Hasta La Ideas

(Photo courtesy Teddy Lo)

Pass the diet cola and Mentos, fire up the 3-D printer, and prepare to be serenaded by Tesla coils, because it’s time for Maker Faire. The bricolage bash kicks off tomorrow at the New York Hall of Science in Queens—take a left at the glowing dragon! Created for last year’s Burning Man festival, “GonKiRin” (Mandarin for “Light Dragon”) is the work of Hong Kong-based light artist Teddy Lo, who constructed the 69-foot-long and 22-foot-tall car-creature from a 1963 Dodge W-300 power dump truck, approximately 2,500 feet of linear RGB LED lighting fixtures, and a massive flamethrower. Artist Ryan Doyle collaborated with Lo on the project. Riders can sit in the dragon’s mouth or relax in a couch on its back as an intrepid DJ spins from a booth on the second story. Can’t make it to Maker Faire? Look for GonKiRin in the New York City Halloween parade later this fall and click below to watch a video of the creature in action.

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Earlier this year, the Metropolitan Museum of Art issued a call for photos that highlighted a detail of a single work of art from its permanent collection, setting off an epidemic of close-looking (who knew Edouard Vuillard‘s canvases were so mesmerizing in extreme zoom?). Having yielded hundreds of submissions—and a gorgeous Tumblr—the “Get Closer” contest has concluded with the announcement this week of five winning entries, including this intriguing close-up taken by Ruth Rogers. We like the elementary school science bookishness of it, teasing the viewer as to its appropriately scaled identity. Is it a colonial textile? The braid of one of Ghirlandaio‘s girls? A intricate rendering of wheat? Nope, it’s the tightly wrapped torso of the Mask of Osiris mummy (305–30 B.C.), acquired by the Met in 1944 from one Mrs. Goddard DuBois. “I can sense the artisan’s hand in this work,” wrote Rogers in her entry. “Look how perfect this wrapping is, thousands of years later. The time, the effort, still projects through time and space.”

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An untitled 2008 photo by Liz Craft.

A royal wedding is an excellent excuse to trot out the carriages, and while our garage is lacking in 1902 State Landaus, Ascot Landaus, or Semi-State Landaus (full disclosure: we do not have a garage), we can delight in artist Liz Craft‘s solo approach. In her untitled 2008 photo, a fashionably dressed adult takes a break in “Carriage,” an outsized bronze baby buggy that looks plucked from the forest home of giants. Craft created the sculptural work in 2008, and when not in use, the carriage holds an enormous porcelain egg on a bed of raffia. This image of the eggless carriage out for a urban adventure is among the artworks on offer in an online auction to benefit the Los Angeles Nomadic Division (LAND), the non-profit public art initiative founded in 2009 by Shamim Momin and Christine Kim, in the run-up to its Thursday bash at Palihouse in West Hollywood. The online auction also includes works by John Baldessari, Barnaby Furnas, Dennis Hopper, Hanna Liden, and Raymond Pettibon. Bidding is open through Wednesday: register here and prepare to get carried away for a good cause.

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Fendi handbags customized by artists Richard Prince (top) and KAWS (bottom) for Christie’s Green Auction: Bid to Save the Earth.

Earth Day is still a few weeks away, but Christie’s got the planet-saving off to an early start on Tuesday. The auction house partnered with Runway to Green to hold A Bid to Save the Earth, an auction and fashion show extravaganza that raised $1.4 million to benefit Conservation International, Oceana, Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Central Park Conservancy. Although it’s too late to enter the paddle battle for lots such as the opportunity to spend a day with President Bill Clinton (one of the sale’s top lots, that went for $100,000), the companion online auction is open through Thursday, April 7. We’ve got our eye on the Fendi baguettes customized by artists including KAWS, Damien Hirst (who created one spin-art version and another covered in rows of candy-colored LSD dots), Andisheh Avini, and Enoc Perez. Richard Prince picked up a marker and jotted a corny joke on his canvas and leather version, while Tom Sachs went for pyro-chic and torched his baguette into oblivion. If it’s fashionable experiences you’re in the market for, bid on runway show tickets and shopping sprees from the likes of Michael Kors, Marc Jacobs, and Vera Wang or splurge on meet and greets with Oprah Winfrey, Justin Bieber, and John McEnroe, whose one-hour tennis lesson has already reached $26,000.

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Eadweard Muybridge, Cockatoo; flying. Plate 759, 1887; collotype; Corcoran Gallery of Art

Two of our favorite things—Moluccan cockatoos and the pioneering photographs of Eadweard Muybridge—come together in today’s Friday Photo, an 1887 collotype that is on view through June 7 at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art as part of “Helios: Eadweard Muybridge in a Time of Change.” The blockbuster exhibition, which takes its name from the sunny pseudonym that Muybridge used in the late 1860s, includes more than 300 objects created between 1857 and 1893, including his only surviving zoopraxiscope—an apparatus he designed to project motion pictures. Curator Philip Brookman of the Corcoran Gallery of Art brought together works from 38 different collections, ranging from Muybridge’s photographs of Yosemite Valley and images of Alaska and the Pacific coast to his 1869 survey of the Central Pacific and Union Pacific Railroads and breathtaking pictures from Panama and Guatemala that reveal his architectural and landscape photography chops (a successful survey photographer, he also worked as a war correspondent). In this doozy from his Animal Locomotion series of stop-motion photographs, Muybridge captured 24 frames worth of a cockatoo in flight. It’s up to you to imagine the bird’s peachy feathers and jaunty salmon crest.

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