Street artists: you either love ‘em or hate ‘em. Or, to put it less bluntly, you either find ‘em innovative public iconographers or find ‘em puerile public nuisances.

In 1987, Compuserve begatteth Image Format 87A.
Image Format 87A begatteth Graphics Interchange Format or GIF (rhymes with a certain brand of peanut butter, the video history above helpfully points out).

Considering the possibility of a truly proletarian art, the great English literary critic William Empson once wrote, “the reason an English audience can enjoy Russian propagandist films is that the propaganda is too remote to be annoying.

If you head to SFMOMA’s café on Third Street in San Francisco, you can order up some Damien Hirst “Amylamine” lemon velvet cake, Donald Judd tomato soup, and Mark Rothko Toast.

A group of top American libraries and academic institutions launched a new centralized research resource today, the Digital Public Library of America (DPLA), making millions of resources (books, images, audiovisual resources, etc.) available in digital format.

The brilliant Native American ballerina Maria Tallchief died Thursday at the age of 88. Tallchief is remembered as one of the great ballet stars of the 20th century.

Some watch the Super Bowl for just the commercials. Others watch films for the title sequences that bookend a movie. Title sequences can be “engaging or wildly entertaining … or simply drop dead beautiful.

In a video for MOCA, the “defining museum of contemporary art” in Los Angeles, Shepard Fairey, the graphic designer and illustrator best known for the Obama Hope poster of 2008, spent a few minutes rapping about the YouTube videos that have inspired him, both personally and professionally.

Havas Worlwide Paris, a global design agency, reawakened fond memories of my days living in Paris. They did it by creating this artistic video that captures the character of Parisian neighborhoods/metro stops through typography. The Marais, Latin Quarter, Montmartre, Père Lachaise, Bastille — they all get a creative nod.

Five years ago Polaroid announced that they would no longer make analog instamatic film. At that moment, if one listened carefully, one could almost hear some of the 20th century’s most famous artists wail in despair, even from the grave. Ansel Adams loved Polaroid and shot some of his famous Yosemite images in that format first.