Buff or Bluff?

Los Angeles' MoCA, under the direction of Jeffrey Deitch (the first and only art dealer/gallery owner at the helm of a major U.S. museum) is at work on the first major survey of the history of graffiti and street art in the United States. The retrospective, titled Art in the Streets, will take place in April 2011 and will span from the 1970s to the present. It will feature over 100 artists (including Basquiat, Space Invader, Banksy, and Mister Cartoon), 25 of whom will have installations and murals on the premises. Deitch commissioned Italian street artist Blu to paint one such mural on the wall of MOCA’s Geffen Contemporary. The work, which depicted a series of wooden caskets draped in dollar bills (a replacement for the American flags that cover the coffins of those soldiers killed in combat), was buffed and whitewashed by the museum yesterday morning - less than 24 hours after its completion.

Was Blu's anti-war/death statement simply too controversial for the museum? One hell of a boring street art exhibit that would make, and so atypical of J. Deitch - what of his work with Kehinde Wiley, Dash Snow, Ryan McGinness, Keith Haring, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Julian Schnabel? Or did the mural perhaps offend the museum's veteran neighbors? The wall faces a Veterans Administration building and is within sight of a war memorial, but a VA representative said that they had placed no complaint to MoCA.

Just speculatin', but the reason for the paint-and-strip seems fairly obvious to me - Blu must have another amazing stop-motion vid up his sleeve, one that will serve as a commentary on the ephemerality of graffiti as an aesthetic genre and political movement. Why else would the museum erase a work they themselves commissioned? Pretty fresh when considering the many incarnations of the Deitch-helmed Bowery mural project, one of the best modern examples of the interaction between street art and fine art, not to mention the recent Underbelly Project. And what could serve as a more thematically perfect piece for the retrospective? Heard it here first, folks! If I'm wrong, well ... shit. That sucks.

Free Fall Fests

If you're in New York this weekend, here are a few ways to enjoy the start of the season, in especially glorious and unseasonable weather ... fo' free.

The Dumbo Arts Festival is a massive, all-weekend-long gathering of 150+ studios, 35+ galleries, arts organizations, music, performance art, dance, film, theater, etc.

On Saturday, experience Oktoberfest in Greenpoint, complete with free pretzels and sausages.

The bi-annual St. Mark's Church Block Party is Saturday as well - check out vendors offering vintage clothes, antiques, and snacks from neighborhood standbys like Veselka.

Sunday, head to Brooklyn Heights for the 36th annual Atlantic Antic Street Festival for ten blocks of food, festivities and fun ... you just might catch the Beastie Boys. Plus free admission to the Transit Museum and Brooklyn Historical Society.

Rather stick to the city on Sunday? Celebrate all things apple on Orchard St (ha) between Broome and Grand at NYC Apple Day.

Happy fall - fingers crossed for some foliage!

BLU my mind

My brother just introduced me to the work of the young Italian street artist who calls himself BLU, a man whose graffiti-driven animation calls to mind both Burton and Brazilian surrealism, while existing in a realm all his own. His latest work, "BIG BANG BOOM," is what he calls "an unscientific point of view on the beginning and evolution of life ... and how it could probably end." The piece is a collaboration between BLU and local artists in Argentina and Uruguay, where it was filmed. It is a breathtaking tour-de-force that truly blows his contemporaries out of the water. Guy is on his game - I can't wait to see what else is in store.

BIG BANG BIG BOOM - the new wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.

Warm up, cool down

At temperatures heat up (The National Weather Service declared a heat advisory for NYC after temps reached the 90s on Monday) city officials have deemed it necessary to open New York's cooling centers. Find the nearest one to you here, or do the old-school thing and jump into one of the 54 Parks outdoor pools, open today until Labor Day.

The only thing hotter than this week's highs is the P.S.1 Warm Up lineup. The Warm Up kicks off with the sounds of Delorean, and continues through August with acts such as Air France, Ratatat, DJ/rupture, Animal Collective, James Murphy, ?uestlove, Treasure Fingers, and more. Starting July 3, on Saturdays from noon to 9pm, visitors can rock out within the confines of an architectural installation created by the winner of the annual Young Architects Program, and check out the stunning experimental exhibition space.

