C-MONSTER.net.

The art paparazzi get to work. (Sublime photo by eugenio_gp.)

• Bush has made the ultimate sacrifice during this war: he’s given up golf.
• Renaissance painting by Domenico Beccafumi broken in two at London’s National Gallery. The best part of this story is the sidebar: a list of pieces of art that have been damaged or destroyed by accident. More here.
• Ickier than a Damien Hirst: Thai artist Kittiwat Unarrom makes dismembered body parts out of bread. Perfect for fans of Saw. (Via NotCot.)
• Polaroid lovers: A show of Robert Mapplethorpe’s Polaroid pictures at the Whitney.
• A list of pieces by Rauschenberg that you can see in NYC right now.
• Calling all portraits. The Smithsonian is having a competition. And there’s a $25,000 prize.
• Photo Essay: The tribal arts and textile show in NYC.
• Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center gathers more than 300 Marilyn Monroe-themed works for exhibition.
• A film about Lawrence Weiner. What we learned: he hates Helvetica. (Via Coudal.)
• At Carnegie: Industry in art.
• The General Accounting Office tells the Smithsonian to shape the hell up. Ever wonder why the Smithsonian is so fucked? This little paragraph in WaPo should explain why: “The Board of Regents is a 17-member voluntary body with representation from the executive, judicial and legislative branches, as well as the public. The membership includes the U.S. chief justice, the vice president, three members each from the House and Senate and nine citizens. Only Congress can remove a regent.” (The GAO report, courtesy of MAN.)
• Looks like the Barnes will be moving to Philly. More here and here.
• Getting trippy and blobby: In the studio with Ernesto Neto.
• New Photojournalism Book: Robert Frank, by Steidl.
• Graff of the Day: Rubio in France. See a full set.
• Now you too can be the proud owner of a Shepard Fairey laptop. Likewise, for a mere $7, you can buy an Obey sticker pack and redecorate the laptop you already have.
• Photos from Insa’s show in Luxembourg.
• Blandifying NYC: Development pressure in the West Village is at an all-time high, reports Bloomberg.
• Photo Essay: Oscar Niemeyer’s Museu Contemporânea de Niteroi. (Via Coudal.)
• An interesting Modernist rethinking of rural Latin American architecture: Casa en el Campo by Benjamín Murúa and Constanza Infante in Chile.
• Architects debate what to do with Eero Saarinen’s Bell Labs building in Holmdel, N.J.
• Folding façades.
• Building a house on a sharp incline means you gotta put in a lotta stairs: the Tolo House by Alvaro Leite Siza in Portugal. (Via NotCot.)
• The Air Hostesses of Yesteryear.
• Your moment of dude. (Via VSL.)

Bonks, in L.A. (Photo by G@b13L.)

• “Michel Gondry Entertained for Days by New Cardboard Box.” (Via AFC.)
• Mark Bradford’s Help Us, a rooftop installation at Carnegie International, is viewable on Google Earth.
• The photography of Juliane Eirich.
• An ad for Brita: “Last year, 16 million gallons of oil were consumed to make plastic water bottles.” The ad neglects to mention how many gallons of oil were consumed to make plastic water filters. (Via NotCot.)
• The Smithsonian is gonna be in a movie. With Ben Stiller. No word if it had to sleep with the director to get the part.
• It’s all about the Benjamins…A story on why Clementine Gallery in NYC is being shuttered: “By October of 1996, they had amassed the princely sum of $60,000— enough to cover their expenses for the first year. (Now, 12 years later, they have to sell at least $80,000 every month to cover expenses.)” (Via Bloggy.)
• Where China and Africa meet. The photography of Paolo Woods.
• From the Department of Who Knew?: Rauschenberg won a Grammy.
• Plus, Jed Perl of the New Republic is no fan of Rauschenberg: “As for his art, it stank in the 1950s and it doesn’t look any better today.” Jack Shafer at Slate agrees. (Via AJ.)
• More Rauschenberg: Video of the artist talking about Erased De Kooning.
• Rich people still spending insane amounts of money on art: Francis Bacon triptych sells for $86.3 million.
• In related art-buying news… The best blog headline of the week: “The Most Expensive Ejaculation Ever Auctioned.” Update: I just learned that May is National Masturbation Month. How apropos.
• New ad campaign for Miami sells the city as high-end art and design destination. One hotel owner isn’t so sure about the plan: “Art is nice, and it adds to our culture and it sells condos. But it doesn’t sell hotel rooms. Sex sells.”
• Bust of Caesar found in French river.
• The Daily Show on the media’s obsession with white, working-class voters, which includes a special report called the West Virginia Douche-Off.
• Urban decay: Hotel edition. (Via MAN.)
• Graff of the Day: Baradon and Grino in Moscow.
• A Q&A with Troy Lovegates, aka Other, which includes a nice selection of images of his work. (Via Ekosystem.)
• The Eyes Have It: A.J. Fosik sculpture at White Walls in S.F.
• Art21 has a round-up of architectural videos, including a tour of the Mies van der Rohe’s Farnsworth House in real life…and Second Life.
• What can you do with a 7’10” wedge of space in Antwerp? Build a four-story house.
• A 1927 bus garage in Moscow to be turned into a gallery.
• Bone china rings.
• Chihuahua in a scuba outfit. (Via Coudal.)
• Your moment of Salvador Dalí, What’s My Line? edition.

