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Wild Art: Revealing Today’s Most Eye-Popping Artworks

Though you probably won't see these artworks in your local art museum, you have seen a number of them right here on My Modern Met. Wild Art is a new book by authors David Carrier and Joachim Pissarro that takes a look at today's most offbeat and outrageous art. From Tilt's half-graffiti hotel room to Kyle Bean's head-scratching sculpture of a chicken made from eggshells, this book is filled with over 300 works that are guaranteed to get your creative juices flowing.

Carrier is the author of several books on art history and is a former art professor at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland and the Cleveland Institute of Art. He states, “We wanted wild art to be looked at the same way as wild animals versus domestic or wild plants versus domesticated.”

Pissarro is a professor of art history at Hunter College in New York. “We are not talking about outsider art,” he told the LA Times. “We are talking about people that are not part of the mainstream art world but have reached a certain degree of fame inside their own worlds and make a living out of it.”

He continues,” “Wild art has no class distinction. It's pure, simple, direct and unsophisticated. When you attend a performance by skateboarder Christian Hosoi, you don't feel like part of a selected public. It's just as fascinating, spectacular and heart-wrenching. It grabs you by the guts. It's out there in the open, and you don't have to pay for it. It's not intimidating.”

Now, courtesy of Wild Art‘s publisher Phaidon, here are some of the most interesting works you can expect to find inside the new book.


What Came First? by Kyle Bean


Melting Ice Cream Truck by The Glue Society


Tree Cozy by Carol Hummel


Take a Seat by Brad Downey


Dog painted to look like a tiger, Zhengzhou, Henann


DJ Ice Sculpture by Takeo Okamoto


Carved Eggplant Skull by Dimitri Tsykalov


Reverse Graffiti by Alexandre Orion


Sand Painting by Andres Amador

Wild Art on Phaidon's website

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