Being lovers of both fine art and irreverence, when we stumbled across this amazing project by Melbourne-based artist Thomas Pavitte over at Colossal, we were completely charmed. Unable to find a satisfactorily large connect the dots puzzle, he gave up the search and made his own, a 6,239 dot representation of the Mona Lisa, which he dubs an “unofficial world record.” We’ll say. ”Dot-to-dot drawings are one of the most basic forms of art,” Pavitte writes, “all you need is the ability to count.” Well, we’re not sure if that’s all you need when you’re creating and then completing a 6,239 connect the dots puzzle, but it sure sounds nice, and it looks pretty cool too. Click through for some more pictures and a time-lapse video of Mona’s 9.5 hour (!) creation.
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You may not know the name “Lisa Gherardini Del Giocondo,” but we’re sure you’ve seen her picture. No, she isn’t the latest Jersey Shore cast member — she was, according to the vast majority of art historians, the model who posed for the most famous portrait of all time, Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa. And, as LiveScience reports, researchers may be very close to locating the crypt where Del Giocondo was buried after her death in 1542. A largely intact skull, io9 notes, would enable the creation of a computer-simulated image of what Del Giocondo really looked like. Sadly, nothing short of successful communication with the spirit world will reveal WTF is going on with that look on Mona Lisa‘s face.
1. In an obvious ploy to upstage Alec Baldwin’s news that he’s leaving 30 Rock next year, Tina Fey announced that she is pregnant with her second child while taping an episode of Oprah yesterday: “Who will be my daughter’s family when my husband and I are dead from stress-induced cankers? She must have a sibling.” In all seriousness, perhaps this means that those rumors about the show ending are true. [via Vulture]
2. J. J. Abrams is teaming up with Alive in Necropolis author Doug Dorst to write a novel for Little, Brown, but because this is an Abrams project, there are no details about the top secret plot as of yet. Look for a fall 2012 release on the Mulholland Books imprint. [via NYT]
3. The Grammys is getting a major (and much needed!) makeover: “Men and women will compete head-to-head, some of the more exotic awards like best Native American album and best spoken-word children’s record have been eliminated, and the number of categories has been reduced by more than 30 in the biggest overhaul in the 53-year history of the Grammys.” [via AP]
4. Stone Roses singer Ian Brown and guitarist John Squire reportedly “buried the hatchet” at bassist Gary “Mani” Mounfield’s mother’s funeral and will reunite the band later this year as long as they can get drummer Alan “Reni” Wren on board. [via NME]
5. Javier Bardem is close to signing a deal to play Roland Deschain (“the last living member of a knightly order of gunslingers”) in Ron Howard’s epic, multi-film adaptation of Stephen King’s seven-novel series, The Dark Tower. [via Deadline]
Bonus link: How Does the Mona Lisa Look Without Mona Lisa?
The work of Woodstock, New York-based artist Devorah Sperber is meant to play tricks on you. Using multi-colored spools of thread, she deconstructs familiar images (from pop culture icons like Superman to famous works of art like the Mona Lisa) into what looks like a messy mosaic — until viewed through a clear, acrylic ball set on a pedestal directly in front of the canvas. “At that point there’s a real jolt when your brain has to make an adjustment from what you thought was there to what is there, and the word associated with that jolt is ‘Wow,’” Sperber recently told the American Museum of Natural History’s Rotunda Magazine. “The idea is to directly engage the viewer so they are having an experience of their own brain in action.” Click through to check out a gallery of her work.
