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Detail: Dangerous Intersection, 2008. (Photos by C-M.)

Photos from the opening of Josh Dorman’s solo show, Babel, at Mary Ryan Gallery in New York City. The show is up until June 21st.

Click on images to supersize. More after the jump.

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Los Reyes del Mambo in Madrid. (Photo courtesy of SpY.)

• Zak Smith’s daily sketchbook.
• But will he be biting himself? Vito Acconci to deliver New School commencement address.
• New York mag has an excerpt of the De Kooning bio, An American Master, in which Rauschenberg swings by and asks to erase one of his drawings. (Via MAN.)
• Photo Essay: Robert Rauschenberg’s Time covers.
• Plus: Art to Go looks back at moments in pretty recent history when Rauschenberg wasn’t so popular, while NPR has audio of an interview with the artist, as well as a bit of music he composed, as part of his obit profile.
• I’d like you to meet your cellmate, “Tiny”: Asian antiquities expert arrested on fraud charges, stemming from SoCal museum raids this past January.
• Artlog.net Artlog.com has a brand spanking new function on their site that could serve as a good hub for organizations doing open calls for artists. If you’re an organization doing an open call, put your stuff up there…and if you’re an artist, check it out…
• The Brooklyn Museum has a super rad, comprehensive online exhibit of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
• When museums rent their art for money. Yeah, they’re talkin’ about you, Louvre.
• Staff cuts at the Getty.
• Harvard Art Museums to unveil new Renzo Piano designs for a new building this weekend.
• Robert Storr in Frieze magazine, on the power of patrons: “Eli Broad’s plan for sharing his collection with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while holding onto it in perpetuity is a glaring example of ‘what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine’ deal-making in the philanthropic domain.” (Via Eyebeam.)
• The Telegraph’s Richard Dorment on the Turner Prize nominees: “For the first time in many years, the Turner Prize shortlist looks to me like a dud. First, the four shortlisted artists struck me as unusually - and irritatingly - similar.” And, the kicker: “It’s the kind of modern art that pundits pay deference to and that deep down nobody really likes.” Plus: Bloomberg and the Guardian help sort out who is who.
• More on Susan Dessel getting censored by the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in N.J.: Heart as Arena and Winkleman.
• When paintings cost more than houses: Lucian Freud painting sells for $33.6 million at Christie’s and sets price record for a work by a living artist (via AJ). The Kaufmann Desert House sells for $15 million.
• Graff of the Day: A Flickr set of the Schmitz Park Bridge in Seattle.
• Ad Deville of Skewville and Ali Ha will open the doors on their Factory Fresh gallery in Brooklyn in early June.
• Marty caps Shepard Fairey on Houston Street in NYC in broad daylight.
• Daze released in Scotland.
• Architectural billings are flaccid.
• National Geographic has a photo essay on architecture in China.
• Charles and Ray Eames introduce their new lounge chair on NBC in 1956.
• A White Forest in a Grey Field by Junya Ishigami in Tokyo.
• Here’s what that fancy hotel yuck-ifying Manhattan’s Lower East Side looks like from the inside.
• The day in graffiti merch: Graffiti’d furniture and graffiti’d dishware.
• More street art as advertising, this time for Vespa in Montreal. Creepy-looking photos here.
• Me love: Nico Nico animated gifs.
• Your moment of bad ideas.

A Rauschenberg piece at Songs For Sale at Deitch, in 2006. (Photo by third uncle.)

Robert Rauschenberg 1925-2008. Read the NY Times obit. See the photo essay. Plus: Bloomberg, AP, Chicago Trib, L.A. Times, Reuters and the Captiva News-Press.

Posted by C-Monster.

Michael de Feo in Miami’s Wynwood arts district. (Photo by C-M.)

• In Beacon, N.Y.: Michael De Feo, Elbow Toe, Cycle, Lady Pink + many other artists do a live paint jam at 510 Main Street, starting Saturday.
• In Huntington, N.Y.: Jae Hi Ahn at Alpan Gallery.
• In NYC: Neo Rauch at David Zwirner, through June 21^st.
• In NYC: The Art of Moroccan Textiles at Cavin Morris.
• In NYC: Elizabeth Peyton at Gavin Brown, through May 17^th.
• In NYC: Yong Ho Ji at Gana Art, through May 24^th.
• In Washington, D.C.: Joe Shannon: Realism Surrealism at the American University Museum.
• In Washington, D.C.: The work of Eero Saarinen at the National Building Museum, through August 23^rd.
• In Chicago: Richard Rogers lecture at the Art Institute of Chicago this Thursday at 6 p.m.
• In Santa Fe: Comic Art Indigène, a look at American Indian comic art, at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture, through January 9^th.
• In L.A.: Uncommon Gardens at Thinkspace.
• In London: Grayson Perry: Unpopular Culture at the Hayward. See a video interview with Perry here.
• In Madrid: Alexandre Arrechea, Suicide Landscape, at Galeria Casado-Santapau, opens tomorrow.
• In Madrid: Rodin at Fundación Mapfre.

