C-MONSTER.net.

Wouldn’t it be cool if Jeff Koons made a giganto version of this? The mind reels…

On to the business at hand: The staff here at C-Monster.net is of the general belief that galleries and museums that don’t let you photograph the art are, how to say it…douche-y. For one, us barbarian blogger types, when we’re not sleeping in our cages or tossing our shit around, have a tendency to share stuff we like with other people. Sometimes this includes images by artists that we respect and admire. And because we operate on a negative budget, this usually includes photos we take ourselves.

Many galleries and museums, however, have strict no-photo policies. (Unless you’re a member of the rapidly-decaying mainstream press, in which case, you can take all the pictures you want.) One New York gallery has been known to take the no-photo thing to a bit of an extreme. Now they’re kickin’ it up a notch: the gallery has reportedly e-mailed a webhead who posted photographs of paintings by one of their artists and asked them to remove the offending photos. The gallery’s e-mail states that this is because the gallery owns “the copyright to the work and all public display of images.” Never mind that the pictures were taken during a public display of the work at the Armory Fair where there were a bajillion photographers. And never mind that the artist is also represented by another gallery.

In this day and age, in which information is shared and disseminated virally, this is the kind of legal B.S. that does an artist, the press and those who enjoy art a real disservice. Does the gallery really think it can control how and when people see an artist’s work? Even the business-end of this equation doesn’t make sense: Why would a gallery want to limit its audience? Or, more importantly, the artist’s audience?

At a time when fine art plays an ever smaller role in our civic lives, this type of action is not only knuckle-headed, it’s seriously self-defeating. For this reason, the first ever C-Monster Douchebag Award (refreshes as it cleans) goes to…

Gallery 303.

Posted C-Monster.

Can you hear me now? (Photo by Celso.)

• Video of wrecking crew taking down Justin Dustin Shuler’s car-kabob sculpture, Spindle, in Berwyn, Illinois—under the cover of darkness—to make way for a fucking Walgreens.
• Newsflash: Art=Currency.
• Crap you can buy to “de-brand” your home. (Via NotCot.)
• This’ll kill an afternoon: The 50 Greatest Commercial Parodies of All Time. (Via Murketing.)
• Reviewing the reviewers: Art to Go takes on the Washington Post’s review of Murakami.
• Biopiracy.
• African art: hot, hot, hot?
• EcoArt Blog draws an interesting parallel between Bauhaus Earthworks and Indian burial mounds.
• Artist Alex Metcalf “listens” to the trees. Literally. And it’s pretty damn cool.
• Trippy ‘net art of the day, courtesy of Peter Baldes. (Via AFC.)
• Photo Essay: The UK Government Art Collection.
• Warhol’s Mao may sell for a buttload of $$$ in Hong Kong auction.
• Trailer from Line of Beauty and Grace, a film about Jock Sturges.
• Today’s art-in-the-trash find: A medieval processional cross.
• In Orlando (as everywhere else): Using art to shill real estate: “Condo developers and their marketing teams ‘understand that art attracts the kinds of demographics they want.’” (Via AJ.)
• Fighting over the United Flight 93 Memorial in Pennsylvania.
• The Cascais Music Conservatory in Portugal.
• SCI-Arc’s Blobwall.
• Looks like the Blobwall: a NYT chart showing American consumer spending. Great seeing that sizeable chunk devoted to fast food. (Via Monoscope.)
• In California, architectural mega-developments that serve as mini police states: No bicycles, no skateboards, no dogs over 25 pounds. And no independent thought.
• Speaking of mega-developments: Photos of the rising Steven Holl city-within-a-city project in Beijing.
• A zero-energy photovoltaic wall in Beijing that will soon start screening art videos. (Via NotCot.)
• Graff of the Day: Grito, RGTD and Aryz in Barcelona.
• The Telegraph’s Richard Dorment on Banksy: He liked him, then he didn’t, and now he kinda likes him again.
• Photos from Peabe’s solo show in Chicago.
• On Sunday, I went to the Graffiti Research Lab film and panel (lots of sausage) at MoMA and then I had the opportunity to watch a bunch of dancers get jiggy next to a Donald Judd sculpture. (See the video.) It was an interesting night. (Update: Crank Junky on Flickr gave me a heads up on this link, where you can download the full GRL film.)
• An Iron Man/Obama billboard jam.
• The Daily Show on our Bataan Death March of a Democratic primary process.
• Vintage Latin American Music of the Day: Ella.
• Your moment of Beethoven’s Fifth, Sid Caesar-style. (Via VSL.)

