The Digest. 02.12.08.

Mantle. Photo by niznoz. Update: niznoz just sent me a link with some background on the above building.

• Will toll roads threaten the Chinati Foundation in Marfa, Tex.?
• Artists from 475 Kent fight to return to their Brooklyn building. Sign the petition.
• Painter Peter Doig, on having a work sell for £5.7 million last year: “It made me feel sick, really…I’m talking about nauseous sick, not so much disgusted or anything. That someone should have put their hand in their pocket and spent that much money on a painting of mine seemed so unconnected to anything that I ever did.”
• Image of exhausted U.S. soldier wins World Press Photo award. Update: See a photo essay with category winners.
• Must-Have Merch: Hieronymus Bosch figurines.
• Graff of the Day: Augor gives a There Will Be Blood billboard a top-to-bottom makeover.
• More on graffiti going electric. (Via WhatYouWrite.)
• Manga Bible.
• It’s a pile-on: Why does the latimes.com arts page suck so unbelievably hard?
• Photo of the Day: Hooters Air.
• Seattle Art Museum planning a show about the influence of Nirvana. The band, not the spiritual concept.
• The blotter: University of Pittsburgh geneticist sentenced to a year of unsupervised release and fined $500 for providing an artist friend with bacteria for an installation.
• Swiss museum heist took less than three minutes and netted Cezanne’s Boy in the Red Vest, Van Gogh’s Blossoming Chestnut Branches, Monet’s Poppies near Vétheuil and Degas’ Count Lepic and His Daughters. More here and here, and a story about who the paintings belonged to.
• The worst foods in America. FYI: Chili’s Awesome Blossom has 2,710 calories. (Via Coudal.)
• Profile of Dorothy Kosinski, new director of D.C.’s Phillips Collection, who is described as having “no patience for idiots.”
• In London: The neighborhood of Fitzrovia now hot, hot, hot among contemporary art gallerists.
• Photo Essay: Inside Herzog & De Meuron’s Bird’s Nest Stadium in Beijing.
• James Russell at Bloomberg describes the new BCAM building as the Pompidou Center with palm trees.
• Weirdest parish ever.
• Gross-out story of the day: Yummy mummy. (Via ackackack.)
• Your moment of via con me.