Monthly archives:December 2017

  • Paradise is an interactive version of The Garden of Earthly Delights which was created in 2016 for the 500-year anniversary of Hieronymus Bosch’s death. This artwork consists of a curious animated short film that recreates similar characters and the landscape of the original, but represents the excesses and desires of modern society- such as sex, power, consumerism, corruption, entertainment, religion and food. The original Bosch’s triptych includes God presenting Eve to Adam, animals and nude people. Studio Smack's version shows funny details with spaceships, Hello Kitty, Coke, headless fried chicken and fantastic characters. What the animation and Bosch’s triptych have in common is that you’ll hardly be able to take it all in. You can watch it for hours. The characters are 3D modeled, geometrically incorrect and represented in a bi dimensional picture of historical context. They were rendered in Cinema 4D and later composited in After Effects. Each of them has their own animation loop.
  • Around a decade ago, Jonathan Olshefski began taking photographs of a basement music studio in North Philadelphia, a hangout for local hip hop artists. The planned photo essay would reflect working life vs. creative life, specifically that of music promoter/producer Christopher “Quest" Rainey, owner of the studio. But Olshefski got so caught up in Rainey’s life and that of his family, that he wound up switching to film and shooting for almost a decade. The result is Quest, an intimate documentary about a working-class African-American family struggling — and ultimately coping — with crime, poverty and illness. For those who aren’t familiar with rough neighborhoods like North Philly, the film also offers a glimpse into an impoverished but tight-knit community that is both frustrated and hopeful about its prospects. Neither glibly upbeat nor utterly despairing, the film achieves a believable balance that seems to reflect the current situation of so many Americans. Quest, which opens with the 2008 presidential election as backdrop and closes with Trump soundbites from the 2016 debates, includes various events as time markers, including Obama's second win in 2012. Though Quest, who exhorts his community to vote, is clearly thrilled with those victories and is suspicious of Trump’s promises to African-Americans, it becomes pretty obvious that the national political scene doesn’t really have much of an effect on the day-to-day realities of his neighborhood. At the [...]
  • On Wednesday 17th November, Leonardo da Vinci’s masterpiece Salvator Mundi, became the most expensive artwork ever sold, after being purchased for £450M during an historic event celebrated at Christie’s auction in New York. The two hour auction took place at Christie’s with a total of sold artwork in the amount of $692 million ($785.9 million with fees), on 58 lots. The sale unexpectedly turned into a historic show. Since the auctioneer Jussi Pylkkänen announced lot nine: Leonardo Da Vinci's Salvator Mundi (circa 1500), it took 19 minutes to sell the artwork for $400 million ($450 million with fees). People clapped and laughed during the unbelievable show. The sale of Davinci’s painting resulted in the most expensive piece ever purchased at an auction and broke all the previous records in the history of art, including the $179.4 million for a Pablo Picasso painting at Les Femmes d'Alger in 2015. The crowd came to Christie’s expecting a show, and in the end they finally got history. Salvator Mundi represents a secular image of a a serene-looking Christ dressed in blue and holding an orb. It also shows an ambiguous gender aspect about his appearance that makes it very mysterious and special. The picture is one of fewer than 20 works by Leonardo still in existence. It's hilarious that the painting was sold by London's Sotheby's auction house in 1958 for less than 50£ when experts refused to believe Da Vinci painted it. For many years it was considered as t[...]