, Things are because we see them) in a very different way after it was painted. The scene itself had maybe little to do with the paintings, but what people thought about after seeing the paintings was changed possibly forever.

I don't think this is an isolated example. Just today for instance, I was cruising around town with a few Publishing School classmates and someone mentioned that the song playing on the radio (which I can't for the life of me remember what it was) always reminded her of Animal House. Perhaps even more poignantly, a few minutes later some song called Windy started playing. I had never heard this song before but I immediately recognized it as the basis for Schlock Rock's Rashi song. Schlock Rock's version of the song is so ingrained in my brain that I am unable to hear any other rendition without thinking of Rashi.

There are tons more instances I can think of: I never liked sweet potatoes until I read The Power of One, in which the main character goes into these like long discourses about the delicious steam of a hot sweet potato rising off the plate on a cold day. Infinite Jest is set in this tripartite schematic, one portion of which occurs in junior tennis academy. I'm awful at tennis, but that doesn't keep me from desperately wanting to play every time I walk by the tennis courts on the way to publishing class. There's this car-stereo star near my house called Illusions. Every time I drive by that place I deepen my voice, say the name of the store and add a ", Michael. A trick is something a whore does for money."

These may seem like pretty insubstantial examples, but controlling what I think is pretty damn powerful.

What art has influenced the way you think? (The comments would be an excellent place for this discussion.)