Obviously, I think this is awesome. But at the same time, I don’t know that I understand this subculture of people who do stuff like this just to receive accolades online. I’m a relatively creative person but I don’t think I’ve ever sat upright in my chair and gone, “I’ve got it! I’m going to make a Mario made out of toast! Oh and with English Muffins for hands!” Sonic the Hedgehog made entirely out of Canadian bacon, sure, but never Toast Mario. But I guess that’s just what separates the winners like Toast Mario from the also-rans. Well, that and 20 pounds of Canadian bacon.

Toast Mario [Imgur]

Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa is arguably the most famous portrait in the world, but now some are speculating that the woman with the inscrutable smile may not be a woman after all. They are suggesting that the Mona Lisa may be a self-portrait, da Vinci in drag.

Italy’s National Committee for Cultural Heritage, a leading association of scientists and art historians, is undertaking the investigation. They think the artist who died in 1519 is buried at a French castle and plan to dig up his skull. Using CSI-style technology, they want to rebuild da Vinci’s face. Will he resemble the mysterious Mona Lisa?

We’re all familiar with da Vinci’s love of riddles from a rather successful succession of books and movies.

“He is interested in symbols, he is interested in puzzles, he is interested in keeping things kind of hidden and this idea about the picture sort of relates to that, that is part of this whole mythologizing of Leonardo as someone who is playing tricks, who is always a step ahead of a viewer, and someone who is making you think of his works in a very different way,” [Jason Rosenfeld, associate professor of Art History at Marymount Manhattan College] says.

This wouldn’t really surprise me at all. Not that I had any inside knowledge or anything but I always wondered why people acted like the Mona Lisa was this amazing painting of a beautiful woman and I thought she looked kind of manly and about as cute as a hypodermic needle full of hepatitis C.

Also how creepy is the Mona Lisa if it really is da Vinci painting himself while dressed in drag? Not for nothing, but a man in the 1400s staring in a mirror and painting himself as he fixes his wig and perhaps tucks his genitals into his tunic doesn’t strike me as a major advancement in art.

[ABC News]

A significant Pablo Picasso painting was damaged after a woman attending art class lost her balance, fell into “The Actor” and tore it, The Metropolitan Museum of Art said.

The unusually large canvas, measuring 77.25 by 45.38 inches (196 by 115 centimeters), sustained a vertical tear of about six inches (15 centimeters) in the lower right-hand corner in the accident on Friday.

The museum, located on the eastern edge of New York’s Central Park, did not elaborate on why the woman fell.

But The Met said the damage did not impact the “focal point of the composition” and that it should be repaired in the coming weeks ahead of a major Picasso retrospective featuring some 250 works at the museum opening on April 27.

Repair work should be “unobtrusive,” it added.

[Yahoo News]

A Brazilian art restorer has discovered a new layer hidden in a centuries-old painting of the Greek god of fertility Priapus by French artist Nicolas Poussin – the deity’s erect penis.

“They hid the phallus of Priapus. It’s what we call adjustment for modesty, and it’s not uncommon,” said Regina Pinto Moreira, quoted in Tuesday’s edition of the Folha de Sao Paulo newspaper.

She suspects the cover-up was made in conservative Catholic Spain in the 18th century.

It does seem to make more sense why he’d have that creepy smile.

In 18th century conservative Catholic Spain’s defense, who hasn’t hid a creepy old man’s erection at some point in their life? We used to do that at Christmas with my grandfather’s leftover tinsel. Outside of a bumpy ride on Santa Claus’s lap, never has childhood trauma been so heartwarmingly seasonal!

[via]

Man, being an artist is some kind of racket. I’m not saying that you needed to be able to be a soothsayer and know that Michael Jackson was going to bleach his skin and get tons more work done and end up looking like a sexy Skeletor, but this is lacking in effort a bit. I could age people in the same manner too, just drawing a fake mustache and frown lines on it. I already do the same thing when I do my yearly “What if so and so were Mexican” illustrations. Though they look suspiciously more like they were done in MS Paint with poorly done images of sombreros and tequila cut and pasted in. It’s art, man, it’s subjective.

[via]

Bonus…check out the classy comments on the source of this photo.

A CHEEKY artist has been given a £20,000 National Lottery grant – to look at girls’ bums.

Sue Williams was given the cash to “explore cultural attitudes towards female buttocks”.

She will create plaster cast moulds of women’s behinds to try to understand their place in contemporary culture.

Swansea-based Mrs Williams, 53, will also examine different racial attitudes towards bums in Europe and Africa. She said: “The project is taking on the issues around the bottom.”

Emma Geliot from the Arts Council of Wales, which awarded the grant, said: “This produces a tee-hee response but there is a serious point.”

Oh there’s a serious point alright…IN MY PANTS. HA! For you see I’m implying that I may have an erection due to the featuring of numerous asses. Jokes are always much funnier when you overexplain them.

I guess there’s probably some validity to studying asses and the sociological implications of them. But I don’t think I’d trust it to some old British lady. If you want an exuberant and thought provoking analysis of the female ass, I’m pretty sure there are countless guys with hidden cameras who’d be more than willing to help you out. They’d probably even pay for it themselves. Then again, they’d quite possibly be too sticky to read. And I don’t think you’d want to lay hands on the plastercast of the asses either. But you should have known what you were getting into when you hired that ass fetish pervert for free then, now shouldn’t you?

