The fraught business of removing and selling street art murals
Published on CNN, 20th January 2020 (LINK)

Written by Christy Kuesel

This article was published in partnership with Artsy, the global platform for discovering and collecting art. The original article can be seen here.

Banksy is well known for creating murals in the dead of night, frequently addressing social ills like homelessness or poverty. Tourists and fans gather around each of his new creations, often spurred to the site by a post on the anonymous artist's Instagram account. So the idea of removing one of these works from public view and selling it is bound to stir up strong emotions.

"It's against the street art world for items that are done in public to be sold," said Darren Julien, founder and CEO of Julien's Auctions, which specializes in selling pop culture-related items and street art.

Many businesses tagged by a famous street artist may not want the attention, or would rather take the financial windfall that could result from selling the work. The owner of a Valero gas station in Los Angeles certainly benefited from Banksy's creation of "Flower Girl" (2008) on their wall. The work depicts a girl with a basket of flowers staring up into a security camera, and was created late one night in 2008.

Another street artist, Mr. Brainwash, asked the gas station owner if his friend could stencil something on the side of the wall. The work later appeared on Banksy's website. When the owner of the gas station decided to sell the property, he looked into ways to save the mural.

How Julien's Auctions actually got a nearly 8,000-pound hunk of concrete to auction, however, is a bit more complicated. The auction house advanced the seller the $80,000 removal cost, and a construction crew came in and removed the section of wall on which the mural was painted. The 2013 sale of "Flower Girl," which brought in $209,000, was one of the first times the street artist's work had been auctioned in the US.

Sales of street art murals in general are divisive. Artists often object to the transformation of a work they created for public enjoyment into an art object to be bought and sold. Although Julien acknowledged the controversy around selling Banksy murals, he argued, "The other side of it is that [auctions are] really what made them famous."

Aerosols, explained
Tiny particles floating in the atmosphere have a much bigger impact on the planet than you might think, and human activity plays a role.
BY ALEJANDRA BORUNDA for National Geographic

THE MOST VIBRANT sunsets, cloud-choked skies, and cough-inducing days all have something in common: They happen because of aerosols, tiny particles that float in the air. Aerosols can be tiny droplets, dust particles, bits of fine black carbon, and other things, and as they float through the atmosphere they change the whole energy balance of the planet.

Aerosols have an outsized effect on the planet’s climate. Some of them, like black and brown carbon, warm the Earth’s atmosphere, while others, like sulfate droplets, cool it. Scientists think that on balance, the whole budget of aerosols ends up cooling the planet slightly. But exactly how much, and how much that effect can shift over days, years, or centuries is still not totally clear.

What are aerosols?
The term aerosol is a catch-all for many kinds of little bits of stuff that end up suspended in the atmosphere, from the surface of the planet all the way to the edges of space. They can be solid or liquid, infinitesimally small or big enough to see with the naked eye.

“Primary” aerosols, like dust, soot, or sea salt, come directly from the planet’s surface. They get lifted into the atmosphere by gusty winds, shot high into the air by exploding volcanoes, or they waft away from smokestacks or flames. “Secondary” aerosols form when different things floating in the atmosphere—like organic compounds released by plants, liquid acid droplets, or other materials—crash together, culminating in a chemical or physical reaction. Secondary aerosols, for example—make the haze that gives the U.S.’s Great Smoky Mountains their name.

Aerosols come from both natural and human sources—and sometimes both at once. Dust, for example, is scoured from deserts, the dried-out edges of rivers, dry lakebeds, and more. Its concentrations in the atmosphere rise and fall with climate; in cold, dry, periods in the planet’s history like the last ice age, more dust filled the atmosphere than during warmer stretches of Earth’s history. But humans have affected that natural cycle, making some places dustier than they otherwise would be and keeping other areas damp.

Sea salts provide another natural source of aerosols. They’re whipped out of the ocean by wind and sea spray and tend to fill the lower parts of the atmosphere. In contrast, some types of very explosive volcanic eruptions can shoot particles and droplets high into the upper atmosphere, where they can float for months or even years, suspended miles above Earth’s surface.

Human activity produces many different types of aerosols. Fossil-fuel burning produces particles, as well as the well-known greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide—so cars, airplanes, power plants, and industrial processes all produce particles that can collect in the atmosphere. Agriculture produces dust, as well as other things like aerosolized nitrogen products, both of which affect air quality near and far.

On the turntable: Beck, Beatles, Rush (RIP Neil Peart)
Photo: Haight Street, SF (artist unknown)

Several dozen from Portland, Oregon

>NEW< Skam

Voxx

Banksy

Berlin (thanks, Brooklyn Street Art)

mimi the clown (just one; thanks, BSA)

Colombia (just one)

Eclair

fnnch

Jeremy Novy

Haight St., SF

The Mission, SF (just one)

The Tenderloin, SF (just one)

Fight against facial recognition hits wall across the West
The result is an impasse that has left tech companies largely in control of where and how to deploy facial recognition.

By JANOSCH DELCKER and CRISTIANO LIMA (POLITICO)
12/30/2019 05:03 AM EST

Face-scanning technology is inspiring a wave of privacy fears as the software creeps into every corner of life in the United States and Europe — at border crossings, on police vehicles and in stadiums, airports and high schools. But efforts to check its spread are hitting a wall of resistance on both sides of the Atlantic.

One big reason: Western governments are embracing this technology for their own use, valuing security and data collection over privacy and civil liberties. And in Washington, President Donald Trump’s impeachment and the death of a key civil rights and privacy champion have snarled expectations for a congressional drive to enact restrictions.

