Since 2007 photographer Matthias Schaller has photographed raw, abstract paintings. The paintings however are not found on canvas, but rather smeared onto the tools used to craft each work of art—the palettes. His series, Das Meisterstück (The Masterpiece), claims these behind-the-scene objects as portraits of the artist, while also giving a direct insight into the detailed techniques performed by each painter.
Schaller was first inspired to begin his photographic collection during a visit to Cy Twombly’s late studio. During the visit he stumbled upon the artist’s palette, which he discovered to be an accurate reflection of the artist’s paintings. Encouraged to further discover the similarities between palette and painting, Schaller has gone on to photograph over two hundred of these historic portraits. His search has led him to collect palettes from all across Europe and the United States, finding the objects in major museums and private foundations and in the custody of artists’ relatives and collectors. The palettes he’s photographed so far in the series belong to seventy painters from both the 19th and 20th century, and include such artists as Monet, van Gogh, Matisse, and Picasso. To accurately analyze the details from paint hue to brushstroke, Schaller presents the images in large format, each work existing at approximately 190 x 150 cm.
Schaller’s practice focuses on non traditional portraits, which he considers “indirect portraits.” Other subject matter has included children’s rooms in Naples, Italy, 150 Italian opera houses, astronaut suits, and early punk vinyls. Through June 8, the Giorgio Cini Foundation will present Schaller’s Das Meisterstück alongside the Venice Biennale, an exhibition that will focus on 20 of Schaller’s palette photographs. (via Hyperallergic)
Palette of Paula Modersohn-Becker / Palette of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec
Palette of Wassily Kandinsky, 2007, 190x156cm, Copyright: Matthias Schaller,Lenbachhaus, München;
Palette of Claude Monet / Palette of Édouard Manet
Palette of Edgar Degas
Palette of Eugene Delacroix / Palette of Georges Seurat
Palette of J.M.W. Turner, 2013, 190x156cm, Copyright: Matthias Schaller, The Royal Academy of Arts, London;
Palette of Francis Bacon, 2007, 190x156cm, Copyright: Matthias Schaller, Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane, Dublin.
Palette of Cy Twombly, 2007, 190x156cm, Copyright: Matthias Schaller, Collezione Nicola del Roscio, Gaeta;
Palette of Pablo Picasso / Palette of Henri Matisse
Palette of Vincent van Gogh, 2007, 190x156cm, Copyright: Matthias Schaller, Musée d’Orsay, Paris;
BuzzFeed sent pictures of some very American things to their UK office and asked them to guess what the pictures were. There were biscuits and gravy and then there were corn dogs and a crunchwrap supreme from Taco Bell. Very American things.
They also included this picture of Chiefs fans tailgating at Arrowhead last year's home opener against the Titans. A few of the responses from their co-workers are spot-on (and a couple of them are not).
This is the most American thing I have ever seen in my life.
What's happening here is many children are following the wrong dads around because everyone accidentally wore the same outfit.
FOOTBALL!!!!! But not the good type. Looks like a bunch of Kansas fans having a jolly good time with their BBQs and six-packs in the car park before a game. Why in a car park? No fucking idea.
God knows. Republican National Convention?
This is a parking lot grill thing! There's a name for it. It's probably at NASCAR. There are flags and half of them are the stars and stripes. USA! USA! USA!
This is tailgating. It's the most popular sport in America. Occasionally they play a celebratory game of football at the end but people don't care as much about that because you can't eat or drink a football.
Notorious Club Kid Michael Alig comments on social media for a body of work he created while in prison and is exhibiting to the public for the first time. (Photo: Aymann Ismail/ANIMALNewYork)
Photographer Gail Victoria Braddock Quagliata walked every block in Manhattan in search of every last bodega, hoping to snap each one before they’re replaced by 7-11s and luxury condos. According to Hyperallergic, Quagliata began the project while searching for the iconic and elusive Anthora coffee cup. She got acquainted with different bodegas in different neighborhoods and became fascinated with the quirks of each one. So between December 2012 and August 2013, she photographed all 1,900 or so. Even in that short time, she saw many close up. So Quagliata’s project became a tribute to a vital and vanishing part of Manhattan street life. “Losing this anchor, replacing it with something safely homogeneous and starkly corporate, steals an integral piece of the character that makes your neighborhood unique,” she writes on her website, where many more photos can be found. Keep scrolling for some of the most interesting bodegas.