Robert Kennedy addresses Berkeley students in 1966. (Courtesy of Bill Eppridge.)

In the various undistinguished jobs I’ve held in dead-tree media, the one cohort I’ve always counted on for scrappy companionship are the photographers. Photojournalists, as a breed, are hard-living, hard-fighting muthas who can kick your ass, drink you under the table and take perfect photographs of the proceedings—all at the same time. They’re easy to recognize because they’re typically unshaven, poorly dressed and have a gleam of crazy in their eyes. In other words, hanging out with them practically guarantees a good time. Or a night in jail.

In recent months, I’ve had the opportunity to spend some quality time hanging out with Bill Eppridge, a former Life and Sports Illustrated photographer, who has taken some of the most memorable images of the second half of the twentieth century: a photo essay on heroin addicts in Needle Park (later turned into a movie with Al Pacino), the Beatles arriving in the U.S. for the very first time, the funeral of a civil rights activist in Mississippi, and, one of my favorites, a motorcycle race in the Mojave. He also took the haunting photograph of a busboy trying to comfort the mortally-wounded Robert F. Kennedy in the kitchen of the Ambassador Hotel.

Needless to say, Bill is pretty badass. And he’s got the scars to prove it. I’m lucky to get to chill with him (and his wife, Adrienne!) and shoot the shit about fishing, photography and the gustatory qualities of a slice of Junior’s cheesecake—as well as what it was like to watch hippies get groovy at Woodstock. Anyhow, Bill has a new book coming out at the end of next month, a compendium of his pics from the Kennedy campaign. And this month, Vanity Fair has a photo excerpt (in the June issue). Pick up the mag, or better yet, check out the online slideshow. It’s got photos no campaign would allow a photographer to take today.

Posted by C-Monster.

Edge, by Tamir Sher. (Image courtesy of Tamir Sher.)

• Jon Stewart asks Howard Dean what the hell the Democrats think they’re doing.
• How to synchronize five metronomes. (Via Kottke.)
• When artists go out of fashion.
• Thieves stealing public art for scrap. (Via AJ.)
• Kintaro ukiyo-e prints.
• Gregor Schneider talks about why he wants to use a dying person in his art: “I reckon that an artist can build humane rooms for death, where people can die in a dignified way—a room that creates dignity and protection. As a sculptor I build rooms. The room is the art.”
• Speaking of death: one of the central works in MoMA’s Design and the Elastic Mind show, a small jacket made up of embryonic stem cells taken from mice, has died.
• Six-part documentary on Francis Bacon online.
• When life imitates Cindy Sherman’s art: Cindy Sherman’s ex makes doc about life with Cindy Sherman. (Via PDN Pulse.)
• Iraqi official proposes a ban on trade of all Iraqi antiquities to help stop looting.
• Police seize Latin American artifacts in Germany.
• Van Gogh painting recreated with cigarette boxes.
• Enterprising Ceramist of the Week: Former public school teacher in England churned out ceramic fakes in his back yard and passed them off as the work of established artists.
• From the Department of Holy-Shit-Everything-Decays: Conservators face issues trying to preserve video.
• Photos from Action/Abstraction at the Jewish Museum.
• Calling all Clement Greenbergs: Write some art criticism. Win a prize. (Unpublished newbies only.)
• Can artists and critics be friends?
• Judd-a-palooza going down in Marfa, Tex. this weekend.
• Museum director compensation is trending up. (Via AJ.)
• Images of the preliminary design of Renzo Piano’s downtown Whitney. Like the art the museum shows: looks impenetrable. The NYT’s Ourossoff, who, overall, liked the structure, describes it as having a “strange, even forbidding aura.”
• Rome’s new mayor wants to tear down new Richard Meier-designed museum near the Spanish Steps. (Via AJ.)
• Midwest Mid-Century Modern in Indiana.
• Totally Bizarre Architectural Story: Mongolian mogul hires 100 architects from around the world so that they might despoil the area’s lovely landscape with…architecture. The best part: the architects travel around the country in gold-colored buses.
• Looks like a tribute to the Kauffman Desert House: Casa Gatica, by Assadi + Pulido, in Rancagua, Chile.
• The Yakisugi house by Terunobu Fujimori in Nagano. (Via NotCot.)
• Cinco de MiMo in Miami, this weekend. (Via Critical Miami.)
• Edward Durell Stone gets remixed: The New 2 Columbus Circle in NYC.
• Mural of the Day: Isoe in Thailand.
• The Cans Festival in London, this weekend. Get location info here.
• Video of the Dutch collective Antistrot at work.
• It’s over for humanity now: Modular robots reassemble themselves when kicked apart. (Via Coudal.)
• Super Cool Custom Super Heroes.
• Your moment of Grease, doggie style.

