My sister, a psychiatrist, has been collecting the work of untrained artists for as long as I can remember, and travels to New York every January for the Outsider Art Fair. This year, I tagged along and discovered Phyllis Kornfeld’s Inside/Outside Envelope Project. Kornfeld has ...

A design for a memorial to President Dwight D. Eisenhower on the National Mall has become the subject of controversy.  The New York Times reports that descendants of Eisenhower complain that Frank Gehry's design, which represents the president as a young farm boy, belittles his legacy of ...

This month, light and space is oddly, magically graspable at the David Zwirner gallery in Chelsea, New York. Doug Wheeler's SA MI 75 DZ NY 12 is an experience that is near-impossible to describe without using the terms "defies comprehension" and "mind-blowing," so we figured we'd get that out of the way now ...

The Scene: San Diego
From Culture Lust, a blog from KPBS in San Diego, hosted by arts and culture producer Angela Carone.

Along dusty Highway 111 in Niland, California, the Buckshot Deli and Diner is the place to get a strong cup of coffee, and directions to the area’s most famous landmark. Owner Ed Brashear says he can tell immediately who wants to go to Salvation Mountain. "Sometime when they walk in ...

Last month, thousands of mathematicians attended the Joint Mathematics Meeting in Boston — the largest annual gathering of its kind. In addition to presentations on phylogenetic algebraic geometry and trace formulas, the conference featured an art exhibition, with 80 artists presenting ....

Video: Mathematical Art

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close starring Tom Hanks and Sandra Bullock, just arrived in theaters. It's an adaptation of the September 11-themed novel by Jonathan Safran Foer. But before Foer became a novelist, he was an aspiring sculptor. As a college freshman, he ...

Slideshow: Joseph Cornell's boxes

A new film premiered this year that is truly one of a kind. whiteonwhite:algorithmicnoir was made by Eve Sussman and her collaborators, known as the Rufus Corporation.  They shot most of the footage in Kazakhstan, improvising the script and taking advantage of the Soviet Union’s ...

Video: watch the trailer

AARON is the world’s first cybernetic artist: an artificially intelligent system that composes its own paintings. Incredibly, the system is the work of one man, Harold Cohen, who had no background in computing when he began the effort. Cohen was a prominent painter; he represented ...

Quiz: Was this art made by a human or a computer?

To make art, a computer first needs to understand what art is. A group of computer scientists at Brigham Young University is attempting this by feeding their program images by the thousands and describing those images. Digital Artist Communicating Intent (she goes by DARCI) recognizes ...

Slideshow: DARCI evaluates art

There’s a new collection of short stories — extremely short stories, just 420 characters long (including spaces). They feature western gunslingers, couples in crisis, dogs and talking chickens. The author, Lou Beach, has managed to pack each tiny tale with vivid descriptions and narratives that ...

Enter Studio 360's 420-Character Story Contest

Don’t stand too close, hands away from the art, don’t talk too loud — you know the etiquette. But right now at the New Museum in New York there's a huge exhibition that breaks all those rules. There are pieces you can climb on, ride on, stick your head into, smell. Even swallow. Carsten Höller  ...

Slideshow: Carston Höller at the New Museum

Since Kit White and I met when I was a freshman in college, I've just realized that means we've been friends for two-thirds of our lives. He is pretty much the same person he was then: philosophically serious but funny and fun, learned, lucid, wise, and a painter ...

The centennial of Romare Bearden’s birth is being celebrated by a number of museums this year and early in 2012. Probably the most famous African-American visual artist of the 20th century, Bearden was best known for a singular approach to collage art that incorporated scraps of wallpaper ...

Slideshow: Romare Bearden in his Studio

Why does a country music megastar and all-American guy like Ronnie Dunn — half of what was Nashville’s biggest act, Brooks and Dunn — have a house full of paintings from the Soviet Union? It’s a long story. Twenty years ago, in the fall of 1991, the Soviet Union was being dismantled, and its highly managed art world vanished ...

Slideshow: Soviet Art in the USA

This weekend, the Brooklyn Academy of Music presented a new work of originality, power, and beauty that left an audience slack-jawed. Brooklyn Babylon is a collaboration between the graphic novelist Danijel Zezelj and composer Darcy James Argue, and it is destined to be considered a classic of the ...

Right now 20th century photography geeks are experiencing something of a perfect storm. From a new coffee table book, to a major museum exhibition, to images just made available on Wikimedia Commons ...

If you live in New York or can make it there by January, the season's must-see painting exhibition is the new Willem de Kooning retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, which spans the artist’s long and productive career. We see his early days ...

We all know the Thomas Edison line: genius is 1% inspiration, 99% perspiration. But there are those who don't seem to perspire at all. Their extraordinary gifts seem to come from no where. We often call those people savants. And some neuroscientists are trying to understand where their talents come from ...

Slideshow: Art by Joel Gilb, Age 12

The Bay Area artist Trevor Paglen calls himself an experimental geographer. For one project, Paglen has been tracking secret government spy satellites and taking photos of them. Paglen’s art begins with rigorous research online, combing through government documents, sorting through data sets, talking to other hobbyists online ...

Slideshow: Trevor Paglen’s Photographs

While traditional street photography usually catches strangers passing by in a public space, the photographer Michele Iversen has been catching strangers passing by in their own private spaces, without their permission. At night she sits in her car and watches the warm glowing windows of strangers' homes waiting for the perfect shot ...

Slideshow: Photography by Michele Iversen