96 yr old: You know how your parents probably say things like, "you were BORN with the internet, you don't know what it's like to live without!"
Me: yeah
96 yr old: Well, my parents said that to me about electricity.
The study’s author, University of Notre Dame economics professor Abigail Wozniak, looked at how hiring practices differ between states with laws that incentivize or encourage drug testing and states with laws that limit or do not require such testing. She found that pro-testing legislation has a “large” and positive effect on black employment and wages, especially among low-skilled black men.
As the chart below shows, enacting pro-drug testing laws improves the share of blacks working in what Wozniak terms high-testing industries, while leading to a decrease in the share of whites working in such industries.
In states that enact anti-testing laws, the opposite proves true: Limiting drug testing appears to hurt black applicants much more than it hurts whites.
The findings imply that companies in states without pro-testing laws are, subconsciously or not, assuming black job applicants are guilty of using illegal drugs until proven innocent. In Wozniak’s opinion, drug testing can therefore help “non-using blacks to prove their status to employers, even as the drug war linked blacks with drug use in the popular imagination.”
“A common assumption is that the rise of drug testing must have had negative consequences for black employment,” Wozniak writes. “However, contrary to what one might expect, the rise of employer drug testing may have benefited African-Americans.”
But in a phone interview with The Huffington Post, Wozniak cautioned against interpreting the study as proof that employers are explicitly discriminating against black applicants.
“The results don’t look like what you would call typical old-school racism,” Wozniak told HuffPost. “The research in the paper suggest that the bias is coming in more subtle ways.”
“Instead of looking really hard at every applicant, they [employers] have these impressions that they go by," she continued. "Testing gives them a rule of thumb that avoids this bias.”
That “rule of thumb” appears to help. A lot. In fact, Wozniak found pro-testing laws increase the share of low-skilled, black men working in high-testing industries by up to 30 percent and raise their wages by 12 percent compared to anti-testing states.
Enacting no laws hurts black candidates too, according to Wozniak's study. When compared to low-skilled, black men in states with no drug testing laws, low-skilled, black men in pro-testing states saw their employment increase by 7-10 percent and their wages increase by 3-4 percent.
Tamar Todd, a senior staff attorney at the Drug Policy Alliance, compared the findings of the study to the disproportionate incarceration rates among black Americans because of the war on drugs. Multiplestudies have found that while blacks and whites in the U.S. tend to use drugs at similar rates regardless of race, blacks are much more likely to be arrested for drug-related offenses.
“It reflects what we know,” Todd said of the new study.
Racial bias has long been known to play some role in the job application process. In 2003, two NBER research fellows published a paper finding that resumes with names that occur frequently among the white population were much more likely to lead to callbacks for an interview than resumes with names that occur more frequently among the black population.
But Maurice Emsellem, a program director at the National Employment Law Project focusing on criminal records and employment, said the answer is not to require more drug testing, but rather "to take aggressive action to limit racial bias in the hiring process."
When companies don’t test for drugs, who is likely to get the job instead of a passed-over black applicant? According to Wozniak’s research, it’s white women. In fact, women as a whole actually appear to be the big losers of pro-testing legislation.
“[T]he impacts of pro-testing legislation are uniformly negative,” Wozniak writes. “High testing industry employment, large firm employment, and benefits coverage all decline for women by about 1.5 percentage points.”
According to 2007 data from the Department of Health and Human Services, 42.9 percent of employees reported that tests for illicit drug or alcohol use occurred at their place of employment during the hiring process.
Wozniak hopes that as a result of her study, people will begin to see drug tests and other available job-search tools not as inhibitors to minorities, but rather as ways for employers to fight their own implicit racial biases.
“Many people may assume that drug testing is harmful and that it makes getting a job more difficult,” Wozniak said. "But I think the evidence is strong that that’s not true for African-Americans.”
Clarification: Emsellem initially told HuffPost that “employers are walking around assuming that somebody has a criminal record," and that drug testing is "dispelling criminal notions." After publication, he clarified his position that he does not support drug testing as a means to prevent racial bias in the hiring process. The article has been updated accordingly.