Hijo del Santo. (Photo by Tetë Calvache.)

• Perfect photo essay for a rainy Monday morning: New York when it was ratty, by lensmaster Jill Freedman.
• Sign the petition to save L.A. taco trucks! (Read all about it in the L.A. Times.)
• Most gag-o-rific art sentence of the day, in a story about how various Miami folk, including developer Craig Robins, are going to start a free graduate art program called Art + Research: “The son of a local developer, Robins is a Miami Beach native who’s always had an interest in art (he wanted to trade in his graduation Rolex for a Salvador Dalí print).” What do you think I can get a for a water-resistant Timex?
• Maya Lin’s Confluence project in Oregon is looking for volunteers.
• Photos from the Fluids exhibition at LACMA.
• Berlin bunker converted into art exhibit space. (Via AO.)
• Because the world really needs more problematizing and paradigm inversion: The Top 10 universities for art history “productivity.” In other words: the universities churning out coma-inducing art speak in the heftiest quantities.
• Sculpture of the day: Mike Ross’s Big Rig Jig at Coachella.
• Gorgeous and Gego-esque: Artist Shirazeh Houshiary’s soon-to-be unveiled window at St-Martin-in-the-Fields in London.
• Carlson & Company: The art fabricators that produce art on an industrial scale…such as giganto balloon dogs.
• Lori Nix’s meticulously constructed miniatures.
• Portfolio has a good timeline of how art dealer Larry Salander got into a financial hole. Interesting fact: It seems that his bank continued to loan him money, even when they knew he was in over his head. (Via AO.)
• An absolutely fascinating photo essay about a woman who sews robes for the KKK. (Via Hrag Vartanian.)
• An analysis of the Flickr School of photography.
• A profile of paper artist Jen Stark.
• The Great Big Interwebs Catches the Attention of the Dead-Tree Types: The Kalm Report profiled in the L.A. Times.
• R.I.P. Surrealist painter Enrico Donati.
• Street art of the Day: Momo in London.
• Photos from Super Combo at chashama ABC Gallery in NYC.
• Espo on the loose in Dublin.
• Sucka Pants has a good photo set of the Rockaway Armada show going up at MassMoCA.
• A Q&A with Ghost in the Seattle Times (via WYW).
• Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum to open in San Fran in June.
• Buildings that sprout things.
• In a related story: NYC is looking for designs for their annual green building competition. (Via Archidose.)
• The Chicago Board Options Exchange vandalizes Wrigley Field.
• The online project journal for MoMA’s prefab house exhibit. (Via Archidose.)
• The Klein Bottle House by McBride Charles Ryan, outside of Melbourne.
• Too cool, literally: Frozen waves in Michigan. (Via AFC.)
• Your moment of Cribs, all Star Trek like.

It woulda been even better if he’d put his head in it. Just think of the headline possibilities. (Photo by moufle.)

Posted by C-Monster.

The Wood Pit, Pig, Montclair, 2008 by Eric Levin, part of his Edible Complex series. Image courtesy of Eric Levin.

