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The Shroud of Turn has many devoted followers, pilgrims who flock to see what they believe is the bloodied face of a crucified Jesus Christ; yet, scientists have carbon-dated it to the Middle Ages, rendering the possibility of it actually being Jesus null and void.

Now an American artist is entering the debate.  Lillian Schwartz, a graphic consultant at the School of Visual Arts in New York, claims that the image is a self-portrait of Leonardo DaVinci, which was made using a crude photographic technique. Essentially he used a camera obscura to project his bust onto the shroud and using egg whites and gelatin painted his image.

Of course, Schwartz has nothing more than some giant coincidences; but it’s an interesting hypothesis based solely on the proportions of both DaVinci’s profile and the Turin’s face. Well, that and DaVinci was a genius artist.  He understood the technological advances needed to produce the Shroud and was in all likelihood a heretic willing to pull a fast one over on people.

Honestly, though, she doesn’t really have any evidence.  But I love the idea that the Shroud of Turn is nothing more than a giant practical joke by Leonardo DaVinci.

From Cool Hunting:

Artist Brian Dettmer dissects books to expose the beauty of their anatomy. Using an X-acto knife and tweezers, Dettmer pulls away carefully selected layers of books, revealing a complex view of their internal organization.

Sara Watson, a British art student, spent three weeks spray painting a Skoda Felicia she got from a junk yard to perfectly match the parking lot and front entrance to her studio.  It’s not quite something that Q would give to Bond, seeing as how it’s horribly visible from any other angle, but still.

“I was experimenting with the whole concept of illusion but needed something a bit more physical to make a real impact,” Watson told the Telegraph.  “People have been stopping in the street to look and coming up and almost bumping into it, so it’s had the desired effect.”

[via The Daily What]

Artist Brock Davis takes photographs and puts those googly eyes things on them giving birth to his “Born with Googly Eyes” series.  It’s equal parts hilarious and scary, much like the end of Who Framed Roger Rabbit? where Christopher Lloyd starts melting.  That’s what I think of every time I see on of these pieces.

Anyway, we’re pretty much in agreement with The Daily What, that this is one of the best things on the internet going.

Above: Collette

When cassette tapes break down, usually they get thrown in the trash (does anyone still use cassette tapes?  No, no one does).

Using discarded cassette tapes, Flikr artist Iri5 turns them into works of art in a series called, “Ghost in the Machine,” portraying various influential musicians such as Jimi Hendrix, Ian Brown, and Jim Morrison.

The one above is of Bob Dylan, obvs, that’’s part of a larger series of cassette tape paintings. You can buy a few of her pieces here and here.

I am an artist who specializes in using non traditional media… old books, cassettes, playing cards, magazines, credit cards… whatever I can find. It feels great to work with strange, older materials. Things that have a mind of their own. Most everything I use has been thrown away or donated at some point. Past its prime, like some of the finest things in the world.

50 Improv Everywhere agents take to the 23rd Street subway platform in Manhattan, where they proceed to admire the pipes, electrical boxes, trash cans, and other commuters as if they were works of art. Postmodern hilarity at its finest.

Said Stuart Semple: “I know at times like this it’s easy to make creativity a low priority, but I want to show on a very human level that an artistic idea might be able to do something important, even for a fleeting moment.”

The “happy clouds” were created using helium, soap and vegetable dye; they drifted over the Thames and the City of London after being released from the Tate Museum of Modern Art.  One was released every seven seconds from eight o’clock this morning, and the eco-friendly clouds lasted 30 minutes before dissolving in the air.

How long before someone photoshops this photo to make it look like the Stay Puff Marshmellow Man is attacking London?

This is some incredible artwork by Hilary Berseth, and a few thousand helpers.

Artists from Rodin to Warhol to Mark Kostabi have outsourced the construction of their work. Hilary Berseth goes them one better: He constructs basic frameworks of wire and wax, then lets teams of tiny yellow-and-black art fabricators finish the job. “I knew they were ordered and regimented,” the Pennsylvania artist says about his honeybees, which built the three otherworldly sculptures on view at Eleven Rivington. “I had an intuition that I’d be able to organize that, architecturally.”

[via notcot]

[via Clusterflock]

“The Pedestrian Project” by Yvette Helin.

About:

The Pedestrian Project consists of several performers wearing entirely black custom-made costumes modeled after the generic images of men, women, and children seen on public signs. Mimicking the lives of everyday people, the roaming sculptural forms inspire the imaginations of onlookers, who often find themselves mesmerized as these familiar icons assume busy lives of their own.

[via]

On a visual level, Pablo Picasso is an artist many people take a shining to, but on a contextual level he leaves many people out in the cold. Guernica, his painting about the Nazi bombings destruction of the town Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, is one such painting that is regarded as his masterpiece; it leaves little to contextualized and therefore can be appreciated solely for its aesthetic value.

Artist Lena Gieseke has created an animated 3-D rendering of Picasso’s greatest work of art. Have any artists created any potential lasting works of art about the current War in Iraq? This is one of curiosity since I am not familiar with the art world.

As a teenager I was always curious about the connection to art and drugs.� Not because I considered myself “an artist” or that I had any predilection for recreational drug use, but because most of the music and books and movies I watched always had some sort of background story wherein the artist was heavily influenced by drugs.

You read enough Hunter S. Thompson or Ken Kesey, listen to any music like Hendrix, The Doors, The Grateful Dead or watch Easy Rider at 14 and you begin to think what gives?

It’s also a curiosity that goes away really quickly, at least for me.� But this was too cool to not share.� An illustrative artist was given heavy doses of LSD and then did a series of nine drawings, each one more under the influence than the previous one.� The entire series is interesting to follow to see how the artist goes from normal to this and then back again.