This has to be the funkiest, weirdest, coolest idea: One Thousand Paintings.

The guy made 1,000 individual, unique paintings all featuring a different number, 1-1,000. They’re all painted in the same style, in the same font, just a different number on each one. He one made one of each, and he’s selling them based on some mathematic formula where the lower the number the more it costs and the more paintings sold the more expensive the remaining paintings get.

So painting 960 is $40. Painting 16 is $295.20.

It’s a pretty brilliant idea. So far he’s sold 258 paintings. At $40 each that’s more than $10,000, and of course most of the paintings have sold for more than $40. The math-inclined can check out his formula themselves and figure out how much he stands to make.

I love ideas like this. Of course coming up with them and pulling them off is the hard part. I’m tempted to buy one, but I have no idea what I’d do with it and I can’t decide what number to pick (and I’m cheap, so I’d be looking at the high numbers, which really limits my choices).

Update: I bought one. #985. Call me a sucker, but I’m buying inspiration. I love the artistic and mathematical ideas behind it, and just the downright cleverness. Plus I like the idea of being one of a thousand people to own one. I’m in good company. See if you can guess why I picked 985.

Update 2: Turns out I didn’t get #985. With the flood of traffic PayPal hasn’t been fast enough in verifying funds, so somebody else bought #985 and their funds verified before mine did. So they get the painting. Doh.

Now that the lowest price is over $100, it’s a bit rich for me, so I won’t try again. I have noticed the sales have slowed (it’s at 449 sold right now, it was at 401 last night, down from the 10 per hour the site was doing for a while), and I’d guess it’s due to the rising cost. It’s an interesting little experiment, and I’m curious if the continually rising cost will mean fewer and fewer sales. Or will the limited availability kick in and make that cost worth it?

Oh, and for the record, I picked #985 because I started blogging on December 5, 1998. 98-5. It’s a stretch, I know, but my wife’s birthday was sold and my daughter’s was too expensive. And 1985 is a fun year, immortalized in that Bowling for Soup song and Back to the Future.

Check out the pictures of this junk van spotted on the streets of Los Angeles. Apparently the owner just likes to attach found objects to his van.

This is just too good. The U.K. artist Banksy installed his own artwork in four New York museums. The Metropolitan Museum of Art took down their acquisition down quickly, while the Museum of Modern Art removed theirs after three days. The other two are supposedly still up. (link via Kottke)

How cool is this? PodBrix (I’m assuming that’s pronounced Pod-Bricks–I’m not always up on my IM-speak) are custom Lego figures inspired by iPod commercials. The guy paints Legos and sells them. The first one (the silhouette, to the right) sold in under ten hours. The second one, Steve Jobs giving a Keynote, sold out in under 36 minutes (and my friend Josh nabbed one).

Based on his $16.99 price and limit of 300 units, the artist is grossing $5,000 on each set. I’m sure hand-painting 300 Legos takes a lot of time, and there’s probably a number of expenses (Legos ain’t cheap), but grossing $10,000 in a month is pretty sweet (I could bury a lot of student loans if my novel sold that well). And if it’s such a simple idea that you could do it, why haven’t you?

You’ve got to love “The Crackers”, a spoof on Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s “The Gates” in Central Park.

A few weeks ago a vibrant, colorful mural was unveiled at the King Family Foundation Child Development Center in the Frogtown neighborhood of St. Paul. Bethel University professor Dale Johnson painted the mural, with the help of Molly Irwin and a few others.

You can view the outside of the playground fence any time by visiting the King CDC, which is located near the corner of I-94 and Western Ave. in the Salvation Army’s Ober Center. You should contact the King CDC’s director to see the inside of the fence.

The Minnesota Christian Chronicle ran my story about the unveiling and Johnson’s other local artwork last week, and Bethel issued a press release which includes several pictures.

My wife works at the King CDC, and when I stop by a few times a week to pick her up it’s a marked improvement to see the bright, joyful colors lighting up their once gray, weathered fence.