If your home needs more atmosphere, try a music-making cloud. The Making Weather is a floating audiovisual, interactive sculpture disguised as a cumulus cloud. It lights up in time with the music, and floats one to two inches above its magnetic base. Making Weather was created by Richard Clarkson.
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Photographer Carl Warner uses food to create incredible landscape pictures which he calls 'foodscapes.' His designs cover cities, landscapes, and seascapes.
All the food used by the artist is in its raw form and is passed on to food banks or homeless shelters once production is completed.
His artwork has been featured in several TV ads and promotional campaigns.
Produced by Claudia Romeo
17-year-old makeup artist James Charles just joined the ranks of Pink, Sofia Vergara, and Katy Perry.
In an Instagram post October 11, Perry announced that Charles will be the first male CoverGirl.
Charles, who has nearly 515,000 Instagram followers, will appear in campaigns for CoverGirl’s newest mascara, "So Lashy."
Check out a few of his looks below.
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Eight people walking with lattes in hand; an intersection full of people carrying balloons; eight people yawning at once. These scenes lie somewhere between fantasy and reality, says photographer Peter Funch.
Funch’s best-known work, "Babel Tales," combines multiple photos from locations in Manhattan to create uncanny coincidences.
"Humans most often can only experience time in a linear manner," Funch said in a 2013 interview. "Breaking away from a linear perspective of time does not make an image 'untrue.’"
Funch has experimented with temporal perspective in other series, taking simultaneous pictures of an event from multiple perspectives and recreating postcards in modern photos. He shared a selection from "Babel Tales" below.
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Artist Bobby Neel Adams became famous for his clever photos of aging. His latest series focuses on death.
"In a strange way I think that it is a natural progression of my world view and my place in it," Adams writes in an email.
The new series, called "Memento Mori," shows road kill and other dead bugs, plants, and animals in haunting arrangements. One image features a pig head floating underwater with flowers in its mouth. Another is a dead quail surrounded by petals.
The series is showing through October 30 at Smack Mellon gallery in Brooklyn. Adams shared a selection of the images below.
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This interactive sculpture is called a Rize Spinning Ferrofluid display and is made using rocket fuel.
A magnet creates a field and the nanoparticles in the fuel stick together, making formations spin and morph.
The artwork can be bought now on Kickstarter for about £80.
Produced by Leon Siciliano
Photographer Bobby Neel Adams always thought he looked like his mother from nose down and his father from nose up.
He explored this question — the ways people look like their parents — in a photo series called "Family Tree." Starting more than two decades ago, he used analog photography techniques, lining up two portraits torn down the middle and attaching them with rubber cement.
"This composite photograph could be viewed as an eerie life-map: in fact, the montage of two different family members is sometimes mistaken for a montage of the same person at different stages of life," Adams wrote about the series.
After seeing a few works by Adams in a new book, "Photoviz," we collected images from two of his series: "AgeMaps" and "Memento Mori," which is being shown in Brooklyn through October 30. Below are some images from "Family Tree."
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These drawings have been animated by a "morphing" program which gives the illusion they are moving. They are part of a series of animated paintings called "Illusions" by artists James R. Eads and Chris McDaniel.
Eads does the original drawings on a digital tablet, McDaniel then uses the software to create the illusion of movement.
Produced by Claudia Romeo
The INSIDER Summary:
• Celebrities like Amar'e Stoudemire, Seth McFarlane, and Kylie Jenner collect Jojo Anavim's artwork.
• Anavim gets his business mainly through word-of-mouth.
• His style is Andy Warhol for the Snapchat generation.
Jojo Anavim was making art for a living, but not the kind of art he wanted to make.
As a commercial artist, he created huge billboards and advertisements for companies like Sephora and W Hotels.
On the side, he started making some of his own work, as a creative outlet for his own ideas. He never planned to make it into a business. His artwork was just for himself. He liked making collages, inspired by Andy Warhol's work that he first saw as a child.
