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Via Animal NY & MocoLoco, a sublime transformation of counterfeit toys:

China and its many meanings are explored in Ena Macana's new China Collection. A selection of toys made in China are re-made in Barcelona in a provocative way that inverts the counterfeit process often seen in China - transforming the toys into fashion accessories. . . .

Other pieces have more complex compositions, the arrangement and repetition of each icon like the military guns cross that give us a new reading, generating new icons, a cross, from the primary one, a military gun.

The urge to transcend nature takes many forms. As Animal NY reminds us, 32 years ago George Willig scaled the World Trade Center and memorialized his effort by writing his name on roof of WTC 2.

The tower is gone, but his mark of immortality remains in this photo.

A familiar scene unfolds in this avant-garde production:

Zane Philstrom's set is a work of stunning beauty, matched only by the impeccably toned bodies of the core performers, who display impressive physical endurance and plenty of flesh while executing Austin McCormick vigorous, baroque choreography. The 75 minute piece is a stylized representation of the story of Adam and Eve and Lilith, who, in some accounts, preceded Eve as Adam's mate but stormed from the Garden because the first man wouldn't try anything but missionary position. From Genesis, the action melts into a dance interpretation of the seven deadly sins, as put forth by fourth century monk Evagrius Ponticus. Trapeze-swinging, gender-bending, and partial nudity abound.

Unlike other dance/theater troupes like Big Dance Theater, which typically uses dance to enliven a narrative, Company XIV's approach here is really more dance/poetry, with a buxom Ring Mistress serving as a sort of dour, whip-cracking announcer of banal aphorisms like, "Good weather is like a good woman. It doesn't always happen and when it does it doesn't always last."

Via The Wooster Collective, the designer explains:

For a few months, we've been hearing terrible news on TV, on the radio... It sounds like the end of the world - we are told about the ice cap melting, about the ozone layer disappearing in the North Pole...

I'm wondering about what I can actually do now!

Pray? No, I'm an atheist - Stop driving? I don't have a car - Sort garbage? I already do so - Turn my TV and radio off?

I come back to my first idea - is praying the only way out?

This mystical carved prayer wheel is apparently the second installed by the artistic collective FAILE--the first was apparently stolen.

I hedge because my own theory is that it was never stolen at all. It simply whirls through time with the right kind of spin.

For video and more pics, check out Animal NY.

The Egypt fad inspired by the discovery of King Tut's tomb is a famous cultural moment from the 1920s. The ad copy points to somewhat less familiar but no less significant aspects of that era: new standards of cleanliness, a celebration of natural products, and the role of beauty & fashion in the promoting women's independence.

Want to understand today? Just go back to the 1920s . . .

Faithful BofG contributor Jennifer Rose Emick offers this iconic charitable enterprise: a figure of Jesus composed of 30,000 Lego pieces assembled by 40 volunteers over 18 months.

This statue is part of a rich tradition of Christian Lego art. There's even an entire Christian music video composed of Lego figures. Watch carefully the multicolor Lego tao t-shirt bearing the label "sinner"!

I'm sure others will have pointed this out by now, but [these graffiti pictures] refer to a book by an Austrian mysticist named Guido von List, according to Wikipedia. The book, Das Geheimnis der Runen (ie, the graffiti in the first picture) continues to influence and inspire neo-Nazis, from which they derive the phrase "Sal und Sig" (the graffiti in the second photo) which I think means "Salvation and Victory."

An ongoing exhibit at PS1:

In the late 1960s poet Ishmael Reed adopted the 19th-century term “HooDoo,” referring to forms of religion and their practice in the New World to explore the idea of spiritual practice outside easily definable faiths or creeds and ritualism on contemporary works of literature and art. “Neo-HooDoo,” he writes in his 1972 collection of poetry, Conjure, “believes that every man is an artist and every artist a priest.” His seminal poems, “The Neo-HooDoo Manifesto” and “The Neo-HooDoo Aesthetic,” delve even deeper into this artistic practice to demonstrate its vitality as an international, multicultural aesthetic that embraces spiritual creativity and innovation.

From Vancouver to Havana, Guatemala City, and Bahia, the artists in NeoHooDoo began using ritualistic practice as a means to recover “lost” spirituality and to reexamine and reinterpret aspects of cultural heritage throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s.

Actress Carol Castro held beads and crucifix in her Brazil Playboy shoot, prompting a court there to halt distribution after the archdiocese protested.

That couldn't happen in the U.S., right? But if she were holding a picture of Mickey Mouse . . .