Visual arts

NFTs shown at the 0X.17 Gallery in lower Manhattan include Bored Apes, CyrptoPunks and other nonfungible token “art.” Everyone knows the best artwork comes with a hashtag and number to let you know just how many similar versions there are out in the world.Photo: Kyle Barr (Gizmodo)The Museum of Modern Art mission statement is to “connect people from around the world to the art of our time.” Unfortunately, it seems like New York’s most prominent purveyor of “thought-provoking art” has some abstract reasons for considering…

The Wildlife Photographer of the Year contest is developed and produced by the Natural History Museum, London. Above, one of the contest’s highly commended images, showing a coconut octopus taking shelter in a shell.Photo: Samuel Sloss/Wildlife Photographer of the YearThis week, the National History Museum in London is previewing its latest collection of the most dazzling and sobering wildlife photos submitted over the past year.For nearly six decades, the UK has played host to the Wildlife Photographer of the Year…

Image: RavensburgerLooking for a satisfying building toy that’s not about stacking colored bricks? GraviTrax instead lets users create sprawling marble runs that send metal balls racing across elevated tracks and through obstacles like inverted loops. This fall, GraviTrax is finally getting electronic elements, allowing for more automation and tracks that, for the first time, can run forever—or at least as long as batteries hold up.Ravensburger is a toy company probably best known for its puzzles and board games, but it…

Cities need to be designed to be more energy efficient, resilient, and affordable. Urban planners today are dealing with challenges that didn’t exist 30 years ago, including more frequent and more extreme weather emergencies. They’re also dealing with the impacts of decisions made long ago, like the prioritization of cars over pedestrians. Urban planning is essential if we want our cities to become more pleasant and safe.The Degrees of the Future 2022 top Urban Planning programs are:Arizona State University | Tempe,…

Let the world envy your overpriced IRL CryptoPunk NFT with a diamond encrusted necklace from Tiffany & Co.It seems like it was just yesterday when NFT proponents were busy trying to justify spending buckets of money on digital collectibles—and spewing tons of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere of our struggling planet—that could largely be seen for free online. But what if everyone could admire your outrageously priced CryptoPunk or Bored Ape encrusted in IRL diamonds? This week, Tiffany & Co. announced its foray…

Image: Good Smile CompanySure, Good Smile could have made a two-armed, two-legged version of da Vinci’s Vitruvian Man, but that’s not what da Vinci sketched. He sketched four arms and four legs, mostly to illustrate human anatomy... but who’s to say he wasn’t also dreaming up the perfect warrior who could suplex Michelangelo’s David in a no-holds-barred wrestling match? Not me, certainly.If you love these figures as much as I do, you can order some of them here—or just go check out more of these wonderful photos.Want more…

Yesterday, Webtoon issued an apology after a New York City ad campaign went viral on Twitter. Kennedy Homan, a Webtoon author herself, took a photo of an ad on a subway platform that read “Comics are literature’s fun side-hustle” next to images from the Webtoon Lore Olympus, the most popular comic on Webtoon with over 1.1 billion views. The tweet, from the Andy Bass author, reads “‘Side-hustle’ my ASS.”When contacted via Twitter DMs for a comment, Homan was more than happy to explain why she was so upset with this…

Two hundred years ago, an earthquake revealed the entrance to a large cave system in southern Spain; sealed within the dark chambers were artworks made tens of thousands of years ago by early modern humans and Neanderthals, our closest relatives. Now, excavations and scientific analyses have revealed the precise age of many of the cave’s artworks and the chronology of the system’s use.The cave is called Cueva de Ardales, and it contains over 1,000 artworks depicting animals, humans, handprints, and abstractions. Though…