Your ex-boyfriend's mug shot

Everyone knows you don't forget your first love, that the initial rush is tattooed in your memory for better or worse. What if the general public could see your first boyfriend or girlfriend the way you see them, colored by heartbreak or softened with nostalgia?
As part of her mid-career survey, A Day Like Any Other, Brazilian conceptual artist Rivane Neuenschwander has hired a forensic sketch artist on the third floor of the New Museum. Visitors can sit with the artist, who will listen to descriptions of their first love and create portraits that will hang on the walls of the gallery. You can sign up with the sketch artist by emailing firstlove@newmuseum.org. A word of advice: might be better to fly solo on this one.

A sea of CDs

Artist Bruce Munro collected 600,000 unwanted CDs from the public for his temporary CDSea installation in Warminster's Long Knoll Field. The scaly rainbow of discs, bisected by a public footpath, was inspired by Munro's meditation on light and water during his days living in Sydney, Australia. People from all over the UK and abroad donated to the cause, the first of a number of self-funded art installations using recycled materials planned for Long Knoll Field. This stunning exercise in collaboration is the gift that gives back to the community: for the next two months, anyone who visits the space can experience what it's like to walk on water.

D.I.Y. Damien Hirst

Thanks to iArtist London, for under a hundred bones you can recreate Damien Hirst's crystallized skull in the comfort of your own home. The company's boxed sets allow aspiring artists to make their own copies of works by Hirst, Banksy and more. Arts and crafts just got a whole lot cooler.
This post is courtesy of my dear Dana who wrote about the kits for Refinery29 today!

Museum on the moon

Did NASA plant a top-secret, teeny-tiny art museum on the moon 40 years ago? The PBS series History Detectives investigates the case in its season eight premiere episode, airing June 21. A miniature ceramic chip embedded with sketches by artists such as Andy Warhol, Claes Oldenburg and Robert Rauschenberg (pictured) may have been stowed away on the Apollo 12 vehicle launched in November of 1969. The artist who dreamed up the project, Forrest "Frosty" Myers, had a dream "to get six great artists together and make a tiny little museum that would be on the moon." Far out!

And speaking of art museums ... the 32nd Annual Museum Mile Festival is tonight from 6-9pm. This mile-long, traffic-free block party grants free entrance to nine of America's finest museums, all along Fifth Ave.

Banksy in the Big Apple

Did anyone really think Banksy would embark on a cross-country promotional tour without hitting up the street art capital of the continent? So far, pieces have been spotted in TriBeCa and Dumbo. If there's anyone who hasn't seen his new flick, Exit Through the Gift Shop, well, what are you waiting for?
Photos courtesy of ANIMAL

Houston gets Fairey-fied

Image courtesy of Wooster Collective

The wall space on the corner of Bowery and Houston which famously sported a Keith Haring mural (and was more recently replaced by the work of Brazilian artist-twins Os Gemeos) is undergoing yet another transformation. Shepard Fairey (he of the OBEY line and the now-infamous Obama HOPE poster) has created a promotional piece for his upcoming show at Deitch Projects called May Day. This will be the gallery's last show before closing, so Jeffery Deitch can take over L.A.'s Museum of Contemporary Art. The mural also happens to be directly across the street from the Landmark Sunshine Cinema, currently screening Banksy's "Exit Through the Gift Shop," which features Fairey. You've got six months to ogle this piece, just blocks away from the spot where Fairey once tagged walls - back when street art was, you know, illegal.

Might as well jump

Nothing feels quite as good as throwing caution to the wind and simply taking a leap of faith, whether it be off a cliff or into a pool. After shooting commissioned portraits for such publications as Life and the Saturday Evening Post, famous 20th-century portrait photographer Philippe Halsman would tell his sitters to spring into midair as he snapped a photo for his personal portfolio. These jubilant shots, then published as Philippe Halsman's Jump Book in 1959, featured artists, celebrities, and politicians up in the air. Vintage photos from his Jumpology series are currently on view in the exhibition Philippe Halsman: Jump at the Laurence Miller Gallery until May 28.

Real-live still life

Artist Alexa Meade blurs the lines between painting and photography, perception and reality, subject and object. Her "living still lifes" utilize human models painted with acrylic and arranged in scenes that appear two-dimensional when photographed. Without being told, I would never have guessed this was a photo!