"One of the things that's just seared in my memory from such a young age was the Coca-Cola billboard in Times Square," Anavim told INSIDER. "I remember just vividly staring at this billboard thinking 'this is the coolest thing I've ever seen.'"
He had his big break when the New York Knicks basketball player Amar'e Stoudemire saw his work online. Stoudemire invited Anavim to his home, and the two quickly became friends.
The basketball player became an early collector of Anavim's work. At a barbecue at Stoudemire's townhouse, Anavim met an "esteemed" art collector, who Anavim declined to name because the collector prefers to remain private. The collector eventually commissioned four original paintings from Anavim after seeing his work.
"It was that evening where I kind of go back, refocus, and say okay, maybe this is where I should be focusing my energy," Anavim said.
When Stoudemire comissioned his first painting from Anavim, he told him that he embraced his Jewish roots and wanted a painting of Moses. It wasn't like anything he'd done before, but Anavim wanted to push his boundaries, so he accepted the offer. He made a mixed-media portrait of the biblical figure, using pieces of a 1948 copy of the New York Times that proclaimed the independence of the State of Israel.
"He almost didn't say anything," Anavim said. "I wasn't sure if he loved it or hated it." Two weeks later, Stoudemire was featured in a Vanity Fair article about his art collection. The story mentioned that he was collecting works by Jean-Michel Basquiat, Roy Lichtenstein, and other modern pop artists. In the article, Stoudemire said his favorite painting was Anavim's Moses portrait.
Stoudemire has made similar comments to other journalists. "We're a very spiritual family, so when they see Moses with the tablet, they're mindful of putting God first,"he told Esquire.
"That really struck a chord with me. You work hard not for the money, you work hard to create opportunities," Anavim said. "I put in the hours, I worked hard, and the opportunity presented itself."
Anavim was inspired to make art early. When he was a teenager, he got a Mac with Photoshop preloaded on it, and used the program to make art. He also enrolled in a cartooning class taught by Al Baruch, a legendary Disney animator who worked on classics like "Peter Pan" and "Lady and the Tramp" and created characters like Captain Hook and Mighty Mouse. He's 88 now and semi-retired, but teaches classes in Florida and still makes art, now focuses on the Holocaust era.
Later on, Anavim discovered Warhol's work, Warhol's Coca-Cola art reminded him of the billboard he saw in Times Square at a young age. One idea he picked up from the artist is that he saw, at first, little distinction between commercial art and fine art. Anavim's own work is inspired heavily by Warhol and other pop artists, but are updated for a world where pop culture is inseparable from the internet-connected devices everyone has in their pockets.
"I will have a portrait of Marilyn Monroe on a painting," Anavim said. "But my own interpretation is that I'm speaking to a new generation. A portrait of Marilyn Monroe will have a Snapchat filter and an iPhone 6 around the border."
As his popularity grew, Anavim began fielding offers from art galleries. That's how the art world's business model normally works. An artist signs a contract with the biggest gallery you can find, and they exclusively display their work for a year or two. When someone wants to buy a work of art on display, the gallery takes somewhere between 50 and 70 percent of the cut.
So Jojo had to decide: should he take a steady gig with a gallery? Or figure out how to live as an artist another way.
In the end, Anavim developed his own business model. He makes pieces he likes, and people just buy them from him directly, usually finding his work based on word-of-mouth. It's worked for him well so far. His buyers include, in addition to Stoudemire, Seth McFarlane, Kylie Jenner, Sheldon Adelson, Russell Simmons, and Daymond John. He also recently curated the art for the condo Kendall and Kylie Jenner stayed in for New York's fashion week. He works out of a full-floor studio in Manhattan's Chelsea neighborhood with his two assistants.
"Historically, the narrative is this: An artist needs to be struggling for an extended period of time," Anavim said. "And then if he catches a lucky break, whether it be through a curator or through a gallery, they'll decide to give them a chance and put them through some sort of gallery."
