In 1961, seven years after J.D. Salinger began his lifelong, self-imposed exile from public life, John Updike described the author as "a uniquely relevant literary artist." Whether Salinger thought Updike's statement was a compliment or a slight is irrelevant. Criticism, publicity, or praise -- Salin

Angry, Dark, Dystopic, Post-war literature, Psychological, Rebel

The Designers Republic creates images that make the most jaded consumer a sucker for packaging. The work is playful in every sense: bright, candy-colored compositions with anime cartoon children running rampant; it's like Hello Kitty playing laser tag. Yet these images play snidely with branding, cor

Bright, Citational, Cool, Playful, Pop, Psychedelic design, Rebel

His delivery was flat. His beady eyes revealed a mind constantly at work. Andy Kaufman threw every joke away -- he delivered bad lines, well, badly. Herein lay the source of his genius: he committed to the premise of the joke and ignored punchlines as byproducts of the comedic process. Every bad gag,

Bombast, Clever, Excessive, In-your-face, Rebel, Wise assy

Olia Lialina is a brazen new voice whose emergence is owed to the World Wide Web. An artist and polemicist, she is seemingly everywhere in on- and offline discussions concerning the development of Internet art, or as she calls it, "net.art." From her home base in Moscow (Lialina is Russian-born), she

Melancholy, Net art, Political, Quirky, Rebel, Technology