• Graff of the Day: Bo130, Microbo, Zosen and Dem in Milan.
• Photos from the Come Correct show at Showroom Gallery in NYC, featuring Cope2, Claw, Fafi + many others.
• Operatic commercial for Molotow’s new pump marker, coming soon to a wall near you.
• An excellent photo essay of the Barry McGee/Clare Rojas show in Riverside, Calif.
• Marshall Astor on the Damien Hirst/Andy Warhol jeans at Fred Segal in L.A.: “I hear they come with a smug sense of capitalist self-satisfaction and a brief respite from your desperate fear of not being with it anymore.”
• In related news: God save us all. Saatchi is gonna unleash the new generation of YBAs on the world.
• The embroidered art of Allison Manch.
• Don’t want to commit to that sleeve? You can now print your own lick ‘n stick tattoos. (Via NotCot.)
• Being an American, I sometimes feel an inherent guilt at merely existing within a system that exports vapid pop culture to the farthest corners of the explored universe. Then I saw this. And it reminded me that we are not alone.
• The Day in Institutional Obeisance: Artnet editor has his show reviewed on Artnet. And guess what? It was glowing. (Via MAN.)
• NYT art critic Roberta Smith and artist Ed Ruscha to get honorary degrees from RISD.
• Up for auction: a Modernist painting by Marsden Hartley that got lost during World War II.
• The art industrial average: going strong in Hong Kong. More here. Plus: Islamic and Indian art set sales records in London.
• The Brooklyn Museum: Making the world safe for expensive handbags and homeland security.
• The Krens-master Cycle, Day 41: Guggenheim Vegas franchise to close, reports the Las Vegas Sun: “Some say the museum’s future always seemed a little sketchy because its programming was uncertain.” (Via AJ.)
• Tom Sachs: More evidence that artists are such total weirdos.
• AFC has an interesting interview that addresses the question of how Internet artists are managing the issue of gallery representation. (Because, of course, the question arises: if your art is on the Internet, do you even need a gallery?) In general, it seems, art is moving in the direction of every other industry: less exclusive deals, more independent contracting.
• Keith Edmier’s 1970s kitchen.
• Bloggers and DIY filmmakers capture S.F. Olympic protests before mainstream media.
• U.S. neo-cons have their panties in a knot over an Absolut vodka ad that ran in Mexico that shows what the border looked like prior to the Mexican-American war of 1848. Note to neo-cons: Learn Spanish, ‘cuz we’re takin’ it back. One lawn at a time. (Via NotCot.)
• Update: Designs for Zaha Hadid’s Guggenheim in Vilnius. (Thanks, Eko.)
• The joy of trying to get a project approved in Manhattan, Jean Nouvel edition.
• Architectural who’s is bigger: Dubai skyline style.
• Sydney Opera House architect Jørn Utzon turned 90 yesterday.
• Good lines: The Strata Hotel by Plasma Studio, in Italy.
• House of the Day: By ARX in Romeirão, Portugal.
• Headline of the Day: “John Varvatos will honor CBGB’s history by selling lots of crap.”
• Adult movie posters of the ’60s and ’70s. My favorite. (Via Coudal.)
• Your moment of dancing with cats. (Via IHP.)

Three of the four Beatles in New York City in 1964. (George Harrison is the one who is missing.) Photo courtesy of Bill Eppridge.

• In Liverpool: The photographs of Bill Eppridge in The Beatles: Backstage and Behind The Scenes at the Albert Dock, opens today.
• In Berlin: The tapestries of Margret Eicher at DAM.
• In NYC: The Date Farmers at Jonathan Levine, opens tomorrow.
• In NYC: The photographs of Jill Freedman at Higher Pictures, through May 17^th.
• In Ann Arbor: The photographs of William Christenberry at the University of Michigan Museum of Art, opens Saturday.
• In Chicago: Con Safos (With Respect): Contemporary Chicano Art from the Joe A. Diaz Collection at the National Museum of Mexican Art, through June 15^th.
• In Houston: Jane South at CTRL Gallery.
• In Scottsdale: Jessica Joslin at Lisa Sette Gallery, through April 26^th.
• In Portland, Ore.: Overstock at Jáce Gáce.
• In L.A.: Phantom Sightings: Art after the Chicano Movement at LACMA. More here.
• In L.A.: James Turrell at the Pomona College Museum of Art.
• In L.A.: Camilo Cruz at the Constant Gallery.
• In S.F.: Timothy Buckwalter, Mike Monteiro, Naoki Mitsuse and many others in California Dreaming at Rare Device, opens today.

Raspberry fingers. (Photo courtesy of Agent Lover.)