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1. Thanks to high-magnification techniques, experts have discovered tiny little letters hiding in the Mona Lisa’s pupils, which should be really exciting news for anyone who has ever wished that the Da Vinci Code was real. [via NYP]
2. Jersey Shore star Jenni “JWoww” Farley is writing an advice book for young girls inspired by The Rules that will cover “secrets on landing a mint guy, staying fresh to death, and kicking the competition to the curb.” [via NYP]
3. This year’s most viral video on YouTube was “Bed Intruder Song,” which had over 60 million views. The rest of the top ten: “TIK TOK KESHA Parody,” Key of Awe$ome; “Greyson Chance Singing Paparazzi”; “Annoying Orange Wazzup”; “The Man Your Man Could Smell Like,” Old Spice; “Yosemitebear Mountain Giant Double Rainbow 1-8-10”; “This Too Shall Pass (Rube Goldberg Machine Version),” OK Go; The Twilight Saga: Eclipse Trailer; Jimmy Surprises Bieber Fan; Ken Block’s Gymkhana Three, Part 2. [via Vulture]
4. Gwyneth Paltrow is returning to Glee as substitute teacher Holly Holliday. In other Glee updates, several cast members have come down with tonsillitis, forcing the show to shut down production. [via LAT]
5. Exciting news for cobblers: Harvey Weinstein has sold an accessories based Project Runway spin-off to Lifetime. [via Deadline]
Bonus link: Read Pam’s Adventures of Jimmy Halpert Comic
Earlier this week, a lone thief wearing a mask broke into the Paris Museum of Modern Art through a window and stole five paintings worth an estimated 100 million euros, or 124 million USD. The paintings included a Picasso, a Matisse, and a Braque. One expert, Alice Farren-Bradley of the Art Loss Registry in London, said the heist “appears to be one of the biggest” ever. This made us curious. Was it? The FBI projects that as much as $6 billion is lost every year to art and culture property crime. Since both art and burglars have been around for as long as we can remember, we decided to take a look at other high-profile art heists throughout history to find out.
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Today at Flavorpill, we wondered whether guerrilla artists eating meatballs out of potholes are madmen or geniuses. We drank our morning joe out of Mona Lisa coffee cup in solidarity with this installation and ogled more pictures taken by the Hubble space telescope. We wondered how good of a speller Marilyn Monroe was (or how awesome of an editor she must have had). We got super bummed to hear that Lily Humphrey/Bass/Van Der Woodsen/Rhodes might have An Illness, and cracked up at the cheesiest guitarists of all time. We were simultaneously impressed and skeeved out by this “chillingly precise” junior version of The Hills and thanked our lucky stars we’ve never gotten such a sassy intern application. (It would also be denied, and posted on the internet.) We were, yet again, disappointed in Courtney. And then we watched a mini-clip to promote the upcoming season of HBO’s True Blood, at which point we got rilly, rilly excitable again. See it after the jump.
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The “Make Art More Awesome” online challenge, with its straightforward prompt to “open up Photoshop, take a famous (or otherwise) piece of art, and make it AWESOME,” has spawned both tasteful and tasteless updates to classic art. Sure, there are crude renditions with the bathroom humor of a middle schooler who just discovered how to use the pen tool. But luckily, there are the clever diamonds in the rough like the animated Pong Mondrian, a Mona Lisa with shifty (dare we say possessed?) eyes, and Whistler’s Stepmother. Here, the best of the bunch, with our top picks in descending order.
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Today at Flavorpill, we were surprised to hear that the Mona Lisa almost took a bath. We wondered if we’d sleep better on a Twitter pillow. We were blown away by these photographs of thousands of soldiers in formation taken by Arthur S. Mole and John D. Thomas. We got the inside scoop on the Apple logo from its designer Rob Janoff. We read about the rarely-discussed negative aspects of the Woodstock Festival. We were excited by the New York Film Festival’s star-lite line-up this year. We read Jeffrey Wells’ scathing review of Inglourious Basterds. We weren’t surprised to discover that the Obama baby boom never happened — do the people who think up these things remember that the economy was tanking? We rocked out to Thomas Pynchon’s playlist (we share a love of The Beach Boys). And finally, we wasted way too much time poring over Mr. Skin’s the Top 100 Celebrity Nude Scenes of all time. Sadly, it’s all ladies…
In case you weren’t around for the original explanation of this recurring feature, the idea is to find cool design stuff that either makes us drool or laugh — or both. If you happen across something that you think deserves a mention here, shoot us an email to tips [at] flavorpill [dot] com. OK, enough foreplay already. Enjoy our five finds for this week after the jump. Read More »
