C-MONSTER.net.

Chihuahua With Cheeseburgers by William Hundley. See a full set of Hundley’s cheeseburger photos. (Photo courtesy of albino_octopus.)

• Not a story about art writers: Art boobs. (Via AFC.)
• A workshop on how to get illegal advertising removed from your neighborhood. Also: The City of L.A. wants to crack down on murals, but seems pretty happy to do absolutely nothing about illegal advertising. Plus: Transforming crap-ass video ads into stained glass.
• Christie’s gets into the gallery business in London, with a new spot coming soon in N.Y.
• Guggenheim in Guadalajara ain’t gonna fly, reportedly because the Krens-master refused to scale down costs. In not-really related museum-building news: Herzog & de Meuron to design a modern art museum in Calcutta and Morphosis to design the new OCMA in Costa Mesa, Calif. (Via architecture.mnp.)
• LACMA seems to have a history of sticky relationships with its donors.
• The New Republic on nihilism in today’s art, as illustrated by Hirst, Koons and Murakami, and the institutions that aid and abet them: “What there is to discuss is not visual experiences so much as visual stunts, which are frequently mind-boggling in their size and complexity.” Plus: “At the Guggenheim, the staff no longer curates exhibitions. They simply invite an artist to come in and rape the place.” (Via A.J.)
• In a related story: The Viktor & Rolf show at London’s Barbican is one big ad, says the Guardian: “…the curation of the show is so adoring, so breathlessly admiring, it might as well have been done by a Vogue junior stylist…”
• Newsgrist runs a factcheck on comments by Frank Stella in The Art Newspaper, on the subject of orphan works. (Via AFC.)
• A trailer from Herb and Dorothy, a documentary about the Vogels, a librarian and postal clerk who amassed one of the most significant collections of modern art in the U.S. (Via WaPo.)
• Photos: Weegee’s Manhattan.
• New York Water Taxi now offering tours of Olafur Eliasson’s Waterfalls.
• Update: chashama is having a pirate party pig roast benefit tonight in NYC, weather permitting.
  
• “Shepard Fairey’s image problem.” (Via Eyebeam.)
• Photos: Skullphone at the Riverside Museum of Art.
• Is the Splasher back?
• Architecture and authoritarianism. In related news: Paul Goldberger writes about architecture in Beijing.
• Midwest Flood News: Frank Lloyd Wright house hit in Charles City, Ia.
• The NYT covers the fate of Paul Rudolph’s Riverview High School in Sarasota. See my pix here.
• Shelters for threatened species made of recycled materials.
• The Lego Death Star. (Via NotCot.)
• Your moment of Jim Carrey as Vanilla Ice.

Olive Trees. (Photo by John Anthony Frederick.)

• Am I microfamous yet? (Via AFC.)
• Inducing agita in the gallery set: Damien Hirst to auction off his own works at Sotheby’s in the fall. More here.
• Plus: See Hirst’s first formaldehyde piece when the YBAs are reunited this fall at Freeze. More here.
• Picasso sold at auction has the honor of being the most expensive painting ever sold in Australia.
• Painting originally thought to be a Rembrandt knock-off is a real-live Rembrandt, a self-portrait of the artist no less. (Via A.J.)
• Midwest flood updates at Eco Art Blog. Plus: An interview with University of Iowa Art Museum interim director Pamela White regarding the floods.
• The Brooklyn Museum has scanned a mummy named Demetrius and put up 3-D views of the X-rays online. (Via Hrag.)
• Frugal living: How artists survive in NYC. (Via MW Capacity.)
• Legs in pulp fiction design.
• Broken architecture as art.
• At least they’re not tearing this one down: A look at the renovations on the Paul Rudolph-designed Yale school of art and architecture. (Via A.J.)
• Steven Holl and Vito Acconci’s leaky and drippy Storefront for Art and Architecture in NYC to be restored.
• Flickr founders quit Flickr.
• Street View: A portfolio of Google photographs.
• Porn spoofs. My favorite: The Da Vinci Load. (Via ackackack.)
• Graff of the Day: Sinboy in Barcelona.
• More graffiti stop motion animation, this time from Germany: History of Breakdance. In a sort-of related post: a video that combs through all manner of vintage video to show the origins of breakdancing’s moves.
• So totally weird it could be art: La Pequeña Hillary Clinton.
• Your moment of shoot ‘em up.

