• Must. Get. These boots. (Thank you for this amazing discovery, @giovannigf.)
• How Peruvian hair ends up on the heads of ladies in Brooklyn. (Things I loved learning: Orthodox women consider curly hair to symbolize an “unruly” spirit.)
• Are you wiping your butt with old growth forests? (Cool Green Science.)
• “Income inequality in the United States is higher than in any other advanced industrial democracy and by conventional measures comparable to that in countries such as Ghana, Nicaragua, and Turkmenistan.”
• There’s an all kinds of interesting story in the New Yorker about the recently refurbished Vatican Library. (Subscription required.)
• Between a Cross and a Hard Place: Excellent piece on the Wojnarowicz controversy (with hstorical context) in ARTnews.
• “Thus, my five-year long trial ended without judgment—neither condemnation nor vindication, a reality hard to accept, given the distorted and slanderous allegations against me.” The Getty’s former antiquities curator Marion True, on the ambivalent end to the charges filed against her in an Italian court for allegedly conspiring to receive illegally excavated antiquities. Read her full statement here. (L.A. Times.)
• Stonerrific: The eCloud sculpture at San Jose International Airport. Watch the video.
• Awesome: The “Is This Art?” iPhone app I helped work on (with the Mattress Factory and Deep Local and the awesome Jeff Inscho), made Technology in the Arts year-end Top Ten!! Don’t have the app? Find it here.
• ¡Art World Smackdown, Super Duper High-Brow Edition! The Met vs. The New York Review of Books.
• The Day in Super Rich Artist Lawsuits: Jeff Koons goes after San Francisco shop for selling balloon dog bookends. Up next: Koons sues guys who make balloon dogs. (Eyeteeth.)
• William Powhida’s guide to the art market, as explained by Felix Salmon.
• Speaking of which… Things you can buy if you have crazy amounts of money: A bullet-scarred Warhol that once belonged to Dennis Hopper.
• A thoughtful essay by Sharon Butler on James Panero’s “Jerry Saltz problem.”
• Exit Through the Gift Shop could just be an Oscar contender. Sorta related: Let the fight for credit begin! Swiss filmmaker says his work was used in the film, yet went uncredited.
• What a difference just a couple of years makes. An incredible photo essay documents lightning speed change in Mongolia. (Gracias, Big Papi G.)
• Manga farming.
• Street artists protest the removal of Blu’s mural at LA MoCA with lasers. Video here.
• Today’s Street Art: Fighmoen in Mexico City.
• The Day in Awesome Graffiti Music Finds: The World’s Best Ever has audio of REVS’s 1993 punk album.
• The Architectural Industrial Average Is Up: Billings at their highest since 2007. (@Architizer.)
• The stunning world of tampon cozies.

If there’s one thing that abounds in Sicily – more than orange groves and vineyards – it’s concrete. True to stereotype, there are cement plants all over this Mafia-riddled island. And its once-beautiful capital, Palermo, is rife with hideous concrete buildings that hover next to Baroque palazzi. (These soulless structures are often constructed using pilfered funds intended to restore buildings bombed in WWII). Amid all of these mind-numbing edifices, we found what is considered the largest work of land art in Europe. And guess what? It’s made of the same poor-quality concrete as the buildings in Palermo.

Only here, it works. Titled Grande Cretto, by postwar Italian artist Alberto Burri, the piece commemorates the destruction of the Western Sicilian town of Gibellina in a catastrophic 1968 earthquake. In 1980, roughly twelve years after residents rebuilt their town 18 km away, Burri covered the hillside town’s streets and ruined buildings– an area roughly 900 x 1200 feet and about 5′ in height, with white concrete.  The streets look like the crackle pattern on Burri’s fabled paintings, only you can walk through these.  Or skate through them. (Not to give anyone any ideas.) But if you were to, no one would know: it’s in the middle of nowhere, a two hour drive from Palermo – and just a short stop from Castellammare del Golfo (birthplace of Joe Bonanno and Frank Stallone, Sr., father of Sly), where you can go for a swim at one of the pristine beaches at the nearby Zingaro nature preserve and then feast on a plate of pasta with sardines, pine nuts and raisins.

Find more information on Burri’s installation here.

Click on images to supersize.

Even the mold and cracks are beautiful.

Standing on top, for the view.

No. it’s not the Mojave. It’s Western Sicily.

Way steeper than it looks.

• Not a Goya.
• Looks good on a turntable: The work of Jesse Paul Miller.
• A video of Rauschenberg talking about erasing the De Kooning: “I spent a month erasing that little drawing.”
• Steal this work: Thefts drive up prices of canvases by Edvard Munch.
• Art Blog Sentence of the Day: “It is a vice of second-rate art to come with its own eloquent explanation attached.”
• The Telegraph’s Richard Dorment on Richard Prince: “…a clever, second-generation follower of the greatest Pop artist of all.”
• Beer as art.
• Trippy Radiohead video that used a 3-D scanning system to capture images.
• An interesting profile of Tom14 in Barcelona, that addresses issues of gentrification in the city. (Via Ekosystem.)
• NYC councilman Peter Vallone seeing red over graffiti supply store Alphabeta in Brooklyn. No word yet on whether he’s gonna try to shut down Home Depot.
• Clan du Néon, turning out the lights on advertising in Paris.
• A Richard Neutra building in Newport Beach, Calif. has been spared the wrecking ball. For now.
• The jury that evaluated Zaha Hadid’s design for the London Olympics seriously overbudget aquatic center warned about its cost and the functionality of its design when making its recommendation to Olympics organizers, who overlooked these little details because they liked all the pretty lines.
• Looks cool: The Swoosh Pavilion at the Architectural Association in London.
• A Q&A with Tadao Ando on his design of Tokyo’s Shibuya Station.
• Call for Entries: Urban planners wanted to design the 21^st Century Street.
• UNESCO threatens to put Lascaux caves on the list of endangered sites of universal importance, giving the French government six months to report on its efforts to save the pre-historic images (via A.J.). Related: A list of spots added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites.
• “May your penis hurt when you make love.” (Via A.J.)
• Save Totoro’s forest. (Via NotCot.)
• Your moment of Andy Warhol on Jasper Johns.

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