Andrew LaVallee

The Web is full of content that only its creator could love. Witness the office-party photos, blogs about people’s pets and bad lip-synched videos that turn up in a few minutes of Google-fueled procrastination.

To Guthrie Lonergan, however, Web junk is the basis of his most popular online art. “I’m sort of interested in that boringness,” he says.

“Internet Group Shot” is one example. The collage, cobbled from dozens of group portraits, shows how people adopt the same huddle when they’re saying “cheese.” For “MySpace Intro Playlist,” Mr. Lonergan looked for the self-made videos that young people post to their personal pages, then strung them together to show how teenagers tend to act similarly and say the same things when they’re introducing themselves.

“There are defaults in our culture,” Mr. Lonergan adds. “MySpace doesn’t set up something for you to create an introduction video, but kind of like a telephone answering machine, you assume a certain kind of voice and say certain things.”

The 23-year-old, who lives in L.A., is one of many artists mining Internet culture for creative inspiration. They make videos out of email spam and multimedia projects from MySpace profiles, and make a case for Web surfing as an art form in itself.

Read Even Boring Blogs Can Be Things of Beauty

Young Cineastes Find Lego a Congenial Medium for the Age of YouTube

In the three-minute film “Cognizance,” a hit man on his way to his next target wordlessly reflects on his life. He walks past shoppers browsing in stores, children on a merry-go-round, a young couple embracing. Finally, he spots his intended victim across a busy street, and, as the soundtrack music by Coldplay swells, he reconsiders and drops his gun in an alley.

As the killer turns and begins to walk home, he finds himself facing the barrel of another man’s gun. A subtle smile crosses his placid, yellow face as the screen fades to black.

One reviewer said he was “overwhelmed with emotion” by the film. Another called it “a gleaming gem,” adding that it was “required viewing for anyone interested in our little plastic world.”

“Cognizance” is one of hundreds of movies known as “brickfilms” that are getting attention on YouTube and other video-sharing sites. Amateur filmmakers use Lego pieces to create characters and scenes, sometimes spending months painstakingly arranging and rearranging the blocks before the camera. Re-creations of famous moments in “Star Wars” and “Titanic,” faithfully rendered in the primary colors of Lego pieces and stitched together from thousands of stop-motion frames, have drawn hundreds of thousands of viewings. Many of the productions are original films with elaborate plotlines, soundtracks and voice-overs.

The growing genre is driven by a lively online community of would-be Spielbergs who swap tips on message boards about tackling the unique challenges of the medium.

Read In This Film Industry It Really Helps To Be a Blockhead

Homeowners Begin to Treat Flashy Electronics as Eyesores; Speakers Disguised as Sconces

When Ryan Heuser was putting the finishing touches on his restored 1960s-era house in Newport Beach, Calif., he wanted to preserve its period look and minimalist interior. It wasn’t hard in the kitchen, which the 34-year-old outfitted with Boffi cabinets and sleek appliances like a Viking range and Miele dishwasher.

But the living room, where he planned to install a home-theater system, was trickier. Even high-end loudspeakers were going to be too clunky for the room, he says. “I really wanted something that blended seamlessly,” says Mr. Heuser, president of Paul Frank Industries Inc., an apparel company.

So he paid about $7,000 for three thin speakers that are embedded in the wall and hidden behind a screen. The system, called Artcoustic, includes an “acoustically transparent” fabric that consumers can have images printed on, making the speakers look like framed artwork or a wall panel.

Big home-entertainment systems and flat-screen plasma television sets may remain status symbols for some, but as prices continue to drop — and the devices become ubiquitous — an increasing number of consumers are downplaying their living-room gadgetry.

Manufacturers, for their part, are adding decorative touches to soften their components’ looks. Others are offering products that disguise liquid-crystal displays as Picassos and speaker systems designed to be works of art in themselves.

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(Also appeared in AOL News, Arizona Republic, Pittsburgh Post-Gazette and Tulsa [Okla.] World.)

A forthcoming exhibit at New York’s Museum of Modern Art will feature work selected by unlikely curators: visitors to the YouTube video-sharing site.

MoMA solicited videos to be included in a retrospective of the Residents, an avant-garde multimedia group, that will open next week. The museum has posted the clips of 11 finalists on YouTube and invited the public to weigh in. The votes and comments those works receive on the site will help determine which are screened at the museum.

It is among the latest moves by museums to capitalize on the popularity of online communities and remain relevant to the new generation of art fans. London’s Saatchi Gallery is sponsoring what it calls “the first reader-curated contemporary art show” later this month, in which online voters picked the participants. In New York, the Smithsonian Institution’s Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum has this year expanded the prestigious awards it bestows on artists, adding a “people’s design award” based on votes from visitors to the museum’s Web site.

Meanwhile, the New York’s Pace/MacGill Gallery staged a summer show based on the photo-sharing site Flickr. Pace/MacGill’s project, called “Self-Portraitr,” included nearly 130,000 user-submitted photos, and drew a younger-than-usual audience — one of the goals of the exhibit, a gallery spokeswoman said.

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