Dodgers outfielder Gary Thomasson was a big disappointment in Japan — in 1980 he was signed to the Yomiuri Giants for a record-breaking sum, then nearly set a record for strikeouts before injuring his knee and retiring.

Artist Akasegawa Genpei took a strange inspiration from this: He defined a “Thomasson” as “an object, part of a building, that was maintained in good condition, but with no purpose, to the point of becoming a work of art.” For example, in Tokyo he’d noticed a well-maintained stairway with a blank wall at its top, and a ticket window that had been boarded up but whose tray had been assiduously permitted still to function.

Akasegawa’s colleague Chikuma Shobo eventually published a whole taxonomy of Thomassons: useless doorways, useless staircases, useless windows, doors to nowhere, senseless signs. Just like art, these items have no purpose in society, but they’re preserved with care, to the point that they seem to be exhibits in themselves. “However, these objects do not appear to have a creator, making them even more art-like than regular art.”

Artist François Abelanet created this perspective-based illusion outside the city hall in Paris in 2011. Ninety gardeners worked for five days to prepare an area of 1500 square meters.

Abelanet called it Qui croire? (Who to Believe?).

In 1987 Marinus Boezem planted 178 Lombardy poplars on a knoll near Almere in the Dutch province of Flevoland.

Now grown to maturity, the trees form a living replica of the Cathedral of Notre-Dame in Reims, France, 150 meters long, 75 meters wide, and 30 meters tall.

The current “Groene Kathedraal” hosts weddings, funerals, and religious services, but Boezem is already planning for the future — a second clearing is being prepared nearby so that as the poplars decline a cathedral of beeches will take its place, and the two will alternate in an endless cycle thereafter.

Italian Futurist Renato Bertelli produced this “Continuous Profile of Mussolini” in 1933, eight years after its subject became dictator of Italy. Surprisingly, Mussolini approved it as an official portrait. Not only did it present him as a cultural pioneer, he thought, but it appealed to his respect for Roman traditions: Where Janus had two faces, to look into the past and the future, Il Duce’s had an infinite number, to see in all directions.

In 2008, Syracuse University art professor Sam Van Aken acquired the three-acre orchard at the New York State Agricultural Experiment Station, which was closing due to funding cuts. Over the next five years he grafted together buds from 250 varieties grown there, creating in the end a single tree with 40 different branches, each bearing a different kind of fruit, including almonds, apricots, cherries, nectarines, peaches, and plums. He’s since gone on to produce 16 such trees.

“I’ve been told by people that have [a tree] at their home that it provides the perfect amount and perfect variety of fruit,” he said. “So rather than having one variety that produces more than you know what to do with, it provides good amounts of each of the 40 varieties. Since all of these fruit ripen at different times, from July through October, you also aren’t inundated.”

Oh, and they also bloom in pink, crimson and white in the spring. Here’s Van Aken’s website.

Chinese artist Liu Bolin is hiding in this photograph. Can you find him?

During a lull in the Prussian attack on Paris in December 1870, the Seventh Company of the French National Guard spent a few hours building a “museum” of snow on the southern edge of the city. Among them was 29-year-old sculptor Alexandre Falguière, who spent three hours crafting La Statue de la Résistance, a nine-foot emblem of French resistance in the form of a defiant woman atop a cannon. Félix Philippoteaux sketched the snow woman, Théophile Gautier wrote an essay, Théodore de Banville published a poem, Félix Bracquemond made an etching, and Faustin Betbeder produced a series of lithographs, but none of these captured the essence of the original. Falguière promised to make a permanent version in plaster or marble, but it never appeared. Critic H. Galli wrote in L’Art français in 1895:

As soon as Falguière was back in his studio, he took up his modeling knife, but he sought, worked, and suffered in vain. None of his maquettes had the proud allure, the poetry of his snow statue; he destroyed them. The capitulation, the dismemberment of France, and then the awful civil war had, alas, dissipated his last hopes. The inspiration was dead.

“Recapturing that magic would prove to be impossible for the unflagging Falguière,” writes Bob Eckstein in The History of the Snowman. “Eventually he created many variations in wax, plaster, terra cotta, and bronze, ranging in size from two to four feet high, all less successful than the original snow sculpture. Falguière could never duplicate the spontaneity and urgency of that long-gone snow woman. That moment had passed and had melted along with his original masterpiece.”