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The crucipuzzles sculpted by Graham Kelman

Giulia Guido · 2 days ago · Art

What value do words have? In the era of images, someone could say that as time goes by they have less and less relevance, yet, often, a large part of the public debate on different issues arises from words used improperly, from different interpretations, or new linguistic needs.
New York-based artist and designer Graham Kelman has addressed this issue in his series of works entitled The Word Search .

Graham Kelman is a self-taught artist who acquired most of his knowledge and technical skills working for over a decade alongside Jenny Holzer on projects for museums such as the Guggenheim Bilbao, MASS MoCA and Kukje Gallery and collaborating with different brands such as Nike, Google and Spotify.

For The World Search he took inspiration from the crucipuzzles, those games found in the enigmatic week in which in a grid of letters you have to search and circle words. Here, instead of making them on paper, Graham Kelman decided to create something more monumental and impactful.

The artist created some sort of medium-sized tiles, each dedicated to a different letter and placed them on a support characterized by the presence of tracks on which to slide the letters and change their position at will. In this way Graham Kelman can create different giant crucifiers playing endlessly with the letters.

Finding the words in his works is neither immediate nor easy: the goal is to restore time and importance not only to the words themselves but also to their meaning.

Being also a graphic designer, The World Search not only has a concrete development, but Kelman has also worked on virtual crucifixes placed in a forest or on a body of water, transforming these games into monumental sculptural works.

The crucipuzzles sculpted by Graham Kelman

Art

The crucipuzzles sculpted by Graham Kelman

All the must-see November 2021's Netflix films and tv series

Giulia Guido · 1 day ago · Art

We have yet to recover from Squid Game and season three of You, but Netflix is already ready to fill our November with more unmissable new releases.

The Harder They Fall: Jonathan Majors, Idris Elba, Zazie Beetz, Regina King, Delroy Lindo, LaKeith Stanfield, RJ Cyler, Edi Gathegi, Danielle Deadwyler and Deon Cole star in this western that's a little different from the usual.
The Harder They Fall will be available on Wednesday, November 3.

Yara: Award-winning director Marco Tullio Giordana ("La meglio gioventù") directs a dramatic film based on a true story. The murder of 13-year-old Yara Gambirasio shocks the town of Brembate di Sopra. In order to bring the culprit to justice, prosecutor Letizia Ruggeri has only a slim clue: DNA traces that are of little use without a database to compare them against.
Yara will be available on Friday, November 5.

Arcane: From the creators of League of Legends comes the new animated series Arcane. The story, set in the utopian region of Piltover and the oppressed valleys of Zaun, reveals the origins of two iconic champions of the game and the power struggle that will divide them.
Arcane will be available on Sunday, November 7.

Passing: Film adaptation of Nella Larsen's acclaimed 1929 novel of the same name. Passing tells the story of two black women, Irene Redfield and Clare Kendry, who could "pass" as white but choose two different ways to live, all during the height of the Harlem Renaissance in late 1920s New York.
Passing will be available on Wednesday, November 10.

Red Notice: An Interpol Red Notice is an international alert to catch the world's most wanted criminals. But anything can happen when the FBI's top profiler (Dwayne Johnson) teams up with two rival thieves (Gal Gadot, Ryan Reynolds) for a risky heist.
Red Notice will be available on Friday, November 12.

Strappare lungo i bordi: Finally, after nearly a year of waiting, the animated series created by Roman comic artist Zerocalcare is about to arrive, and he's ready to blow our minds with his irreverence.
Strappare lungo i bordi will be available from Wednesday, November 17.

