hidden treasures - other people's work part 2

The Etsy site has about 500,000 sellers according to their documentation. There's some nice stuff, there's some nasty stuff and every so often I'll notice something that's very clever.. not just clever in this case but ingenious. That's quite rare. I thought, just for the heck of it, I'd show you some items an actual famous artist has for sale there. Mark Bryan seems to have a similar viewpoint to me and to many of you which shows quite well in this painting called 'Republic of Amnesia'.

Now I'll show you one of the cellulose phones Mark Bryan has for sale on Etsy:

 

Are there monkeys in your head telling you things you don’t need to hear? Let’s face it, we all hear those guys yammering in the background and sometimes it’s just too much. You can “BE HERE NOW”. It’s time to say no to those monkeys. Breath deep and say to them “Shut the f… up!”

In addition to their fine craftsmanship and subversive message, each Lost Horizon Cellulose phone also comes with a generous service plan and user agreement : Lost Horizon agrees to provide free unlimited minutes for you to talk to your phone until you die. Our guaranteed GPS service will always be ready to tell you that you are right here, right now.

Lost Horizon phones are hand crafted (by my own pet monkey) from wood, paper, glue, a brass hinge, varnish, and one eight penny nail. They are approx. 4” tall, 2” wide and 1.25” thick. Included with each phone is a very nice fabric drawstring bag (again, made by my monkey) to store your phone safely. Your user agreement card fits nicely inside. Lost Horizon phones never require charging in order to function. An active imagination is all you will need.

Lost Horizon phones were designed by artist Mark Bryan (he’s famous) and each one features a print from an original oil painting and is hand signed by him. You may see more of his work at artofmarkbryan.com

Tags editgeekery,gadget,art,cell phone


As it's so well expressed on his website:

Humorologist C.W. Metcalf says humor and laughter do not exist in the absence of sorrow and tears, but co-exist as a balance of sanity. Mark Bryan's iconography, loaded as it is with multiple inferences, has the potential to make us laugh and also think about the frivolities and stupidities committed by so-called "enlightened" human beings . "Sometimes while I'm sketching," says Bryan, "I often feel like I'm taking notes at a dark comedy, but the play never ends, and they won't let us go home."
essay by Nicholas Roukes, Artful Jesters

His phones cost just $36 and I can't believe nobody has bought one yet. I think some people have had their senses of humor surgically removed.

I hope you'll have a look at his paintings and other cell phones. We all deserve a good laugh through the tears.

☀

community property

A couple of weeks ago I posted about Banksy and other graffiti artists who run around late at night decorating urban architecture. I think it's a wonderful idea but not many of us are talented enough or energetic enough to adopt the lifestyle. Admittedly too, many examples of graffiti are little more than the results of unsightly vandalism or gang tags. So I began to wonder what an ordinary person could do to become an active participant in a form of subversive cultural protest without the likelihood of getting arrested? It was then that I discovered guerilla gardening.

Gardening on public or vacant land has been around for a long time but in the past few years it's become an international underground (☺) movement ever since Richard Reynolds wrote a book about his efforts. It began with him creeping out late at night from his apartment in East London, digging little holes, and popping in plants he'd grown on his windowsill. Here he is to tell you himself:



What all attempts at guerrilla gardening have in common is a deep challenge to relations to property. If the gardening isn’t illicit, if it isn’t on someone else’s land without their permission, then it isn’t guerrilla – it’s just gardening. I'm off to make my first seed bomb. Now is a good time to reface the planet one GARDEN at a time

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