art

The pragmatic and the weak tend to believe that if you can't beat them, you should join them. However, a significant number of the world's humans would just as soon carry on beating them.

Please choose sides, then, on a subject that may divide the artistic community from here to eternity.

The Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis is the latest to offer something that might stick in a throat or two: tweet seats.

Yes, this is a specially cordoned-off pen in which digital obsessives whip out their iPhones and tweet: "Oh, look. The fat lady's dead!" … Read more

An avid player of Electronic Arts' "The Simpsons: Tapped Out" mobile game, David Lamb was disheartened when he logged into his account in October and found that all of the data from his game was gone.

The iOS game, which is essentially "Farmville" with Springfield buildings and Simpsons characters, rewards players who spend huge amounts of time completing tasks and collecting money in an effort to re-create their favorite animated city. Lamb, a 45-year-old video editor from La Canada, Calif., had accumulated $80,000 in game cash and 70 donuts (the game's premium currency) after … Read more

Dream Wallpaper is a free screensaver that rotates a series of stunning high-resolution desktop background images. You can choose from regular and widescreen images in a range of categories, and download more wallpaper images online, too.

Dream Wallpaper set its first image as our desktop background as soon as we installed the program. Unlike many single screensavers, Dream Wallpaper has a user interface you can open from a system tray icon that also accesses the previous and next wallpapers. Dream Wallpaper's main view displays six or more wallpaper images in each of its Local Wallpaper and Network Wallpaper categories, … Read more

The Smithsonian's "Art of Video Games" exhibit has now closed, but games will be on display at another high-profile art museum beginning early next year.

New York's Museum of Modern Art has announced that it's chosen 40 games to display at a new game-specific gallery.

Games selected for display at MoMA go back decades and include the likes of Pac-Man and Spacewar, but also contemporary releases such as Portal and Minecraft.

The games will be on display as part of the museum's Architecture and Design collection at the establishment's Johnson Galleries beginning in … Read more

Sadly, the French trampoline bridge Crave told you about last month remains a concept. But in some news that's sure to make you jump with hopeful joy, Russia recently boasted an actual trampoline sidewalk. Could there be a more fun way to get from Point A to Point B? I think not.

Estonian firm Salto Architects built the sidewalk for the Archstoyanie Festival, an annual art and design exhibition in the village of Nicola-Lenivets about a four-hour drive away from Moscow. Archstoyanie visitors used the 167-foot-long "Fast Track" sidewalk for both play and playful transport between festival venues. … Read more

You know that greasy bike chain sitting in the corner of your garage? Take a look at the below gallery of original art made from bicycle components, and you might think twice about getting rid of it.

Chicago-based bike parts company SRAM gave a group of handpicked artists a box each of 100 high-performance bicycle components and told them to craft something amazing. They responded with everything from a bike-centric interpretation of Vincent van Gogh's famous "Starry Night" to a robotic ostrich, a crawling "Sramantis," and your typical Mary Jane-wearing bike chain quadruped with a plastic baby head. … Read more

Despite my small fear of bugs, there's just something creepily cute about these mechanical insects by Justin Gershenson-Gates.

Gates, a self-taught tinkerer, usually sells jewelry accented with watch gears on his Web site A Mechanical Mind, but people can't seem to get enough of his occasional arthropods made from watch parts, tiny lightbulbs, and other bits and bobs.

In an e-mail interview with Crave, Gates revealed the inspiration behind these creepy designs: a recent trip featuring a freak spider encounter -- "with a leg span of about 3 inches," he says -- prompted the idea. After returning from vacation, Gates created a set of spider legs with watch-winding stems and tacked on other watch parts to create his first spider. … Read more

With its nice range of editing options combined with the simplicity of touch-screen controls, PicsArt is a handy photo-editing app.

The main interface is colorful, and the primary options to edit, add effects, access the camera, and create collages are easily accessible. Menus vary by task. In most cases, it only takes a couple of taps to add a border, remove red-eye, or apply one of the numerous effects. Other settings were quickly adjusted with a swipe to move a slider left or right. As the controls were simple and easy to understand, we could really focus on the fun … Read more

Let's go back in time. Way back. Keep going. OK, stop. You're in the Ptolemaic Period. It's somewhere around 304 to 30 B.C. You're in Egypt. You're playing Dungeons & Dragons. Except back then, it's more like Pyramids & Petsuchos.

The Metropolitan Museum of Art owns what may be the world's oldest d20 die. It's made out of serpentine and looks to be in remarkably good shape for its age. … Read more