Franz von Bayros

Franz von Bayros (1866-1924) was an Austrian illustrator and commercial artist belonging to another movement near and dear to my heart, the Decadents. His best known works belong to a series, though not a formal one, known as "Tales at the Dressing Table" and are shocking in their frank depictions of rather extreme sexual practices, as well as notable for their simple technical splendor. The complexity, baroque quality of the images presented with clinical precision of line and texture, serves as an elegant evocation of cultural decadence, lavishness and resplendence coupled with spiritual destitution.

The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken

The Royal Greenhouses of Laeken are a vast complex of eleven greenhouses, covering approximately 2.5 hectares (270,000 square feet) and located in Brussels. Commissioned by King Leopold II of Belgium in 1874 and completed in 1895 the greenhouses, designed by the ever-faithful-to-the-crown Alphonse Balat, are sublime. As they are only open to the public two weeks out of the year, being reserved for royal use (I'm not sure what they do with them) the remaining fifty, it is a rare opportunity to experience them in full, and for this one must feel a vague sense of hostility towards the Belgian Royal family, a generally unprecedented experience.

AES+F Group

Since its formation in 1985 by

Tatiana Arzamasova, Lev Evzovich, and Evgeny Svyatsky, AES has created an extensive and diverse body of work. Additionally many works have been created in collaboration with photographer Vladimir Fridkes, calling themselves instead the AES+F group, and it is with these works that this post is primarily concerned. The works are deeply unsettling, in their ephebo- and hebe- philiac tendencies, the icy cleanliness of both the youth and the digital landscapes they inhabit, and the portentous, if not religious, tableaux vivants they grimly comprise. I find the posed nature of the photographs particularly interesting, they are hyper-posed, not only has the documentarian aspect of 20th century photography been discarded, the constructed nature of the image has become a formal aspect, and the sterility of the images is borne of this formalization.

Anyway they're very nice.

Tony Oursler's Influence Machine

Tony Oursler (born 1957) is a New York based multimedia artist. I must admit I despise almost everything the man has ever produced. I find both his early and recent works to be conceptually and aesthetically offensive and generally puerile. However in 2000 he was commissioned by the Public Art Fund to create a series of works known both collectively and individually as the  "Influence Machine". These works may be somewhat subdued, pretty public art without the concupiscent orifices of his other projections, and in terms of conceptual or intellectual merit I can't exactly argue in their defense, however as pretty works of public art I find them so delightful I couldn't resist posting them.
T.J. Clark also wrote quite an interesting piece on Ousler's work as well as that of de Chirico and Manet for the MIT press, entitled Modernism, Postmodernism, and Steam, which is certainly worth reading if any of the images catch your fancy.

Grayson Perry

Grayson Perry (born 1960) is an English potter and fashion icon, well I suppose not everyone would call him a fashion icon, but I certainly would. Anyway, he was the recipient of the Turner Prize in 2003, and honor to which he responded with the following statement 

""Well, it's about time a transvestite potter won the Turner Prize."

His female alter-ego is named Claire and has been described by the artist himself in a number of ways including, but not limited to "“a 19th century reforming matriarch" "a middle-England protester for No More Art"  "an aero-model-maker" "an Eastern European Freedom Fighter” and “a fortysomething woman living in a Barratt home, the kind of woman who eats ready meals and can just about sew on a button.”

He deals often with child abuse and teddy bears.