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OOP 7.29.07.:

Leonard Cohen No.2, Joe Strummer No.1, Hank Williams No.3, Nina Simone No.2, Frank Black No.2, RZA No.2, Albert Ayler No.1, Serge Gainsbourg No.2, Django Rheinhardt No.1, Williams Shakespeare, Jean Michel Basquiat Crown, David Lynch No.2, Walken 3, Bette Davis No.1, Spalding Gray No.2, Steve McQueen, Vincent Price, John Cassavetes No.1, David Cronenberg No.1, Bette Davis, Casa blanca, Agent Cooper, Hitchcock No.1, Katharine Hepburn No.1, Werner Herzog No.1, Jim Henson, Clara Bow No.2, Claudette Colbert No.2, Marlene Dietrich No.1, Orson Welles No.2, Louise Brooks No.1, Werner Herzog No.2, Lauren Bacall No.1, Isabella Rossellini, Lavar Burton, George Carlin No.2, Don Knotts, Lord Buckley, C.S. Lewis, Rene Magritte No.2, D.H. Lawrence, Lenny Bruce No.2-4, Gilles Deleuze No.1, Robert Creeley No.1, Walt Whitman No.2, Gabriel Garcia Marquez No.3, Henry Miller No.2-3, Herman Hesse No.2, Johnny Carson, Phyllis Diller, Larry David, Anais Nin No.3, William Carlos Williams No.2, Franz Kafka No.2, Noam Chomsky No.2, Stephen Biko, Emma Goldman, MLK Jr. No.1, Roland Barthes No.1, Franz Bopp, ee cummings no.1, Fyodor Dostoevsky No.2, Marcel Duchamp No.2, Williams S. Burroughs No.3, Robert Rauschenberg No.1, Jean Cocteau No.1, Lawrence Durrell No.2, Gertrude Stein No.1, Samuel Beckett No. 2-3, Robert E. Howard, Ralph Waldo Emerson No.2, W.H. Auden No.2, P.K. Dick No.2, Virginia Woolf No.1, Pablo Neruda No.1, Charles Bukowski No.2-3, Robert Southey, John Steinbeck No.2

Candida Höfer's photographs of libraries are sober and restrained – the atmosphere is disturbed by neither visitors nor users, especially as she forgoes any staging of the locations. The emptiness is imbued with substance by a subtle attention to colour, and the prevailing silence instilled with a metaphysical quality that gives voice to the objects, over and above the eloquence of the furnishings or the pathos of the architecture.

This sumptuous volume contains Höfer’s famously ascetic images of the British Library in London, the Escorial in Spain, the Whitney Museum and the Pierpoint Library in New York, the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris, the Villa Medici in Rome and the Hamburg University Library, among others.

Umberto Eco introduces the collection with a witty reflection on the role of libraries in all our lives.

Almost completely devoid of people, as is Höfer’s trademark, these pictures radiate a comforting serenity that is exceptional in contemporary photography.

Candida Höfer was born in Eberswalde, just north of Berlin, in 1944. She was a student at the Düsseldorf Academy of Art from 1973 to 1982, and studied film under Ole John before going on to study photography under the tutelage of Bernd Becher. Since 1975 she has taken part in numerous group exhibitions and held countless solo shows, and is now considered one of the greats of the current international photographic and art community. Thames & Hudson published Candida Höfer: A Monograph in 2003.
Umberto Eco is a philosopher and professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna. His novel The Name of the Rose is an international bestseller.

Also of interest
Candida Höfer A Monograph
Basic Forms of Industrial Buildings by Bernd Becher
The Most Beautiful Libraries of the World
No Man’s Land: The Photography of Lynne Cohen

via Thames & Hudson 

There are so many more you should see:  Chema Madoz Photography 

The exhibition, only showing at the National Museum of Scotland in Edinburgh, will offer visitors a new and intimate perspective on Picasso the man, the artist and the icon.

Drawing from the collections of international organisations and private owners, Picasso: Fired with Passion is one of two in-depth exhibitions that will bring Picasso to Edinburgh, showcasing the different aspects of this world-famous artist. The National Galleries of Scotland’s Picasso on Paper will feature prints, drawings and illustrated books dating from the early 1900s to the 1950s.

