Posted inArt

Painting is Alive and Kicking at the Kathmandu International Art Festival

KATHMANDU, Nepal — The Kathmandu International Art Festival opened on a sunny November 25 morning in the grand ballroom of Yak & Yeti hotel in Kathmandu. Though this was the second international art festival (the first was Between Myth and Reality: Status of Women in 2009) to be hosted in the new republic of Nepal, in terms of scale, it was unprecedented, a rare non-profit and non-commercial endeavour showcasing the works of 95 artists from 31 countries spread across 16 venues.

Posted inBooks

Oh, Knitta Puh-leze

Urban Knits, a small book of colorful photographs, explores a relatively new kind of graffiti called “urban knitting,” self-proclaimed to be the most “inoffensive” type of urban graffiti. Like most books of its kind, a collection compiled by theme, Urban Knits unintentionally shows the wide discrepancies in quality that exist in all forms of art, but that are especially prevalent in graffiti and street art. When the impetus for making art is not exclusively about the quality of the work itself but rather about the act of leaving a mark, the results are often less than imaginative. This seems to hold true for tagging as well as knitting.