Den of Inequity, 2007, ink drawing with digital color by Kathryn DiLego. (Image courtesy of Kathryn DiLego.)

• Designer Karl Lagerfeld on contemporary art in the June issue of Vanity Fair: “I sold all of my art, because modern art is really only beautiful when it is displayed in huge places. If you live in an airport, fine. But I live on the Quai Voltaire, so where do you put this stuff?”
• Gap-Whitney art-merch T-shirts. How long before some poor kid in the Andes is spotted wearing a third hand version of one of these? (Via AFC.)
• A preview of the street art pieces at today’s Bonham’s contemporary art auction.
• The art market ain’t totally dead yet, reports The Telegraph.
• Bratwurst-a-palooza: Gagosian’s showing nothing but sausage for the month of May. Nothing but white sausage.
• In an unrelated story… A buncha girls make it to the Turner Prize short list: Cathy Wilkes, Runa Islam and Goshka Macuga. More here and here.
• But the Guardian’s Jonathan Jones is rooting for a dude, Mark Leckey, to get the prize: “He’s the only artist on the Turner shortlist who is really distinctive.”
• What to do with controversial art? If you’re the Long Beach Island Foundation for Arts & Sciences, in N.J., you put a scrim around it so no one has to suffer the consequences of being intellectually or emotionally challenged. James Wagner has the story.
• The latest Spencer Tunick nekkid people extravaganza: This time in Austria. And it involves (soccer) balls. More here.
• Miami just had its last Bas Fisher Invitational.
• The L.A. Times deconstructs the fall of Guggenheim Vegas: “Most residents and tourists will barely register the loss of the museum, which drew 1.1 million visitors over nearly seven years. The Venetian will simply morph, with the menacing ease of a comic-book villain, into its latest, post-Koolhaas incarnation. The Jewel Box is reportedly set to become a sizable Louis Vuitton boutique.”
• ThingsYoungerThanMcCain.com. Sample items: Alaska, Kodachrome, Israel and McDonald’s. (Via VSL.)
• Images from Tom Sanford’s show at Leo Koenig in NYC.
• The art at Carnegie International: It’s the end of the world as we know it.
• New doc to pay tribute to Alice Neel at the Northwest Film Forum, which starts Friday.
• In the Financial Times: “Most bankers worry that the art market is opaque, illiquid and unpredictable.” (Via A.O.)
• Sending a text message is more expensive than transmitting data from the Hubble to Earth. (Via Eyebeam.)
• Graff of the Day: BToy at the Cans Festival in London.
• Photos: Obey and Saber in L.A.’s Echo Park.
• Going On by Gnarls Barkley.
• Japanese custom scooters.
• Solar lily pads. (Via NotCot.)
• Going Up: Photos of OMA’s new CCTV building under construction in Beijing. Included is a link to a huge Flickr set of building shots.
• A Modern house grows in Queens.
• Are auctions the best way to protect classic Modernist houses?
• Bike trees. (Via architecture.mnp.)
• The inner workings of George Bush’s personality revealed.
• Your moment of O’Reilly, vintage tantrum edition.

Dodecahedron lamp, 2005. (Photo by C-M.)

Olafur Eliasson at Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery in NYC. The show runs through June 21st.

Posted by C-Monster.

Matt Siren. (Photos by C-M.)

Darkcloud and Matt Siren had one heck of a jam-packed opening for their exhibit of paintings and prints at the Woodward Gallery. In addition to the main event, there was plenty of collaboration. The show includes a mini-show within a show: Siren got together all kinds of artists - including 2ESAE, AVone, Gore-B, Infinity and many others - for a series of collaborative sign paintings that hang at the gallery’s entrance.

Money shots after the jump. Click on images to supersize.

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Switchblade, by Peter Gronquist. (Courtesy of Peter Gronquist.)

