C-MONSTER.net.

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.

Fuck Art: Let’s be Hedge Fund Managers by Marc Johns. See the full set of his Post-It note drawings, as well as his website.

• It is the fifth anniversary of the U.S. invasion of Iraq. In honor of this profoundly sad moment: Four photo essays by Magnum photographers about war. (The commentary on the one by Thomas Dworzak is especially sublime.)
• In related news: Iraq’s National Museum will not reopen.
• Art Review Lead of the Day: “You know that embarrassed feeling you get at dinner parties when one of the guests is making a complete prat of themselves, and everybody knows it but them, and the humane thing to do would be to get them to stop, but you are not your brother’s keeper and, besides, they probably wouldn’t listen to you anyway? That’s the feeling I had going around the Barbican’s excruciating attempt to create a Martian Museum of Terrestrial Art. What a cringe-making display of creative curatorship.”
• How to create your own font.
• Thinking about the Milky Way.
• Graff of the Day: Gualicho in Buenos Aires.
• JR goes big in Brussels.
• A round-up (heh heh, get it?) of spherical architecture. (Richard: You forgot this one.)
• Bad Banking News is Good News for the NYC Skyline: The Bear Stearns collapse means JP Morgan won’t be able to erect fugly headquarters.
• Trippy stairs.
• New Book: Pentagram Papers 37: Forgotten Architects, chronicling the work of German Jewish architects and designers who worked in 1930s Germany.
• Recurso’s low-impact environmental housing in Mexico City.
• Beer can butterflies.
• Whitney Museum to get beaucoup dinero from its chairman, Leonard Lauder.
• Madrid’s Caixaforum debuts with paintings from the Uffizi.
• Public Service Announcement.
• Photos from CA Boom V, a West Coast design show, which includes a shot of $1000 Shepard Fairey skate decks from Bottega Montana.
• Not a rhetorical question: What does Lever House smell like?
• The Top 10 Weirdest Rock ‘n Roll Deaths. (Via Coudal.)
• Wooden Buddha sets auction record for Japanese art during Christie’s sale.
• In related art industrial average news: A pickled fish by Damien Hirst, which hung for years in a fish ‘n chip shop in Leeds, will now be sold at auction. Scrumptious!
• W.H. Auden gets goes down.
• German graphic design on Flickr. (Via Coudal.)
• Novelists strike fails to affect nation whatsoever. (Via The Elegant Variation.)
• Your moment of live animal shows.

Chris Uphues at Alcove Gallery, in NYC, through April 12th. Photo by C-M.

• Urge your member of Congress to support the artist deduction bill.
• Speaking of Congress… An animated short: The History of Evil.
• Trying to preserve Richard Serra’s Shift.
• Iraqi artist claims censorship after his Virtual Jihadi video piece is shut down by Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in Troy, NY.
• The 100 Best Last Lines from Novels. (Via The Elegant Variation.)
• As it digs for a subway, Rome unearths all sorts of treasures. (Via AJ.)
• Geometric sculpture on Flickr.
• No need to smoke weed. Now you can just drink the water.
• When Mongo Thomson imitates James Turrell.
• The Krens-master Cycle, Day 17: Thomas Krens, you’ve turned the Gugg into the artistic equivalent of Starbucks and now you’re retiring. What are you gonna do? Go on a 1,400-mile motorcycle ride down the Baja coast with Jeremy Irons, Laurence Fishburne and Dennis Hopper.
• Art in the degraded image stream.
• The Brooklyn Museum is now accepting photos for Click!, their crowd-curated exhibit.
• A Q&A, in one 1 and 2 parts, with the curators of the Whitney Biennial.
• Biennial Review of the Day: “The Whitney is not in the business of selling art, but this Biennial shows that it’s nevertheless caught up in the market’s bizarre hysteria, swooning over mediocrity and prodigally handing out prestige.” (Via AJ.)
• Way More Interesting than the Biennial: All those blowhard financial types that Eliot Spitzer has prosecuted are probably now wearing red dresses and prancing around.
• A round-up of worthwhile museum blogs.
• Alternate intro to Star Wars.
• To everyone’s surprise, the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht is moving merch, including a Jackson Pollock painting for a cool $8 mil.
• In a related story: How many art fairs do you think there will be in Miami this December? Cast your vote here.
• Graff of the Day: Ibie, Sakristan and Edjinn in Barcelona.
• The views from Mt. Everest.
• A history of 20^th century war told with food. (Via NotCot.)
• Beautiful bridges. (Via ackackack.)
• Photos of apartment density in Hong Kong.
• Zaha Hadid is everywhere, except Britain. (Via AJ.)
• A splendid gathering of trailers.
• Steven Holl architects is looking for slaves interns.
• Google’s Zurich office looks like a day care center.
• A gallery of deleted images.
• Your moment of British-ness.