Website: beautifulcrime.com
Twitter: @beautifulcrime
Facebook: facebook.com/beautifulcrime
When did you start out blogging?
Beautiful Crime has been around as a company since 2004, but we started blogging about urban, contemporary and digital & interactive art when the website relaunched at the end of March this year, along with our online shop, which sells contemporary and urban original artworks and prints.
How did you choose your blog name?
The name was chosen by a previous MD of the company almost a decade ago. Originally, Beautiful Crime was just for urban and street art, so the name challenged the idea of street art and graffiti being a 'crime' with the idea that actually, street art and graf - like art on gallery walls and 'legal' art in public spaces - can be visually beautiful.
What's it all about and why?
We only found art we were really interested in, on Facebook pages and YouTube, so we decided to gather all the really exciting, amusing, alternative, cutting edge and interesting stuff into one news portal - BeautifulCrime.com. We offer our audience a 'daily dose of art' but none of it's plain or boring!
We also speak to artists in our 'Have a Word w/' interviews as well as art critics, authors and (coming soon) a whole load of other well-known names from other creative industries that you perhaps might not know had art collections or were avid art enthusiasts. Ultimate interviewees would be Banksy, Sir Paul Smith and perhaps even someone like Lady Gaga - why not?
We are also an online shop for art and to some extent, an artists' agent, having put on art shows for some of them in the past. We are collectors of urban and contemporary art ourselves so we know what people are after.
Some of the artists are affiliated or exclusively represented by Beautiful Crime, but we also sell secondary works by other artists such as Pam Glew, Antony Micallef and Banksy. beautifulcrime.com/shop
Also check out Crime Lab. This is our third strand of beautifulcrime.com.
What do you do when you're not blogging?
Find interesting artists and people to interview, go to art shows and if you're talking about non-art related activities, you'd probably find us in the pub or travelling to sunnier climates!
If you could be in one place in the world right now, where would it be?
Brazil for the street art, the scene out there is very interesting right now; or maybe Japan or LA - second to the UK, we have a lot of fans from both these areas, both of which are on our hitlist for our next culture fix.
Who or what is your main inspiration? There are too many artists around yesterday and today, as well as relevant pioneers within the art world's legacy to name! And perhaps as controversial as it may sound, the projects that big car, alcohol, fashion and drinks brands have been able to put on, with the aid of all types of artists, have been very inspiring - 4D catwalk shows in Beijing for example, live spray events and so forth.
