The Digest. 08.25.08.

Oslo, Norway. August 17th, at 4:10 p.m. (Photo by Ti.mo)

• Question of the Day: “Does anyone really give a shit about David Byrne’s bike racks?”
• Hirst Today, Not Gone Tomorrow: As Damien Hirst prepares to takes his wares to auction (and bypass his gallerists in the process), Cristina Ruiz at the Art Newspaper reports on the more than 200 pieces that his London gallery has failed to sell. The back stock is worth in excess of £100 million (not counting the diamond-studded skull) and includes an inventory of 34 butterfly paintings, half a dozen medicine cabinets and several dead things in formaldehyde. Maybe Hirst should be selling his stuff here.
• Fake Olympics, 2008: First, there was that lip-synching kid that got everyone’s panties in a knot. Now Cai Guo-Qiang has issued a statement on the fake fireworks “controversy.” Does this mean that the Students for a Free Tibet protestors were fake arrested? And then fake released? The mind reels.
• Plus: Everybody’s a critic. Including the Chinese government.
• Art-o-palooza begins in Denver, in time for the Democratic National Convention. Because I’m sure the first thing those caucus types are gonna do when they get into town, is don their finest donkey hats and head right to the Denver Art Museum.
• The Guardian has rounded up three decades worth of quotes by Tracey Emin. Sample: Emin on journalists: “They write 500 words, put me down, get their pay packets, pay off their credit cards, pay their mortgages, shag their wives—and when they do it’s me they’re thinking of.” (Via A.O.)
• Washington, D.C. types offended by underwear art.
• The Jeff Koons yacht: Looking like a Cancún party boat. (Via A.O.)
• Looking Around has one and two highly interesting posts that do a full body smackdown on the whole idea kicking around at the University of Iowa to sell off a Pollock to pay bills.
• Was a portrait that sold at auction for $21,000 back in ’98 done by Leonardo Da Vinci?
• Public art: Not as boring as it used to be, reports the NY Times. And not as public as it used to be either, reports Modern Art Notes.
• An excerpt from Peter Plagens’s novel, The Art Critic, is now available on ArtNet. Here’s the sex part, so that you don’t have to go looking for it: “Arthur’s sexual predilections were well within the bounds of bedroom civility—a little oral, occasional doggy-style, once in a while all the lights left on—and he was considerate enough to get up afterward and bring a bottle of mineral water avec gaz and two glasses back to one of the night tables.”
• For art lovers with a lotta dough: Private museum tours. (Via Personism.)
• The type of story I would one day love to write: Alma Guillermoprieto in National Geographic on the cholitas luchadoras of Bolivia. See the photo essay.
• Graff of the Day: Kislow in the Ukraine.
• Tate Modern exhibit on street art gets the city of São Paulo to rethink graffiti buffing policy.
• A U.S. couple—a.k.a. Ether and Dani—faces felony charges for graffiti “spree.” More here.
• Frank Gehry is out as architect of Brooklyn’s Theater for a New Audience.
• The Day in Vertical Lines: The Campus Universitário in Vigo, Spain, by Alfonso Penela.
• Architecture’s useless vestiges. (Via Life Without Buildings.)
• Brutalism: preserving the architecture nobody likes.
• Your moment of junk as art.

Posted by C-Monster.