It's pretty, but is it Art? | Kipling

And the first rude sketch that the world had seen was joy to his mighty heart, till the Devil whispered behind the leaves "It's pretty, but is it Art?"
The Conundrum of the Workshops Rudyard Kipling

Google image search results for landart when sorted by red orange yellow and green respectively

I love it when google improves its image search results, especially when my images float up to the top. (Sorting image search results according to their color is only available for google.com, the rest of the world is going to have to wait). vi.sualize.us is the site that helped my images climb in the google results. And vi.sulize.us is still the best place to go if you looking for landart images on the web.

I've linked the screenshots to their relevant search results, which will probable stay similar for a week or longer.

Karl Blossfeldt "Wundergarten der Nature"

Karl Blossfeldt is a hero of mine. He was a professor at the "Universität der Künst" here in Charlottenburg about a hundred years ago, and he didn't consider himself an artist or a photographer, but rather took photos of weeds he collected on the outskirts of Berlin to use as subject material in the University.

So he worked for decades teaching students how they could learn about architecture and art just by studying plants, and then Nierendorf, a gallerist from the opposite side of the Hardenbergstraße where he was teaching, went and organized an exhibition for Blossfeldt, who was already 61.

Two years later Blossfeldt's book 'Urformen der Kunst' was published, and he became famous overnight. His second book 'Wundergarten der Nature' was published in 1932, and he died on the ninth of December of the same year.

I admire how unassuming he was. He wasn't interested in becoming recognized for what he had done, he just wanted to take good pictures of plants.

Art that inspires me

Its the details that count. Durer knew it, Rembrant knew it, and so does Claire Scully, of thequietrevolution. Makes me want to draw again.

found through vi.sualize.us

"A first-rate soup is more creative than a second-rate painting. "
-Abraham Maslow

Cultural Confinement according to Robert Smithson

I never understood american landart. Smithson and the rest of them were too abstract for me, although I thought that maybe I could change my opinion if I could ever go and see what they had done onsite. But I recently stumbled accross an excellent article about the beginning of land art in america which quoted Smithson, and I was most impressed by what he had to say so I went looking for more and here's what I got;

"Cultural confinement takes place when a curator imposes his own limits on an art exhibition , rather than asking an artist to set his limits. Artists are expected to fit into fraudulent categories. Some artists imagine they've got a hold on this apparatus, which in fact has got a hold of them. As a result, they end up supporting a cultural prison that is out of their control. Artists themselves are not confined, but their output is. Museums, like asylums and jails, have wards and cells- in other words, neutral rooms called "galleries." A work of art when placed in a gallery loses its charge, and becomes a portable object or surface disengaged from the outside world. A vacant white room with lights is still a submission to the neutral. Works of art seen in such spaces seem to be going through a kind of esthetic convalescence. They are looked upon as so many inanimate invalids, waiting for critics to pronounce them curable or incurable. The function of the warden-curator is to separate art from the rest of society. Next comes integration. Once the work of art is totally neutralized, ineffective, abstracted, safe, and politically lobotomized it is ready to be consumed by society. All is reduced to visual fodder and transportable merchandise. Innovations are allowed only if they support this kind of confinement."

That is far and away the best critic of galleries I have ever come accross. It makes me want to read more.

STRANDBEESTEN_TRAILER from Alexander Schlichter on Vimeo.

i didn't understand kinectic sculpture until i saw one of george rickey's works in lehnin last summer, and i was checking out some of his works on youtube when i stumbled across the work of theo jansen. that is one crazy artist! very inspiring.