Hoax Museum Blog: Art

Underwater Basket Weaving — I can't remember why I searched for "Underwater Basket Weaving" on wikipedia, but when I did I was surprised to discover that it's a real craft. I had frequently heard the phrase used in college as a joke to mean an easy class, and it always made me imagine people submerged in a swimming pool trying to weave a basket. I never thought it was something real. But turns out it is real. Wikipedia defines it as: I'm assuming that Wikipedia's definition is correct. After all, it sounds reasonable. But it made me wonder how the term came to mean an easy class, and whether any colleges actually offer Underwater Basket Weaving.

The second question is the easiest to answer, since the Wikipedia article also states that: "The University of California, San Diego's recreation department first offered an underwater basket-weaving class in 1984. Saint Joseph's College in Indiana offers this class as well."

I want to verify that UCSD and St. Joseph's actually do offer such a course. But assuming they do, do any other colleges offer it? I'm not sure. All I can say is that I've never seen it listed in any college catalog. (Wikipedia links to an Underwater Basket Weaving syllabus supposedly offered by the University of Portsmouth, but the syllabus reads like a joke, so I'm guessing it is a joke.)

The earliest reference to the term that I could find, searching on Newspaper Archive, was May 9, 1960. The author of a Pasadena Independent trivia column noted that "Son Herbert reports that underwater basket weaving is all the rage among college students who want to spare the brain cells." So evidently the joke had been well established by 1960. I would guess the origin of the term dates to the late 1950s. Did the joke start after a college actually began offering this course? I don't know, but it seems possible.

Elevator Illusion — The floor of this elevator, in Taiwan, is painted to look as if there is no floor, just the lift shaft.

As someone who's terrified of heights, I would need to be crowbarred into this lift. There's not a chance of me voluntarily travelling in it - it would freak me out too much. Yes, I'm a wuss.

(Thanks, Charybdis.)

Quick Links: Banyan Tree Gets Police Protection, etc. — Banyan Tree Gets Police Protection
A century-old banyan tree in Jakarta has been given police protection after a group of youths attacked it to prove it had no mystical powers.

Parents Kidnap Bride-To-Be
The day before her wedding, Julianna Redd's parents told her they were taking her on a shopping trip. Instead, they drove her 240 miles to Colorado and held her there until after the wedding was supposed to take place.

3D Studies of the Mona Lisa
New 3D studies of the Mona Lisa have led scientists to be able to pinpoint more precisely the date it was painted.

Common Job Scams
A brief rundown of some of the most common job scams.

(Thanks, Accipiter.)

Quick Links: Itsy Bitsy Imposter, etc. — Itsy Bitsy Imposter
Paul Vance, co-writer of the song 'Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini' was slightly startled to read his own obituary - the result of an imposter.

Robot Art Goes On Display
A Portugese artist has devised a robot that creates its own paintings.

Teddy Bear Causes 2,500 Trout Deaths
A teddy bear that fell into a pool at a Fish and Game Department hatchery earlier this month clogged a drain, and suffocated a large number of trout in New Hampshire.
A written warning has been given: "RELEASE OF ANY TEDDY BEARS into the fish hatchery water IS NOT PERMITTED."

(Thanks, Accipiter.)

Microscopic Art — Alex from Colombia forwarded me these pictures of microscopic art. The pictures come with this caption: Yes, it's all true. The artist's full name is Willard Wigan. You can check out his website.

Incidentally, Wigan is not the only micro-sculptor around. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles has, for quite a few years, had a display of the microminiatures of Hagop Sandaldjian. Worth checking out if you're ever in the area. The MJT website notes that Sandaldjian also developed a technique for working between heartbeats:

Quick Links: Magic Goats, etc. —
Murdered goat turns into man
Here's an original alibi: What I killed was a goat, Officer. Then that goat magically transformed into my brother. I'd like to see this excuse appear in an episode of CSI.

Man, 29, passes for toddler
Mark Coshever flew from Britain to Amsterdam using his two-year-old daughter's passport. Airline staff never noticed. He must have a babyface.

Fifth grader generates glass pieces from her head
"The phenomenon started when Sarita fainted one day after which she began to bleed from the forehead and a sliver of glass came out. However, the wound healed soon after that, leaving no scars." She's a sure bet at the school talent show.

Blind man claims Hitler paintings are fake
It's not the controversy I'm interested in as much as the idea of a blind art critic. He decided the pictures were fake by getting "somebody to write the signatures from the Jeffery’s paintings on a bit of paper, with my hand gently leaning over theirs."

