Edward Burtynsky, Nickel Tailings No. 36, Sudbury, Ontario 1996

Things fall apart: mnartists.org has a great new feature called 10 Questions in which critics, this time including Patricia Briggs, Alex Starace, and Tyler Green, answer questions generated by forum visitors. Green, of Modern Art Notes, on the biggest non-art-world factor influencing artists: “Degeneration, particularly of societies, cultures, and political systems…We see it in the work of Jason Middlebrook’s works-on-paper of societies ‘advancing’ to a point of environmental collapse, or in Ed Burtynsky’s photos [above] of what we are doing to the planet. Hans Haacke and Raymond Pettibon looked at the American political system in their recent solo shows at Paula Cooper and Regen Projects respectively. Artists such as Enrique Metinides go back into their old work to present violent images, installing them recently to remind us how fascinated Americans are with destruction.”

TEDtalks: Kind of a big brother to Minneapolis’ PUSH conference, TED features big-name thinkers, including Al Gore, New York Times writer David Pogue, MacArthur fellow and Sustainable South Bronx founder Majora Carter, and others. Now their talks at TED 2006 are being made available as free podcasts. (Burtynsky, by the way, was the winner of the 2005 TEDPrize; click on his Worldchanging link to see what he did with the $100k award.)

Artist/Curators: Brian Sholis traces a recent trend: artist-curated summer group exhibitions–A four-dimensional being writes poetry on a field with sculptures, curated by Charles Ray, at Matthew Marks; Justine Kurland and Dan Torop’s A Rabbit as King of the Ghosts at Mitchell-Innes & Nash; Arturo Herrera’s I’m Yours Now at Sikkema Jenkins; Banks Violette‘s War on .45 / My Mirrors Are Painted Black (For You) at Bortolami Dayan; and others.

Free Adam Curtis! Stay Free! tips us off that Adam Curtis’ BBC documentaries The Power of Nightmares (mentioned here) and The Century of the Self are available for free download at the Internet Archive. Because of the archival and found footage of his work, Curtis says getting rights to produce a DVD would be “prohibitively costly and a nightmare – no pun intended.”

Canine choreography: New Art finds some early films of William Wegman, from synchronized Weimaraners to comedic gags about crooked fingers and a dog spelling bee.

Pegagogy: In Jaffa, Israel, designer Yaacov Kaufman has curated a show featuring some 300 examples of clothespins, tracing the humble history of this ubiquitous tool. On display are clothespegs that illustrate design variations (including those that attempt “to ‘uplift’ the product and it’s design”), functional innovations, artful interpretations, and cultural differences (“such as the Chinese bamboo peg, bearing the family name on it, to distinguish it in a communal space, or the huge Japanese carpet peg”).

Hearing colors: Opening Thursday, the Tate Modern’s exhibition Kandinsky: The Path to Abstraction 1908–1922 tracks the early part of Kandinsky’s career, from early landscapes of the Bavarian countryside to his co-founding of Der Blaue Reiter (The Blue Rider) group, a period during which he “began to conceive of painting as an alternative pathway to spiritual reality.” The Telegraph reports that Kandinsky likely had synesthesia, a blurring of two or more senses, something he reportedly discovered during a Wagnerian opera in Moscow: “I saw all my colours in spirit, before my eyes. Wild, almost crazy lines were sketched in front of me.”

Architects’ Choice: Switzerland’s Jacques Herzog and Pierre de Meuron are the first architects to curate MoMA’s “Artists’ Choice” series, in which they can select and arrange works from the museum’s holdings. The objects they chose, from Eva Zeisel ceramcs to Tupperware, are hidden in walls and only viewable through slots, and their film suggestions (including Fargo) are projected on the ceiling. New York’s Alexandra Lange interviews the pair on their curious choices.

Gehry’s “Trojan Horse”: From its “outlandish disproportion to the neighborhoods around it” to the “abhorrent track record” of its financier, Bruce Ratner, the 16-tower Atlantic Yards development planned for Brooklyn is all wrong for his hometown, writes novelist and Brooklynite Jonathan Lethem in an open letter to its designer, Frank Gehry. Describing the “commercially ambitious, but aesthetically–and socially–disastrous” development (the biggest project by a single developer in New York City history), Lethem urges the famed architect to just “walk away” from the deal.

Artlinks: A lengthy list of art blogs, compiled by Re-title. And here’s ArtbloggingLA’s list of Los Angeles museums with MySpace accounts (here’s ours).

Loot and pillaging: As a Klimt painting looted by the Nazis fetches a record-breaking $135 million at auction, the Getty reveals that 350 artifacts–including 35 pieces from its 104-piece catalogue of “masterpieces”–may have been illegally excavated and exported from Italy.

Ruscha mural non-update: The U.S. Department of Labor, which owns the Job Corps building where artist Kent Twitchell’s recently destroyed Ed Ruscha mural, released a not-very-informative statement on what happened to the artwork. “The L.A. Job Corps Center’s first concern is the safety of Job Corps students and staff. For that reason, they made the decision to repair a potential safety hazard posed by the condition of the building faade. We are in the process of assessing how the repair was handled in light of these concerns.”

Minneapolis’ design boom: Citing our new cultural building projects–Jean Nouvel’s Guthrie Theater, Cesar Pelli’s Central Library, Herzog & de Meuron’s Walker, Michael Graves MIA expansion–Newsweek dubs Minneapolis “a design boomtown.”

Haikus for a newly neutered dog: A collaborative writing project by readers of Ze Frank’s site. {Read about Ze’s presentation at PUSH last week, about his Wikicomedy in the Sunday Times; and perspectives on PUSH by Sam Perry, a Digital Vision Fellow at Stanford.}