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Read this book!

Great news today from Becki Fuller and Luna Park at The Street Spot: Reader/Booker/ReadMoreBooks/Hoodrich/Boans… has a book out. Operation Madman has a 186-page hardcover book called The Reader. Reader is one of my favorite active writers in America and while I haven’t seen this book in the flesh (I’ve just ordered my copy), I’m pretty confident that it will be worth reading.

Based on the sample pages online, this doesn’t look like a typical graff book at all, but then again, Reader isn’t your typical writer.

This weekend, The Reader is available online for $13. After this weekend, it will be $20.

Photo by LoisInWonderland

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Weekend link-o-rama

Elfo's road sign for an underground robber

Getting back in the swing of things at school this week. Fair warning, today is the first meeting of a class I’m taking about conceptual art. I’m excited and the professor seems awesome, but just fair warning: That class could bleed over into the rest of my life and lead to an increase in bullshitting from me here on Vandalog. Unfortunately, I haven’t sorted out a proper internet connection yet since getting back to school, so I’ve been a bit lax this week. Here’s what’s been going on:

  • This isn’t street art or urban art or low brow or anything really related to Vandalog, but one of my favorite artists, Hiroyuki Doi, has a show on in New York right now. Definitely check it out.
  • Kid Acne has a new zine out.
  • This collaboration between Malarky, Billy and Mighty Mo is great.
  • At first I hated this sculpture from Jeremy Fish, but now I’m thinking I’d love to walk by it every day.
  • Last week I asked about graffiti photographers in Philadelphia, and Fat Cap has found a great one.
  • I think some of these pieces from Phil Jones are old, some just remind me of Asbestos’ Lost series and some are pretty meh, but damn overall Jones is kicking ass with some fun street art.
  • Felice Varini makes me smile.
  • Exit Through The Gift Shop was nominated for a BAFTA and won an award for documentaries. In other Banksy news, someone is trying to sell 5 Banksy works on paper, basically preparatory works, for £125,000.
  • This “news” article reads like a press release for Bonhams, but there is one surprising bit of information in there: Apparently the Shepard Fairey Peace Goddess, which sold earlier this month at Bonhams for £27,600, is the highest price ever paid for a Shepard Fairey work at auction. I would have thought he’d reached a higher number by now, but I guess most of the work that goes to auction tends to be prints and HPMs, not the large collages or retired stencils that might have otherwise already reached that number. UPDATE: Of course, the article is wrong. That isn’t the highest price paid for a Shepard Fairey work at auction. Not sure if this price is the highest, but it’s much higher than the Bonhams result. So I guess that article is just a giant press release. Sorry.
  • And because that last thing was all about money, here’s a relevant old piece from Twist/Barry McGee.
  • Jose Parla has been busy in Toronto (Thanks to Simon for the tip).

Photo by Elfo

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Going down

The above photo was taken earlier today. The home was a squat in downtown Madrid and the wall is by 3ttman and Remed.

Photo by Miss Kaliansky

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Swings and googly eyes making the world a better place

Yes. Blu and Nunca and Shepard Fairey and all the rest can put up really impressive gigantic murals that tourists will travel from around the world to see and property owners will cover in plexiglass. That’s cool sometimes. But there’s something to be said for the anonymous street art that just makes people smile. It’s an often overlooked segment of the street art world, because a lot of that sort of work is small, very ephemeral, hard to notice, something that doesn’t look like art, hard to capture an image of on film and impossible to experience through a photograph. This is a short post attempting to draw attention to some of that art. To me, it’s just as important, if not more important, than the sort of street art that will one day wind up in museums.

