Found art is way more interesting than street art

Every week I check a bookmarked Flickr search for street art Chicago. Even though I try to make the search exclude graffiti, I still end up with mostly graffiti images. Every now and then there might be something remotely interesting in the results.

Then today I figured why not change the search term from “street art Chicago” to “found art Chicago“. OH WOW. The results are SO much better! Below is a sampling of some of the images I faved from this improved search.

I love hand-drawn journals like this. Especially since it was done in 1992 and posted online 23 years later!      

The John Spellman Library has a bunch of artist diorama/boxes posted. This one is especially neat, because it’s a dark room developing a Poloroid!

The image on the left is an artist book that expandes out to show this rock inside!        

The collection of artist boxes.

Gotta love a Paul Bunyan in cross-stitch.         A fun page border from a 1913 book. The internetarchivebookimages has a TON of images online. While they are really cool, at one point they dominated my search results. I had to add -bhl to my search term to remove these images from my results.

A collection of doorknobs and door plates from a 1905 book. They way they are positioned makes them look they are some sort of magical creatures from Beauty and the Beast.         A dude who looks like the Ferdinand Hodler painting, “James Vibert, Sculptor” at the Art Institute of Chicago.

A fun book on a funky shimmery background. Makes you wonder what is inside this book with all those wires poking out!  

Do you see the spiral pattern? Pretty neat artwork that someone left behind in Grant Park.

A cool painting on found wood.  

    Melancholy painting. Such is what happens when you search for “found”–you end up with a good amount of melancholy things. Maybe that’s why I like this search so much.

This collection of praying hands is kinda creepy. But also interesting how it makes you aware the classical prayer position really involves hands so much.  

    The final piece I’ll leave you with on this search is a luchador Kidrobot dunny.

Placed art is much more interesting than the graffiti art posted on Flickr. The wide variety of photos, plus the ability to do a simple search also shows just how much better Flickr is than Instagram. There is no way possible to be able to do an in-depth search like this on Instagram. People, please start using Flickr again.

Placed art is better than street art. Flickr is better than Instagram.