The Fine Art and Design Blog by Darren Daz Cox - Creative Consultant and Strategist

I just saw the documentary on tv about how computers can analyze paintings known to be authentic and then pick out a fake based on a number of logical algorithms. The show had an impressive looking fake made of a van Gogh painting by an ‘expert on creating fakes to help museums find fakes’  and then three teams of computer geeks used their computers to find the fake out of a stack of photos taken of the fake and authentic van Gogh paintings.

The geeks, of course, used their amazing brains and high tech toys to save the museums of the world from being ‘ripped off’ by unscrupulous villains who might fool them into spending millions on a ‘fake’ painting and they all lived happily ever after.

Of course, as long as people are in charge of the machines and people desire money, then people will lie, including the lab techs and museums *gasp*.

Whether a painting in a museum is authentic or not is ultimately up to you, at the very least, make up your own mind about whether you like something or not.

The honesty that matters is your personal honesty, as Vincent van Gogh himself wrote in these words to his brother Theo.

"Believe me, in art matters the saying, "Honesty is the best policy," is true; rather more trouble on a serious study than a kind of chic to flatter the public. Sometimes in moments of worry I have longed for some of that chic, but thinking it over I say, No, let me be true to myself, and express severe, rough but true things in a rough manner. I shall not run after the art lovers or dealers; let whoever wants to come to me. In due time we shall reap, if we faint not!"

The reason why history has remembered our friend Vincent is because he didn’t sell out, he didn’t make art in a style that was currently selling because he was following a muse, and we as a society like that. We wouldn’t know who he was If he had been a regular guy, you know, someone with a normal career like a computer tech or someone who paints fake paintings for museums (so they can tell what a fake looks like, not to increase their revenue by pretending the fakes are real because unlike the rest of society, museums care about authenticity more than money!)

This will be moved to a static page after a while, but here it is all my art on Flickr. Remember that there is a creative commons licence on these if you would like to add a little bit of art to your blog! (you can use them as long as you say they are by me!).

here are two oil paintings that now have added onto them wet acrylic gel medium that looks white until it dries and then it turns clear.

The green and red are watered down tinted glue which is essentially liquid plastic that drys transparent. Plenty of standard elmers/white school glue has been added also.

The mixture will crackle randomly and create some nice effects!

This little demo video is made in Toufee, which is a nice simple Flash movie maker. It has been giving me all kind of crazy problems though, but it may not be the fault of Toufee, Flash itself has been mighty screwy lately every since I installed FireFox 3.

I had problems with the Photoshop-like software in A.viary.com earlier but now that is fixed yea.

This seems to work fine now directly as is from Toufee but the sound doesn’t work in IE7, damn, I’m scratching my head but it seems that the more times I work with it the more things finally work, as if my PC is evolving and adapting. Earlier today it converted a Toufee flash movie I made to avi (after a dozen failed attempts "frame load error"), which ultimately looked like utter crap by the time it was on youtube arrrgh…a work in progess…..

Anyway, it’s my cool art and a funny pop punk song from the time before ‘pop punk’ was a term hehe!

Biff Brown and I have collaborated in a creative way since 1985, here’s his song K-Mart (performed by his old early 90’s punk band 3-man on their demo tape)

"It’s really gross the people pushing and shoving

to go through the place you gotta go numchuckin’

It’s blood and guts and bombs and guns (god, I just hope I didn’t hurt anyone)

K-Mart, K-Mart, ran my sister down with a shopping cart

there was a sale I just couldn’t resist

but the light went off and I got pissed"

I didn’t renew dazhoney.com a few months ago for various reasons and figured it would end up as a spam site as other domain names I had once owned ended up as. Surprisingly I found it was available today with no penalty whee, I know it’s not a ‘valuable domain name’ but there are several links to it out there, far more than to other sites that were bought up by spammers before. I’m guessing that as time as gone on the spammers are a lot more selective!

So anyway, as I did with gobzine.com earlier this year  I reclaimed a url and will use it to get my art out to the world. It’s not an obsession as much as an art project to see how far the internet can promote an artist without having to pay an "official" art site where the art elite will judge you but rather let the public judge my art and influence the art galleries to want me! Well, it’s a fun project no matter how successful it is!

Daz Honey is the name of my avatar (character) in the digital world of SecondLife which isn’t a game but rather a big 3D chatroom where you can build and sell things. Here’s some of the artsy things associated with my adventures in the digital world.

This one was a castle I built within SecondLife (that’s my avatar as a girl walking through).

and finally for today, here’s a current snapshot of Daz Honey at the Om Festival, I love that place!

On a different topic, today I went into the Art Alliance gallery to pick up my painting from the last show and was surprised to see a new show up. According to the newsletters and website nothing was scheduled and the big arts organization down the road hadn’t mentioned it either.

The show is photography by Dominican orphans and Alice Pearce the vp of shareusa.org a tiny local non-profit charity group that is raising awareness and money for the kids. If you live in the NYC area it’s only an hour and a bit on the train from Penn station, you can walk to the gallery from the station. Local Monmouth county folks should stop in and say hello to the volunteers or stop by their website at least. Below is the youtube video from their site, it’s not fancy but it’s good to watch!