The Digest. 11.26.07.

At the Getty Villa. Photo by ubignut.

• Return to sender: The Getty Villa gets a colonic.
• Giving New York City all the charm of Dallas with crap-ass, ‘80s-style mega-developments. More here.
• The Day in Bedfellows: More about museums on the art-dealer dole.
• Jury still out on whether Charles Bukowski is landmark-worthy.
• Kleptomaniac CFO provides Bellevue Arts Museum with unique fundraising opportunity.
• When Art Stories Go Harlequin: “The 32-year-old artist with the long, ungovernable brown hair and intense eyes carefully checked his work, lightly strumming petal-like curlicue peelings to make sure they hadn’t been marred.”
• From the Department of It-Must-Be-True-It-Was-in-Page-Six: Why Gagosian is buying pieces by his own artists.
• In Britain, they’ve accumulated so much art, they sometimes lose it. And then they have to find it. No doubt this keeps the government types employed. (Via ArtsJournal.)
• Performance art by any other name is still performance art.
• Newsflash: Art in China could become, gasp, “the preserve of the rich.” No worries, because the poor in China can always buy knock-off art on the streets.
• Is it art or is it crap? Take the test and find out.
• R.I.P Charles D. Kratka. (View one of his mosaics here.)
• R.I.P. Paul Brach. (The Smithsonian has a 1971 oral history interview with him here.)
• Someone please give Ed Winkleman a job in development at the Fox Network, because I’d watch his show. (Though, this being set in Miami, I would like to suggest a role for Edward James Olmos. Something in which he has to sport a Pancho Villa moustache and seethe two-word lines like, “Find them.”)
• Way bigger than Salcedo’s crack at the Tate: Urs Fischer’s pit at Gavin Brown. (Tip: no need to go to a gallery to see a pit. They’re free and accessible in a desolate urban area near you.)
• Visual Nuggets: Conny Kuilboer.
• A classification of the types of nerds expected to attend Miami Basel. Though they forgot the dowdy art media.
• Architecture for jocks.
• In related news: a book about architectural egos.
• Artist Quote of the Day: “During the Renaissance, if I lived then, would I have been good enough to be a background painter for some of those masters? Why? Because I painted mural after mural—battle scenes and the Vikings for the movies and a bing and a bang and a bing bang boom!”
• The U.S. government hasn’t yet figured out how to attack Iran, so they’re going after AP photographers instead.
• In unrelated news: Iraq’s National Museum to reopen.
• The day in over-priced street art. (And more on those Banksy fakes.)
• And because it seems that I am required to include one more Jeff Koons reference in this round-up.
• In Madrid: Warhol on Warhol at La Casa Encendida and Andy Goldsworthy at the Parque del Retiro.
• In Hamburg: Juergen Mayer’s bubbly office building.
• In NYC: Satch Hoyt’s Say It Loud at the Brooklyn Museum. (Holy shit, people, what’s with the Oscar-length speeches?)
• In L.A.: Robert Hardgrave at BLK/MRKT Gallery.
• Your moment of soul: Dig it.