Los Reyes del Mambo in Madrid. (Photo courtesy of SpY.)

• Zak Smith’s daily sketchbook.
• But will he be biting himself? Vito Acconci to deliver New School commencement address.
• New York mag has an excerpt of the De Kooning bio, An American Master, in which Rauschenberg swings by and asks to erase one of his drawings. (Via MAN.)
• Photo Essay: Robert Rauschenberg’s Time covers.
• Plus: Art to Go looks back at moments in pretty recent history when Rauschenberg wasn’t so popular, while NPR has audio of an interview with the artist, as well as a bit of music he composed, as part of his obit profile.
• I’d like you to meet your cellmate, “Tiny”: Asian antiquities expert arrested on fraud charges, stemming from SoCal museum raids this past January.
• Artlog.net Artlog.com has a brand spanking new function on their site that could serve as a good hub for organizations doing open calls for artists. If you’re an organization doing an open call, put your stuff up there…and if you’re an artist, check it out…
• The Brooklyn Museum has a super rad, comprehensive online exhibit of Hiroshige’s One Hundred Famous Views of Edo.
• When museums rent their art for money. Yeah, they’re talkin’ about you, Louvre.
• Staff cuts at the Getty.
• Harvard Art Museums to unveil new Renzo Piano designs for a new building this weekend.
• Robert Storr in Frieze magazine, on the power of patrons: “Eli Broad’s plan for sharing his collection with the Los Angeles County Museum of Art while holding onto it in perpetuity is a glaring example of ‘what’s yours is mine and what’s mine is mine’ deal-making in the philanthropic domain.” (Via Eyebeam.)
• The Telegraph’s Richard Dorment on the Turner Prize nominees: “For the first time in many years, the Turner Prize shortlist looks to me like a dud. First, the four shortlisted artists struck me as unusually - and irritatingly - similar.” And, the kicker: “It’s the kind of modern art that pundits pay deference to and that deep down nobody really likes.” Plus: Bloomberg and the Guardian help sort out who is who.
• More on Susan Dessel getting censored by the Long Beach Island Foundation of the Arts and Sciences in N.J.: Heart as Arena and Winkleman.
• When paintings cost more than houses: Lucian Freud painting sells for $33.6 million at Christie’s and sets price record for a work by a living artist (via AJ). The Kaufmann Desert House sells for $15 million.
• Graff of the Day: A Flickr set of the Schmitz Park Bridge in Seattle.
• Ad Deville of Skewville and Ali Ha will open the doors on their Factory Fresh gallery in Brooklyn in early June.
• Marty caps Shepard Fairey on Houston Street in NYC in broad daylight.
• Daze released in Scotland.
• Architectural billings are flaccid.
• National Geographic has a photo essay on architecture in China.
• Charles and Ray Eames introduce their new lounge chair on NBC in 1956.
• A White Forest in a Grey Field by Junya Ishigami in Tokyo.
• Here’s what that fancy hotel yuck-ifying Manhattan’s Lower East Side looks like from the inside.
• The day in graffiti merch: Graffiti’d furniture and graffiti’d dishware.
• More street art as advertising, this time for Vespa in Montreal. Creepy-looking photos here.
• Me love: Nico Nico animated gifs.
• Your moment of bad ideas.