"I'm not saying there's not good galleries out there that can bring your value up," Anavim said." But "if they decide to drop you, they just drop you and you're really left holding nothing."
You can look at a Pelle Cass photo for several moments before realizing it doesn’t make sense.
See if you can spot what's going on in this picture of people walking down the stairs:
Figured it out?
"Each person’s foot is hovering an inch or so above the next step," Cass says by email. "The odds that 19 strangers would be caught at the same crucial instant in the same instantaneous photograph just before landing on the next step must be astronomically small."
How does Cass do it? Calling himself a subversive trick photographer, the Boston artist takes hundreds of photos on a tripod in a single spot over about an hour. He then goes back to his studio and carefully selects content to include in a composite image.
"I don’t change a thing and I never move a figure or doctor a single Pixel,"he explains. "I simply decide what stays in and what’s left out."
Photos in "Selected People" can show a perfect spectrum of colors, a collection of people raising their arms, or simply an arrangement the artist finds striking.
"I never pass up the chance to make a joke, visual or otherwise," he adds.
Cass shared a set of photos from "Selected People," including a few never seen before. See if you can spot what’s wrong.
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Cutaway illustrations are an art form of their own. So much so, in fact, that there's now a coffee table book of them: "Look Inside" from publisher Gestalten.
The book includes a sports car "exploded" to show every part, and musculoskeletal diagrams of a baseball pitch — and they’re pretty cool to look at .
Keep reading to see some highlights.
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Facebook's Menlo Park, California campus is anything but ordinary.
From the nine-acre rooftop garden where employees sip free avocado berry smoothies to the vast, open-office floor plan designed by Frank Gehry, Facebook spares no expense at creating a special environment for its workers.
Part of that experience includes an impressive collection of art installations and paintings — some of which are created by Facebook employees themselves.
"I've always believed our offices should feel like a work in progress, just like our products and the community we're trying to build," CEO Mark Zuckerberg wrote on Facebook Monday. "When you step onto our campus, you should feel like you can shape the world around you."
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How much can you tell about a person by looking at their things?
Paula Zuccotti started investigating this question a few years ago by photographing everything people around the world touch in a day. The subjects took notes on everything they touched and then gathered the objects later.
"Many gadgets have been designed to help us figure out what we do in a day—calories consumed, steps taken, stress levels—but the answers are already in front of us," Zuccotti says in an email.
The project, "Everything We Touch," is featured in a book and will be the subject of a documentary. Zuccotti, a product designer and consultant, says focusing on the items people interact with provided some insights.
"People are unified much more by their interests than by geography or age," she says. "Someone’s photo from China can look more like someone from California than from another Chinese counterpart."
From an 8-year-old in Melbourne to a 72-year-old in Shanghai, here’s what people touch in a day.
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For $9.99 per month — less than one museum ticket — New York startup Electric Objects wants to beam art from galleries and museums into your living room.
The company announced its newest product, a 23-inch digital canvas called the EO2, on October 18. The device is designed to show static or animated artwork on a 1080p matte screen, which can be controlled from your smartphone or desktop. The screen, which is surrounded by an aluminum frame that's 21.75 inches tall by 12.9 inches wide, retails for $299.
The EO2 connects to your home Wi-Fi network, and comes with a connected app that lets owners choose which images to display. They can upload their own images, or browse an array of offerings and user-submitted art playlists on Electric Objects' platform. From there, they can freely switch between images as desired or put them in a slideshow rotation. Call it a Chromecast for art.
Electric Objects founder Jake Levine tells Business Insider that he hopes the device will make art more accessible to people who either don't go to museums or are sometimes unsatisfied with the experience. While there's value in seeing art in person, there's no comparable digital analogue.
"The connection between artist and viewer has escaped the art world for the last 10 years while every other industry has been transformed by the internet," he says. Electric Objects wants to erase that gap by forging a connection from creators to viewers on its platform.