Germany's Declaration of Surrender for sale
Chuck Loesch claims to have the first official declaration of Germany's surrender. And he's trying to sell it on eBay for $100,000. It's a teletype message that reads "Germany has just uncoditoinally surrendered." (Spelling mustn't have been their strong suit.) Just one problem. The message is dated April 28. Germany surrendered on May 7.

Suri’s Bronzed Baby Poop — Daniel Edwards, creator of the controversial statue of Britney Spears giving birth on a bear-skin rug, has gone one step further with his new sculpture.
Entitled Suri's Bronzed Baby Poop, it is a homage to Tom Cruise and Katie Holmes' new baby, and her... well, poop.

The piece is set to be auctioned on Ebay, to raise money for charity, but the auction appears to have been taken down.

(Thanks, Jen.)

Flower Urinals — Kathy Johnston sent along a link to these pictures of artistic urinals created by urinal sculptor Clark Sorensen. (I would love to be able to tell people at cocktail parties that my job was a 'urinal sculptor'.) Yes, they're real urinals, although I don't know if they're actually installed and being used anywhere. Check out more examples of Sorensen's art at clarkmade.com. I think a fake fly would be the ideal addition to his urinals.

Han van Meegeren Biography — The Guardian has a review of a new biography of the notorious art forger Han van Meegeren. The biography, by Frank Wynne, is titled I Was Vermeer: The Legend of the Forger who Swindled the Nazis. Van Meegeren, who was driven to a career in forgery by anger at being ignored by the art establishment, ended up becoming fantastically wealthy from his career in deception, before his downfall: I believe that an authentic van Meegeren fake is now worth a huge amount of money. There's actually a lot of demand for authentic fakes by well-known forgers (i.e. fakes that have a history of actually having fooled people). This, of course, has inspired a second-tier of forgers to create fake fakes.

Canned Art — Kathy forwarded me these pictures of sculptures made entirely from cans. She notes that: "It says 'stacked can art' but I can't see how some of these are not glued together. How could they stand up that well, unless they got glued together?"

I agree. There's no way glue hasn't been used in some of these sculptures. Particularly the one of the butterfly, in which a few of the cans appear to be totally unsupported. The sculptures were created for the Canstruction Contest, which is a contest sponsored by the Society for Design Administration for the Design and Construction Industry. According to the contest blurb: So they say that the sculptures are made entirely out of canned foods, but they don't claim that no glue was used. Therefore I'm assuming that glue is permissible. Many more examples of Canned Art can be viewed at the Canstruction Slideshow.

Huge Sculptures — Tamakia Gant asks: "Are these real? They look so amazing!!!"

Yeah, they are pretty cool. And they are real (real sculptures, not real people!) They're the work of Australian hyper-realist sculptor Ron Mueck. According to the Wikipedia entry about him, "Mueck's sculptures faithfully reproduce the minute detail of the human body, but play with scale to produce disconcertingly jarring visual images."

Fake Konrad Kujau Fakes — Konrad Kujau was the forger responsible for creating the Hitler Diaries. After he served his prison sentence, he became something of a minor celebrity in Germany, and his "authentic fakes" of famous paintings became sought after in their own right by collectors. Kujau died in 2000, but now his great-niece, Petra, has been charged with selling hundreds of fakes of his fakes. The Times reports that:

Petra Kujau, 47, faces fraud charges for selling at least 500 fake Kujaus to clients worldwide through an internet auction site for more than €550,000 (£381,000). Some of the oil paintings, bought from art schools in Asia for as little as €10 apiece, fetched up to €3,500 because the Kujau signature inflated their value.

I wonder if these fake Kujau forgeries will now also become collector's items? I wouldn't mind having one to hang in my office, but only if I can get it for €10, not €3,500.

Painted Room Illusions — These photos show rooms painted in such a way that, if you stand in the correct place, a pattern will appear. Despite looking photoshopped, they are real. The painted rooms are the creations of artist Felice Varini. On his website you can find more examples of his art if you search around long enough (and struggle through the incredibly bad navigation). Varini writes:

The painted form achieves its coherence when the viewer stands at the vantage point. When he* moves out of it, the work meets with space generating infinite vantage points on the form. It is not therefore through this original vantage point that I see the work achieved; it takes place in the set of vantage points the viewer can have on it. If I establish a particular relation to architectural features that influence the installation shape, my work still preserves its independence whatever architectural spaces I encounter. I start from an actual situation to construct my painting. Reality is never altered, erased or modified, it interests and seduces me in all its complexity. I work "here and now".

I have no idea what that's supposed to mean, but the illusions are pretty cool. (Thanks to Eric Kimlinger for sending me a link to the photos.)

