Artists Are Making Junk—Literally

Beware the scruffy artists at the corner cafe—they may be serial polluters and not even know it, Laurie Fendrich writes in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Many painters, tree-huggers by claim, will flush chemicals down the drain, and ignore the carbon footprint of their synthetic pigments. They just "think of their paints as gooey stuff that can be turned into a nice painting," Fendrich writes.

Old-style shutterbugs, elbow-deep in chemicals, are no better. And installation artists are the worst: A huge plastic bubblewrap piece may be made from recycled goods, but where will it go when the gallery run is over? “The art world isn’t green,” Fendrich concludes. “It’s mud.” (More art stories.)