• What she said. Though, between you and me, I’m thinking of renaming the award the Lars Ulrich Intellectual Property Hysteria Prize.
• In related news: gratuitous shots of Gallery 303-related stuff on Look, See and Heart as Arena. Plus: understanding Fair Use, courtesy of AFC.
• The heart-warming tale of two stoners and the douchebags that try to keep them down.
• Today’s is-the-art-market-gonna-crash? story is brought to you by the Independent.
• And in a swing of the pendulum, the Guardian reports that the street art market is hot, hot, hot. (Via AJ.)
• Despite so-so sales, the Denver Post thinks that Art Chicago is much improved.
• Sotheby’s now catering to Russian oligarchs by selling art wares at a high-end Moscow mall.
• Art prices are high because making art has become more expensive, claim artists and their galleries. That’s what happens when art becomes musical theatre.
• Son of Schnabel. (Via AO.)
• The Day in State Law Prudery: Indianapolis Museum of Art, along with ACLU, sue over Indiana state law that would require them to register as a porn purveyor because their collection features nudes. (Via MAN.)
• Will they have a Ricky Ricardo room? Commission to study the feasibility of a national Latino museum in D.C. (I do not have a good feeling about this.)
• The Art Institute of Chicago charges another museum $2 million to borrow 92 paintings.
• Oakland Museum to begin work on a serious makeover.
• Former Navy officer now selling Iraqi contemporary art.
• Photo Essay: Geometry in painting. In keeping with the theme: The work of John Belingheri.
• Fear of a Black Planet: Fine arts commission in D.C. asks artist to make statue of MLK less “confrontational.”
• Gag-o-rific subway ad for the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
• Ansel Adams: The stories behind the pictures, as told by his former assistant.
• Looks like the apocalypse: Volcanic explosion-meets-lightning in Chile.
• Bob Dylan’s gonna have an art show.
• An exhibit about L.A.’s Chicano punk scene at the Claremont Musem.
• Republican convention manager forced to resign after mag reveals that he consulted for Burmese junta, work that involved “a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing ‘falsehoods’ by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses.” (Via Eyeteeth.)
• Rojo magazine’s website now has art videos. Check out Living Paintings by Robert Seidal to see a trippy-cool light show. (Via Juxtapoz.)
• Plastic bag shelter.
• Is Calatrava’s downtown train station in NYC getting cost-cutted into boring blandness? Probably.
• The architectural photography of Cristóbal Palma.
• Don’t miss! Wonderful talk by James Howard Kunstler on crap-ass city planning in U.S. ‘burbs: “There’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down this block.” Plus: “Please stop referring to yourselves as consumers.” (Via ackackack.)
• A building with mirrored exteriors: Hotel Aire de Bardenas by Monica Rivera & Emiliano López in Spain.
• Graff of the Day: Loser in New Jersey, in one and two parts. Well done!
• Free Daze: Graffiti artist gets 28 month-sentence, $20,000 fine in Scottish graffiti case.
• Shepard Fairey’s gonna get a big museum show at Boston’s ICA next year. (Via Art21.)
• Frackin’ cool graffiti animation video from Blu. (Via Ekosystem.)
• Spray paint can pillows.
• Juicy rumor of the Day: Are Banksy and Nick Walker the same person?
• Transparent Post Its.
• Your moment of Beckett meets Joyce on a golf course.

(Photo by C-M.)

Heard this from an Iraqi acquaintance who lives in Baghdad:

An American, a Brit and an Iraqi arrive in hell. The American goes to the pay phone and calls his family in the United States. He talks for 15 minutes. Satan charges him $10 million for the call because “it’s long distance.” The American grudgingly pays. The Brit makes a phone call to his family in England. The same charges apply: $10 million. Finally, the Iraqi goes to the phone and calls his family in Baghdad. He talks for hours — to everyone he knows. After he hangs up, he asks Satan, “How much?”

Satan replies: “Five dollars.”

The Iraqi says, “How can that be? I talked for hours.”

Satan says: “Hell-to-hell. It’s a local call.”

Posted by C-Monster.

Zhang’s ash painting, as it was being produced. (Photos by C-M.)

Photos from the opening of Zhang Huan’s show at Pace Wildenstein. It was totally over the top. In a good way. His most prominent piece was a giant ash painting, which was created on the surface of adjoining six-foot tall concrete blocks. You have to climb several steps, up onto a scaffolding, to see the piece, which was being touched up by a young woman in white, who would float over it and flick little piles of ash on various strategic locations. I was afraid to sneeze.

More pix after the jump. Click on images to see ‘em big.
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