Jersey Street. Photo by Joe Holmes.

• Soap Pope on a Rope.
• The Day in Decadent Art Merch: Murakami unveils new Louis Vuitton line in Vegas (via Marshall Astor) and very expensive T-shirts from Dash Snow (via AFC).
• A NY Times Twitter feed from the Whitney’s Art Party. Spotted: Sean Lennon taking a tinkle.
• The text of Richard Serra’s commencement speech at Williams: “I have no problem with the virtual reality on your screens as long as you are aware that it is virtual. My concern is that experience by proxy is a poor substitute for the reality of the interactive space we inhabit…Don’t let the rhetoric of simulation steal away the immediacy of your experience. Keep it real, keep it in the moment.” (Via Hrag.)
• Is Jeff Koons from Mars? The Washington Post seems to think so.
• Ed Winkleman reviews the new HBO documentary The Art of Failure.
• Folkestown, England is having a triennial, and it features Tracey Emin, Nathan Coley and Mark Wallinger, among others.
• Totally trippy: Photos from the Viktor & Rolf doll show at the Barbican in London.
• Now that’s what I call innovation: Flip flops that come equipped with a bottle opener.
• The street art industrial average is high: Banksy chimp exceeds expectation at London auction.
• More graffiti as video: 310 Squad in Moscow. (Via Ekosystem.)
• Video: Astillas, El Tono’s D.I.Y. sculptural installation in Lima, Peru. (The chicha music accompanying the video is totally sweet.)
• New book of graffiti photos, spanning three decades: They Call it Graffiti.
• When street artists imitate studio artists: Gaia meets Matthew Day Jackson Edition.
• Eames stamps are now for sale. (Via Kottke.)
• Norman Foster’s Hearst Tower makes it into Grand Theft Auto IV. (Via Eyebeam.)
• Tadao Ando’s new building for the Clark Art Institute, in Mass., to open this weekend.
• The Month in Total Douche-y-ness: The Associated Effing Press wants to charge bloggers to quote their articles. !!!??? More here.
• Slack Power.
• Your moment of Quizás, psychedelic edition.

Die Stickerin, 2008, by Neo Rauch at David Zwirner in NYC, through June 21st. (Photo by C-M.)

• Q&As with Werner Herzog on Gothamist and Defamer. (Merci to Mlle. Connasse for the latter.)
• Midwest Flood Reports: There’s an informative flood round-up on MAN, as well as images of the waters reaching the low-lying University of Iowa’s art campus in one and two parts, and pix of the University’s Advanced Technology Building, designed by Frank Gehry. Also: Louis Sullivan’s bank in Cedar Rapids likely sustains damage and photos of water lapping at the Figge Art Museum in Davenport.
• Turning parking lots into solar energy stations. (Via architecture.mnp.)
• A video report on Ai Wei Wei, the Chinese artist who helped design the Bird’s Nest stadium, and who has now announced that he will boycott the Beijing Olympics. The writer of the blog post asks, “How are you going to take a commission and then talk shit later…?” It’s a little concept called free speech…
• Photos of Zaha Hadid’s Zaragoza Bridge Pavilion.
• A dead mall grows in China.
• Astro Boy made from recycled train tickets.
• Ladies: Learn how to tinkle while standing. (For the sake of propriety, I will not reveal the high-ranking art industry executive who sent this to me.)
• Graff of the Day: Ewok 5MH and Cope2.
• Video: The reverse graffiti of Paul ‘Moose’ Curtis.
• Cable news sucks so unbelievably hard.
• The Day in Petulant Artists. In a related story: A Brooklyn artist sues a fan for posting photos of his work online (via AJ).
• Australians debate the limits of free speech in the wake of the brouhaha over Bill Henson’s photographs of naked girls (via AJ). Germaine Greer gives her take.
• Art the Vote: Artists in Missouri to do get-out-the-vote billboards.
• AIDS in art.
• A story about New York City’s ghost bike memorials.
• Murakami and Cai Guo Qiang to travel to Guggenheim Bilbao.
• I heart high art ridiculousness.
• The Seventh Veil.
• Your moment of Adam and Eve.

Dog Lying in the Snow by Franz Marc, 1910. (Image courtesy of lyceo_hispanico.)

