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Good thing the Metropolitan Museum of Art, better known as The Met, doesn’t have a “you break it, you buy it” policy. 

Otherwise, a  woman attending art class who tripped and fell into Picasso’s “The Actor” would be in some shit right now.  Not that she isn’t, after CAUSING A SIX-INCH GASH in the painting, but you know, even more so. 

“The unusually large canvas, measuring 77.25 by 45.38 inches (196 by 115 centimeters), sustained a vertical tear” on Friday when klutzy magoo damaged it. “But The Met said the damage did not impact the “focal point of the composition” and that it should be repaired in the coming weeks ahead of a major Picasso retrospective featuring some 250 works at the museum opening on April 27.”

“The Actor” was painted in the winter of 1904-1905, during Pablo Picasso’s Rose Period.  It was donated to The Met in 1952.

Gallery 1988 posted all of the art from the Under The Influence: Masters of the Universe Tribute Art Show, which took place over the weekend in Los Angeles.

“Everybody seems to cling to what we remember from as children,” curator and gallery co-owner Jensen Karp told the LA Weekly.  ”That’s what this show is all about. It’s not only saying that we love what the past was about but it’s also saying that it helped our creativity grow.”

For boys of a certain age, playing with cheap plastic toys developed not only a sense of adventure, but for myself it fostered a sense of storytelling.  For others, like the artists in the shows, I imagine it created a love for art and drawing and a path that led them to the gallery over the weekend.

Sad face!  So I guess the conundrum that is history’s most intriguing smile has been solved: “The Italian scientist says the model in the oil painting had a xanthelasma – a subcutaneous accumulation of cholesterol – in the hollow of her left eye and a fatty tissue tumour.  It suggests very high levels of cholesterol in the model, thought to be Lisa del Giocondo, a member of a Florence family who married a cloth and silk merchant.” 

I feel her pain having high cholesterol my entire life.  Though in my defense I did eat a bowl of ice cream a night from the time I was seven until I turned 15.

Artist Michael Johansson makes full-sized objects that resemble those plastic click-out models from your childhood. You know, like a model car or airplane or whatnot, except, the dingy pictured above, entitled “Toys ‘R’ Us”, is a 1:1 scale model made from functional boating equipment and a welded metal frame.  It’s impossible to look at and not think that it’s a drawing or some sort of 2-D artwork.  Nope! [via]

“The Rotating Kitchen” is an art installation by Zeger Reyers that began slowing rotating at the December opening of the “Eating the Universe” exhibtion at the Kunsthalle Düsseldorf in Germany and will continue rotating until February 29th, 2010.

There should be a live feed or a rotating camera with this installation.  Also?  How bad is it going to smell in the gallery come February?  [via]

What happens when decades of battling evil villains catches up with the world’s greatest heroes? Gilles Barbier’s L’Hospice envisions the superheroes who don’t die in battle, but instead ignominously retire like the rest of us.  I particularly love Mr. Fantastic. [via]

I’ll be perfectly honest, most of this hardly makes sense to me.  It’s possible that it’s just early and I haven’t had enough narcotics caffeine enter my body, but: “For each unique visitor it receives, Temporary.cc deletes part of itself. These deletions change the way browsers understand the website’s code and create a unique (de)generative piece after each new user. Because each unique visit produces a new composition through self-destruction, Temporary.cc can never be truly indexed, as any subsequent act of viewing could irreparably modifiy it.”  So if you go to look at it, it will never look the same for two viewers alike, but also currently it looks like nothing more than distended code.  I would have loved to have seen the website when it first went live.  [via]

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.