[Update: 28-Jan-08: The creator of these pictures has decided to remove them; you can read his rationale [1] on Flickr. If you look around at the various sites that linked [2] to the original pictures, you can find a few more samples. -Adam]

If you have a few minutes to spare, hop over to Flickr to see PaulTheWineGuy's set of famous works of art [3], all cleverly modified with digital artifacts of today's electronic culture. Rodin's "The Thinker" appears with a Windows hourglass wait cursor, for instance, and HTML table tags are superimposed on a classic Mondrian. Then there's Jasper Johns's 1961 map of the United States - complete with Google Maps controls. A few of the images are a bit more subtle (and show a Windows sensibility): Ctrl+C and Ctrl+V have been added to Andy Warhol's "100 Cans" to apply the current concept of replication to Warhol's work, and a much-damaged work by Antonello da Messina has broken-image rectangles overlaid on the parts that lack paint, as though a Web browser had failed to load those parts. The visual puns and trenchant revisions are both amusing and, I suspect, telling commentary on both our electronic culture and the original works.

[image link] [4]

[1]: http://www.paulthewineguy.com/post/24858699
[2]: http://www.google.com/search?q=%22Understanding+Art+for+Geeks%22+PaulTheWineGuy
[3]: http://www.flickr.com/photos/paulthewineguy/sets/72157603619920398/
[4]: http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2329/2196573409_de78a8c935.jpg

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