Vino, Foxy Lady and Drank in Florence, Italy. (Photo by 18K.)
Hey Folks: As you’ll notice, C-Monster has a new look. After tinkering with buggy layouts that were inserting spam code for boner drugs in my page (the nerve!!), I should hopefully be rocking and rolling. Or at least humming my favorite lite music favorites. xox, C.
- Way to elevate the discourse: Simon & Schuster, with the aid of Mary Matalin, is funding a writer who has referred to Hillary Clinton as a “lesbo” and Muslims as “ragheads.”
- Crucified frog sculpture is blasphemous, says Pope. And fugly, says C-Monster.
- Damien Hirst’s London dealer denies they have a “mountain” of unsold works. Most puzzling quote in the story: Robert Sandelson, a London dealer who, in the past, has sold Hirst’s works on the secondary market: “Sotheby’s auction is payback time for Damien…He’s saying to the dealers, ‘If you can’t sell these pieces, I’ll find someone who can.’” Um, payback for what? He’s already one of the richest artists on the planet. More here.
- That would be a thumbs down: Lucian Freud portrait destroyed by man who didn’t like his double chin (via A.O.). Because you know you want to read more.
- Alfredo Jaar on culture as a prison.
- The Day in Art Forgery: Looking Around reviews a coupla tomes on those fake Vermeers.
- Selling to the Oligarchs: Larry Gagosian is planning a big show - featuring pieces by Giacometti, Lichtenstein and De Kooning - in an old chocolate factory in Moscow.
- In unrelated news: Moscow’s Tretyakov Gallery, a state-owned museum, is in talks with the city government to build a new space for its collection of modern and contemporary art.
- Fallout from the trashed Léger at Wellesley: Some lady wants her shit back.
- The New Yorker visits with Kehinde Wiley. A photo essay of his work can be found here.
- James Powderly, of Graffiti Research Lab, talks about his time in the Beijing big house. See some of his China pix here.
- An outdoor advertising company in Minneapolis is freaked out by Suzanne Opton’s artful photos of American soldiers.
- C-Monster en Español: Este link está de requeteputamadre.
- Hurricane of Hype: Banksy is doing New Orleans.
- The Wall Street Journal on why urban planning at NYC’s Ground Zero has been a “fiasco.” Sample line: “What went wrong, in the broadest sense, is that everything meant to turn the area into a symbol of rebirth and regeneration was subverted by political weakness or opportunism and New York’s bottom-line, top-dollar mentality; what we have at Ground Zero is an awful marriage of deals and death… Everything that would have enriched and enlivened the area is gone…”
- Paul Rudolph’s Yale School of Architecture gets a renovation by Charles Gwathmey.
- Drunk architecture: A trippy residential development in Norway’s Tromsø Straight by 70º Arkitektur.
- Moving Richard Neutra’s Maxwell House from one L.A. neighborhood to another.
- Sexy people. (Via Coudal.)
- Your moment of musical porn.
Posted by C-Monster.
Detail of El Retaule de l’amor, 1910, by Julio Romero de Torres at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. (Photo by C-M.)
Posted by C-Monster.
Judith Supine in New York. (Photo by Jake Dobkin.)
- Animal has an interview with one of the Free Tibet activists recently arrested in and deported from China.
- Cooler than David Byrne’s Playing the Building: Artist David van Tieghem playing New York City.
- The joy of vinyl.
- Bigger than a hurtling SUV, taller than a towering McMansion: Behemoth public art, courtesy of Arup and Anish Kapoor.
- Only in the Dead-Tree Edition: An insightful Q&A with video artist Kalup Linzy can be found in the summer issue of Bomb.
- The Devi Art Foundation, a museum of contemporary art, is set to open in New Delhi this Saturday.
- Liu Bolin’s Camouflage series. (Via NotCot.)
- Catching Up: R.I.P. John Russell, art critic and Manny Farber, film critic.
- The music of chairs.
- The Art Industrial Average is down. A Sotheby’s auction in Melbourne sold just 49 percent of its total works. (Via A.J.)
- Better than Performance Art: Kottke reports that the doc, Hands on a Hardbody, can now be watched on Google Video.
- The New York Times has a link blog. It’s no C-Monster. (Via Fimoculous.)
- Whose is bigger? Comparing podium design at the conventions.
- Graff Truck of the Day: Bue, Uri and Resto in Barcelona.
- Wired wants photos of your geek tattoos.
- JetBlue’s new JFK food court. And not a moment too soon, because I don’t think I coulda handled another meal at “Mex and the City.”
- A video profile of Portuguese architect Alvaro Siza and the buildings he designed for the architecture school in Porto.
- L.A. Star Maps, Architecture Edition.
- Your moment of Muppet death metal.
Posted by C-Monster.
Oslo, Norway. August 17th, at 4:10 p.m. (Photo by Ti.mo)
- Question of the Day: “Does anyone really give a shit about David Byrne’s bike racks?”
- Hirst Today, Not Gone Tomorrow: As Damien Hirst prepares to takes his wares to auction (and bypass his gallerists in the process), Cristina Ruiz at the Art Newspaper reports on the more than 200 pieces that his London gallery has failed to sell. The back stock is worth in excess of £100 million (not counting the diamond-studded skull) and includes an inventory of 34 butterfly paintings, half a dozen medicine cabinets and several dead things in formaldehyde. Maybe Hirst should be selling his stuff here.
