
You have to wonder if something is edgy anymore if a fashion label can quickly flip the “transgression” into merchandise within a few days. Case in point … Kidult v. Marc Jacobs.


A lot has changed since novelist and physicist C.P. Snow’s assertion in the 1960s that Western intellectual life was split between two irreconcilable cultures: the arts and the sciences. Around that time, Experiments in Art and Technology (E.A.T.) was just beginning its efforts to bridge those two spheres. Fifty years later, Carnegie Mellon University’s Miller Gallery has made a significant contribution to representing and documenting where the relationship between art, science, and technology stands with the exhibition Intimate Science and the related book New Art/Science Affinities.

MANILA, Philippines — As is so often said about Chongqing, you’ve never heard of it, but with 30 million people and rising, it’s one of the largest municipalities in the world (for perspective, all of New York state has some 20 million people). Located in the heart of southwest China, a former city in Sichuan Province but now independent, Chongqing also hosts the country’s largest graffiti street, and perhaps the world’s.

After happening on several graffiti statements by the writer FADE, I realized that graffiti may be one of the most long-lasting artistic and political protests.Occupying public space and asserting the power of the individual, every tag, piece, statement or other form of graffiti is a true demonstration.

COPENHAGEN — Shepard Fairey’s wall mural at Jagtvej 69 in the Nørrebro neighborhood of Copenhagen may scream “Peace” but graffiti artists appear to have declared war on the art work that sits on the site of Ungdomshuset, the former leftist youth center that was destroyed by the country’s right-wing government in 2007.

Evacuated from my Lower Manhattan apartment and hiding from Hurricane Irene, I find myself thinking about anonymous street art and what it means to art-viewing practices. Different from traditional art and even graffiti, the anonymous works that are found on construction walls, corners of the street and shop grates pose a difficult yet exciting problem for the street art or historian enthusiast that comes across them.