Over the winter break, a high school friend of mine introduced me to Faces in Places. He loves that blog. Me, I’m indifferent, but I see the appeal. When I mentioned to him that there were a bunch of googly eyes appearing on my university campus, where people would put googly eyes on things to help facilitate more Faces-in-Places-like-things, he laughed. Here at Haverford, the googly eyes are a mystery, but it turns out that some of his friends started a bunch of googling (as they call it) on the Wesleyan University campus. I don’t think they were consciously trying to make art, they were just trying to make people smile and take back to the world “googling” from Google. But putting googly eyes on things is amazing street art. Is it as complex as something by MOMO? No. But it makes people smile and it brightens their day! That, to me, is one of the most noble and important goals of street art. And it’s not particularly difficult to achieve. So go and google something or scribble a funny piece of graffiti in the bathroom stall, it’s probably not going to end up in MoMA, but it may just make somebody smile, and that’s much more important.

Another similar project is this one by Oh San Fransisco:

Even though there’s a slight advertising component with that project and it’s not completely anonymous, it’s still a pretty damn good gift to the community. Putting up swings is a simple gift to make the world a better place. Kudos to Oh San Fransisco for getting out and making people have a better day. Random Acts of Greatness also explains well why they like Oh San Francisco’s project.

Photo by waystation

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Futura x 12ozProphet full video and new shirts

Futura has done a series of t-shirts with 12ozProphet. Kind of cool. I’m not usually a fan of straight up logo shirts, but Futura’s style trumps my usual reservations and the white t-shirt is just a straight photo of a Pointman sketch, which I think is cool. Check out some more full sets of images on 12oz. These shirts will be available very soon (about 2 and a half hours from now as of this post being published) on the 12oz website.

No word yet on the price UPDATE: Shirts are $32-36, but there is a giveaway that Hypebeast and 12ozProphet are running where you can win a free shirt. You can check out all the rules and prizes here. Seems a bit complicated to enter, but I imagine Futura fans will think it’s worth it for a t-shirt or even a photo print.

And here’s a great video interview that 12oz have done with Futura:

Futura x 12ozProphet Feature from ALSO KNOWN AS on Vimeo.

Who else is excited about that little comment at the end about The Twins? Sounds like Os Gemeos are involved here somehow too. Maybe some shirts of their own coming up with 12oz?

Photo courtesy of 12ozProphet

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New Kaws Companion up for Sale

Three color variations of the latest Kaws companion are up for sale on the artist’s site. Designed in conjunction with Robert Lazzarini, the 8″ toys retail for $180 and will surely sell out. The melting design is really innovative, and in my opinion, are some of the best sculptural work I have seen yet. Certainly a bit more interesting than a play on a Disney or Looney Tunes characters.

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Identity of Banksy on eBay jumps to almost $1 million

UPDATE: The auction has been pulled from eBay, once again. First it was for not selling an actual item but just information, but then the auction was relisted as selling a piece of paper with Banksy’s name on it. Presumably this time the listing was pulled for just being a joke.

Well, the eBay auction claiming to be selling Banksy’s identity based on tax returns has just gone from a crazy item that a fool could waste $20k on to a complete farce. As of late Monday night here on the East Coast, the bidding has reached $999,999.00! There’s still more than a day left, so I’m hoping it surpasses $1 million, just for laughs.

This whole thing is ridiculous. For one thing, there’s no way that somebody actually used tax returns to figure out Banksy’s identity as he claims, and even if this seller does have Banksy’s identity through some other means and wants to sell it, the original But It Now price of $20,000 was already outrageous. I bet the seller just read this article from The Daily Mail, wrote the name Robin Gunningham on a piece of paper and plans to sell that. That’s what I would do if I wanted to make a quick buck and didn’t care about being a complete asshole. After all, that piece of paper with a name is all that’s for sale in the auction, not any actual records or evidence.

I’m probably taking this whole thing too seriously be even writing about it like this. Does anyone out there know what happens when people renege on eBay bids, even obviously phony ones?

Clearly, eBay should remove this listing again, as they did the first time it went up.

On a related topic, it looks like Banksy has once again hit up the infamous Robbo wall in Camden, London. It hasn’t been confirmed as a Banksy piece, but I’m pretty confident that it is.

Photo by loungerie