> I sometimes think about Paul McCartney. People always say, “Oh, Paul McCartney, he sold out. He writes popular music.” Paul McCartney is as true to himself as John Lennon was true to himself. They just had different interests. One of the things that I find is that I tend not to be very good at making commercial Hollywood movies. Every time I try, I fail, because I don’t understand them. I worked with Denzel Washington and he understands how to make a good Hollywood movie. He understands what the audience is thinking and wanting and knows how to do that without being crass. It’s an art; it’s a skill. It’s just a question of what your goal is. I do think about what I want from the second half of my life. I don’t know what I want to do…

As someone else said, "They’re sort of adorably snobby."

Dorian Lynskey:

Ten days ago a concert-goer at the Cedar Cultural Centre in Minneapolis made the mistake of shouting out a sarcastic request for the Knack's 1979 hit My Sharona towards the end of a show by Georgia indie-rocker Bradford Cox's Atlas Sound project. For his sins he was rewarded with a dissonant, hour-long, "death trance" version during which Cox free-associated spoken-word lyrics about "the death of folk music, the passing of time, and the ends of our lives", invited the heckler to remove his clothes, and repeatedly shouted: "This is what happens when you make requests." Some fans fled the venue, aghast. One reviewer fretted: "Atlas Sound at the Cedar was unforgettable, definitely, but it's disappointing that it was for strange reasons."

Good art is a kind of magic. It does magical things for both artist and audience. We can have long polysyllabic arguments about how to describe the way this magic works, but the plain fact is that good art is magical and precious and cool. It’s hard to try and make good art, and it seems to me wholly reasonable that good artists should be concerned with their work’s cultural reception.

Over the last few years, I've been collecting examples of metagames — not the strategy of metagaming, but playable games about videogames. Most of these, like Desert Bus or Quest for the Crown, are one-joke games for a quick laugh. Others, like Cow Clicker and Upgrade Complete, are playable critiques of game mechanics. Some are even (gasp!) fun.

Video games are art, just not in the way we would traditionally think of or perceive. Perhaps not a high art, but art nonetheless. It is true that no video game has ever been considered to be on par with any great work of art, and I believe none can be deemed as such, for now. It’s a young art form. And I’m sure that if Roger were asked that same question with regards to film, when movies where merely nickelodeon pieces, he’d say the same thing.

But year after year in late summer, a small city rises on this ancient lakebed in the Black Rock Desert, in Pershing County in northwestern Nevada. It’s the annual event — or festival, or party — known as Burning Man, an eight-day experiment in self-expression and self-reliance that is now one of the most notorious cultural events in North America.

In 1969 Dali was approached by Spanish confectioners Chupa Chups to design a new logo, and the result became as instantly recognisable as his melting clocks. Dali incorporated the Chupa Chups name into a brightly coloured daisy shape. Always keenly aware of branding, Dali suggested that the logo be placed on top of the lolly instead of the side so that it could always be seen intact.<br />
Eye-catching, bold and deceptively simple, the logo has barely changed since Dali created it.

A book printed through a printing chain made of four desktop printers using four different colors and technologies dated from 1880 to 1976. A production process that brings together small scale and large scale production, two sides of the same history.

I set myself a half-day project to write music specifically for shuffle mode – making use of randomness to try and make something more than the sum of its parts. The ever-brilliant Russell Davies (who works a few desks away at the BRIG) sowed the seed of the idea in my head around January 2011.

Imagine a book—in this case the 1934 novel The Street of Crocodiles, a surrealistic set of linked stories by the Polish Holocaust victim Bruno Schulz—whose pages have been cut out to form a latticework of words. The result is a new, much shorter story and a paper sculpture, a remarkable piece of inert, unclickable technology: the anti-Kindle. Reading it is a little like going through an FBI document full of blacked-out passages, except that the excised portions are now holes through which you get glimpses of subsequent text. The format slows your eye down (though it helps if you slightly lift the page you’re on), but the book is so brief that it can still be read in half an hour.

A phantom with a stencil and a can of spray paint, maybe the premier "Guerrilla Street Artist" in the world, Banksy is almost impossible to find, but his work is everywhere. And he makes people very, very happy.

How do we see the world around us? The Penguin on Design series includes the works of creative thinkers whose writings on art, design and the media have changed our vision forever. Bruno Munari was among the most inspirational designers of all time, described by Picasso as ‘the new Leonardo’. Munari insisted that design be beautiful, functional and accessible, and this enlightening and highly entertaining book sets out his ideas about visual, graphic and industrial design and the role it plays in the objects we use everyday. Lamps, road signs, typography, posters, children’s books, advertising, cars and chairs – these are just some of the subjects to which he turns his illuminating gaze.

"The Story of Art", one of the best-known and best-loved books on art ever written, has been a world bestseller for over half a century. Professor Gombrich's clear and engaging text combines with hundreds of full-colour illustrations to trace the history of art in an unfolding narrative, from primitive cave paintings to controversial art works of the present day.

Arcology, a portmanteau of the words "architecture" and "ecology",[1] is a set of architectural design principles aimed toward the design of enormous habitats (hyperstructures) of extremely high human population density. These largely hypothetical structures would contain a variety of residential, commercial, and agricultural facilities and minimize individual human environmental impact. They are often portrayed as self-contained or economically self-sufficient.

We consistently hear from the Argo-bloggers that the most difficult part of blogging is the visual component – telling your stories in pictures as well as words. It’s hard even before we get to the many legal and ethical pitfalls that most folks haven’t been trained on how to avoid. But we also know how incredibly valuable images are for storytelling, comprehension, punctuation, humor, delight and many, many other things. So each blogger has to figure out a strategy for acquiring and using images.

These are lovely; Far, Far Away – three prints by Andy Helms from the original trilogy, $15 each or $40 for the set. One day I’m going to get fed up with these minimalist works, but that day isn’t today:

Modernist Cuisine is a six-volume, 2,400-page set that is destined to reinvent cooking. The lavishly illustrated books use thousands of original images to make the science and technology clear and engaging.

Interactive video built in HTML5 and featuring music from Arcade Fire.

"Hang your favorite book on the wall with the complete text, arranged to depict a memorable scene from the book!" http://postertext.com/

Michael Jackson’s 1983 “Thriller” remains the most popular music video of all time: a 14-minute horror spoof that changed the business. Behind the scenes it gave its star a temporary home with director John Landis, sparked a near romance with actress Ola Ray, and revealed how damaged the young pop idol already was.

"A creator, such as an artist, musician, photographer, craftsperson, performer, animator, designer, videomaker, or author - in other words, anyone producing works of art - needs to acquire only 1,000 True Fans to make a living."

Comedian Harry Hill discusses his unusual paintings: "Being an artist is a higher calling than a comedian, because the comedian has to respond to his or her audience. In comedy I've had many jokes which I thought were really funny, but if the audience doesn't laugh, you end up having to drop them. An artist can do what he or she likes. You may not sell many paintings, but you're still an artist."

"Jason Rohrer's solitary and stubborn quest for a future in which pixels and code and computers will make you cry and feel and love."