“Graffiti art, let’s remember, is purposefully one of the less controlled and more transient of art forms. It is inherently communal, whether in the enjoyment or in its genesis and longevity. Performance art, of course, is more fleeting by definition, but both graffiti and performance art take away much of the control from the artist, whether limiting themselves in time or creating a painting that will necessarily be under the community’s control. Both though, tend to raise a strange frustration in people, perhaps because these forms so diverge from our traditional notions of art as eternal, as belonging in a museum. Graffiti takes the city as its canvas, the walls, alleyways, and windows of lived life, an intrusion of art into the stuffiness of the city, but always as part of the city. To then treat it as an objet d’art, to quarantine it off, transforms it and takes it out of its natural and proper context.”

– http://www.guernicamag.com/daily/joe-winkler-objectified/

“He’s taking this Bansky — to the bank!

The owner of a Queens auto-glass shop made off with the British street artist’s latest work Tuesday afternoon in response to a big-bucks bid to purchase the piece.

Bernardo “Choco” Veles enlisted about 20 pals to help dismantle and remove Banksy’s makeshift sculpture of the Great Sphinx of Giza just hours after it appeared near his Willetts Point business.

“A big gallery truck pulled up and offered me money. He gave me a card,” said Veles, owner of Choco Auto Glass.”

– http://nypost.com/2013/10/22/shop-owner-sells-off-banksy-sphinx-statue/

“

On October 13, the infamous street artist Banksy attempted to sell $60 canvases (worth tens-of-thousands of dollars each) to unsuspecting New Yorkers. In seven hours, he had just three customers.

When news of this broke, the story took over New York. In that echo of media hype, we saw an opportunity for a little mischief, and a chance to make a statement about the nature of hype, public personas, and the value of art.

After a lot of hustle, Lance Pilgrim ( @TheElroyJenkins ) and I, with the help of film maker George Gross ( http://vimeo.com/georgegross ) recreated the Banksy stall one week later.

Same price. Same images. Same location. Everything was the same—we even got Lance’s father Michael to be the salesman. Everything was identical…except for two things:

• The public consciousness had changed.
• Our work was completely worthless.

We were open about this. Our sign said “Fake Banksy.” Mike assured every customer that it was fake. Each canvas even came with a legally notarized “Certificate of Inauthenticity,” claiming that what they bought was not an original Banksy.

It didn’t matter.

We sold everything in less than an hour. Including the price sign.

”

– http://fakebookfriends.com/blog/fake-banksy-sells-out

“

It remains a commonly held belief that for hundreds of years people didn’t smile in pictures because their teeth were generally awful. This is not really true – bad teeth were so common that this was not seen as necessarily taking away from someone’s attractiveness. Lord Palmerston, Queen Victoria’s whig prime minister, was often described as being devastatingly good-looking, and having a ‘strikingly handsome face and figure’ despite the fact that he had a number of prominent teeth missing as a result of hunting accidents. It was only in later life, when he acquired a set of flapping false teeth, that his image was compromised. His fear of them falling out when he spoke led to a stop-start delivery of his speeches, causing Disraeli to openly poke fun at him in parliament.

Nonetheless, both painters and sitters did have a number of good reasons for being disinclined to encourage the smile. The primary reason is as obvious as it is overlooked: it is hard to do. In the few examples we have of broad smiles in formal portraiture, the effect is often not particularly pleasing, and this is something we can easily experience today. When a camera is produced and we are asked to smile, we perform gamely. But should the process take too long, it takes only a fraction of a moment for our smiles to turn into uncomfortable grimaces. What was voluntary a moment ago immediately becomes intolerable. A smile is like a blush – it is a response, not an expression per se, and so it can neither be easily maintained nor easily recorded.

”

– http://publicdomainreview.org/2013/09/18/the-serious-and-the-smirk-the-smile-in-portraiture/