"We have artists who live in Brooklyn and produce something, and within minutes it's up on the wall on someone's kitchen in London," Levine says.
Electric Objects' newest feature is an optional $9.99-a-month "art discovery service" called Art Club, which the company bills as a thoughtfully curated series that's updated every week. The subscription gives users access to work from museum collections — Electric Objects gives access to free pieces from five museums, including LACMA, the National Gallery of Art, and the Getty — and exclusive original artwork. The company has an ongoing program that commissions artists to create series of five or six works for the platform. In the future, Electric Objects also plans to provide access to live-streamed performance art shows or painting sessions.
This isn't far from Netflix's model — the company also offers subscribers access to a wide array of content for a monthly fee, and pays studios to make original creative works exclusively for the platform.
Levine says his customers have been pleased with how seamlessly the viewing experience translates from gallery to home. One customer told him that she and her husband and kids were taking turns displaying different artworks and reading about them.
"That should be a museum director's dream," Levine says, "to be able to take that experience and educational mission of the organization and take it into the daily lives of their members. And it's thrilling to see that happen."
As a display, the EO2's functionality isn't much different than, say, a large-scale digital picture frame that you can order on Amazon for a similar price. But the relative cheapness of the EO2 for its size beats out the competition. Meural and Blackdove offer similar digital canvases with their own artist networks, but theirs are bigger and pricier — 32 x 21 inches for $595 and 42.4 x 24.6 inches for $999 respectively.
But at $299, Electric Objects could be an easy, affordable way to put a rotating art gallery inside your home.
SEE ALSO: 7 science-backed reasons you should make art, even if you're bad at it
Join the conversation about this story »
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Sisyphus is a kinetic art coffee table that uses a marble that automatically rolls to draw intricate designs on a layer of sand. The artist behind this ingenious table is Bruce Shapiro and has raised over $1.7 million on Kickstarter for the tables.
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Geneva (AFP) - Swiss customs authorities have slapped a billionaire with a $4 million fine for failing to properly declare some 200 artworks imported into Switzerland, according to media reports confirmed by officials Sunday.
Financier Urs Schwarzenbach has for years been bringing precious artworks by the likes of Yves Klein and Giovanno Segantini into Switzerland without declaring them to customs officials, or reporting their worth at far below their actual value, several Swiss media outlets reported.
Suspecting the billionaire of importing artwork illegally, Swiss customs authorities opened an investigation in 2012.
The probe concluded earlier this month that he had effectively dodged duties worth 10 million Swiss francs ($10 million, 9.2 million euros), which he was ordered to repay, along with a four million franc fine, the NZZ am Sonntag, Sonntagszeitung and Le Matin Dimanche weeklies reported.
Swiss finance ministry spokesman Daniel Saameli confirmed the content of the reports to AFP.
According to the papers, Schwarzenbach has agreed to pay back the 10 million francs, but is contesting the fine.
The 68-year-old's lawyers in London told the papers he denied any intentional wrongdoing, and wanted to present his side of the story to the district court in Zurich to clear his name.
Schwarzenbach, who is based in Britain and is reportedly a good friend of Prince Charles, had brought at least 123 works of art into Switzerland without declaring them, with some ending up on the walls of his luxury Zurich Dolder Grand hotel, the papers said.
In one case detailed in Sunday's articles, he purchased a Giovanno Segantini painting, "Le due madri", for 1.4 million Swiss francs at a Christie's auction in Geneva in 2011, and quickly flew it to Britain, thus avoiding Swiss taxation.
But the painting reportedly reemerged in his luxurious Villa Meridiana in St. Moritz in the Swiss Alps, without him ever paying duties on it.
Other artworks reportedly brought in under the radar include a painting by Russian geometric abstract artist Kazimir Malevich, valued at 16 million francs, and Yves Klein's MG41 (L'age d'or), the papers said.