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.

Switchblade, by Peter Gronquist. (Courtesy of Peter Gronquist.)

• What she said. Though, between you and me, I’m thinking of renaming the award the Lars Ulrich Intellectual Property Hysteria Prize.
• In related news: gratuitous shots of Gallery 303-related stuff on Look, See and Heart as Arena. Plus: understanding Fair Use, courtesy of AFC.
• The heart-warming tale of two stoners and the douchebags that try to keep them down.
• Today’s is-the-art-market-gonna-crash? story is brought to you by the Independent.
• And in a swing of the pendulum, the Guardian reports that the street art market is hot, hot, hot. (Via AJ.)
• Despite so-so sales, the Denver Post thinks that Art Chicago is much improved.
• Sotheby’s now catering to Russian oligarchs by selling art wares at a high-end Moscow mall.
• Art prices are high because making art has become more expensive, claim artists and their galleries. That’s what happens when art becomes musical theatre.
• Son of Schnabel. (Via AO.)
• The Day in State Law Prudery: Indianapolis Museum of Art, along with ACLU, sue over Indiana state law that would require them to register as a porn purveyor because their collection features nudes. (Via MAN.)
• Will they have a Ricky Ricardo room? Commission to study the feasibility of a national Latino museum in D.C. (I do not have a good feeling about this.)
• The Art Institute of Chicago charges another museum $2 million to borrow 92 paintings.
• Oakland Museum to begin work on a serious makeover.
• Former Navy officer now selling Iraqi contemporary art.
• Photo Essay: Geometry in painting. In keeping with the theme: The work of John Belingheri.
• Fear of a Black Planet: Fine arts commission in D.C. asks artist to make statue of MLK less “confrontational.”
• Gag-o-rific subway ad for the School of Visual Arts in NYC.
• Ansel Adams: The stories behind the pictures, as told by his former assistant.
• Looks like the apocalypse: Volcanic explosion-meets-lightning in Chile.
• Bob Dylan’s gonna have an art show.
• An exhibit about L.A.’s Chicano punk scene at the Claremont Musem.
• Republican convention manager forced to resign after mag reveals that he consulted for Burmese junta, work that involved “a PR campaign to burnish the junta’s image, drafting releases praising Burma’s efforts to curb the drug trade and denouncing ‘falsehoods’ by the Bush administration that the regime engaged in rape and other abuses.” (Via Eyeteeth.)
• Rojo magazine’s website now has art videos. Check out Living Paintings by Robert Seidal to see a trippy-cool light show. (Via Juxtapoz.)
• Plastic bag shelter.
• Is Calatrava’s downtown train station in NYC getting cost-cutted into boring blandness? Probably.
• The architectural photography of Cristóbal Palma.
• Don’t miss! Wonderful talk by James Howard Kunstler on crap-ass city planning in U.S. ‘burbs: “There’s not enough Prozac in the world to make people feel okay about going down this block.” Plus: “Please stop referring to yourselves as consumers.” (Via ackackack.)
• A building with mirrored exteriors: Hotel Aire de Bardenas by Monica Rivera & Emiliano López in Spain.
• Graff of the Day: Loser in New Jersey, in one and two parts. Well done!
• Free Daze: Graffiti artist gets 28 month-sentence, $20,000 fine in Scottish graffiti case.
• Shepard Fairey’s gonna get a big museum show at Boston’s ICA next year. (Via Art21.)
• Frackin’ cool graffiti animation video from Blu. (Via Ekosystem.)
• Spray paint can pillows.
• Juicy rumor of the Day: Are Banksy and Nick Walker the same person?
• Transparent Post Its.
• Your moment of Beckett meets Joyce on a golf course.