The ever-inscrutable Aphex Twin—the cool electro name of musician Richard D. James—has, once again, done something inscrutable. As reported by Vulture, he just released a ZIP file containing over 200 songs, which you can download for free at this link. There’s also a YouTube playlist that contains 207 tracks (because kids only listen to music on YouTube these days anyway), which Vulture says was also created by Aphex Twin. There are definitely a lot of tracks in the downloaded file that are also on the YouTube playlist, but since they’re both so long and so many of the songs have names like “prncDMC” or “1.5 Dp5 Beats,” it’s hard to tell if they’re exactly the same. Figuring that out sounds like a good job for someone with a ridiculous amount of time on their hands.
In the early hours of Wednesday morning, the age of robotic graffiti was born. KATSU, a well-known graffiti artist and vandal, used a hacked Phantom drone to paint a giant red scribble across Kendall Jenner’s face on one of New York City’s largest and most viewed billboards. By all accounts, it is the first time that a drone has been deployed for a major act of public vandalism.
In April last year, KATSU made headlines when he demonstrated that he had figured out how to attach a spray can to an off-the-shelf DJI Phantom drone. At the time, he was only using the drone to paint canvasses for white-wall galleries. But he assured the world that soon he would take his mad invention out into the streets and create enormous tags in places that were previously inaccessible to even the most daring and acrobatic taggers. Now, he appears to have made good on his promise in grand fashion.
“It turned out surprisingly well,” said KATSU, whose previous stunts include using a hacked fire-extinguisher to vandalise L.A. MOCA. “It’s exciting to see its first potential use as a device for vandalism,” he added, cheerfully.
The Calvin Klein billboard, one of New York City’s largest, sits at the busy intersection of Houston St and Lafayette St. The graffiti drone’s potential for troublemaking on an unprecedentedly grand scale is obvious. The billboard, which was previously graced by a topless, (perhaps) digitally-enhanced Justin Bieber, is absolutely gigantic, about six stories tall. It would have been almost impossible to tag Jenner’s face using the traditional methods. One could rappel off the top of the building or use a cherry picker, but neither option is exactly safe, or subtle, or quick enough that one could do it without cops on regular patrol spotting it. With the drone, by contrast, it took less than a minute. Still, the artist admitted, “It was a bit tense.” (Needless to say, the stunt was extremely illegal).
As the domestic drone industry grows feverishly, and multicopters like DJI’s Phantom become cheaper and more powerful, artists have been eager to experiment with the technology. It was only a matter of time, then, that people would figure out that the drone has enormous potential for subversive acts on the streets, where defying the laws of gravity is the whole point. Given the enduring privacy, safety, and legal concerns around the technology, conceptually it makes a certain amount of sense that it would find uses at the peripheries of what most people (let alone the law) would consider acceptable. KATSU’s scribble high above SoHo might not look like much, but it represents the potential that drones have to transform graffiti forever.
Graffiti artist Katsu recently debuted a series of paintings made with a spray-paint-wielding drone.Photos by KATSU and The Hole
Still, police departments across the country probably don’t need to start panicking quite yet. This is, after all, graffiti drone 1.0. KATSU said that it can be temperamental and unpredictable, especially when it shifts perpendicular to the surface that its painting. The controls can be twitchy. “Seventy percent of the concentration is in maintaining this equilibrium with the two dimensional surface while you are painting,” he explained. We have a ways to go until drones are capable of autonomously blasting tags while their artist masters relax at home.
But that is the plan, and KATSU’s stunt this week was proof of concept. He is also gearing up to release a new, more user-friendly version of the graffiti drone “very soon.” While he refused to give me too many details, he did say that it would have some element of computer vision to help with stability.
Still, even graffiti drone 1.0 is something to be reckoned with. It has made what was up until yesterday an impossible tag look easy. KATSU himself seems to have been caught a little off guard by how powerful the drone has proven to be. “It’s a bit frightening.”
Slop buckets, when stripped of their smelly context, can make for some visually interesting art.
This anonymous Tumblr, shared on Reddit, hosts a collection of photos apparently taken from the slop bucket (restaurant jargon for “liquid trash receptacle”) of a of a Park Slope restaurant. New photos are uploaded daily.
The results function sort of like On Kawara’s date paintings, documenting the present moment. They’re also fascinating in a way that anyone who examines the tissue after blowing their nose will understand.
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