The Museums’ exhibition reveals the artist’s work from 1947 to 1961, a significant period of his life when he was working at Vallauris and Cannes in southern France. Over 100 objects, including outstanding examples of ceramics, metalwork, painting and lithography, will be on display, and it is the first significant showing of his ceramics in the UK for over a decade.

Picasso: Fired with Passion offers an intimate glimpse into Picasso’s family life, and his friendships with contemporaries, such as the French artists Jean Cocteau and Georges Braque as well as acclaimed photographer Lee Miller and surrealist painter, poet, and historian Roland Penrose. There are personal objects and photographs, revealing the connections between his private life and his artistic career, which capture the joie-de-vivre of post-war Europe and an important time in the artist’s family life.

via artdaily 

The piece above, a collaboration between JR and BLU is part of "Planet Prozess", a massive urban art event now taking place in Berlin.

For the organizers:

"(...)The participating artists place a special emphasis on the conjunction of internal and external space. The exibition will be a dynamic process whereby the Artists develop their work over the three weeks. For one month the former Senatsreservenspeicher, situated at the Spree, will become the nerve center connecting all artistic processes. “Planet Prozess” invites the public to join the creation-process every day of the exhibition; to meet the artists and to discover the variety of urban creation and communication. Participating and observing, the public can experience the diversity of street writing, graffiti or other forms of urban expression.

After 21 days the creative process comes to an end. We are going to celebrate the results with a Block Party and a second Opening. The works will be on show for another ten days. The internationally renowned artists, from train-writer to fine artist, reflect their national and cultural context in their work."

40 Artists/12 Nations
4 Floors/1.200 Quadratmeter
1 City/1 Process
Opening: 20. JULI 2007 6 pm
Final & Blockparty: 11. AUGUST 2007 2 pm
Finissage: 19. AUGUST 2007 2 pm

SENATSRESERVENSPEICHER
Cuvrystr. 3-4
Berlin Kreuzberg
U-Bhf Schlesisches Tor (U1)

via Wooster Collective 

Shinjuku Station? Huge. With 3.3 million people passing through one of Tokyo's busiest stations daily, it's not exactly a place that can be closed for renovation. Starting in 2003, a construction worker by the name Shuetsu Satoh began creating temporary signs made from strips of adhesive tape. These weren't typical construction signs, but instead, elaborate works of art. Not only did his work help herds of commuters find their way through the Shinjuku Station labyrinth, but they were also strikingly attractive.

Using multi-colored electrical tape, trimmed to create different shapes, Satoh employed a distinctive stylized blocky font for his creations, which differed greatly from the bland font the station was already using. According to Satoh, his boss asked him to hurry up with his sign creation—not so much because Satoh was working too slow, but rather, because his boss wanted to see Satoh's latest creation.

Now that his work at Shinjuku Station is finished, he is now creating signs and arrows for the Nippori Station, currently under renovation. There's a documentary about Satoh's Shinjuku signs ( here and here) in which he talks about the challenges of creating these signs, and a new doc in progress looks at his new work. It's fascinating, even if you don't understand Japanese and beautiful no matter what language you speak.

via coolhunting 

See more images here and here.

via Mixed Greens via Design Sponge
 

I'll publish what I can while shirts are drying during this evening's printing marathon. 
Thanks to everyone for the kind emails.  A depressing, disorienting week calls for a few blasts of color I'd say...

First up, Gerhard Richter at the Philadelphia Museum of Art

PHILADELPHIA, PA.-The Philadelphia Museum of Art continues its commitment to presenting provocative contemporary art with Notations: Kiefer, Polke, Richter, an exhibition including works by several of the most significant painters to come of age in Germany during the culturally charged aftermath of World War II. Anselm Kiefer, Sigmar Polke, and Gerhard Richter have mounted vigorous reexaminations of pictorial practice, pushing the limits of expressive possibilities in their art. Each asks precise and poignant questions about the relevance of history painting and explores the relationship between painting and photography. On view from July 21 to November 25, 2007.

Jean-Francois Moriceau and Petra Mrzyk's "mistakes" also suggest the foreigner's keen awareness of the mutability of language, and there is much in the way of innuendo, fertile juxtapositions, and mordant wit in their visual vocabulary as well. Many of their drawings speculate on the secret life of art... --Meghan Dailey, Artforum International

More inspiring mistakes can be viewed here