- Fake Olympics, 2008: First, there was that lip-synching kid that got everyone’s panties in a knot. Now Cai Guo-Qiang has issued a statement on the fake fireworks “controversy.” Does this mean that the Students for a Free Tibet protestors were fake arrested? And then fake released? The mind reels.
- Plus: Everybody’s a critic. Including the Chinese government.
- Art-o-palooza begins in Denver, in time for the Democratic National Convention. Because I’m sure the first thing those caucus types are gonna do when they get into town, is don their finest donkey hats and head right to the Denver Art Museum.
- The Guardian has rounded up three decades worth of quotes by Tracey Emin. Sample: Emin on journalists: “They write 500 words, put me down, get their pay packets, pay off their credit cards, pay their mortgages, shag their wives—and when they do it’s me they’re thinking of.” (Via A.O.)
- Washington, D.C. types offended by underwear art.
- The Jeff Koons yacht: Looking like a Cancún party boat. (Via A.O.)
- Looking Around has one and two highly interesting posts that do a full body smackdown on the whole idea kicking around at the University of Iowa to sell off a Pollock to pay bills.
- Was a portrait that sold at auction for $21,000 back in ’98 done by Leonardo Da Vinci?
- Public art: Not as boring as it used to be, reports the NY Times. And not as public as it used to be either, reports Modern Art Notes.
- An excerpt from Peter Plagens’s novel, The Art Critic, is now available on ArtNet. Here’s the sex part, so that you don’t have to go looking for it: “Arthur’s sexual predilections were well within the bounds of bedroom civility—a little oral, occasional doggy-style, once in a while all the lights left on—and he was considerate enough to get up afterward and bring a bottle of mineral water avec gaz and two glasses back to one of the night tables.”
- For art lovers with a lotta dough: Private museum tours. (Via Personism.)
- The type of story I would one day love to write: Alma Guillermoprieto in National Geographic on the cholitas luchadoras of Bolivia. See the photo essay.
- Graff of the Day: Kislow in the Ukraine.
- Tate Modern exhibit on street art gets the city of São Paulo to rethink graffiti buffing policy.
- A U.S. couple—a.k.a. Ether and Dani—faces felony charges for graffiti “spree.” More here.
- Frank Gehry is out as architect of Brooklyn’s Theater for a New Audience.
- The Day in Vertical Lines: The Campus Universitário in Vigo, Spain, by Alfonso Penela.
- Architecture’s useless vestiges. (Via Life Without Buildings.)
- Brutalism: preserving the architecture nobody likes.
- Your moment of junk as art.
Posted by C-Monster.
Opera, 1922, by Ricardo Urgell, at the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya in Barcelona. (Photo by C-M.)
Posted by C-Monster.
Loomit, in Germany. (Photo by Luna Park.)
- James Powderly of Graffiti Research Lab is held in Beijing after unfurling a Free Tibet banner at the Olympic Park. Another story here and Eyebeam’s statement here.
- China will not lend Cultural Revolution-era works to NYC’s Asia Society.
- Warhol chocolates? I suggested it months ago.
- Artist Self-Promotional Schpiel of the Day, courtesy of painter Jason Chase: “Go to my website, and remember that owning a painting by me will make you smarter and more likable.”
- Theo Jansen’s Animaris Rhinoceros. (Via Eyebeam.)
- LACMA acquires Illegal Operation, a 1962 sculpture by Ed Kienholz about illegal abortion.
- CultureGrrl reports that former Met director-turned-ArtNet columnist Thomas Hoving needs to pick up the clue phone.
- Will the bear market affect art giving? Um, yeah.
- The Golden Shit Awards. Turns out Paul McCarthy isn’t the only one with a poo fixation. (Via Ekosystem.)
- Bruno Taylor is making the world better one bus station swing at a time.
- Graff of the Day: Roa in Belgium.
- CNN on Steve Powers’ Waterboard Thrill Ride in Coney Island. More at Razor Apple.
- If you live in Houston, you can sign up for lessons in graffiti drawing.
- More on Architecture School, the Sundance Channel’s reality show in which students design schemes for single-family house for New Orleans. See video clips.
- Burj Dubai, the tallest building in the world, is almost finished. And it looks like a rocket launcher.
- On the opposite end of the spectrum…Buildings that take forever to build: Antoni Gaudí’s Sagrada Familia cathedral is mired in controversy. Manuel Borja-Villel, director of the Reina Sofía in Madrid, told the Guardian last week: “What they are constructing has little to do with the spirit of Gaudí. It has more to do with building a tourist attraction…” (Via architecture.mnp.)
- When architecture imitates art: Beijing bird’s nest stadium meets Christo and Jeanne-Claude edition.
- WBEZ public radio in Chicago has a segment about the ethics of building in places such as China with Pritzker Prize-winner Thomas Mayne, among others. Mayne comes on at about Minute 30. (Via Unbeige.)
- Highly speculative and highly entertaining: Building megastructures for space.
- Your moment of Welcome Back.
Posted by C-Monster.
