Art in Unusual Places

[Corrupted Unicorn]

No, this is not about that weird graffiti you found inside a wall while renovating your house... but it can be, if you want to. 

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder, and I want to know what do you behold as art. What is that thing you love but nobody understands? What is that thing it is not usually considered a category of "art" but you believe it should? You know that wiki that classifies bread tags? I'm talking about that kind of stuff.

When it comes to me, I'm very fond of three things:

• Airbrushed carnival ride art of bootleg copyrighted characters - I find it very amusing and loveable for some reason, maybe the total disregard of copyright rules. Just give me a dozen of not-just-quite-right Disney and Dreamworks characters in a colorful sparkly background and throw in Spongebob and Sonic for good measure. Everytime there's a carnival in town I end up taking photos of the rides because of this.
• Funky-looking mascots for obscure products - You know, like the funny but kinda creepy sorta-CGI sorta-not giraffe that advertises your country's cheese slices or that weird bootleg Bubsy squirrel I saw only once on a yoghurt package. Some are interesting, some are unintentionally funny or creepy, a few of them will actually have an appealing design, but they never leave you indifferent.
• Masked Singer costumes - I just HAD to mention this one  Listen. All around the world people with entire careers in fashion and costume design, people who have worked for big celebs and events like Katy Perry and the Superbowl, as well as lesser known but still very talented people, design and make funny banana and koala costumes for celebrities to wear while singing. It's like asking racing car designers to make a clown car. And the results are, for the most part, amazing. The subject, the themes, how it all ties together. It's a never-ending stream of inventive and creative character design for me.

Now, what are yours? What do you love and keep in high regard that is a little bit unusual and why?

[Guest]

    Airbrushed carnival ride art of bootleg copyrighted characters - I find it very amusing and loveable for some reason, maybe the total disregard of copyright rules. Just give me a dozen of not-just-quite-right Disney and Dreamworks characters in a colorful sparkly background and throw in Spongebob and Sonic for good measure. Everytime there's a carnival in town I end up taking photos of the rides because of this.

My estranged late grandfather made these! He was a spraypainter specifically for carnival rides. He just downloaded and printed images from the internet and then copied them onto the rides lol.

[SilkSkull]

Rapid fire list

• Metal band album covers
• Knock off game cartridges
• Adult Swim bumpers
• Knock off emojis
• Bar/Club bathroom wall graffiti
• Guinness world record covers
• Video game sky-boxes
• Old people rugs

[TheFrugalGamer]

Ha, I KNEW you were going to mention Masked Singer costumes, because I saw you mention that on your site! Your website is such a rabbit hole and I love it 

I've got to second the knock-off cartridges. I love knock-off games in general, and I'm always interested in seeing the differences between the genuine and fake products. Every now and then, you find a gem and the knock-off ends up being better than the original.

In that same vein, licensed games, especially ones for stupid kids cartoons that were shovelware before they finished getting made. I find them amusing, and hey, they paid for someone's rent somewhere in the world.

I really like looking into knock-off handheld digital pets, and I've recently been building up a collection of info on the different ones I've seen.

This one may be less obscure, but bad, cheap movies. The ones made by a handful of people with the cheapest equipment they could find.

[glitterpigeon]

one time i went to an art gallery, while i loved it there, eventually i needed to go to the bathroom, and it was really, really hard to find one. i ended up wandering down this weird dead-end bridge thing overlooking a part of the gallery that was closed for construction. it was really interesting to watch them down there, but I was especially drawn to this one tool cart I could see that had a painting of a moose on the side. secret art in the art gallery, that no one else would really pay much attention to, probably. not the kind of art that usually gets displayed in a gallery, but the kind that likely has more presense in our daily lives.

idk, i was particularly drawn to this idea of unintentional or ignored art in places where people go to see art. this was not what the gallery was about at all, but this was the most memorable art I saw that day.

[slimeteefs]

i feel this way on like... a lot of little objects. fishing lures, etc. stuff that someone sculpted in some capacity.

[plasticseaslug]

i find a lot of beauty in trash. little pieces of paper intended to be looked at and thrown away, wrappers, old phones long-since taken apart, anything i can get my hands on. i tend to collect whatever trash i produce into my journals as true "scrap" books. i feel as if in the society we live in, we simply create trash by living, so looking back on those scrapbook entries feels more tangibly as if i were looking back on how that day/week/month was going for me.

[Thorn]

I honestly like bathroom graffiti and stickers a lot. A lot of it is petty and crass depending on where you're at, but there's something so fun and beautiful about the irreverence and the anonymity of it, seeing what people can do in five minutes with the random thoughts in their head and a blank wall to anonymously say anything. I especially find music venue and bar bathrooms beautiful in that way, even if they're messy otherwise, because of all of the bands and the stickers and the personal notes, the way the walls actually talk at you to tell you what they've seen.

[Misanthropic Monster™]

Unusual art I like to see or things I perceive as 'art' List:

• Cartoon landfills/dumps/garbage:
I've always been fond of garbage in fiction, especially landfills, examples from some of my fave shows below:

Spoiler

[close]

• Graffiti in toilet stalls
I just love how this looks, and how you can get an idea of what was going through someone's head as they were pooping. I also just like the dingy aesthetic of it.

• Cartoon depictions of toilets
I dunno why this has always been something I love to see - I just love toilets.

Spoiler

[close]

• Cross-sections!
This is a big one I can't help but love seeing cross-sections of buildings or objects... especially if you can see the innerworkings of plumbing [/color]

[kepler-16b]

I find a lot of beauty in abandoned buildings / structures. One time I went to Bosnia for two weeks with some friends, and the Sarajevo bobsled track has stuck with me. It was like this road/halfpipe looking thing a few meters off the ground, covered head to toe in graffiti. It felt almost like an unofficial art gallery, the amount of drawings were on this thing.
Also, my town has a world war 2 bunker in the forest nearby (I used to always go there with some friends when I was like 12) AND an enormous abandoned warehouse near the railway. they're renovating the warehouse now, and I'm lowkey sad that I'll never be able to go inside. there's just something so enchanting about them and I can't explain it