Colossal: Art and Visual Ingenuity
The blog Colossal is the baby of freelance writer Christopher Jobson, who is based in Chicago. It is a sharp looking, tightly focused blog with material that never ceases to amuse me and often has me saying ‘wow!’
Colossal features art and projects, including photography, from around the world. The artwork is largely displayed through photographs, with little text. The minimalist descriptions allow you to look and think for yourself – something that I prefer in this non-scholarly look at art. On occasion, video is used to show even more about the pieces, as with this one showing the painting on the edge of a 19th-century book housed at the University of Iowa.
The selected items for Colossal are often funny, sometimes idiosyncratic and very unlikely to be mainstream in any way. I find things here that amuse me but are not necessarily part of the art world in the sense of being on the market, shown in a gallery, or discussed in Art Forum.
Jobson insists on non-digital art for his articles, which in the blogosphere is somewhat unusual. There is great digital art out there, but he admires objects, often handmade or at least one-off constructions. His admiration is infectious, as witnessed by a post on a toothpick-artist that has had hundreds of thousands of likes.
This site also appeals to my design sense in its simplicity. The posts always have the same format – images, with rarely more than one to two paragraphs of text. There are just a few categories under which his items are organized: art, design, photography, and video. The blog is supported by ads on the right side of the page, but they are without pop-ups or other annoyances. The blog also hosts a shop, so unobtrusive that I went to this site for a year before I even noticed it. My favorite aspect of the site besides the art itself is the great looking title bar – love the Colossal font!
Today’s post is the perfect example of why I continue to look at this site. This video made me laugh out loud, but it also made me think about something deeper – our culture of excess. The ultimate irony is that the video is an ad for a candy bar! Somehow that made it funnier. And, chocolate as excess is ok with me.
