“Welcome to The Museum of Forgotten Art Supplies… where tools of the trade that have died or have just about died a slow slow death are cheerfully exhibited. Due to severe government budget cuts to the arts, our little museum’s acquisition funds are frankly, well, bupkus. So, we welcome Drawgerers to submit images of any artistic tools, machinery, gadgets, etc. that they feel have bitten the dust.” (Thanks Chris Glass!)

“An experiment to exploit the single frames that make up an animated film and explore the emotions of the creative process. Created with 987 Polaroids and no computer compositing. By Jordan C Greenhalgh.”

Hey! It’s back! September 28! Shaun Inman vs Kevin Cornell! Coudal’s Photoshop Tennis returns as Layer Tennis with Adobe as a sponsor — and I love that ad, btw. Wonder if they’ll repost the old archives someday (I was lucky enough to play in the 4th match of the original set of games back in 2001).

Starting in just two weeks we’ll be hosting a series of live design events on Friday afternoons called Layer Tennis. We originally called the game “Photoshop Tennis” but these days there are a ton more tools that can be used alone and in combination to create things and we wanted to open these games up to millions of new possibilities.

Hey L.A. — this event is just a few hours from now: Sunday, June 24 at 7pm at Machine Project, 1200 D North Alvarado, Los Angeles, Cal.: “It is hard to believe there is anything new to be discovered about perspective drawing. But in 2004 twin artists Trevor and Ryan Oakes made a startling discovery about how to render perspectival images on the inner surface on a sphere. Their discovery is all the more intriguing in the light of recent controversy surrounding David Hockney’s thesis about the use of spherical lenses in the making of perspective drawings in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.”

“Creative people want to express that creativity. Meanwhile, they need to make a living — possibly by finding an audience for some buyable form of that creativity. This is an old predicament, but the Internet enables new experiments in resolving it — like the Swap Meat, a project of a Web site called Coudal.com. Coudal Partners is a small firm based in Chicago that does branding and design work for clients and has also created products of its own. Coudal.com is certainly a promotional tool for the firm, but just as certainly a constantly updated trove of interesting links and cleverly entertaining goof-off projects. Which is more or less how the Swap Meat started.”

“In the thirteen years I’ve been on the web, twelve of which I’ve spent doing professional web site design, and the last two of which have sent me to hundreds of artists’ web sites, I’ve come to the inevitable conclusion that the thing artists want most when placing their art on the web is for it not to be seen.” (Thanks Coudal Partners!)

XPLANE alumnus Dan Zettwoch has a show up at the Art Annex Gallery of St. Louis Community College: “The show is called ‘Ruined Pants’ and is chock full of my homemade screenprints, everything from birth announcements to holiday cards to comic book covers to punk rock flyers I’ve made over the past few years.”

If you’re in St. Louis, Missouri, stop by Friday, June 8, between 6 and 8 p.m. for the opening reception and some excellent art.

“Whoever he is, Banksy revels in the incongruities of his persona. ‘The art world is the biggest joke going,’ he has said. ‘It’s a rest home for the overprivileged, the pretentious, and the weak.’ Although he once declared that ‘every other type of art compared to graffiti is a step down,’ in recent years he has produced his share of traditional works on canvas and on paper, suitable for hanging indoors, above a couch.”

“Microsoft Powerpoint transitions, running in sequence, switching from black to white by Daniel Eatock & Timothy Evans: After viewing Transition I remembered a quicktime I had seen on an avant-garde art website. The film was Rhythms 21 by Hans Richter from 1921. The similarities between the two films are quite exact at times, both feature wipes from white to black and black to white. It was quite interesting to me that there could be these parallels between works made 85 years apart.”

“An increasing number of artists are working with digital technologies and that’s posing some new and especially difficult preservation problems for museums. One difficulty is what to do when a work of art needs to keep a hard drive running, or maintain an Internet connection.”

“A little while ago, someone sent me an email and asked me whether I could tell him what made a photo great. I wrote back that I had been thinking about it (so far, so good) and that I was in the process of writing an entry about it (well…). In principle, it’s probably the easiest question to ask. We know a great photo when we see one. But then describing what it is that makes it great is an entirely different matter. And, of course, different people pick different photos. So I thought it would be quite silly if I wrote an entry about this all on my own and pretended I was some kind of authority. Instead, I emailed as many friends, fellow bloggers, and photographers as possible — looking through my ‘contacts’ — and asked them instead, the idea being that, in the end, it is probably the sum of what every single person has to say that will answer the question ‘What makes a photo great?’ — or maybe not (which would make it all the more interesting).”

“So why do artists look at pictures — especially non-abstract pictures — differently from non-artists? Vogt and Magnussen argue that it comes down to training: artists have learned to identify the real details of a picture, not just the ones that are immediately most salient to the perceptual system, which is naturally disposed to focusing on objects and faces.” (Thanks kottke.org!)

At MoMA: “This exhibition brings together thirteen contemporary artists whose works offer a rich account of the interplay between abstraction and comic models of representation.” (Thanks HOWBlog!)

“The goal of the Urban Curators project is to engage the public in the celebration of the decaying urban environment, recognizing its inherent aesthetic qualities as well as the important role that it plays within our cultural habitat. The project achieves its goal by elevating common, overlooked objects and spaces within the city of Providence, Rhode Island to the level of high art.”

“The instinct to create art is completely normal. From our time as little children, we seek to express ourselves. Whether that be by odd verbal utterances, or even a smile, or the drawing on the living room wall, we release our emotions that are bottled up inside and set them free. To claim to be a ‘professional artist’ … is something I find to be an oxymoron.”