The result is an impasse that has left tech companies largely in control of where and how to deploy facial recognition, which they have sold to police agencies and embedded in consumers’ apps and smartphones. The stalemate has persisted even in Europe’s most privacy-minded countries, such as Germany, and despite a bipartisan U.S. alliance of civil-libertarian Democrats and Republicans.

Advocates for tighter regulations point to China as an example of the technology’s nightmare potential, amid reports authorities are using it to indiscriminately track citizens in public, identify pro-democracy protesters in Hong Kong and oppress millions of Muslim Uighurs in Xinjiang. Current implementations of the software also perpetuate racial bias by misidentifying people of color far more frequently than white people, according to a U.S. government study released just before Congress left town for Christmas.

“Facial recognition needs to be stopped before a fait accompli is established,” Patrick Breyer, a member of the European Parliament for the Pirate Party Germany, told POLITICO.

"The use of facial recognition technology poses a staggering threat to Americans’ privacy," Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), who is prepping legislation to crack down on the software, said in June.

'We were lawless!' Banksy's photographer reveals their scams and scrapes

Steve Lazarides was the art renegade’s strategist, photographer and minder. As his shots are published [in a self-published book], he recalls the politics, parties and soaring price tags of ‘Matey Boy’

Stuart Jeffries (The Guardian)
Mon 16 Dec 2019 12.54 GMTLast modified on Mon 16 Dec 2019 16.50 GMT

One Christmas, Steve Lazarides and Banksy [his Stencil Archive] decided to kill Santa. “Reject false icons,” read the slogan hastily spray painted across their shopfront, behind a highly festive effigy they had created of Father Christmas dangling from a noose. Dotted around were signs intended to lure passersby into their shop, in the hope that they would join in the party and buy some artworks. The signs, however, may have had the opposite effect. “Santa’s Ghetto,” read one. “Stinking art piss,” read another.

“There were a few complaints about what we did to Santa,” says Lazarides, once Banksy’s right-hand man. “And about the noise. We didn’t care. It was a group show we did every year, so artists could make a little dough and punters could pick up some affordable art for Christmas stockings.”

Lazarides worked with Banksy for 11 rollercoaster years, initially documenting the artist at work back in 1997, then becoming his agent, strategist and even minder. The Christmas art shop had been rented from one of Soho’s last porn barons – but disaster struck. Liquid leaked through from the floor above, soaking an impromptu chandelier made of traffic cones. “I went to investigate,” says Lazarides. “It was a toilet overflowing. The crowd at the party thought it was part of the show. It wasn’t. It was literally stinking art piss.”

The art he and Banksy sold at Santa’s Ghetto was certainly affordable back in the noughties – but it could not be classified as such today. Lazarides recalls carrying armfuls of original Banksy prints to the shop, where they’d shift for £25. “At today’s rates,” he says, “I reckon each armful would be worth about half a million quid.”

One work, called Bomb Middle England, depicted three elderly women playing bowls with balls that had lit fuses coming out of them. In 2007, Sotheby’s sold a version of this image for £102,000, at the time the most ever fetched for a Banksy. It has since been eclipsed, with the title now held by the 2009 painting Devolved Parliament, which went for £8.5m earlier this year.

While Lazarides is happily reminiscing about the Santas of Christmases past, Banksy is on the streets of Birmingham making art about the scandals of Christmas present – in the form of his mural and video of two reindeer pulling, not Santa in his sleigh, but a homeless man called Ryan lying on a bench in the city’s jewellery quarter.

A Lesson in Street Art: how a movement morphed out of graffiti and into the art world (Part I)

By Katherine Keener Published on 9 December 2019 (art-critique.com)

PURPOSE OF THIS LESSON:
Street art is a relatively new movement that is becoming more and more prolific in the art world. In this lesson, we will explore the history of graffiti, which is what street art is born out of, and then explore how street art has become what it is today. Looking at the history of graffiti is critical to understand the nuances of graffiti vs. street art and to understanding the pros and cons of street art as a movement and how artists categorized as street artists have either embraced or responded to the movement. At the end of the lesson, students should have a better understanding of how graffiti paved the way for street art. They should also be able to think critically about an artwork to determine ways in which it is more kin to graffiti or street art.

This lesson is best geared towards secondary or high school level students. Here, we have presented the topic as an art history lesson but it could easily be adapted into a studio art lesson, too.

PART I: HOW GRAFFITI GOT TO THE 21ST CENTURY AND PAVED THE WAY FOR STREET ART

Earliest known cave art by modern humans found in Indonesia
Pictures of human-like hunters and fleeing mammals dated to nearly 44,000 years old

Hannah Devlin (LINK)
Wed 11 Dec 2019 18.00 GMTLast modified on Wed 11 Dec 2019 18.12 GMT

Cave art depicting human-animal hybrid figures hunting warty pigs and dwarf buffaloes has been dated to nearly 44,000 years old, making it the earliest known cave art by our species.

The artwork in Indonesia is nearly twice as old as any previous hunting scene and provides unprecedented insights into the earliest storytelling and the emergence of modern human cognition.

Previously, images of this level of sophistication dated to about 20,000 years ago, with the oldest cave paintings believed to be more basic creations such as handprints.

“We were stunned by the implications of this image,” said Adam Brumm, an archaeologist at the Australian Research Centre for Human Evolution at Griffith University. “This was just mind-boggling because this showed us that this was possibly the oldest rock art anywhere on the face of this planet.”

The painting, discovered in 2017, is one of hundreds in South Sulawesi, including a red hand stencil, which was dated to at least 40,000 years ago. But the latest finding is exceptional as it is more than twice as old as any previously known narrative scenes and hints at ancient myths and an early capacity for imagination.