Shipwreck, 2008, an impromptu sculpture made of driftwood by R.L. Croft, with Michael Anthony, on the Outer Banks of North Carolina. Click here to see an image that conveys the scale. (Photo courtesy of R.L. Croft.)

• Even as casualties mount, and hundreds of thousands of people are without food, water and shelter, the Burmese junta refuses entry to foreign aid workers.
• Colbert interviews Hasan Elahi, a Florida New Jersey-based artist and professor accused of terrorist activities, who maintains a website in which he tracks himself for the FBI. In looking at all the photos of what he eats, all I can say is dude likes meat.
• British artist to face manslaughter charges after two women are killed by one of his sculptures.
• Artist turns L.A. traffic islands into “national parks.” See a photo essay. (For those who are into contextualization: It’s reminiscent of Darius & Downey.)
• “If the winning entry of this year’s Cartier award is a joke, it’s got a terrible punchline.”
• Drudge + Clinton + Warhol.
• In NYC: When art imitates tourism.
• Sandro Bondi named Italy’s new culture minister. No word on whether he’s a fan of antiquities repatriation. Though, apparently, he is afraid of flying.
• The new U.S. embassy in Beijing will feature art by Jeff Koons Cai Guo-Qiang, Louise Bourgeois (please tell me it’s the giant cock) and Robert Rauschenberg.
• The NYT on Carnegie: “Life on Mars, the 55th Carnegie International, is the latest exercise in handsome, measured, frictionless thoughtfulness. It may actually have more than its share of interesting art and poetic juxtapositions. Yet almost nothing happens.”
• S.F. MoMA acquires prints by William Eggleston.
• Sotheby’s posts first quarter loss because of lower sales and higher salaries. Sounds like Sotheby’s is being run by the government.
• New Book: Michelangelo and the Sistine Chapel by Andrew Graham-Dixon.
• Reap What You Sew, an interactive video installation by Nicole Mackinlay at Barney’s, that shows shoppers where in Africa the materials for their fancy togs came from.
• Lewis Black on Bush’s economic stimulus plan: “This stimulus plan is about Americans buying crap.”
• John Cage performs Water Walk on I’ve Got a Secret in 1960.
• Drawing gets its due at the Menil in Houston.
• Gold Farming: People who play multiplayer online games in order to sell product to other players.
• Barry Manilow Lived Here: The Kaufmann Desert House goes up for bids next Tuesday at Christie’s.
• Architects at Play at the Cincinnati Contemporary Arts Center.
• A Libeskind-style tank for your goldfish.
• Winners from the VI Biennial of Iberoamerican Architecture & Urbanism in Lisbon: Medellin’s Parque España Library, by Colombian architect Giancarlo Mazzanti, took the top prize.
• Defining a Toronto style of architecture. (Via Contemporist.)
• Preservationist coalition wants to restore Miami’s Marine Stadium, a sweeping Modernist structure designed by Hilario Candela in 1963, which has sat abandoned on the city’s waterfront since the hurricane of ’92.
• The Wicked Witch of the West is Dead: NYC’s Westside Railyards project, which was gonna be one big crap-ass megadevelopment, is finito.
• David Adjaye’s designs on display at Denver’s MCA, through May 25^th.
• BKLYN Designs Fair opens tomorrow.
• Street art of the Day: Dhear and Smithe in Mexico.
• Sam Flores and Saner paint in Mexico City.
• Your moment of Mother’s Day. (Thanks, Yvonne!)

Caleb Neelon mural in L.A. His show, Caleb Neelon is Working On It, opens at the Carmichael Gallery this Saturday. (Photo courtesy of Carmichael.)

