ART: Molly Crabapple's World Maker Faire New York 2012 Poster

Illustrator Molly Crabapple, previously featured in a video interview with stated, has created lively and intricate poster art for this weekend’s World Maker Faire 2012 in New York City, which she has posted to her Tumblr.

She describes it as having “Many things hidden within,” so clearly a closer look is required.

The World Maker Faire, part of “New York Maker Week,” will be held today and tomorrow, Sept. 29-30, at the New York Hall of Science in Queens, NY. 

Artist Hazel Dooney: 'Discomfort the Viewer, Not Turn Them On'

stated interviewed artist Hazel Dooney almost two years ago during a period in her life she describes in a post on her blog:

This is my story of the past three years: I went mad. I went bankrupt. My father died from a particularly aggressive cancer. I went mad again, and not just from grief. I stopped painting. I fell ill. I recovered. I started painting again.

Since we spoke with her she has revealed the story of her youth in a difficult-to-read blog post, admitted herself to a psychiatric hospital for a month of treatment, and regained her health. And despite her struggles, she is one of the top 50 traded artists by value in the Australian and New Zealand markets. What is most notable is that she left the gallery system seven years ago, works hard to market her own work, sacrificed a key tool in marketing her own work by leaving Facebook on principle, and yet remains very much in the public eye.

Check out her TED Talk (below), but perhaps more interesting is this video interview with Australian newspaper, The Age.

'Coolness is Everywhere': Josh Rubin, Cool Hunting Founder

Back in 2003, Josh Rubin started Cool Hunting as a personal outlet to share inspirational content he found around the web. Today the site gets nearly 4 million page views per month and produces a lot of original style, design, and tech content.

We heard Josh speak at the Portable Curators Conference on the topic of curation and what is “cool.”

Defining and discussing what is “cool” is probably the least cool thing anyone can do. Any attempt to formulate a complete curatorial process to theorize on what cool is will often sound stiff, square—downright uncool. But Rubin’s open-ended analytical approach toward that exploration and discovery is most decidedly, if pragmatically, cool.

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Doug Aitken's Acid Modernism

The Venice, CA home that artist Doug Aitken shares with Gemma Ponsa is representative of what he calls “Acid Modernism.” It is trippy and mod, with tables that can be played as instruments, secret doors, and walls painted to match the outdoor foliage you see through adjacent windows.

Crazy 4 Kate Kelton's Cult Culture

Kate Kelton pointing to her work at Gallery 1988’s Crazy 4 Cult pop-up show.

Gallery1988 is an LA-based pop culture art gallery. On Thursday, I attended the opening of their very first New York show, Crazy 4 Cult, and the line was around the block of their Meatpacking district pop-up. Fans actually arrived in the morning to hold their place in line. Fortunately, participating artist / actress Kate Kelton was there to let me in, saving me hours of waiting in line.

To get a feel for the culture here, Kate is among the 200 artists in the show. She is known from her prolific appearances in Tic Tac ads over the past decade, and as one of the twins from Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle, but that will change starting Thursday and Friday, August 16 & 17, when the IFC series Bullet in the Face premieres. In the show, she plays, “a pretty fabulous femme fatale,” alongside co-stars Eddie Izzard and Eric Roberts in what is being billed as “the most violent sitcom ever.”

Kate’s work in the Gallery1988 show—like the rest of the art—references cult film. I managed a short exchange with gallery co-owner Jason Karp to learn how he creates so much interest in his openings.

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