Link: It’s Nice That

I came across the mini-spectacularity of Ben Wilson’s jewell-like paintings on chewing gum mere days ago, though I’m a little slow on the uptake (he’s been doing them for nine years).

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Slinkachu recently created Worst Wurst for his ongoing series of miniature street art installations at The Little People Project

Laughing Squid:

The 1949 salesman’s catalog from the National Candy Wholesalers Association is full of great images and slogans for making confectionery sales

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Slinkachu:

First up is  The Big City, a show opening in Ludwigsburg, Germany on 23rd October at Kunstverein Ludwigsburg. The solo show, my first in Germany, will feature a combination of past work and installations as well as some new work shot on the streets of Berlin, Stuttgart and Ludwigsburg.

wooster collective

The Evolution of Video Game Controllers by Pop Chart Lab, featuring “119 species and 11 genera over seven decades of gaming”.

The AIGA worked to ensure that professional designers should be compensated fairly for their work long before technology allowed for easy, free publication of writing and photography

Pop Chart Lab has created The Titanic Taxonomy of Wrestler Names, celebrating the noms de guerre of 382 professional wrestlers.

Laughing Squid:

Andrew Barr of Canada’s newspaper National Post collaborated with illustrator Mike Faille to tally up the carnage from antagonist Jason Voorhees in the Friday the 13th slasher film polylogy which began in the 1980s.

Laughing Squid:

Dangerous Minds recently did a nice image gallery of selected bubblegum trading cards of the 1960s and ’70

David Young V is on a mission. Shuttling between two studio spaces in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco— frequently in the dead of night—he engages in the business of recovering fragments from a future world. To hear him speak about the tomorrow he foresees; a world of zealots, martyrs, psychotic orphans and armed bike couriers, one is reminded of Mad-Max… if it had more military training and dabbled in cryptography and linguistics.

Applying old master techniques, (Witz) achieves impressively convincing trompe l’oeil illusions of light, shadow and depth in his finely rendered portraits, landscapes and still lifes. The artist recently added digital media tools to his process (having previously used traditional projection methods). Combining old master techniques and digital technology, he photographs his subjects, composes in photoshop, prints an a-chromatic underpainting on canvas then glazes and scumbles over this foundation using traditional representational painting…

Link: Mosh pit paintings by Dan Witz – Boing Boing

There’s always conformity in art—fashions come in and out—but such obsessive devotion to a previous generation’s ideals and ideas is very wrong. It suggests these artists are too much in thrall to their elders, excessively satisfied with an insider’s game of art, not really making their own work. That they are becoming a Lost Generation.

Link: Jerry Saltz on Why the Work of Today’s Well-Educated Artists Lacks Content — New York Magazine

Link: Very bad late ’90s hip-hop cover art – Boing Boing

Link: Bad Art of The Rapture

From war, art. This is the basic premise of The Graffiti of War , a project from two combat veterans that features the unconventional military art that soldiers, seamen, marines, and airmen (and women) create during deployments. From tanks spray painted with “I love u baby” to memorials for the dead to enemy jets covered in graffiti, every art work tells a story. It’s the alternative, unauthorized history of war from those who fought it.

Link: The Graffiti of War – Boing Boing

Here we’re introduced to the artist ZEROSIX, whose imagery is characterized by quirky and deadpan quotation, in both image and text. Who, by the judgement of his colleagues, is truly badass.

Link: Soldier-Taggers: Afghanistan as Fight Club — BagNews