• Looking Around says museum directors can curb the onslaught of coma-inducing artspeak by banning five words. An update here. And more on the phenomenon here.
• The photographs of Magnum shooter Dennis Stock. I think this is my favorite. (Via ackackack.)
• The Brooklyn Museum to “honor” Bruce Ratner, the developer who is making NYC unaffordable to average joes (and building fugly-ass malls). This comes a little more than a week after the Museum decided to donate a portion of its proceeds from Murakami’s Louis Vuitton boutique sales to the Federal Enforcement Homeland Security Foundation. (Because what we really need is more surveillance.) I’m just waiting for someone to tell me that they’ve hired Rudy Giuliani as a curator.
• What the dead lady said: Boston-ites are debating whether the planned Renzo Piano extension to the Gardner Museum will be true to Isabella Stewart Gardner’s wishes.
• Whitney Biennial review of the day: “Assemblage was everywhere, and I can’t tell you if it was interesting.”
• The President of Fine Art Capital predicts a sharp downturn in the art industrial average. In the same story, Portfolio also reports that MoMA bought nine pieces by Jarbas Lopes at Volta.
• The true face of Leonardo Da Vinci?
• Life Before Death: The before-and-after death portraits of Walter Schels. (Via BoingBoing.)
• Chris Ware animates This American Life.
• In keeping with yesterday’s special report about makin’ art that will last longer than five minutes: Insects find art delicious.
• That sublime point where the Rolling Stones and Rice Krispies intersect.
• Brno municipal authorities will finally begin to work on finding an outfit to repair Mies’ Tugendhat House—which is in desperate need of restoration.
• R.I.P. modernist architect Ralph Rapson.
• Nikola Basic’s sea organ, in Croatia. (Via NotCot.)
• Zaha Hadid’s new skyscraper design for Dubai.
• What it all means: The Guardian analyzes the future of street art in the wake of the Skullphone billboard non-hijacking in L.A.
• A Q&A with stencil pioneer Blek le Rat: “This life is fucking important so do not waste yours on bullshit.”
• There’s a street art film festival this weekend in New Brunswick, N.J. (Via Ekosystem.)
• Knitted street art: some historical context.
• Your moment of creatively translated Bollywood films.

New York Times photojournalist Dith Pran, with Sydney Schanberg, interviewing a soldier about the American bombing of Cambodia in 1973.

• R.I.P. Dith Pran, photographer who escaped Cambodia’s killing fields. See a photo essay.
• Jean Nouvel wins the Pritzker. Here are the NYT and LAT stories. More coverage here and here. Plus: a photo essay.
• Not to be left behind architecturally: Qatar also has a fancy new museum by I.M. Pei that they want everyone to know about.
• Dezeen’s Top 10 skyscraper designs. (What’s with all the giant dildoes?)
• Architectural rendering of a Washington, D.C. project only features white people. (Via MAN.)
• Shredding for the Big Guy.: The Catholic Archdiocese in NYC is having a design contest for a papal skateboard. The winning design will be given to the Pope during his visit to the city. Submit your design here.
• In related news: Photorealist painter Marilyn Minters has a skate deck series.
• R.I.P. Angus Fairhurst, YBA.
• New marijuana decriminalization bill to hit Congress.
• A story about Crystal Bridges, a.k.a. Museo Wal-Mart. I’m no fan of Wal-Mart, but those northeastern museum types sure get their panties in a knot when an outsider hits the scene. (Via AJ.)
• Audio Slideshow: Enrique Chagoya’s Borderlandia at the Berkeley Art Museum.
• Race and art.
• Ron Mueck in action.
• An online gallery of the work of Puerto Rican artist Rafael Tufiño, who passed away two weeks ago. (Click on the link that says Rafael Tufiño on the left.)
• Hell yeah! Trippy-cool digital art by Erik Natzke and Robert Hodgin. Plus: more Hodgin here. (Thanks to Rabbit Meets Hat for the links.)
• Oh, gag.
• Today’s Art Industrial Average: Not so bad versus heading for a fall?
• Hipster bingo versus Cholo bingo.
• Brian Tolle’s stump.
• L.A. gallerist Merry Karnowsky opens up a second space in Berlin.
• Urban Scene’s paint-by-numbers. (Via graceful.spoon.)
• Graff of the Day: Mambo and Hrvrk in Copenhagen.
• Video of Joshua Allen Harris’s inflatable street sculptures.
• How Banksy got rich.
• A disturbing video about the web of Moonie influence in right-wing U.S. politics. (Thank you, Howard, for the link.)
• This is the type of story that makes me LOL: It’s about the trauma that insufferable yuppie “design-conscious” parents are subjected to when their spawn throw yogurt at the shantung silk drapes. Which brings me to Item #7 of the Top 10 things I didn’t want to deal with in ‘08. (Via Unbeige.)
• For those of you lucky enough to speak Spanish: Bolivian novelist Edmundo Paz Soldán has a good report on Latin America’s flourishing literary non-fiction scene.
• Space Porn: Stellar movement time lapse.
• Your moment of musical rollerskating.