William Christenberry returns every year to central Alabama near Tuscaloosa to chronicle the very slowly morphing rural landscape of his childhood: faded wooden barns, kudzu, covered buildings, dilapidated roadside markets with rusty signs and a certain old barbecue joint. Kurt asks Christenberry how he avoids cliches while ...

Why do paintings cost what they cost? Who makes the decision that one work of art sells for thousands or millions while another one sells for hundreds of dollars...or not at all? Sarah Elzas went looking for answers along New York's art gallery food chain, her first ...

Many a painter has stared at a blank canvas and pondered what to paint. Not any more! Jack Handey, whom you might remember as the author of Saturday Night Live's "Deep Thoughts", offers his best suggestions.

Imagine walking through an art gallery and finding a single wall of digital clouds lifted from the classic "80" Nintendo game Super Mario Brothers. Cory Arcangel, the young artist behind the project, explains to Rebecca Cascade why reprogramming video game software comes as naturally ...

There may be nothing prettier than birdsong, but birds don't make art - each species sings pretty much the same tune. Are animals ever really creative? WBUR's Sean Cole met a dog painter and an orchestra of elephants.

Named after an infamously stupid episode of Happy Days, “jumping the shark” describes the moment when the inspiration dries up and it all starts to go downhill. Kurt called some of our listeners to ask about the filmmakers, musicians, and artists who let them down big time.

As part of Studio 360's series on science and creativity, Sarah Lilley talks with scientists who admire the impressionist painter Claude Monet not just for his color choices, but for his ability to trick the human eye and brain.

Photographer Amanda Jones takes pictures of dogs – and her work is in high demand. Her photos aren't kitch. She strives to capture the essence of each animal. Andrew Adam Newman visited Jones during a recent shoot. Actually, he had his dog photographed.

John Cale tells Kurt about what it was like to work with the Pop art superstar in the 1960s.

Artist Clifford Ross was disappointed with the pictures he took on vacation. So he built a new kind of camera with resolution years ahead of digital photography -- and he may have reinvented how we look at pictures. Produced by Andrew Adam Newman.

Don Ingber is a cell biologist from Harvard Medical School, Children's Hospital. One day he saw a piece of modern sculpture and—Eureka!-he was inspired to make a major breakthrough in biology. Lu Olkowski reports on the unlikely epiphany.

Lawrence Weschler sees amazing patterns and provocative echoes in images that shouldn't share anything in common -- like a photo from Ground Zero and a Rembrandt painting. The results are eerie and possibly profound -- but Weschler wants us to figure out what it all means.

Japan has embraced cuteness with a vengeance, from the ubiquitous Hello Kitty to the successful artist-designer Takashi Murakami, the Andy Warhol of Japan. Sarah Lilley tries to figure out why an ancient culture like Japan's would strive to be super adorable.

Benjamin Franklin once joked that "nothing is certain but death and taxes." But when it comes to taxes, the joke is often at the expense of artists. Ilya Marritz explains why a proposal in Congress could make April a happier month for some.

Artist Marina Abramovic encourages you not only to touch her art installation piece, "Dream Bed," she wants you to lie right down inside it and record what happens next. WBUR's Sean Cole stopped by for a nap.

Aminah Robinson works with all kinds of materials and found objects —anything from wood to leather, textiles to mud. When Kurt Andersen spoke with Robinson, she explained how she takes her artistic cues from her ancestry and from her community, and the necessity of ...

Kurt Andersen asks meteorologist Adam Sobel and landscape painter April Gornik what makes spring so special. Webcast only at studio360.org.

Mark Lombardi was obsessed with financial chicanery, and with drawing the lines in which power flows. When he died in 2000, he left 14,000 index cards with entries on everything from multinational corporations to arms dealers to his own friends. But why are his huge, detailed drawings so difficult to ...

Sophie Matisse is a New York artist who has been reproducing masterpieces by great painters like Vermeer, da Vinci, Velasquez, and even by her great grandfather Henry Matisse. But her reproductions leave out the crucial people and objects that are supposed to be the focus of our ...

Dr. Dennis Pelli researches how we read, identify shapes, even why we find art compelling. Once a semester he takes a group of students to see a piece of installation art that he believes will teach them how to be better scientific observers. Laura Starecheski tagged along ...