Miss Van.

El Celso.

Rostarr.

JMR.

Patch Whisky.

Gen, Oze and Droid of the 907 Crew.

Tony Bones.

Celso and Aiko.

One of the museum’s highlights is the room devoted to animal sex. At one point during the opening, I was watching pandas hump to the tune of electronica. Amazing.

In an exhibit about sex and digital culture on the second floor, a wall-sized installation showed Anthony Weiner’s infamous Facebook flirting. I love the one where he asks if she’s checked him out on TV.

Candy Rain.

F*ck Art is up through June 10.

A relief of the Gemini capsule carved by artist Kevin Sudeith in northern California. The artist has recently been working around New York. My story on his petroglyphs is now up at WNYC. (Image courtesy of Sudeith.)

On Public Housing

A view of the Marcy Houses. (Photo by NYC-Metrocard.)

Michael Kimmelman has an interesting piece about large-scale housing developments in the New York Times. He takes a look at the fate of the infamous Pruitt-Igoe projects in St. Louis and draws a comparison to the Penn South buildings in New York’s Chelsea, which have been largely successful as a housing development. He discusses how economic and other urban development factors can affect the success or failure of architectural design. All around an interesting piece. But while I dig Kimmelman’s focus on publicly-minded design (a breath of fresh air after Ourossoff’s era of mega-projects), it seems like a bit of an oversight to pen a very long story about these types of constructions and not even mention places like the Marcy Houses in Bed-Stuy or Red Hook Houses in Red Hook — two places with a history that is infinitely less rosy than that of Penn South.

Linkage

• In an essay in Vanity Fair, Kurt Anderson says we are in a period of cultural stasis — relentlessly remixing everything that came before, but not necessarily adding anything new: “In our Been There Done That Mashup Age, nothing is obsolete, and nothing is really new; it’s all good. I feel as if the whole culture is stoned, listening to an LP that’s been skipping for decades, playing the same groove over and over. Nobody has the wit or gumption to stand up and lift the stylus.” Sure explains a lot of the art I see…
• Holy Shit: Dude surfing a 90-foot wave.
• Interesting essay in the Atlantic on how much information is too much for Google to have.
• Bytebeats: music from the programming language C.
• That point where Tony Curtis and Christopher Wool intersect.
• A proposed turn-of-the-20th-century reconstruction of the Venus de Milo. Amazing and weird. (@giovannigf.)
• The New York Observer profiles the life and times of artist and ArtNet editor Walter Robinson.
• And the Wall Street Journal mag takes on Anne Pasternak, the director of Creative Time.
• The Day in Art Merch: Private jets decorated with graffiti by RETNA.
• Plus, speaking of airplane graffiti: The Boneyard Project. Making airplane hulls all pretty-like.
• There’s nothing like a book review that revels in a little dismemberment: Heather Havrilesky on Caitlin Flanagan’s Girl Land. Yowza. (@embeedub)
• “The main thing to remember is the sunlight, and the immense expanse of sky and earth that it illuminates: it sucks the color out of everything that it touches, takes the green out of leaves and the sap out of twigs, makes human beings seem small and of no importance.” — Mystery writer James Cain, on California in the 1930s.

An abstraction made from reclaimed lath board by Kinetic Tornado (in benefit of the Konbit Shelter Project).

Jaguar, by Oranit Solomonov.

A full view of Rome, ca. 1970, by the Rev. Samuel David Phillips.

Cowboy Talk, 2008, by Fort Guerin.

John Mullins? (Forgot to note the wall text…)

Untitled (from Gainesville, FL), by Jessie Aaron (1887-1979).

Returning Soldier, 1973, by Purvis Young.

Canton Ginger II, 2010 by Gerard Cambon.

Magnolia Park, by Harry Underwood.

Untitled, by Thornton Dial.

Seenarella Inner Limits by William Scott.

The Outsider Art Fair went down in Manhattan this past weekend, featuring good stuff by outsider and folk artists from all over. Saw some very lovely stuff.

I know these are porcelain and that they’re hand-painted and that there’s four million of them (more on that here), but this install bears an uncanny resemblance to Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s silver-candy piece, Untitled (Placebo), from 1991 — which is currently on view at MoMA. And which can be touched and eaten.