Sebastian Errazuriz

Faith can restore a fractured soul. When temperatures skyrocket, it can also be quite refreshing. Over the weekend, at a pre-Design Week party at Gallery R'Pure in New York's Flatiron District, Chilean-born artist Sebastian Errazuriz's latest work -- 100 wine-flavored popsicles molded around crosses instead of sticks -- was doled out and both literally and metaphorically consumed by an audience. As each popsicle was eaten, a wooden crucifix emerged, a drawing of Jesus decorating its center.

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Joy Xie

Van Gogh's smoking skull on a banana

Those organic bananas you bought from Whole Foods -- sure, they might be kinda cool, but you know what's really cool? Bananas with tattoos. Nobody wants to mess with fruit that's got a sweet tat (or eat it, really).

The time-lapse video on the next page is the work of artist Phil Hansen, who uses a push pin to pierce the outer peel of the fruit, which exposes the interior to air, causing it to rot and turn brown. The result is classic art pieces, like Michelangelo's The Creation of Adam, re-created on a yellow, awkwardly shaped canvas.

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Flickr/Joey Zanotti

"I try to stay with themes or objects or sources I can trace back to my personal history," artist Robert Therrien once said. "The further back I can trace something as being meaningful to me in some way or another ... the more I am attracted to it." Little wonder, then, that plates, pots and pans have inspired much of his recent artwork. Today's Flickr pool photo, of an untitled sculpture by Therrien at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, comes to you courtesy of L.A. Weekly reader Joey Zanotti.

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Lucien Smith

Cheerios

A 4-year-old artist might sculpt a lumpy face in a dish of mashed potatoes, adding peas for eyes. Twenty years later, the same artist might stage a gleeful cafeteria food fight and call it social sculpture. Curator Hanne Mugaas says, "Food has always been present in art. ... It is linked to pleasure." She's right; no necessity other than sex may be more so. In "The Art of Cooking," the Mugaas-curated eats-and-art-themed exhibit opening at the Royal/T in Culver City today, food is appropriately muse, medium and message -- and everyone, as Mugaas notes, can relate to it.

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Sapore dei Mobili

Design in good taste

Milan-based designers Ryosuke Fukusada and Rui Pereira explain their Sapore dei Mobili (Taste of Furniture), a waffle pan that turns out tiny edible furniture, as a "reflection about the velocity of the contemporary furniture industry and how the consumers are unable to digest the huge amount of new products launched every year." Because how better to make design digestible than to make design that's literally digestible?

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Herb Ritts (J. Paul Getty Museum)

Djimon With Octopus, Hollywood, 1989

If you've ever found yourself completely devoid of compelling reasons for a friend to meet you at a museum on a gorgeous, beer-on-the-beach sort of Saturday (the dark galleries are at least air-conditioned, the tram to the Getty is sort of fun), you have new food fodder: The Getty Restaurant is serving up multicourse meals coinciding with the museum's Herb Ritts: L.A. Style exhibition on view through August.

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Mike D + Roy Choi

Prior to his days covering the city's tastiest (and unhealthiest) lunches under $10, Los Angeles food blogger Zach Brooks of Midtown Lunch worked as a music programmer at Sirius Satellite Radio in New York. But when Brooks went bicoastal two years ago, he didn't give up his love for music but instead channeled it into a site called "Food Is the New Rock", which just launched its first "preview" podcast yesterday.

When the podcast officially launches next month, Brooks and co-host KCRW DJ Chuck P -- a figure who is something of a local legend among music geeks -- will host a special guest each week to discuss "the places where food and music intersect in pop culture." So what type of crowd is Brooks hoping to attract to the show? "We might talk to a musician about food, or a food person about music, or maybe just a random person who likes food and music," he says.

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Ben Campbell

McDonald's burger and fries under glass

There's playing with your food, and there's Playing With Your Food. A kind of brilliant example of the latter is the artwork of Ben Campbell, a Texas artist who recently constructed a mummy entirely out of McDonald's food.

Campbell, who describes himself as "some guy in West Texas who makes artwork out of old food," constructed the mummy to demonstrate the correlation between ancient Egypt mummification practices and modern society's obsession with immortality. At least that's what we think. Maybe keep reading.

We caught up with Campbell this morning, after seeing his project on Facebook and Kickstarter. (Pledge $10 and you get a mummified order of small McDonald's fries!) Because if you could ask a guy why he decided to build a mummy out of burgers and fries, wouldn't you?

As for why Campbell does stuff like this, he told us, "I'm generally known for not taking myself too seriously and pursuing odd projects. Because of that, the only thing I'm probably suited for in life is to be a celebrity artist." If West Texas doesn't work out, he can always move here.

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djjewelz/Flickr

Doughnuts

Arts group ForYourArt kicks off the opening of its location across the street from LACMA at 6020 Wilshire Blvd. on Saturday with a box of doughnuts to share, as you do on your first day of work when you want to endear yourself to your officemates. Because this is an arts group, after all, the sugary medium is the message: To coincide with LACMA's 24-hour screening of Christian Marclay's The Clock from noon Saturday to noon Sunday, ForYourArt will host "Around the Clock: 24-Hour Donut City" to comment on the nature of Los Angeles' sprawl and 24-hour doughnut shops.

Marclay, who was profiled in a lengthy article in last week's The New Yorker, spent three years compiling thousands of hours' worth of scenes from television and film where the time or a clock is shown, organizing them by hour and editing them together into one giant collage. The final movie is a full 24 hours, with each hour unfolding in real time, minute by minute, turning the film itself into a clock of sorts.

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Dominic Wilcox

The Queen on a coin

When McVitie's, manufacturer of the immensely popular British snack called Jaffa Cakes, asked artist Dominic Wilcox to creatively use the snacks to celebrate the upcoming London Summer Olympics, he took a little inspiration from his friends. Or, more specifically, how his friends eat their Jaffa Cakes. The cake (which, depending on who you talk to, is actually a biscuit) has a spongy base layer topped with orange jelly and covered in chocolate; with all these components, there are, apparently, at least as many ways to eat a Jaffa Cake as there are to eat an Oreo Cookie.

As Wilcox explains on his site, Variations on Normal, he took note of how his friends "described their strange and unique methods of eating them. I started to nibble and pick away, going through 30 boxes of Jaffa Cakes to try to get shapes that fitted with my British-themed ideas." He ended up nibbling the cake/biscuits into the queen, the Union Jack, Stonehenge and our personal favorite, the Loch Ness monster, which is perfectly plated on a sea of blue. Typical of many who work at the intersection of food and art, Wilcox ran into a little bit of trouble: "One problem I had was when I got distracted by the radio and then looked back to see I had eaten the Loch Ness monster."

A few more photos of the Jaffa Cake art, courtesy of Wilcox himself, after the jump.

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