The Digest. 12.06.07.

Live from Miami Beach: I Hate You Art by Felix Curto.

• It’s as if Hemingway had been writing about art fairs: “Our nada who art in nada, nada be thy name thy kingdom nada thy will be nada as it is in nada. Give us this nada our daily nada and nada us our nada as we nada our nadas and nada us not into nada but deliver us from nada; pues nada. Hail nothing full.” —Ernest Hemingway, A Clean Well-Lighted Place.
• Running of the Bulls at Pamplona + Alexander Calder + High Prices=Art Basel. More here and here.
• Photos from the initial stampede.
• And I Quote: “Everyone is pressed up against the glass at 11:59:59. And when they open the doors, it’s like wildebeests trying to cross the river while the crocodiles snap at them.”
• Attack of the Basel corporate sponsors.
• OMG, Basel is about parties, not art.
• Chinese art hot, hot, hot at the Basel Frazzle.
• The day in bizarrely named art fairs: NADA (which means “nothing” in Spanish) ain’t so bad, reports ArtInfo.
• Because the world doesn’t have enough art fairs: A new one for L.A. (Via Art Observed.)
• I poop on you: Some background on Paul McCarthy’s buttplug chocolate Santa.
• Marc Trujillo likes to paint “everyday purgatories.” No word on whether he’s painted an art fair.
• Artworld Smackdown: Photographers of Marlboro ads versus Richard Prince: “If I italicized ‘Moby-Dick,’ then would it be my book? I don’t know. But I don’t think so.”
• Studio Gangster: Espo has a new book.
• Dear Museum Wankers: What’s with the no-photo policies? Museums are public institutions that accept public money—as in my taxes. If I want to shoot a dead fish, I should fucking well be able to. You guys all blab on and on about creating “interactive art” exhibits that “engage the public,” yet you won’t allow photos. Stop freaking out about intellectual property rights and lame-ass merchandising and start letting people record and share the art.
• Is it me, or does that recently auctioned Mesopotamian lioness look a lot like a Thundercat?
• Visual nuggets: Merkz + Girod’s library in Maastricht.
• The Tate Modern gets a buttload of money from the gummint. More here.
• The photographs of Chien-Chi Chang.
• The art industrial average is on the upswing in India. (Via Arts Journal.)
• When art imitates the present: Conjuring a “decadent, doomed world” at the Wallace Collection.
• Suburban Tokyo nightscapes by Tomoyuki Sakaguchi.
• In Chicago: The New Authentics at Spertus.
• In London: Permission to Paint at the Leonard Street Gallery.
• Your moment of hardness: all walking like.