Help

Brain Pickings takes 200+ hours a month to curate and edit. If you find any joy and value in it, we would really appreciate a modest donation.

Subscribe

  • Subscribe by RSS feed
  • Subscribe by email

Connect

  • Follow on Twitter
  • Stumble It
  • Add to del.icio.us
  • Become a Fan
  • TwitterCounter for @brainpicker
ted.com
Posts Tagged ‘art’

01

Sep

2010

The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game

Conceptual horizons, or why the time to judge a book by its cover may have just arrived.

In the 1920’s, a collective of Surrealists invented exquisite corpse, a game-like collaborative creation process wherein each contributor tacks on to a composition either by following a strict rule or by being only shown what the last person has contributed. Now, Brooklyn-based designers Julia Rothman, Jenny Volvovski and Matt Lamothe have replicated the exquisite corpse idea in a brilliant collaborative illustration project that enlisted 100 of today’s most talented artist and designers to co-create a book by building on each other’s work. Today, the project comes to life as The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — an absolutely remarkable tome nearly two years in the making.

Here’s how it works: Each artist contributed one page to the book. The first five were given a few starter words to inspire their drawing, then each of the following artists only saw the page that immediately preceded theirs and used images to build on the story. Besides this conceptual continuity, a more visual one — a horizontal line that starts on the left side of the page and ends on the right — drew the images together. Artsts were free to interpret the line ever which way they liked, which most did with incredible ingenuity.

The project is an instant piece of creative culture history, from the illustrated introduction by McSweeney’s Dave Eggers of 826 Valencia and Where The Wild Things Are fame, to the meticulous making of its cover, to the all-star roster of contributing artists. (Including many we’ve raved about previously — Lisa Congdon, Luke Ramsey, Meg Hunt and many, many more.)

Sample some of the goodness, then do yourself a favor and grab a copy of The Exquisite Book: 100 Artists Play a Collaborative Game — we haven’t been this excited about an extracurricular art book since Pixar’s The Ancient Book of Sex & Science.

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.

20

Aug

2010

CoolClimate: Addressing Climate Change Through Art

From polar bears to pop art, or how canvases connect disconnects.

Today, thanks to prolific media coverage and the work of hundreds of dedicated nonprofits, most rational people are fully aware of the severity with which climate change threatens humanity and the planet. There is, however, often a disconnect between that rational awareness and our emotional engagement with the issue. This disconnect is precisely what the 2010 CoolClimate Art Contest aims to address through the power of art.

The international competition calls for artists to create iconic images that challenge how we relate to global warming, spanning the entire spectrum of climate change hotpoints — from clean energy to air pollution to honeybee extinction.

Plastic Iceberg Year 3010

Artist: M. L. Dauray

Man Vs. Bees: or Bees as the Canary in the Coal Mine

Artist: Jeff Faerber

Climate Is Changing

Artist: h4nd

From an abstract representation of how global warming impacts a swimming polar bear in oil on canvas to a pop-artish reflection on environmental deterioration, the submissions so far encompass nearly every art genre and medium.

Subconscious

Artist: Pansa Sunavee

Poison Harms All Sea Creatures

Artist: bymarty

Global Warming

Artist: lyndaelyzoo

The competition is judged by an eclectic yet uniformly impressive jury featuring acclaimed comedian-turned-environmental-activist Chevy Chase, Philippe Cousteau, son of legendary marine explorer and activist Jacques Cousteau, and museum world heavy-hitter David Ross.

Step

Artist: PansaSunavee

Submission is open through September 6, so get in on the (climate) action or rally your artist friends to. Meanwhile, browse entries from the U.S. and elsewhere around the world.

via ChangeObserver

We’ve got a weekly newsletter and people say it’s cool. It comes out on Sundays, offers the week’s articles, and features five more tasty bites of web-wide interestingness. Here’s an example. Like? Sign up.