An Artist's Junkyard of Dreams
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To first-time viewers, the 50-foot-high Forevertron might look like nothing more than 320 tons of towering scrap metal. But its creator says it's also an antigravity machine designed to propel him to the heavens. Michelle Delio reports from Prairie du Sac, Wisconsin.
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A messy battle with Mass MoCA wanting to uncover an exhibition and the artist Christoph BÃ¼chel wanting to withdraw it.
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An artist is offering to donate his own head to a museum - if a collection of shrunken heads has to be returned.
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You know those racy photos you threw out in 1994? Maybe they are in a new book of found art.
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It's an art collection that could hold  as many as 80 works by Vincent van Gogh and nearly half-a-dozen  by Paul Cezanne, that is if the champions of a dead Dutch  furniture dealer are to be believed.
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An artist reinterprets George Lucas' classic characters with a steampunk twist. Darth Vader has never been this cool. In Table of Malcontents.
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Art collectors spend millions to buy masterpieces, but the masterpiece they buy today could prove to be virtually worthless tomorrow if they aren&#39;t careful.
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Joe Grand has never really thought of himself as an artist, but on Saturday night, he&#39;s having his first gallery opening.Grand is a hardware hacker: He&#39;s at home with a soldering iron in his hand and&#160;the guts of some electronic device opened up in front of him. A former member of the L0pht Heavy Industries hacker collective, he designed the programmable conference badges used at this year&#39;s Defcon 15 hacker conference and a cheap RFID reader, soon to be on store shelves at Radio Shack.His show, called &quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; is happening at the 20 goto 10 gallery, on the fringe of San Francisco&#39;s notorious Tenderloin district. It&#39;s the kind of place where you&#39;d expect to see a hacker art exhibit: It&#39;s populated by junkies, liquor stores, and dive bars. Gallery owner Christopher Abad says the space was filled with old TVs and other junk hoarded by &quot;dumpster-diving meth heads&quot; before he moved in earlier this year.Abad, a noted hacker in his own right, says that Grand&#39;s work is good enough that it deserves the kind of attention you get in a fine-art gallery setting. &quot;A lot of the stuff that I&#39;ve seen him work on is pretty interesting, and it&#39;s rare for hackers to get any kind of credit outside of that community or any exposure at all,&quot; he said. &quot;At best you get to see some movie where it&#39;s all completely embellished.&quot;Though 20 goto10 also has the typical fine-art exhibits and book readings you&#39;d expect from a gallery, it&#39;s a bit of a hacker experiment. Abad featured another technology-themed installation in the gallery&#39;s first show this past February: a system that could be used to spoof caller ID, check other people&#39;s voicemail and launch unsuspecting man-in-the-middle attacks.Abad says he wants 20 goto 10 to be a venue that goes beyond the standard hacker conference. The gallery environment lets people gather information at their own pace.&quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; includes the Defcon badges Grand has designed as well as a &quot;Curtain of Shame&quot; of malfunctioning badges, a Marquee sign with the word Kingpin (Grand&#39;s hacker moniker) cut into Nintendo and Atari circuit boards and a modified searchlight from a US Army M-60 Patton tank.There will also be an interactive RFID exhibit and what Grand calls his Lichtenberg Lighting Frame -- a large acrylic block he picked up at a Boston flea market with a tiny multi-color LED&#160;display in the middle.But one of Grand&#39;s favorite pieces is a hacked up Atari computer called Atari K-9. While visiting his family, last Thanksgiving, Grand found a floppy disk containing a program that he&#39;d written for the Atari when he was eight. He created a custom display for the machine to &quot;make it look like it was created by Atari in the 80s&quot; and got his old program to run on the Atari. It&#39;s a silly graphic of K-9, the robot dog, from the 1970s TV series Dr. Who, but Grand sees it as a kind of collaborative project with his eight year-old self. &quot;It&#39;s basically to pay tribute to my past. I grew up with an Atari 400 computer,&quot; he said.Grand makes his living running his design company, Grand Idea Studio, and he&#39;s currently filming an engineering TV show, due to air next year on a popular science cable channel,But does he consider himself an artist? Maybe electronics aesthete would be a better description.&quot;Engineering and electronics does have this simple, beautiful way about it. If something is done in a really elegant fashion, then it could be considered art,&quot; he said. &quot;Sometimes I&#39;ll open up a product to see how it&#39;s made ... and there&#39;s a lot of beautiful design work that goes on.&quot;&quot;It&#39;s hard for me to consider myself an artist, because what I do to me doesn&#39;t seem like art,&quot; he added. &quot;People can call me an artist. I still consider myself an engineer and a hardware hacker.&quot;&quot;When Electronics Become Art,&quot; runs through Nov. 8 at 20 goto 10, 679 Geary Street, San Francisco. The show opens on Saturday, from 7 p.m. to 11 p.m., and gallery hours are 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. on Thursday and Friday; 3 p.m. to 6 p.m. on weekends.
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A German art group reprograms old assembly-line robots to become autonomous artists. The machines draw, spin tunes and dance in public. The group wants to show that the industrial beasts can create beauty. By David Cohn.
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Another designer tries to revive the label, and rise above its history of failure.
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An artist known for contrasting nature and culture continues to explore visual and behavioral patterns with new videos.
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Art theft may conjure up images of a suave movie villain creeping through a dark gallery &#151; or last year's bold daylight robbery of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" from a Norway museum. Most art heists, however, are far more subtle, involving forged documents, fake prints or smuggled cultural artifacts that slowly make their way into the hands of private owners or museums.
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It is one of the world's biggest  interior art spaces, and American artist Bruce Nauman has  filled it with nothing -- nothing that is except noise.
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Charles G. Shaw belongs to a generation of abstract painters who remain for the most part stubbornly lost.
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The Parrish Art Museumâs show feels at times like a master class led by artist Eric Fischl, although a somewhat anachronistic one. Painting is hardly dead.
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A commercial photographer and train buffâs works seem at once folksy and uncanny, with phallic monsters of industrial dynamism racing through benign, Norman Rockwell-esque visions of semirural America.
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The art world is wondering how volatile financial markets might affect its own specialized market.