• Artist website blocked at art museum due to “adult content.”
• Gap founder gives up plan for a big museum in S.F.’s Presidio.
• Steals and Deals: Bernie Madoff associate Ezra Merkin forced to sell art collection.
• In sort of related news: Dutch arts official vanishes after the discovery that he had embezzled €15.5 million from an arts organization’s accounts. (Arts Journal.)
• The Vatican has announced that it has found what is believed to be a Michelangelo self-portrait. And a U.S. scholar claims to have found a self-portrait by Rembrandt as a 16-year-old. (Arts Journal.)
• Tickets and their machines.
• More reasons why the Saltz-master should have a blog.
• Roast Beef Dinner: A cool Thiebaud in Toledo.
• The Day in Fictional Bankruptcies.
• Ooh ooh, the Deutsche Bank Art Mag story about bloggers is also available in English. And, guess what? We’re “controversial!”
• When architectural installations imitate Tony Cragg.
• The Humphrey Winterton Collection of East African photographs, a searchable database. (Coudal.)
• A previously unpublished view of the Tienanmen “Tank Man.”
• Today’s Street Art: Lister in Sydney.
• Graffiti as proselytizing tool: A Q&A with Jesus Saves.
• For the Typography Geeks: A new font based on Brazilian Pixaçao graffiti.
• The architecture of Michael Jackson’s Neverland compound. Photo essay here.
• Trippy: the glass balcony at the Sears Tower.
• An installation made with hula hoops.
• Your moment of breakdancing Stormtrooper. (Gracias, Celso.)

• In Lima, Peru: Re-Hacer El Amor: Habitaciones/Hostales/Lima, featuring photographs by Renzo Giraldo, Roberto Huarcaya and Gihan Tubbeh, at the Centro Cultural de España (CCELIMA) in Santa Beatriz, opens Friday.
• In Nantes, France: Ernesto Neto, A Culpa Civilizada, at the Musée des Beaux-arts, opens Sunday.
• In NYC: Consumption: A Show by Mike Dash, at Lyons Wier, opens Monday.
• In NYC: Dan Graham at the Whitney, through Oct. 11.
• In NYC: Black Acid Co-Op, Jonah Freeman and Justin Lowe, at Deitch, opens today.
• In L.A.: Hank Willis Thomas, Black is Beautiful, at Roberts & Tilton in Culver City, through Aug. 1.
• In S.F.: Evan B. Harris and Alisha Wessler, Back Channels at Johanssen Projects in Oakland, opens Friday.

Squeak Carnwath’s paintings are too big to be shoplifted. Otherwise, I would happily “own” one or two of the idiosyncratic, icon-addled, blackboard-sized canvasses from her first solo museum show at the Oakland Museum of California — at the tender age of 62. As one of the leading California artists no one’s ever heard of (unlike her cohorts Viola Frey and Jay DeFeo), Carnwath fuses the personal symbology of a genius Waldorf preschooler with the flawed humanity of the psychotherapy couch. The result is pure Californication.

I couldn’t not love her recurring guilt-free zones (Everything(2)), or her collection of good luck symbols (Good Luck ), bunnies (Long Happy Life ) and record albums (Side One ) — the latter representing about the side-oneness of life. There’s a shameless appropriation of periodic table grids (Four Months), confession (Promise) and assorted visual elements that once led people to associate her work with outsider art. Each painting reads like a short story asking universal questions. Then on the video at the end of the show, there’s Squeak with all the answers. And you walk out feeling like you just had a great talk with your therapist.

Painting Is No Ordinary Object runs through Aug 23.

Side One.

Reflection.

Gone.

The Story of Painting.

Trying Simply to Be Happy.

Think About It.

Promise.

Right Now.

Trying to Know Lost.

Carnwath talks about her work, in a video at the end of the show.