[via]

Each year on the boardwalk, thousands of french fries are consumed by beachgoers, snatched by seagulls or tossed in the trash at the end of the day.

But once a year, the truly lucky ones become art.

Entrants in the city’s french fry sculpting contest take paper plates full of deep-fried potatoes and mash them together in previously unimaginable ways to produce oily, high-carb masterpieces.

“Anybody can work in paint or clay,” said Kevin Brown, one of about 150 contestants this year. “But it takes a real artist to work in potatoes.”

[via]

You can find a whole bunch more awesome Peep recreations here. I’m partial to Marion Barry’s arrest, myself.

In related news, I f’ing hate chocolate rabbits and wish they’d all die in a fire. They taste like crap, the chocolate is probably the chocoquivalent of the serfs in a feudal system, and frankly why the f is a bunny Easter’s mascot? Isn’t it because they used to eat rabbits on Easter? And if so, what did the rabbit do to get promoted from “food” to “mascot”? Get naked pictures of Jack Easter, the CEO of Easter? I guess I have a lot of questions even without getting to the issue of Jesus’s zombification.

[whole lot more peepage for you here]

Georgia Max Coffee chose to redesign the toilets of a number of key ski resorts in Japan. The cubicles were fully wrapped on all sides, so that the person caught short would have a ski jumper’s view when they were sitting on the loo. The person could look down at their skis (simply printed on the floor of the cubicle) and see the steep ski jump slope ahead of them. The toilet paper holder carried the only brand messaging in the cubicle, reading: “Seriously kick-ass intensely sweet for the real coffee super zinging unstoppable Max! Taste-explosion!” The message also featured the URL www.maxcoffee.jp, where visitors could view videos of extreme sports as well as sign up to the MAX community.

I love Japan. They’re so creative. But holy crap is it a terrifying thought to be on the toilet and all of a sudden it starts slaloming away. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t be able to maintain my balance, which would not only lead to a dumping of toilet water and feces on my head, but also a ceramic bowl smashing me in the face. So let’s just say I’m hoping my toilet isn’t reading the Internet right now and taking a look at this bit of art-vertising.

Is there anything in Japan that isn’t terrifying though? Vending machines with used schoolgirl panties, girls getting crap on while wearing wedding dresses, tentacle rape monsters running for political office…it’s like my dreams have come to life and created a thriving economy and technology development infrastructure, only with more short people and less delicious penises.

[image, via]

A giant inflatable dog poo has caused chaos, breaking windows and pulling down power lines, after it flew away from an outdoor exhibition.

The artwork by American artist Paul McCarthy blew away from a Swiss museum, living up to its title, Complex Shit.

It was carried 200 metres, leaving a trail of destruction, and breaking windows at a children’s home.

The safety system installed to deflate the giant poo in this kind of incident didn’t work.

Museum director Juri Steiner said the artwork ended up in the grounds of the children’s home.

Perhaps this is a higher power’s way of saying, “Slow down McCarthy, feces is only meant to be so big.” You spat in the faces of the Gods by daring to build a pile of poo that large, my friend. And now they are angry. And vengeful. The first step is the crap destroying a town. Next hail storms of feces will swoop down upon the area around the art. Then everyone around it will begin excreting waste all over themselves. All because you had to be “avant garde”. So thanks Paul. I hope it was all worth it.

Crumbling walls in Italian town Bocchignano are being repaired — with Lego Bricks.

Sporting the denim overalls and checked shirt for this village was German artist Jan Vormann, whose approach centered on finding walls with missing bricks and replacing them with the colorful children’s building material.

The wacky artist was surprised to find how perfect the bricks fit the bill.

“At first I thought it would be a complicated procedure to fit the pieces,” Vormann said. “But as it turned out, the bigger plastic pieces were compatible with the smaller ones, and the Lego held itself in place without any glue whatsoever.”

However, the 25-year-old did admit that the colorful construction could not last forever.

“I tried to apply some glue, but, on the dusty patina of the stone, it would not stick,” Vormann said. “So I decided to just put them up like this, aware of the fact of erosion and the influence of weather.”

You may be shocked to learn that Legos in the brick walls of buildings aren’t a great idea. You may as well repair the walls with positive thinking or hobo cum, all the while making the same “artistic” vision of the temporary nature of life as well as how hard it is to be an artist and not eat the vat of hobo cum you’re using for repairs.

I’m also sick of Lego invading aspect of my life. These buildings, our superheroes, they even have their own independent nation within the United States borders! When do we say “no more”? When Lego Mussolini comes in and demands our blood? We must stop the Lego menace before it destroys us all!

It’s mind-boggling what people can do in the name of art. Punching people in the face as they do silly things, wiping feces in the form of religious icon, it’s just so absurd. I may have missed my calling in life. Sigh, one day my dream of a Voltron made entirely of aborted fetuses will come to fruition. Dream big or go home, that’s my motto.