• HowISpentMyStimulus.com. (Via Coudal.)
• Shepard Fairey talks to Animal New York about his vision condition.
• Graff of the Day: Bastardilla in Colombia.
• A story about street art, on and off the street, by Hrag Vartanian in the Brooklyn Rail.
• Fecal Face has an interview with D*Face. Plus: Images of D*Face in S.F.
• Melodramatic Norwegian anti-tagging ad. (Via What You Write.)
• New Book: Andreas Gursky.
• Son of Rambow. This looks rad.
• “Shoot the Headline Writer.” CultureGrrl deconstructs the NY Times bogus auction coverage of Christie’s weak sales. She also reports that last night’s Sotheby’s auctions met expectations (and set a record for Léger), much to the relief of the art industry at large. If you don’t keep up on the minute-by-minute cash register ka-chings, Looking Around has a nice round-up of what’s been going on in the Art, Inc. sales department.
• There’s a rippling crackle going through the Russian art market, caused by a report claiming that 800 paintings in private collections there are fakes.
• Carnegie International is going gangbusters, reports the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (Via AJ.)
• Art to Go, on the Chinese artists p.o.’d by the fact that the Estella Collection didn’t keep its promises: Welcome to Capitalism. She also offers this sound advice: get it in writing.
• The Day in Hyperbolized Art Conjecture, a gallery write-up comparing artist Chris Burden to Johnny Knoxville of MTV’s Jackass: “Almost three decades earlier, the artist Chris Burden choreographed a performance in which he had an assistant fire a single shot to his left arm. Knoxville’s act [getting shot while wearing a bulletproof vest] was a stunt, Burden’s Shoot sited as it was within the time frame of the Vietman War, understood as political/social gesture, contextualized as Art performance, was so much more. Both shots made a sound, Chris Burden’s was heard round the world.”
• Provocative Art Headline: “Is contemporary art paying too much attention to work that should be ignored?” Provocative Art Answer: Hell yeah. (Via AJ.)
• Missing sculpture by Margarita Checa shows up at L.A. gallery’s doorstep three years after it disappeared.
• In England: When public art commissions go BIG.
• Pork topiary.
• This should be good in its badness: Art for the political conventions.
• The work of Fernando Orellana. Check out his piece Extruder, which makes little cars out of Play-Doh.
• “It is now widely accepted that the art history of the second half of the 20th century is no longer a history of artworks, but a history of exhibitions.”
• Planet-Douche. (Via NotCot.)
• Life Without Buildings has a series of posts, in one, two, three parts, on how architecture and Star Wars intersect. Complete with visuals. (Via architecture.mnp.)
• The Month in Ironic (and Frackin’ Hilarious) Architecturespeak: The story of John Jessop, of the U.K., who had to provide a “design access statement” about a small shed on his farm. (Via Unbeige.)
• More Hollywood + Architecture: Neutra’s Lovell House in L.A. confidential.
• Concrete bat roosts help reforest. (Via The Show So Far.)
• Booty shot of the Day.
• Space porn: The Gegenschein over Chile. (Via Coudal.)
• Your moment of Don Rickles roasting Ronald Reagan.

Buenos Aires street. (Photo by R. Niemi.)

• The work of Lordy Rodriguez.
• The C-Monster Art Industrial Average Report™: Christie’s fails to hit its targeted sales during last night’s auctions, though Monet’s Le Pont du Chemin de fer à Argenteuil, which sold for $41.5 million, did set a record for the artist. More here and here.
• In a related story: Chinese artists annoyed by the sale of the Estella Collection, in which they claim they were duped into selling works at a discount because they were told the pieces would eventually be donated to a museum.
• An interesting essay about race and patriotism by Michael Eric Dyson.
• Cooper-Hewitt and MoMA win Webby Awards.
• The Day in Art Merch: Art computers by Dell.
• Carnegie International’s Life on Mars, much like life on earth, where the white guys run everything, reports the L.A. Times. “Take the eight California-based artists. California is a minority-majority state, with 57% of its population Latino, Asian and African American, but only two of its Carnegie International artists fit that profile. Neither is Latino, the largest minority. Only one is a woman.” More on the show here.
• The work of Arik Levy.
• An essay about the growing presence of robots in our lives.
• Photos from Colin Chillag’s show at Angstrom in L.A.
• I’ve linked to this in the past, but I had to link again: Let’s Paint TV. Because it’s so totally frackin’ weird.
• Jerry Saltz on Larry Gagosian: “People grouse because he has hundreds of thousands of square feet of exhibition space and represents like 95 artists, but New York would really miss him if his gallery closed down. He’s sort of a combination of a corporate raider, a dark lord, Peggy Guggenheim, and a railroad magnate.” (Via Kottke.)
• Weapons for the fashionista set. Love the Fendi chain saw.
• Photos: Richard Serra at the Grand Palais in Paris. The artist, btw, is p.o.’d that people are putting their feet on his sculptures, something that just furthers my belief that Richard Serra should someday design a skate ramp.
• The further blandification of NYC: Eddie Boros’s Tower of Toys in NYC’s East Village to be taken down on order of the Parks Department. (Via Gammablog’s Flickr.)
• The design arithmetic on the Dark Lord Foster’s new Moscow building.
• The Barn House by Buro2 in Belgium.
• The world’s tallest Lego tower. (Via NotCot.)
• Renderings of Daniel Libeskind’s Spirit House Chandelier, soon to be installed at the Royal Ontario Museum.
• Totally rad graffiti architecture of the day: Evol in Berlin. Turning utility boxes into mini-buildings.
• Stussy shirts by Ghost.
• The Cost of War, a link I nicked from my buddy, Bill.
• Your moment of Stephen Colbert, dancing.

