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For sale on eBay: The Identity of "Banksy." Probably a hoax, but maybe not? Well, Mashable believes it.

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A new book will feature Marco Anelli's photos of everyone who sat with Marina Abramovic during "The Artist is Present" at MoMA this year. So that'll be a little of Bjork, a little of Franco, and a lot of that annoying crying dude (and the much less annoying girl in disguises). [via Gothamist]

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A follow-up to the Nic Rad show: Gawker TV at the closing and Meghan Keane in The Awl.

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performance art isn't new. what seems (and i am not plugged in enough to know) to be newish is that arts institutions/artists are getting more comfy with people interacting with that performance. turning it into a two-way street, an improvisational experience in which you actually become part of the art/performance. this is not only going on in art - it seems comments, liking, friending, tagging, trending, hacking, reblogging, etc. are behaviors that know no platform. which is both cool and chaotic.

but a year ago, MoMA wasn't cool with thehappycorpglobal getting Posterboy to mash up MoMA ads in the subways. i guess you could have your picture made while jumping in front of art, but you couldn't have a street artist cut & splice it. maybe it's just that they don't mind people interacting with or subverting the art when the art is inside their four walls...

because now people are talking to the art, staring at the art, mimicking the art, and making the art cry. -- FB

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PS 1 director Klaus Biesenbach once argued with Lady Gaga over whether she's a "performance artist." That and more in a great big post from David Byrne on "recontextualizing work", art world economics, video installations, Tino Sehgal, Marina Abramovic, the Whitney Biennial, advertising, oh, just about everything happening in the art world today. -JM

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The Most Infamous Girl in the History of the Internet by Parker Ito. (Not Julia Allison) Found on artist Jon Rafman's Tumblr (Kool Aid Man in Second Life, The Nine Eyes of Google Street View) -JM

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Noted NYC graffiti artist Lee Quinones has responded to readers' questions at NYTimes.com. His work is in the permanent collection of the Whitney Museum, he appears in Wild Style, and he painted Luis Guzman's truck in How to Make it in America. Even if you don't like graffiti, his responses are worth reading just for their musicality. --ADM

Update: Part 2 and Part 3 are posted. His use of the language is just as joyous. And, per request, here's some of his subway work. And the story of his crew, the Fabulous 5ive.

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The 2010 Whitney Biennial has opened. The Times says it is understated but sometimes provocative. New York magazine agrees. Note that the exhibit includes the unforgettable 'Marine Wedding' photos by Nina Berman. --ADM

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The Upper Playground Gallery in Los Angeles has revealed "The Lost Art of Inglourious Basterds", a collection of fanmade artwork inspired by Quentin Tarantino's last movie. Each piece was numbered and signed by Tarantino himself. Check out the image gallery at Rope of Silicon. --MM

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"Crash", the new exhibition at London's Gagosian gallery brings together works by artists who have been influenced by the JG Ballard, from his contemporaries such as Ed Ruscha, Andy Warhol and Helmut Newton, to younger artists such as Tacita Dean, Jenny Saville, and Mike Nelson. Check out the photo gallery here. --MM

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For New Yorkers, this looks pretty awesome:

Seven on Seven will pair seven leading artists with seven game-changing technologists in teams of two, and challenge them to develop something new -- be it an application, social media, artwork, product, or whatever they imagine -- over the course of a single day.

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The essence of Warhol's genius was to eliminate the one aspect of a thing without which that thing would, to conventional ways of thinking, cease to be itself, and then to see what happened. He made movies of objects that never moved and used actors who could not act, and he made art that did not look like art. He wrote a novel without doing any writing. He had his mother sign his work, and he sent an actor, Allen Midgette, to impersonate him on the lecture tour (and, for a while, Midgette got away with it). He had other people make his paintings.

--The New Yorker, annoying abstracted online.

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WaPo: What Would Warhol Blog? [via]

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1.4 million people voted on the question of "Greatest Artist of the 20th Century."

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Kool-Aid Man In Second Life. Mesmerizing video. [via]

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Rhizome (the nyc-based digital arts organization) is borrowing the Million Dollar Homepage idea for fund-raising: The Rhizome $50,000 Homepage.

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What Would Andy Warhol Do on the Internets?, which includes a passing mention of @AndyWarhol, which is now up to 465 followers even though I still haven't done anything with it. What else would Warhol do, besides rule at FourSquare?

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Just launched: Life.com, which Heffernan calls "hands-down the Web's greatest photo site."

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I didn't know that John Berger's Ways of Seeing actually started as a 1972 BBC documentary.

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The Futurist Manifesto was published 100 years ago today. My college thesis project for my Art History minor was about the Italian Futurists and it included a reimagining of what Futurism would have been like if the morons weren't fascists. [via]

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First the AP accuses him of copyright infringement on the Obama poster, now Shepard Fairey is in jail for tagging.

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Strangely satisfying online discussion: What movie, song or work of art should we transmit to outer space in case anyone is out there? [via]

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100 Best Photo Album Covers.

