Smile Smile Smile

On way to Basel tomorrow and am packing (in a suitcase a quarter of the size of the one I brought to Venice - I'm learning). Listening to Jayson Musson's incredible CVS Bangers mix which I recommend immensely. I've know him since his Plastic Little days, put him in my last book and am very very proud in a show at Grimm Museum back in 2010 (the first time his alter ego Hennessey Youngman had a gallery outing I might add). The mix cannot help but make you smile - in a magic FM in a taxi on the way home in 4am kind of way - and inspired this little blog of smiley art.

Artists images from top to bottom - Eddie Peake, Richard Jackson, Shoplifter aka Hrafnhildur Arnardottir, Alisdair Frost

Open Sesame, Open Source

I did a talk last night for Its Nice That magazine on open source art projects, alongside amazing graphic designer Ken Garland. Its was really enjoyable and enlightening (and I'm never going to look at political graphics in the same way again).

In hommage to the open source sense of collaboration and information access here is a list of all the links and subjects I discussed:

Roland Barthes ‘The Death of the Author’ 1968

Hennessey Youngman on Relational Aesthetics

Introduction to net.art (1994-1999) by Natalie Bookchin and Alexei Shulgin

Olia Lialina 'My Boyfriend Came Back From The War' 1996

Douglas Davis' The World's First Collaborative Sentence' 1994

Natalie Bookchin 'Mass Ornament' 2009

Graffiti Research Lab at Ars Electronica, Linz (complete with a dose of Alicia Keyes)

Hackteria www.hackteria.org

Oliver Laric 'Missile Variations' 2009

Aleksandra Domanovic 'Nineteen Thirty'

Relational What?

The video above is the latest from Hennessy Youngman aka Jayson Scott Musson who I showed at Syncopation in Berlin last October and who is one of the artists in my next book out in August. He's so bloody talented and this video is spot on.

Hennessy Youngman

A great Philly based artist Jayson Musson (who will be in my next book) has started an internet alter ego telling the art world how it is... Hennessy Youngman. Watch and laugh.