All the must-see November 2021's Netflix films and tv series

Art

All the must-see November 2021's Netflix films and tv series

The biggest archive of rave party flyers

Tommaso Berra · 1 day ago · Art

Before Instagram stories promoting parties and DJ sets, the only way to know where to hang out was posters and flyers. To get attention, flyers were given a lot of graphic research, which over the years created a strand of fans and collectors. Dave, then 13 years old from Plymouth, in the south west of England, began in 1998 to preserve all the flyers of clubs and rave parties in the city, now collected in Phatmedia: the largest online archive of rave party posters in the world. In addition to collecting party invitations from bulletin boards or sidewalks around the city, Dave for years received flyers from his cousin in the London club scene. Phatmedia now collects 21000 images tracing the history of the underground of the last twenty years. There is a continuous return of subjects representing a culture that exalts metaphysical journeys, psychedelic drugs, lysergic rainbows, but also a great attention to graphics. Many of these flyers are in fact reference points and inspiration for the crazy lettering and printing techniques used. The artwork is contemporary in style, and becomes a way to tell the freedom of expression and escapism of entire generations, as Dave himself declared to The Face: "When I was first handed a flyer, I'd never seen anything like it. They were our way into underground culture, had the look and feel of something only we could know and understand. The artwork of a flyer can promise pure escapism just from its design."
The entire archive is available along with other rave culture-related insights on Phatmedia's website.

The biggest archive of rave party flyers

Art

The biggest archive of rave party flyers

MSCHF, the collective that among 1000 copies of Warhol has sold a real one

Giulia Guido · 1 day ago · Art

MSCHF is a name that we are seeing written a lot these days. At first glance it might seem like an acronym, an acronym for something much more pompous and institutional, but we suggest you stop trying to understand what it means. MSCHF is the name of a New York collective – collective might be reductive, but maybe the right word to define it hasn't been invented yet – that since 2016 has been putting up absurd and not always easily understandable projects that hide unexpected morals and keys to interpretation.

Since the first work launched in May 2018, each new project is named drop, just as if it were a product just put on the market. As mentioned just now, their latest initiative, namely the 59th drop titled "Possibly Real Copy Of 'Fairies' by Andy Warhol" has made a lot of buzz.

MSCHF purchased "Fairies" an original Andy Warhol pen drawing dated 1954. Once the work was obtained, the collective made 999 fake copies, using the same materials as the original. Later, the 1000 pieces were sold at 250 dollars each on the Museum of Forgeries website, specially created for the occasion, but without revealing to anyone which was the original. Thus, a further work formed by the 1000 "Fairies" owned by 1000 different people came to life.

What the creatives of MSCHF did was to apply the strategy used for normal consumer goods to a work of art: mass produce (or reproduce) to allow more people to own a certain object.

On the Museum of Forgeries website you can find a sentence that can well be taken as the manifesto of this 59th drop: More than slashed canvas or burned pages, democratization of access or ownership destroys any work premised on exclusivity. In short, by referring to artworks that were born with the goal of subverting the system and then ended up being part of it, MSCHF tells us that the only thing that can destroy any system based on exclusivity is democratization of access or ownership.

With "Possibly Real Copy Of 'Fairies' by Andy Warhol" the collective has managed to make the original as much a fake as the replicas they made.

If the 59th drop gives us the MSCHF's point of view of the art world, the ensemble of all their works (available on the official website and on the App downloadable only in the States) gives a general view on different topics and areas.

Emblematic were drop 07 "Jesus Shoes" and drop 43 "Satan Shoes" for which they worked in both cases on a pair of Nike Air Max 97. For the former, the air unit was filled with 60 milliliters of holy water taken from the Jordan River, while for the latter – made in collaboration with rapper Lil Nas X – the air unit was filled with 66 milliliters of red ink and a drop of human blood. Following the subversive style that has distinguished their work over the years, both drops were completed without Nike's permission, which has twice been forced to file a lawsuit against MSCHF.

The collective's projects often and frequently start in the digital world, such as the very first drop launched in May 2018 titled "The Persistence of Chaos". The work consisted of a single 2008 Windows laptop with six malware programs installed that had allegedly caused nearly $100 billion in damage to the global economy.

Every week MSCHF's thousands of followers can't wait to discover the new drop, but even in this case, the collective doesn't rely on trivial countdowns on Instagram or Newsletters. On their website you can already see all the dates of the next 33 drops, each with its own countdown, and – always for those who live in the States – to get more news you can leave your phone number, then the collective will send messages whenever you need them.