Shelley Lambert

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Dust and Lint Covered Dollhouses

9:11 pm by admin in Sculpture

Welcome to the Dollhouse, unless you have allergies that is.

Maria Adelaida Lopez, a Colombian-born artist, covers doll-houses with vacuum-cleaner lint in tribute to her days working as a house-cleaner while taking her Master’s in Philiadelphia, and in tribute to the “other Marias” who still clean house. She collects full vacuum bags from others to continue with her art.

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Robots Discuss Politics

8:54 pm by admin in Multimedia

Finally, I can discuss politics with robots… it is truly what I have been waiting for… (insert eye roll here)…

IT was late in the day, rain was streaking the windows of a converted warehouse in San Francisco and the robot was not behaving. Represented by a talking head on a flat-screen monitor, and equipped with voice-recognition software, the artificial intelligence computer - known as DiNA - was designed to chat with visitors about current affairs. She is supposed to be a political animal, or more precisely, machine. But at this point in early November, just a few weeks before making her New York debut, she sounded rather clueless. When asked her opinion of the war in Iraq, she called it a “silly question.” When asked whether she supported President Bush, she didn’t recognize his name.

The robot’s programmer, Colin Klingman, was taken aback. “She has a lot to say on Bush, believe me,” he said. “I’ll have to check the code.”

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Beauty Creates Urge to Destroy

9:09 pm by admin in Art News

Apparently, this is an actual phenomenon. Have you ever wanted to destroy something beautiful?

If you thought art galleries were quiet havens of contemplation, think again. Looking at great works of art can inspire a strong, sometimes irresistible urge to destroy, Italian researchers have found.

Dubbed the “David syndrome,” after the statue of the young Hebrew king by Michelangelo, the condition can provoke an overwhelming desire to damage the art being viewed, the psychoanalyst who identified the malady told Reuters.

The David syndrome has links to the somewhat better known Stendhal syndrome, a term Magherini coined more than 20 years ago, which causes viewers of art to be physically overcome by their reaction to art, sometimes leading to hospitalization.

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Bran New

9:09 pm by admin in Digital

Here are just a few of the dozens of ‘bran’ out there…

These little bran critters are sure cute!

A bran is a template. A canvas if you like. Think back to when you were a kid - remember he-man figures? Each one essentially the same piece of plastic with a different paint job? bran is a bit like that.

Hopefully you can see bran as a creative outlet, a bit of a playground where you can try out your illustration and design skills within the confines of a simple object.

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FBI’s Top Ten Art Crimes

10:02 am by admin in Art News

Well, I guess art crime pays.

The decision to set up an FBI Art Crimes Team in November 2004 was in part an acknowledgement of the obvious - that art crime is now big business.

By one estimation, transactions of $1bn to $2bn take place annually.

FBI’s Top Ten Art Crimes

• From 7,000 to 10,000 looted and stolen Iraqi artefacts, 2003
• 12 paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, 1990
• Two Renoirs and one Rembrandt from Sweden’s National Museum, 2000 (two recovered)
• Munch’s The Scream and The Madonna from the Munch Museum in Oslo, 2004
• Benevenuto Cellini Salt Cellar from Vienna’s Kunsthistorisches Museum, 2003
• Caravaggio’s Nativity with San Lorenzo and San Francesco from Palermo, 1969
• Davidoff-Morini Stradivarius violin from a New York apartment, 1995
• Two Van Gogh paintings from Amsterdam’s Vincent Van Gogh Museum, 2002
• Cezanne’s View of Auvers-sur-Oise from Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, 1999
• Leonardo’s Madonna with the Yarnwinder from Scotland’s Drumlanrig Castle, 2003

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Knitting With Paperclips

9:36 pm by admin in Crafts

It sounds more like a type of personal torture to me, as small finickity things tend to make me want to seek a hammer, but I find this quite amusing for someone else to try, if they are bored and have very little else in their lives to do…

I do think it is neat that this artist guy is making short movies about people who make things.

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Beautiful Hand Painted Mice

8:34 pm by admin in Blogroll

These crazy kalinka-rinky dinks from Ekaterinburg (Ural, Russia) are too precious. Buy one now for your sweet babushka.

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Did the Tate Pay Ransom?

9:50 pm by admin in Blogroll

BBC documentary alleges that the Tate Gallery paid a £3.3million ransom to recover some stolen Turner paintings.

Ex-detective superintendent Mike Lawrence told the documentary: “The deal was that the recovery of the art was more important than arrests. It was a strange feeling.”
The two works - Shade And Darkness: The Evening Of The Deluge, and Light And Colour (Goethe’s Theory): The Morning after the Deluge - were stolen from the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt in 1994 while on loan to the exhibition Goethe And The Visual Arts.

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WWI cubist paint-jobs for battleships

7:26 pm by admin in Blogroll

You sunk my battleship! Not really. Why would you want to sink somethin’ so purdy?

During WWI, British and American battleships were painted with gay, brightly colored cubist designs in order to confuse enemy torpedo operators about the location and direction of the vessels. The paint-jobs were called “Dazzle Paint” or “Razzle Dazzle”.

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