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10 Top Music Videos Made By Artists: Classic (Blondie, Yoko, Eno, etc.) and Contemporary (Deerhoof, Bjork, Beck, etc.).

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The other night while we were, ugh, group blogging, Katie noticed that I have a tattoo on my right arm -- a small Chinese character. "What does that mean -- irony?" she asked. The idea of a tattoo of the Chinese character for irony struck me as the best idea ever! Anyway, BoingBoing has a post that explores the question of who owns the copyright of the tattoo -- the tattooed? the tattooer? third parties?

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Cool Slate infoviz slideshow: data visualizations and artists. Included: some history on treemaps, They Rule, Jonathan Harris, Name Voyager, Jason Salavon, Visual Complexity, Radiohead's "House of Cards" video, and several other Fimoc favorites.

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Picasso's Guernica in 3D.

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"Wired Magazine, dated February 2007, contains 67 pages of advertising whose logos are placed in exactly these positions. Print run 250 + signed edition of 50." More mags from One Page Magazine. [via]

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Opening this weekend at MoMA: Design and the Elastic Mind. (Update: NYT review. Update #2: The exhibition site is up now.)

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A theory for you to consider: In a culture in which everything from philanthropy to vaginas are calculated acts of social display, aren't art thieves the greatest heroes of our time? Seriously, if you steal a famous painting, no one can actually know this. In the age of inflated social capital, stealing art is the only act in which one can express a personal, non-financial relationship to art. (Oh, a link: some dudes stole some paintings by Cezanne, Degas, Monet, and Van Gogh from a Zurich museum. Also, Slate has some answers for what to do with a stolen painting.)

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Kottke catches a meme: time merge media.

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One of my favorite pastimes is watching Gawker commenters jump on Nick Douglas' case. From the start, the entire set despised Nick's ignoble task: to explain internet culture to a city that just discovered Tumblr. (For context, remember when all of NYC was scared of blogs? And then remember when they were scared of comments? Now they're totally freaked out by Twitter.) The Gawker loyalists have unwittingly become like their old media foes -- resistant to change like nothing I've since the last Tribune meeting I sat in. (Back in Minnesota, I invented a word for this: neu-liberalism. Those are liberals who think they're really progressive but are actually completely freaked out by anything that moves faster than circa-1985 MTV. So think: daily newspaper editors and NPR listeners.) And so it's logical that Nick has gradually become accepted, even appreciated, in the past few weeks, because eventually all change is accepted. His most recent piece introduces a decent concept: Diggbrow, an analysis of what constitutes "art" among the populist areas of the internet. "The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it." Whoa, slow down there, buddy...

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Anyone in NYC wanna hit this New Museum / Rhizome event on Friday?

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Andy Warhol eating a hamburger. Mm-hm. [via]

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Art + blogs + Facebook = ArtReview.com. [via]

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Shepard "Obey" Fairey has always seemed like one of those anomalies in the indie fame machine. On the occasion of his L.A. solo show, here's an essay showing his plagiarist tendencies. UPDATE: in the comments, Jeff Croft makes the artist-free-to-appropriate argument.

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Interview in The Believer with Adrian Tomine.

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Sorta brilliant Eyebeam art project: Hip-Hop Pop-Ups. While you listen to Kanye's new album, it tosses out a popup ad every time a brand is mentioned.

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New York Mag's sad story on Theresa Duncan and Jeremy Blake. [via]

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Continuing with his new strategy to pinch Japanese imagery, Kanye's new album cover was designed by Takashi Murakami.

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Better than my Fake Steven Wright Twitter account: Fake Jenny Holzer.

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What I don't understand is why Eno stopped at 77 million. It could easily be 77 billion... or infinite!

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I've been following this story all week about Damien Hirst's diamond skull sculpture, For The Love of God, Believe, but not until Greg did a post did I really find an angle worth pursuing.

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Hieronymus Bosch Action Figures.

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Next month, MoMA opens a digital art retrospective called Automatic Update.

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A Rothko painting sold for $73 million. Yipe. NYmag's Vulture tries to track down who bought it.

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The New Yorker gives Banksy the big story treatment.

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Pentagram did all the identity work on the new Seattle Art Museum, which reopened over the weekend and has been getting great reviews: The Stranger | Seattle Times | Seattle P-I.

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You would think that digital art would have far fewer problems when it comes to preservation, but an NPR story suggests otherwise. [via]

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Decent essay that compares outdoor artists Shepard Fairey (the Obey guy) and Banksy (the prankster guy): "Art Collecting for Dummies 2.0".

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Sol LeWitt, who was a huge inspiration on me in college, has died.

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I caught up with the onslaught of Jeff Wall coverage over the weekend. (If you somehow missed it, the photographer just had a retrospective at MoMA open. You can catch up, too! NYT Mag, New Yorker, NYT, NY Mag, NewsDay.) Only somewhat familiar with the Vancouver artist's work, I needed a refresher: while MoMA's website for the exhibition lacks depth, it is rich in zoomable detail; meanwhile, the site for last year's Tate retrospective is almost perfect (navigate via the room boxes on the left). The exhibit moves to Chicago in June and San Fran in October.