Yes, I’m asking for money.

This summer, I’m going to be working as studio assistant/translator/chasqui for my partner-in-crime Celso on a series of installations that will go up at the Qorikancha  the old Inca sun temple in Cusco, Peru. For the project — which is titled La Luz — he’ll be building a series of architectural installations around the ruins grounds (and the attached Dominican monastery) using several hundred bottles of Inca Kola, the nuclear yellow Peruvian soda (see images above and below). It will be a pop paean to the gold that once covered the site. The piece will be pulled apart and re-installed in a new location every three days. At the end of each installation, the public will be allowed to take the Inca Kola home.

The museum that manages the site, the Museo Qorikancha y Convento de Santo Domingo, has commissioned the piece. But as with most arts institutions in Peru, the budgets are tiny. Which is why we’re asking for your help. This is going to be a beautiful project — unlike anything the museum has ever done. So pleasepleaseplease help us get to Peru! Any donation, no matter how small, makes a difference.

Please click through to Celso’s Kickstarter to send us your pennies. We have all kinds of goodies for rewards. And we promise that your donations will be wisely and prudently spent (on lots of Inca Kola). If you’re a regular reader, please think of this as a way to help me keep doing what I love to do — namely, writing about great-weird art I find wherever I happen to be.

Thanks so much! And thanks for reading C-Mon!!!

xox,
C.

• “Make a cruel and offensive offer.” Papers filed in a lawsuit reveal negotiating tactics at Gagosian. Juicy.
• N+1 has a must-read essay on the general oleaginousness of Sotheby’s, which makes their treatment of unionized art handlers even more nausea-inspiring.
• If you go to a shit farm, you’ll find shit: Morley Safer went to Art Basel Miami Beach and found general vapidity. Duh!
• Roberta Smith deconstructs Safer’s “clueless exercise.” She also takes a dig at “semi-informed” bloggers. (Because lord knows I’ve *never* read anything semi-informed in the New York Times.)
• Jerry Saltz has challenged Safer to curate a show. I’d like to suggest that Safer hang out with those Sotheby’s art handlers instead of hobnobbing with Larry Gagosian. You know, something informed and incisive, rather than mere gum-flapping.
• Speaking of which: The price of art fairs. Highly interesting piece, even if it appears to be missing the line items for rent-a-boyfriends and cocaine.
• Urban Outfitters — a company with a Santorum-supporting CEO — sells (or sold?) T-shirt featuring gay icon Robert Mapplethorpe.
• On the world of art celebrity: Klaus Biesenbach and his Twitter feed. (Gallerist NY.)
• Larry Rivers’ Legs: Are they a sculpture? Or a structure? I love it when these scintillating questions get asked.
• A round-up of interesting artist websites. (Have to agree with Hyperallergic: the David Hockney copyright disclaimer is pretty douchey.)
• Sasha Frere-Jones, in defense of Twitter.
• Will the train ever leave the station? On trying to fund Jeff Koons’ steaming piece of boner art.
• Plus: Heart As Arena comes up with a tasteful alternative to Koons’ dangling locomotive.
• Remembering Hilton Kramer…and his incredibly right-wing politics. (Read this all the way through. The end is pretty spectacular.)
• Teaching Art in 89 Simple Lessons: If the producers of Work of Art had employed this book to come up with the challenges in the show things coulda been really interesting…
• The Gallery of Default Anonymity.
• Related: Screenshots of Despair.
• Just because: Snoop Dogg’s Soundcloud.

Man, I LOVE Robert Hughes when he’s railing against money!!! And this short documentary series about how money has come to rule the world of contemporary art is so good, I’ve posted posted all six episodes here. Not only is the message (and the historical footage) all kinds of amazing, the scenes that show Hughes staring dramatically into space are straight out of Masterpiece Theatre. There are many fantabulous moments in this doc (footage of Robert Rauschenberg crashing Robert Scull’s auction of his work is one of them), but my most favorite comes in Episode 6, in which Hughes interrogates collector Alberto Mugrabi about art. IT IS FUCKING SUBLIME (even if Hughes conveniently overlooks the fact that Rauschenberg was kind of phoning it in at the end).

Seriously, light a fattie and watch this. It is sooooo good on so many levels.

Double hat-tip to Jörg Colberg for pointing the way on this. The additional five episodes can be found below.

Would look smashing with a plastic cover: a mid-nineteenth century sofa attributed to John Henry Belter.

A sculpture by Donald Fortescue and Lawrence LaBianca in the museum’s New Materiality exhibit, up through June 12. This piece had a very subtle audio component to it: stand under the trumpet and you could hear the faint sounds of water sloshing. It was the kids there who pointed this out to us.

An incredible sculpture of a mastiff in the museum’s entryway — an earthenware piece crafted during the Eastern Han Dynasty 25-220 CE).

Accompanying the mastiff: This glazed clay sculpture of a small barking dog, produced during the Han Dynasty (206 BCE – 220 CE). <3

Since I seem to be on a yappy dog kick: a painting by Alex Katz, from 1971.

Yes, I’m a dogaholic. An image of a pooch snoozing, part of triptych painted by Jan Swart (von Groningen) in the mid 16th century.

Here’s the full triptych, which is titled Triptych with Moses and the Tablets of the Law and Josiah and the Book of the Law. Whew.

Saint Francis of Assissi in his tomb, by Francisco de Zurbarán, 1630/34. Pairs well with…

…Alfred Leslie’s self-portrait from 1970. Love the hammer.

This was pretty awesome: Pieter Breughel the Younger’s Peasant Brawl, painted circa 1620. Apparently, this is the sort of thing Hapsburg aristocrats used to like to hang in their chateaus.

The Gardener, 1912, by Alexei Jawkensky.

The day we visited the museum was field trip day. (There must have been half a dozen school buses parked out front.) I loved watching the kids hopscotch on top of Carl Andre’s 144 Pieces of Zinc, a sculpture from 1967.

A little girl takes in the view of a sculpture by Alexander Calder.

Here’s what she was looking at.

Laid Table, from 2007, by Beth Lipman.

Garmisch-Partenkirchen, 1933, by Marsden Hartley. We saw a lot of mountains on this trip. This painting reminded me of some of our vistas.

I found this painting by Everett Shin, from circa 1910, rather striking for the way in which he masked out the woman’s face.

Ralph’s, by Robert Cottingham, from 1968.

Wally Barker, 1948, by Max Beckmann.

The museum had a pretty wild design collection. Above, a settee reconstructed from original drawings by Josef Ulrich Danhauser, circa 1815. This has Washington, D.C. written all over it.

This blew my mind: a settee from the Biedermeir period in Austria — from the 1820s. So crazy to see something so totally 1970s modern emerge from the early 19th century.

Speaking of couches: This is the sort of painting I’d expect to see over a white leather number owned by some South American narco-boss. It’s Jean-León Gerôme’s The Two Majesties, from 1883.

The second floor galleries have spectacular views of Lake Michigan — including this sculpture room that offers couches for chilling, within the Bradley Collection.

At the gift shop: Museum lip balm. Handy.

A panoramic scan of the museum’s lobby atrium. (Note that this photo is a distorted view of lobby.)

Even the garage is gaspingly beautiful — looking like a BMW showroom. I’m sure this building is a bitch to maintain (hinged metal roof mechanism next to a lake=rust galore), but it’s absolutely gorgeous to look at.

After the museum, we headed to the Old German Beer Hall for lunch. The brat and beer came to a whopping $4. Milwaukee, I love you.