By and large political street art, or street art with a message, is crap. The very best players create beautiful propaganda, while most of the others are cheap-shot artists, whiney ideologues or humorless vandals who produce works completely devoid of subtlety or introspection. Banksy, whose work “Stop and Search” is pictured above, works at a level so far above the others there’s really no comparison.
Category: Art
Beauties and Beasts
From an upcoming show by Nicoletta Ceccoli at Roq La Rue Gallery.
Skull
by Chip 7
Visual feast
Illustrator Mário Fonseca starts with a photograph, then builds up an illustration layer by layer, starting with traditional art tools, then moving to the computer. The results are extrodinary compositions of line and color, techno-realistic versions of Mike Giant’s illustrated women. See the extended for another example of Mário’s work.
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Pretty empty
If I remember the story correctly from high school history class, the Spartans punished their wrongdoers twice: once for doing something wrong, and once for getting caught. Last week French street artist Zevs was arrested for pouring paint on a Chanel logo he had just slapped up outside a Giorgio Armani store in Hong Kong. A friend videotaped the mischief. He was arrested immediately thereafter and pled guilty to one count of criminal damage. If there’s any justice in this world, he will be punished thrice: once for his criminal act, once for getting caught, and once for wasting everyone’s time with art that is, at best, pretty nonsense, as in the painting above, and at worst is repetitive, boring, and with only the slightest hint at meaning — bad graffiti carried out by a malicious, OCD-suffering retard all juiced-up after reading though his stack of Adbusters.
Big Head
by Bob Dob.
Green-eyed Susan
In his paintings, Swiss artist Oliver Zappelli mixes religious mysticism with monsters, hypersaturated colors with hyperexplicit sexual imagery. “Love in the flowers” (shown above) is more whimsical than explicit, more nature than Nativity, and much the better for it.
Unexpecting
by Ana Bagayan.
Untooned roundup
Art has been about re-mixes for centuries. The retelling of famous stories, painting, and repainting what is essentially the same bouquet of flowers or bountiful still life of food, the same battles, over and over. Another trick is to take an icon from one context and put it into another. Paint a sculpture, sculpt a painting, create an opera from a talk show.
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Celestial Tree
By Robert Venosa.