After schooling New Yorkers on etiquette via numerous unsanctioned interventions, artist Jay Shells channeled his love of hip hop music and his uncanny sign-making skills towards a brand new project: “Rap Quotes.” For this ongoing project, Shells created official-looking street signs quoting famous rap lyrics that shout out specific street corners and locations. He then […]
ANIMAL’s feature Artist’s Notebook asks artists to show us their original idea sketch next to a finished piece. This week, we’re talking to Brooklyn-based painter Christian Rex van Minnen whose immaculate portraits and tableaux are a perfect mix of visual opulence and pretty horror. Today, he shows us the inspiration and process behind RED & GREEN. This painting was started […]
This weekend, popular mythical creature Tilda Swinton re-performed her 1995 piece The Maybe at the MoMA, without making a press announcement. She slept quietly inside a glass, aquarium-like enclosure as visiting crowds swarmed outside. She has been talking about doing this at the MoMA since 2005, before Marina Abramović performed her three-month The Artist Is Present epic. She will be doing unannounced pop-up performances throughout the […]
For yet another artistic example of why Vine is the most exciting social media platform going, take a look at the music video for Masters in France’s “Flexin,” which automatically populates itself with clips based tagged with words from the song’s lyrics. If a verse includes the word “high,” for example, and you once Vined […]
The NYPD has created a new facial recognition unit, which specializes in identifying subjects using photographs, according to a DNAinfo report. Established late last year, the eight-officer unit uses software to scan for faces in Facebook, Instagram, and surveillance camera images, then match them against the mugshots of known criminals. Thankfully, a facial match doesn’t […]
When we did our roundup of ridiculous photos from Mayor Bloomberg’s Flickr account last month, we grabbed a few of the images from the annual Inner Circle dinner–NYC’s over-the-top, broadway-themed answer to the White House Correspondent’s Association Dinner. This year’s event went down Saturday night, and while no bits were quite as rich as the […]
Charles, Hell’s Kitchen. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork) […]
While attempting to investigate a mysterious grouping of balloons in Gowanus, Vanishing New York stumbled upon an even deeper mystery. (Photo: Vanishing New York) […]
“No, I didn’t. But they’re pretty great.” That’s what artist Tom Sanford told ANIMAL when we noticed a similarity between his fleshy, parodic style (see celebs on a stripper, right) and that of these “controversial” Ford of India ads (see gagged and tied celebs/strippers in trunks, left and center). The rapey Russ Meyer-esque aesthetics of Berlusconi […]
“Electrosmog” is what artist Jean-Pierre Aube calls the electromagnetic fields generated by the radio frequency spectrum used by telecommunication systems. Though we can’t see it, electrosmog lurks in every city — it’s essential for everyone from emergency public transportation services to you and me texting each other. Fascinated by the idea of this invisible “pollution” […]
