German for “link dump”: Thanks to Seattle museology grad student Lynn Bethke for the smart, new way of looking at the link-dumps known as Centerpoints: Wunderkammer (top left). I suppose these quick hits are a kind of “cabinet of curiosities” (as Julian Dibbell calls it), especially considering Bethke’s analogy: “[I]t’s like the funny shaped cornflakes that folks might collect. It’s cool, and somehow worth keeping, but maybe not worth devoting a whole lot of time to.” For illustration purposes (and definitely not worth a standalone post), here’s a giant, John Kerry-shaped cornflake.

Stats of the Union: OK, this isn’t art-related at all, but… The New York Times has an amazing web application that lets you search and compare the number of times George W. Bush used terms like “terrorism” or “economy” in all his SOTU addresses. Beats the tally sheet I was keeping last night…

The real shock at the Chapman Bros. show: Guardian art critic Mark Ravenhill likens the work of Jake and Dinos Chapman (top center, now on view at Tate Liverpool) to Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal,” a satirical solution to Ireland’s poverty that involved dining on babies. “The wit is as savage, the anger at injustice and cruelty as strong,” he writes. But what he’s surprised by isn’t the violence of the work, but at the lack of discretion by parents visiting the show:

“Look at what the soldiers are doing,” said one parent, holding a toddler up to see. The toddler giggled with gleeful curiosity. I looked around. What the soldiers are doing, countless hundreds of them, is massacring naked civilians and tipping their bodies into mass graves.

“Ooh look, there’s more over there,” cooed the parent, and the toddler skipped excitedly over to another massacre.

Street critique: NYC street artists are not amused that works by Swoon (detail, top right), Os Gemeos, Shepard Fairey and others are being destroyed by a paint-bucket-wielding critic dubbed “The Splasher.” Dousing unsanctioned wall murals with paint, he or she then posts a manifesto (allegedly adhered using glass-shard-laden wheat paste) calling such artists “advance scouts for capital” and their work “fetishized action[s] of banality.” Sounds like art-school posturing to me. Gothamist has more.

Weird and/or wonderful: Pac-Mondrian. The Museum of Scientifically Accurate Fabric Brain Art. Turner Prize-winner Jeremy Deller wants you to design a bat house.

Happy hundredth: With the show Picasso and American Art heading out on the road soon (and coming here this summer), the Guardian‘s Jonathan Jones muses on the 100th anniversary of Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a painting that represents “the rift, the break that divides past and future“–and, arguably, launched modern art. He concludes: “100 years on, Picasso’s is still so new, so troubling, it would be an insult to call it a masterpiece.”

On influences: Jasper Johns, who has a prominent place in the Picasso show, on the influence of other artists on his work: “Earlier, hoping to make paintings that I could feel were my own, I deliberately tried to avoid anything that I sensed was a reference or resemblance to the work of others. This didn’t mean that I didn’t think of others and their work. Later, as motifs, I suppose, some of this thought showed up in what I was doing.”

Burtynsky videos: In honor of Manufactured Landscapes, the documentary on Edward Burtynsky, heading for Sundance (trailer here), here’s a series of short YouTube interviews with the photographer. And, via Zeke, here’s video of Burtynsky’s talk at last year’s TED conference.

This program brought to you by… What will the breakup of the Altria (aka Phillip Morris) Group mean for the Whitney? Was it a racially charged bit of fiction or a scathing collage that included the logo of the school’s corporate owner that prompted the Art Institute of California to confiscate copies of the literary magazine Mute/Off and fire its advisor?

Geek Love: The much-blogged story of the Super Mario wedding cake, a custom design for the marriage of New Media’s Brent, keeps going and going. This weekend, the St. Paul Pioneer Press talked with the bride and groom about how the self-described “Web geeks” met and how the cake came to be.

Anime-tion: The Simpsons and Futurama characters, as if drawn by an anime artist.

Graffvertising: Does the rise of graffiti art, in the ad mecca of New York, have anything to do with a supersaturation of advertising? In his Design master’s thesis at St. Martin’s in London, Alex Kataras concludes that “graffiti art is the logical progression of art. A combination of art, popular culture and the guiding principle of advertising which is omnipresent.” While calling the thesis “a bit of a stretch,” folks over at Fallon ponder other parallels, those of advertising and graffiti, brands and the graf writer’s tag. (Thanks, Justin.)

Promising podcasts: Haven’t listened yet, but MIT’s Center for Advanced Visual Studies has a compelling lineup of audioblog features with artists, including Harrell Fletcher, Vito Acconci, and Simon Starling.

“Bullet versus Ballet”: Yesterday, the Minnesota State Senate introduced a constitutional amendment that would hike the state sales tax by 3/8 percent, with proceeds getting divvied up by “water, wildlife preservation, arts and the humanities.” But outdoor and environmental groups are trying to exclude the arts from the measure, fearing it’ll hurt the amendment’s chance when it eventually shows up on voters’ ballots.

Time launches an art blog. Sort of. Culturegrrl reports that Time magazine is planning a blog for art/architecture critic Richard Lacayo. Quite the scoop, considering that, as of this writing, the blog is nothing more than a few test posts and a linkroll (it doesn’t include the Walker, or any institutional blogs, but features Alec Soth and several Artsjournal blogs).

Guards Gone Wild: Nearby Stevens Squre Center for the Arts opens a show of art by guards at the Walker, Minneapolis Institute of Arts, and Weisman Art. Tomorrow night’s opening features music by “guard musicians” Hot Rod Hearse and, formerly of the Walker staff, Ben Glaros.

Top Tech Towns and other lists: Minneapolis’ Marcy-Holmes is one of America’s Best Eco-Neighborhoods, according to Natural Home magazine. But the Twin Cities didn’t place on Wired‘s top-10 tech towns list. While Boston led the list, it’s Washington DC (#10) that earned top distinction in one curious category: compared to the other top cities, it can boast more personal ads per capita on the dating site Geek 2 Geek.