• Insanely good long-exposure photographs of crowds by Alexey Titarenko.
• Man accidentally throws out Damien Hirst print. Plus: Thieves steal Picassos from São Paulo museum (via A.J.). In a sort of related story: the demand for insurance on art increases (via A.O.).
• Pro Marlene Dumas? Or anti Marlene Dumas? Anaba reports, you decide. (Read the original NYT Mag profile here.)
• Charles Saatchi buys entire student show. For reals.
• Empty swimming pools. (Via ackackack.)
• Video: David Byrne shows how Playing the Building works. (My earlier report here.)
• Guggenheim Vilnius, not so fast.
• German museum director in Leipzig is under fire for ceding curatorial control to collectors and commercial galleries.
• New York Brutal. (Via What You Write.)
• Video: Henry Moore at the Bronx Botanical Garden.
• The Day in Corporate Spinelessness: How Olympics sponsors are addressing the issue of human rights in Darfur.
• Photo essay: Norman Foster’s Terminal Three at the Beijing Airport, which clearly takes up one ‘uge tract of land.
• The Chicago Trib has a big fat story on the Art Institute of Chicago’s new Renzo Piano-designed wing (still under construction), complete with video and extra photos.
• I’m in a Southwest Kind of Way: An Arizona house by Steven Holl architects and a California house by Tom Kundig.
• A design by Buckminster Fuller deconstructed. Plus: The architect’s personal archive, now in Stanford’s possession, weighs 45 tons.
• Stormtrooper cufflinks.
• Photos: Barry McGee and Doug Aitken at Carnegie International.
• Graff of the Day: 7906, ZKD and Lutsk in the Ukraine.
• You can now do karaoke on your Playstation. Speaking of which, here’s the Neil Diamond karaoke I saw this past weekend.
• Your moment of alligators.

A detail of Boston’s Art Deco Hatch Shell, originally built in 1941. (Photo by Hargo.)

• Cool ad for Greenpeace.
• The Day in Art Media Intrigue: Turns out the NY Sun likes to use speculative blog posts as a source in its “reporting.” More here.
• Media Intrigue, Part Deux: How are artists chosen for newspaper profiles? It helps to be young. And good looking.
• That’s a lot of Cheetos and Budweiser: There are two million artists in the U.S., according to the NEA.
• U2 to sell Basquiat painting.
• A call for art dedicated to Tom Waits.
• Video of Chris Burden’s 65-foot tall Erector set skyscraper in NYC’s Rock Center. (Via Marshall Astor.)
• Third Ward TX, a documentary about a community planning initiative and art project in a poverty-stricken Houston neighborhood under pressure from development.
• The McGuggentage: Lithuanian gov’t gives the ok to build a combined franchise museum of the Guggenheim and Hermitage (via AJ). It’s kinda like those food courts where you can get Subway and Dunkin’ Donuts at the same time. More here.
• Art Institute of Chicago to debut renovated wing. It’d be nice if the Trib’s online edition thought to include images.
• Audit uncovers problems at California’s Long Beach Museum of Art, including misspent funds and, reportedly, missing works.
• Lucky dude: eugeniogp of N.J. won the random drawing for a signed copy of A Time It Was by Bill Eppridge. Congrats!
• A gallery of phone sex operators. (Via Kottke.)
• Graffiti Video of the Day: Quasimoto in Bullyshit, part of a new feature on Bo130’s blog on Ekosystem, where he features his favorite flicks.
• New book: Black & White Freedrawings, the collaborative drawings of Zeptonn, from the Netherlands, with Jon Burgerman, DGPH, Philip Tseng, Hello Brute and many others.
• Not a joke: Jell-O architecture.
• A Rem Koolhaas design rendering meets Gordon Matta-Clark. (Via NotCot.)
• In the wake of the whole fist bump ridiculosity, Colbert ran an excellent segment about the history of the fist bump. I found a great example to add to the mix: an ad for male hair coloring, airing on network television (a.k.a. Internet for the infirm), in which a strapping white Boomer dude runs up a beach in a body-hugging wet suit and then goes to do a fist bump with his strapping Boomer buddies.
• I want, I need, I have to have: an alien coffee table. (Via ackackack.)
• Your moment of Blowin’ in the Wind, Sam Cooke style.