The year was 1981. We had a brand new software company as a client—VM Software, and they needed a poster to attract visibility at a trade show. The 80’s were a tumultuous time in the technology space. Mainframes were king, and it would be the mid to late part of the decade before we would even own a Macintosh which we leased along with a 10″ (maybe 12″) monitor, keyboard and mouse, for the princely sum of $15,000.

Along with my former partner, Alex Berry, we conceived a poster that would take the famous Hokusai wave and morph it into a new format—representing the transition from analog to digital and is reflective of where the software/hardware industry was starting to move. Mainframe technology and legacy systems were on their way out, and a new order was in its infancy. The internet was still just an experiment and would not be available to the public for many years to come.
Getting an image of the Hokusai wave was easy. I then contacted an illustrator that I had worked with and asked him if he would be able to create a digitized section of the map. Brad Pomeroy labored on creating hundreds of tiny little squares by overlaying an acetate sheet over a copy of the original lithograph and coloring each and every one by hand using Prismacolor pencils. While Brad was working on the digital version, we tried to figure out how to attack the line work. While this might be easy today using Illustrator or Photoshop—back then those programs did not exist. Instead, I had two designers laboriously ink each line on another vellum overlap using rapidographs and ink. Since the line work had to be precise, each artist could only work on it for 1/2 hour at a time—so three of us spent untold hours switching off. I still get requests for copies of the poster and people often want to know what program I used to create it and what filters I used. I get a chuckle out of that thinking that this poster really did portend the wave of the future. Oh, and one last hidden clue that I have never revealed—the Japanese calligraphy in the top left hand corner—it means “Grafik.”

One thing that both Duchamp and Warhol understood was that, in the modern world, certain objects and products became universal. The wealthy and the poor both drank Coca Cola and smoked Marlboros, Decades after their deaths, we all tap out our lives on smartphones, and use the same apps. Whereas once God and religion were the universal themes of Western art, Duchamp and Warhol saw that products had overtaken that role. There is no contemporary artist who better continues that tradition than Koons.

Banksy's anonymity makes it hard to authenticate his pieces and prints, so Banksy has created a nonprofit called "Pest Control" that issues certificates of authenticity: you send them an alleged Banksy print and £65 and if they agree that it's authentic, they'll return it with a certificate that has a torn-in-half "Di-faced" fake banknote with Lady Diana's face on it, with a handwritten ID number across the bill.

As Clinton Freeman points out, this is a great piece of cryptographic engineering: faking a Banksy cert involves matching the tear precisely, and also requires that a would-be counterfeiter know what was written on the other half of the note, which is stored at Pest Control and is not made available. //

Can an information system be art? Because, like I said, it’s flipping sweet, and all executed in Banksy’s trademark tongue in cheek style. This whole authentication process would easily be my favourite artwork by Banksy.

What happens when you come to own a very old painting that’s in need of some tender loving care? For pity’s sake, don’t break out the soap and water.

That’s just what I did recently, with a very dingy, dirty oil on canvas that I picked up at a local auction. The painting depicts the Annunciation, that moment described in the Bible when Mary consents to become the mother of Jesus.

Underneath all the surface grime and cracking, I suspected it was probably a Northern Italian piece by a lesser artist, dating from the second half of the 17th century. Despite its rather sorry state of preservation, the painting struck me as a work of art that had lived a rough life, but was still worth saving.
Enter Katja Grauman, a professional art restorer I discovered online. After seeing the before and after examples on her site, I knew that if anyone could unlock the hidden potential in this dirty, disintegrating bit of painted old cloth, she could. I recently sat down with her in her Virginia studio, to discuss what she had to do to bring this very old work of art back from the brink, and what it takes to be an art restorer.