La nueva campaña de la coleccion actual de ropa interior Maria Magdalena.

Buenos Aires, Argentina.

In the early 20th century, the photograph still seemed new. The German intellectual Walter Benjamin tried to understand how photography changed art: it replaced the “aura” of the masterpiece with a new, democratic way of making pictures. Going on for a century later, we’re living in the midst of a technological revolution that has left photography itself behind. Here’s the latest: artist Jorge Colombo makes pictures of New York street life using the Brushes application (bought for $4.99 — “a great leveller”) on his iPhone. The results are impressively delicate and lively.

Lots of people take photos on a phone — the casual record of what you see is fun to share. Colombo’s pictures are a creative extension of that: he sketches what he sees in New York, and these fast, fragmentary glimpses of a car park entrance, a pizza joint, a view between buildings have an impressionistic immediacy. He can “draw in the dark”, working on the illuminated screen to depict the city by night. They are not pretentious, they do not claim to be more than a sort of visual diary. But they show that a sensitive eye can use any medium to respond to the beauty of the world — whether it’s a brush or Brushes.

by Jonathan Jones
The Guardian, Monday 16 March 2009

See the movie here.

see original article here

The AP Has No Case Against Shepard Fairey

A few days ago, the Associated Press announced that Obama’s famous HOPE poster amounts to copyright infringement. The artist behind the poster, Shepard Fairey, has never hidden the fact that he based his iconic creation on a photograph he found through Google. The AP thinks it owns the copyright to that photograph, since Mannie Garcia was freelancing for the AP when he shot it. With posters sold out, a special edition in theNational Portrait Gallery, and major exhibitions in New York and Boston, the AP wants in on the windfall.
But the AP would very likely lose this case if it ever ended up in court. That’s because, under copyright law, Fairey’s work almost certainly qualifies as “fair use” of Garcia’s photograph. 

The term “fair use” gets batted around a lot, often incorrectly, and so deserves some explanation. At the most general level, copyright law prohibits you from copying another person’s original creative work. That means you’re typically not allowed to create work using someone else’s original unless you pay that person. “Fair use” is an exception to this rule: it says that sometimes you don’t have to pay someone to use his or her original work. Whether you do–that is, whether your new work qualifies as “fair use”–depends on what, exactly, the original work is, how much of it you’re using, how you transform it, and whether your new work hurts the commercial market for the original. (Note that the issue has nothing to do with whether anyone thinks your use is “fair.”)

By far the most important factor is how you transform the original work–but, contrary to popular belief, the transformation that really matters is the conceptual one, not the physical one. 

Take, for example, an influential 2006 decision vindicating Jeff Koons. A fashion photographer named Andrea Blanch sued Koons for using a picture of hers in one of his paintings without paying her. Koons had scanned her photograph, which she had taken for a Gucci ad, and cut and pasted it into a digital composition he then painted. The federal appeals court said that Koons didn’t need to pay Blanch to do what he did, because of how thoroughly Koons had transformed the photograph.

The court explained that a “transformative” work adds something new to the original work, alters its message or meaning, takes on a different character or furthers a different purpose. It treats the original work as raw material in the creation of new expression, new aesthetics or new insights. Koons’s painting was “transformative” because it made a new statement altogether different from Blanch’s. Whereas Blanch said she was interested in creating an “erotic sense,” Koons explained that he wanted his audience to reassess its experience with commercial products and to consider how mass-marketed images “affect our lives.”

Jonathan Melber / The Huffington Post

Read the entire article HERE

For a street artist whose work is scrupulously shrouded in anonymity to evade detection by the NYPD, Poster Boy’s comeuppance resulted from a puzzlingly sloppy lowering of his guard.

The anti-consumerist guerrilla artist, dubbed New York’s Banksy, was picked up by plain clothed officers on Saturday at an art show in the SoHo area of Manhattan, his presence at the event having been openly proclaimed on a fly leaflet.

It was an invitation that the NYPD could not resist. For months they have been trying to track down the mysterious figure, whose work on the city’s subway system has earned him increasing celebrity or notoriety, depending on your point of view.

His work is a twist on the age-old form of New York subway graffiti.

The city’s zero tolerance policy towards petty crime has long eradicated painted graffiti from the trains themselves, and most graffiti practitioners are now reduced to “scratchiti” where logos are etched into the windows of the carriages.

Poster Boy has taken the reliance on razor blades inherent in scratchiti and put it to much more sophisticated and intriguing use. He realised that the film and product adverts at subway stations are now made with self-adhesive backing, rendering them giant stickers, which can be cut up into bits and remodelled in an echo of a digital mash-up.

So the Hollywood star Alec Baldwin is recast with a red nose and blue tears. The Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt, appearing on a poster advertising Puma shoes, is metamorphosed so that he now lends his name to the fast food chain McDonald’s, with the headline “McDorse the world”.

The anti-consumerist edge is put to even more overt political use in posters such as one for the film Iron Man which is remoulded as Iran = Nam.

More than 400 such interventions in less than a year has earned the artist a large internet following. A short video on YouTube, Spending Time With Poster Boy, has been viewed 785,897 times. He was also featured on an underground art website called Friends We Love, wearing a businessman’s white shirt and tie but with his face pixellated.

Ed Pilkington / The guardian

read the entire article HERE

Bucky Fukumoto is represented in Mexico by Container One

New Work
29th January - 19th February, 2009
Reception for the Artist and Private View - Thursday, 29th January, 6.30 - 8.30pm

Post Box Gallery

7 Howick Place, London, SW1P 1BB
www.postboxgallery.com