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.)

Happy Cinco de Mayo! May your margaritas be frozen and your nachos spicy. (The photo is of a relative who is still trying to live this down.)

• A reef made of NYC subway cars. (Via BldgBlog.)
• Is Shepard Fairey going blind?
• “No Gagosian, No Party.”
• Graff of the Day: Shaka and Nosbe of the PPA Crew in Paris.
• A Flickr set on the Cans Festival in London (via Ekosystem). More at Supertouch.
• Profile of Speerstra, a graffiti-focused gallery in Holland.
• Concrete Alchemy, a traveling show of graffiti art: NYC, N.J., Philly, D.C. and National Harbor, Md. Kicks off May 16th in N.Y.
• A nice story in the S.F. Chronicle about the Fecal Face gallery.
• The work of Zamak. (Via ackackack.)
• A round-up of weird (useless) shit you can buy. Including a Space Invader cutting board. (Not by the street artist.)
• Mogul wants to put Blade Runner-style billboards on L.A. buildings using LEDs. Dude: can’t you showcase some art on there instead? Does the world really need more advertising?
• Sublime artist-with-art photo of the day: Damien Hirst and his skull.
• In a related story: skulls in art, hot, hot, hot.
• More Obama art merch for sale. (Via The Moment.)
• The NYT has a list of the very expensive objets d’art that are coming up for auction in the next two weeks: Francis Bacon for $25 to $35 million, anyone? (More on Bacon’s sky-high prices here.) Plus: a record-selling Rothko painting, sold at Sotheby’s last year, is going to Qatar.
• SITE Santa Fe Albright-Knox director Louis Grachos on sculptor Tom Sachs: “Tom straddles that line somewhere between humor, good taste and bad taste.”
• A profile of Alana Heiss, founder of P.S. 1, who is retiring this year. (Not voluntarily.)
• The stained glass windows of Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke.
• All 120 Crayola crayon names. (Via ackackack.)
• How the Denver Museum acquired Thomas Eakins’ Cowboy Singing: enlist a billionaire to help pay the tab.
• Michael Heizer’s earthworks at the Menil in Houston.
• Clementine Gallery in NYC is closing.
• The New York Photo Festival.
• Frozen Caribbean seawater as art. Sounds sustainable.
• The work of Arne Quinze.
• NY Art Beat: new website for NYC art events.
• Bug sex with Isabella Rossellini. I love how totally weird she’s willing to be.
• Gehry’s Atlantic Yards project in NYC dying a little piece at a time.
• Photo Essay: Libeskind’s Jewish Museum in S.F.
• Another view of the Bird’s Nest in Beijing.
• A Q&A with literary blogger Mark Sarvas, of The Elegant Variation.
• Craig Ferguson’s speech at the White House Correspondents Dinner. The Rumsfeld video at Minute 15 is sublime.
• Your moment of trapped-in-an-elevator, courtesy of Mlle. Connasse.