Every serious operator of the Bad Art Detector™ should know how to recognize kitsch. Not because kitsch is necessarily bad, but because it is one of the great shape-shifters of visual culture. It can be ugly, beautiful, sincere, ridiculous, sentimental, nostalgic, commercial, or all of the above at the same…
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The series of paintings String Theories begins with a simple premise: everything is connected, although the evidence is rarely conclusive. These paintings occupy the uneasy territory between order and disorder, geometry and gesture, calculation and intuition. Blocks of color establish a kind of architectural framework—rectangles, fields, compartments, planes and boundaries—while…
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The “Analog Revolution” is interesting because it isn’t really a rejection of technology. It’s more like a rebellion against the disappearance of physicality, friction, skill, limitation, and human participation. The things being rediscovered aren’t necessarily “better”—they’re things that became unnecessary, then oddly desirable. Photography and visual arts are probably the…
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The PVS59 Pre-Visualization Scope has finally arrived to solve one of the great unresolved problems of contemporary image-making: apparently, looking at something and deciding how to photograph it was not complicated enough. Designed for artists, photographers, cinematographers and other people who have somehow managed to avoid the comforting simplicity of…
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There are moments in life that don’t feel like they happened years ago. They feel like they happened in another lifetime. On March 8, 1983, I stood in the crowd at The Old Lady On Brady in Tulsa, Oklahoma watching the Stray Cats tear through a set that permanently rewired…
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This is the absolute latest instructional release from the Illegal Art Department, where even the most respectable educational charts have a habit of wandering into questionable territory. Three meticulous diagrams present a man and woman side-by-side, their facial proportions carefully mapped with all the reassuring authority of a vintage drafting…
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Some people find money in parking lots. Some find car keys. Every now and then someone gets lucky and discovers a winning lottery ticket. I found government paperwork. It was lying face down in the August sun, halfway between an oil stain and a crushed convenience store cup. The paper…
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The French curve was invented to solve problems, not create them. It is an obedient servant of engineers, architects, and draftsmen—a cold piece of steel that promises perfect, repeatable curves with no surprises and no opinions. It exists to eliminate human error. That seemed like an excellent place to begin.…
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Directly from the Illegal Art Collection, Mommy Kommies is a completely unofficial public service campaign dedicated to protecting free thought from the irresistible lure of fashionable certainty. Presented in the stark visual language of mid-century propaganda, these posters celebrate the drab and inevitable ending of big promises made — not…
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Rude Boy 
The Artist 
Eric Hatheway 
Dirque du Soleil