Hoax Cartoons — Here's a couple of hoax-related cartoons. The first one was found by my wife in yesterday's paper:


This next one was found by Big Gary on Yahoo. (It refers to Sony's fake graffiti.)

Extra Virgin Mary — I'm about five days late posting this, but better late than never. An advertisement for an "Extra Virgin Mary Statue" slipped by the editors of the conservative Catholic magazine, America. The advertisement offered "a stunning ... statue of the Virgin Mary standing atop a serpent wearing a delicate veil of latex." The "delicate veil of latex" was a blue condom. America's editors didn't examine the accompanying photo closely enough to realize this. And so the ad ran in the December 5 edition. People who contacted the seller were told the ad was meant "as an assault on Catholic faith and devotion." I don't know who the artist was who created the ad. Maybe it was Banksy.

Fantastic Eggs — Alejandro from Colombia sent in these pictures that are circulating via email with the subject "Huevos Fantasticos" (or "Fantastic Eggs" in English). He asks, "Are these things real?" Well, I'm pretty sure they are real. I think they're examples of carved ostrich eggs. Do a google image search for "carved ostrich egg" and you'll come up with plenty of other examples. However, I don't know who the artist is responsible for these specific carvings.

Monkey Art Fools Expert — Dr. Katja Schneider, director of the State Art Museum in Moritzburg, has been embarrassed by mistaking a painting done by Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp, for a work by the late Ernst Wilhelm Nay:

The director of the State Art Museum of Moritzburg in Saxony-Anhalt, Katja Schneider, suggested the painting was by the Guggenheim Prize-winning artist Ernst Wilhelm Nay. "It looks like an Ernst Wilhelm Nay. He was famous for using such blotches of colour," Dr Schneider confidently asserted. The canvas was actually the work of Banghi, a 31-year-old female chimp at the local zoo. While Banghi likes to paint, she is not able to build up much of a body of work as her mate Satscho generally destroys her paintings before they can get to the gallery. But this one survived long enough to give Dr Schneider a red face. "I did think it looked a bit rushed," she told Bild newspaper.

Of course, this isn't the first time monkey art has fooled an expert. The classic case occurred in 1964 when newsmen from Sweden's Göteborgs-Tidningen obtained some paintings by Peter, a four-year-old chimp at the Boras zoo. They hung the paintings in a gallery, claiming they were the work of avant-garde artist Pierre Brassau. And soon the works were drawing critical acclaim. One critic wrote: "Brassau paints with powerful strokes, but also with clear determination. His brush strokes twist with furious fastidiousness. Pierre is an artist who performs with the delicacy of a ballet dancer."

Unfortunately I haven't been able to find examples posted online of the art of either Banghi or Pierre Brassau.

Cooling Down With David — Maybe some city really did sponsor the urban art project depicted below. But I doubt it. It definitely looks photoshopped to me. There must be an original David-free version of this picture floating around somewhere.
Update: The fountain is real. It's the Crown Fountain designed by artist Jaume Plensa in Chicago's Millennium Park. But the image of David is fake. The Millennium Park website explains:

The fountain consists of two 50-foot glass block towers at each end of a shallow reflecting pool. The towers project video images from a broad social spectrum of Chicago citizens, a reference to the traditional use of gargoyles in fountains, where faces of mythological beings were sculpted with open mouths to allow water, a symbol of life, to flow out. Plensa adapted this practice by having faces of Chicago citizens projected on LED screens and having water flow through a water outlet in the screen to give the illusion of water spouting from their mouths. The collection of faces, Plensa's tribute to Chicagoans, was taken from a cross-section of 1,000 residents.

In other words, it would be possible to project an image of Michelangelo's David onto the tower, but it doesn't sound as if this has ever been done.

Update: This image comes from a Fark photoshop contest. It was created by a Farker named gigglechick.

The Grafton Portrait of Shakespeare — The National Portrait Gallery has reported that the Grafton portrait, long thought to depict Shakespeare as a young man, doesn't depict him at all. They don't know who the guy in the painting is. The portrait apparently served as the inspiration for the portrayal of Shakespeare in the movie Shakespeare in Love.

So the Grafton portrait will now join the Flower portrait (revealed to be a nineteenth-century fake earlier this year) in the category of "portraits of Shakespeare that don't actually show Shakespeare." My hunch is that all the depictions of Shakespeare are unreliable. We'll never know what he looked like.

MIDI or Virtuoso? — Reverent.org has an interesting quiz that challenges you to tell the difference between music played by a computer and music played by a human virtuoso. Most people will probably find it pretty easy. I, however, scored only 63%. I mistook Rachmaninov for a computer (among other errors).