Chris Burden

http://www.artbabble.org/video/lacma/chris-burden-and-michael-govan-lacma

This is the video I watched with additions from ArtBabble. Look at some of those and for video of his earlier performances, mention his hoarding.

My short visit to the Google Art Project

Along with stories of the situation in Egypt, I've been noticing posts on Twitter about the Google Art Project, so I decided to take a look. I wasn't too impressed on my first visit, but now that I've tried a second time, I'm quite impressed. cnet News has a pretty good description and slide show of the process and a few of the artworks.

One of the great features of the Project is that magnification of the art seems to really work, and gets the viewer much closer to examining the process than other attempts that I've seen. Sometimes this takes a long time to be obvious, but once the pixels clear, the results are pretty amazing. My collection, as of today includes a medium-distance view of the face of  "The Princess from the Land of Porcelain" by James McNeill Whistler, and a very close closeup of the canvas threads and paint strokes of Vincent van Gogh's "The Starry Night". And now the lion's head from Henry Rousaeau's "The Sleeping Gypsy", although the paint strokes aren't as visible here.

You can also walk down the halls, and around the walls of the art galleries and museums, much like on Street View, but so far that is mostly annoying, although you do get an idea of the layout of the galleries. I just got taken out the back wall of MoMA in New York, and into a street, so maybe this is more of an experiment in serendipity than an exploration of the building.