C-MONSTER.net.

(Photo by C-M.)

Heard this from an Iraqi acquaintance who lives in Baghdad:

An American, a Brit and an Iraqi arrive in hell. The American goes to the pay phone and calls his family in the United States. He talks for 15 minutes. Satan charges him $10 million for the call because “it’s long distance.” The American grudgingly pays. The Brit makes a phone call to his family in England. The same charges apply: $10 million. Finally, the Iraqi goes to the phone and calls his family in Baghdad. He talks for hours — to everyone he knows. After he hangs up, he asks Satan, “How much?”

Satan replies: “Five dollars.”

The Iraqi says, “How can that be? I talked for hours.”

Satan says: “Hell-to-hell. It’s a local call.”

Posted by C-Monster.

Zhang’s ash painting, as it was being produced. (Photos by C-M.)

Photos from the opening of Zhang Huan’s show at Pace Wildenstein. It was totally over the top. In a good way. His most prominent piece was a giant ash painting, which was created on the surface of adjoining six-foot tall concrete blocks. You have to climb several steps, up onto a scaffolding, to see the piece, which was being touched up by a young woman in white, who would float over it and flick little piles of ash on various strategic locations. I was afraid to sneeze.

More pix after the jump. Click on images to see ‘em big.
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Embroidered piece by Steve Macdonald, aka the Ramblin’ Worker. (All photos courtesy of Paper Boat.)

Artists Steve MacDonald and Rachel Budde came together for a new exhibit last week at the Paper Boat Gallery, an independent arts space in Millwaukee. The folks at the gallery were kind enough to put up a very nice Flickr set that shows opening night proceedings. If you’re in Milwaukee, this looks like it’s definitely worth checking out. The show runs through the end of the month.

Money shots after the jump. Read the rest of this entry »

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!)

A view of Canonge’s Idolatries/Idolatrías, with Sarita Montiel on the screen.

At the closing party for the CINE-REAL exhibit at MediaNoche, in NYC, I spent some time playing around with this seriously rad interactive sculpture by multimedia artist Hector Canonge. The piece consists of an array of 16 Latin American food products - from pickled jalapeños to condensed milk to pork rinds - each of which features a Latina on the packaging. There’s a virginal-looking milkmaid, mother-figure types, and, of course, fiery ladies - like the woman on the La Morena tin, who is just bursting with attitude. (Love her.)

Viewers can then scan each of these products with the grocery scanner (on the wall, to the right) and it launches a clip of vintage Spanish or Latin American cinema, which features a woman that resembles, in look and demeanour, the image on the grocery product. It was an innovative exploration of the whole virgin/mother/whore archetype in Latin American culture. I’m just bummed that I didn’t make it to the show’s opening, so that I could have touted this sooner…

See more pix after the jump. Click on images to see ‘em large.

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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.

Darkcloud. (Photo by shoehorn99.)

• In NYC: Matt Siren and Darkcloud in Street Language at the Woodward Gallery, opens Saturday at 6 p.m.
• In NYC: Olafur Eliasson, John Gerrard, Hamish Fulton and Nanna Hänninen in Navigating the Ether at Bryce Wolkowitz, opens this evening at 6 p.m.
• In NYC: Tomma Abts at the New Museum.
• In NYC: Tom Sanford at Leo Keonig, opens Friday.
• In NYC: Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin, opens today.
• In NYC: Peter Garfield at Pierogi in Brooklyn, through May 19^th.
• In Miami: Paul Clemence, Construkts at Chelsea Galleria.
• In Miami: Beatriz Monteavaro at Snitzer.
• In L.A.: Desert Interventions at Bert Green downtown.
• In L.A.: Joshua Krause at Cersoli in Culver City.
• In L.A.: Pop Pollution at The Lab 101, opens Saturday.
• In S.F.: D*Face and Armsrock at Fifty24SF.
• In S.F.: Kelsea Brookes and AJ Fosik at White Walls, opens Saturday.
• In S.F: Curve at The Shooting Gallery.
• In Seattle: Joy Garnett, in the group show Eden’s on Fire, at Platform Gallery.
• In Seattle: Combine: A Group Show of Cut Paper, featuring work by Monica Canilao, AJ Fosik, Greg Lamarche + many others, at BLVD, opens Friday.
• In London: Fujita at Haunch of Venison.
• In Paris: Louise Bourgeois at the Pompidou, through June 2^nd.
• In Shanghai: Isidro Blasco at Contrasts Gallery.

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.

Inga Huld Tryggvadottir. (Photos by C-M.)

Photos from Lather, Rinse, Repeat: new works by Aurora Robson, Inga Huld Tryggvadottir, Jason Wagner and Megan Hayes at Lumenhouse in Brooklyn. The show is up until May 18th. Check it out!

Click on images to make ‘em big. Many more pix after the jump.

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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.