I don't know if there's a more accurate name for this type of art, besides "conceptual art" – but the my favorite kind of art is when the artist makes stuff with giant bits of typography.

This post will introduce two of my favorites.

Artist #1: Lawrence Weiner

This is the first artist I came across that makes this kind of art. As this gallery says, Weiner "is among the trailblazers of the 1960s to present art as language."

Here's an awesome 5-minute video with him from 2008.

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I first heard about him from the design matters podcast back in 2008. the website for the episode is still online but the CSS seems to be stripped from the site, leaving the typography in the default 12-point Times New Roman which kinda works for this guy.

Here's another one of his works:

Other resources: wikipedia / this art gallery

Artist #2: Robert Montgomery

This guy is British and has been making art more recently than Weiner. Here's a bit from his biography:

Robert Montgomery follows a tradition of conceptual art and stands out by bringing a poetic voice to the discourse of text art. Montgomery creates billboard poems, light pieces, fire poems, woodcuts and watercolors.

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Here are some examples of his work:

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and this one:

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Check out more on his site.

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I like this kind of art for a bunch of reasons.

let's make a list since this is a blog post.

• It's unexpected when you see it in person - giant letters in places you don't normally see them
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• The only other time you see big words in the world is on billboards and signs and stuff. When someone's trying to sell you something. This isn't.
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• I always wonder how people come up with stuff to write about. Like the actual topics. giant typography art makes that question have even more interesting, since someone is committing to make those words as big as possible.
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• One can't really own the art. I guess you could own the building it's on, but the whole point is that the public can see it.
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• It's just delightful! 

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Oh yeah Stefan Sagmeister does stuff like this too but everyone knows about him already.

This is my favorite thing on the internet right now. Each week, the folks at The Pudding try a get a computer to win the New Yorker’s weekly cartoon caption contest.

Here’s this week’s attempt:

You can sign up for their email newsletter to help train the algorithm at their website.  

I liked this short story by Keith Ridgway in The New Yorker. It's about about an older woman whose young neighbors are having a party has so many good lines in it.

Here's an excerpt:

He was pulling some sort of, what on earth, headphones? Big black things, with the big fat pads for the ears.

—Headphones here, for this, which is this old

A small . . . a phone?

—An iPod. My old iPod. And I don’t know what you like obviously, or even if this is a stupid idea, you might not want to listen to anything at all, but there’s playlists on there, some easy-listening things, some pop stuff, and some classical as well, you can, will I show you what, will I show you how this works?

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See also: other things to which I've linked.