When he did declare artwork, Schwarzenbach, whose fortune was valued last year by Swiss financial magazine Bilanz at 1.25 billion Swiss francs, sometimes reportedly presented fake receipts for amounts far lower than what he had actually paid.
On June 16, 2012 he is alleged to have presented Gottardo Segantini's "Paysage alpin" to Swiss customs officials along with a receipt for just 10,000 francs. That is less than a tenth of the 105,000 euros he actually paid for the piece, the papers reported.
In all, the case concerns more than 200 works of art, with a combined value of at least 130 million francs, they said.
Paul Maria Schneggenburger has always been fascinated with sleep."It’s an unconscious state of mind where scientists still haven’t really figured out yet what’s going on," he says.
Early in his career, Schneggenburger would take pictures of sleeping people where ever he saw them: "On the park bench, trains, at the party."
In 2010, he had the idea to take six-hour exposures of sleepers: first himself and then couples, families, and anyone else he could convince to come into his Vienna studio. Shot on black sheets in a dimly lit room, the images are intimate and surreal.
"The Sleep of the Beloved" is an ongoing series. Schneggenburger invites anyone who is interested to contact him about recording their own sleep.
Check out a selection below.
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Over the weekend, the Association of Licensed Architects announced the winners of its prestigious design competition. A variety of buildings types — from homes to sportsplexes to museums — won gold and silver awards.
One such gold winner was Myefski Architects' design for a satellite Guggenheim Museum in Helsinki. Featuring a grassy rooftop that slopes to the sidewalk, the design would incorporate both the interior and waterfront exterior as part of the museum.
In 2015, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Foundation launched an international competition to design a new location in the Finnish capital, and over 1,700 architects anonymously submitted.
The Guggenheim selected six finalists — though Myefski Architects' design wasn't one of them— with the grand winner being the Paris-based architecture firm Moreau Kusunoki. Its dark timber-and-glass design distinguishes itself from the original, pristine white Guggenheim New York City, designed by famed architect Frank Lloyd Wright.
There are no concrete plans to build a Guggenheim in the Finnish capital.
In September, Finland's government vetoed funding for the museum, which was expected to cost $147 million. Guggenheim's proposal to build a museum in Helsinki had drawn controversy as well.
As Quartz notes, when Helsinki's city planners welcomed the Guggenheim museum, they were also hoping that Guggenheim's name would bring more tourist money to the capital. Exactly that happened when a Frank Gehry-designed Guggenheim came to Bilbao, Spain — the museum's unusual metal facade was credited for bringing more visitors to the Spanish city.
Opponents to the proposed museum in Helsinki have labeled it "ArtDonald's," saying the museum would prioritize western art over work from local artists, according to The Guardian.
The Guggenheim has three international locations, with another one set to open in Abu Dhabi in 2017. If the Finnish museum is ever built, it will undoubtedly draw many visitors, just like the other starchitect-designed Guggenheims.
SEE ALSO: The 36 most beautiful museums in the world
Join the conversation about this story »
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Fabian Oefner thought about becoming a car designer. But he decided he was better suited for art.
"I found out there are too many other things that I like better, so I chose a different path," Oefner said in an interview.
The Swiss artist is best known for his "Disintegrating" photos, which show super cars exploding into hundreds of parts.
He pulls off the illusion with a time-consuming process. He starts with a sketch. He works with model makers at Amalgam to create perfect scale models of the cars that include internal parts. He disassembles the model and photographs every piece at a precise angle. He combines all the shots together digitally.
"It’s a combination between love of cars and … the idea of stopping time," Oefner said.
Oefner says he selected standout cars from history to feature in the shots. As for why he chose older models: "The technology is more appealing to the human eye when you look at the older cars." Plus, he says, "it’s very difficult to get the models from newer cars."
"Disintegrating – Part II," a follow-up to a 2013 batch, is currently on display at M.A.D. Gallery spaces in Taipei and Geneva. See some highlights below.
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