• Video: After Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers took a drive with Ed Ruscha, the LA art festival Pacific Standard Time has a new promo video. This one’s better and weirder: An art-averse Jason Schwartzman has a visitation from a spectral John Baldessari, who appears on nighttime walls around Los Angeles to discuss gorgonzola, Jackson Pollock, cubism, Mondriaan and topics beyond…

• With Viktor the robotic drawing machine coming to the Walker Oct. 20, here’s a few other robots of note: iCub, the humanoid robot nominated to by British scientists to carry the Olympic torch next year, and a surgical robot so precise it can peel a grape.

• Art by Romare Bearden (1911-1988) is coming to U.S. postage stamps.

• Looking at the Creative Time exhibition, Living As Form, the New York Times highlights a work by Pedro Reyes, whose puppet-based show Baby Marx is on view at the Walker through Nov. 27. For his installation Palas por Pistolas, “1,527 guns were collected in a Mexican town racked by drug-related violence. The weapons were melted down and turned into shovels that were then used to plant trees on public-school grounds. Some of the spades are on display at the start of the exhibition, along with a young tree, which will be planted in a community garden after the show ends.”

• LEGO architecture du jour: Via Wilco, who featured the building on the cover of their 2002 album Yankee Hotel Foxtrot, a plastic-block rendering of Chicago’s Marina City, by architect Bertrand Goldbert. It’s part of the National Building Museum’s LEGO® Architecture: Towering Ambition, on view til next September.

• Lu Qing is urging Chinese legislators to reject a proposed measure that’d legalize the kind of detention her husband, dissident artist Ai Weiwei, endured. Changes to the Criminal Procedure Code would OK imprisonment of citizens in secret locations without contact with family. “If the above measures are passed, it will be a regression for China’s legal system, the deterioration of human rights, and will be a hindrance to the progress of our civilization,” Lu wrote to a committee in the National People’s Congress.  “(When) a citizen is taken away by a public security arm, a notice to the family members is the most basic right.”

• Sculptor Oliviero Rainaldi is getting a second shot at a sculpture of Pope John Paul II. Some critics said the work, a 16-foot bronze piece installed outside Rome’s main train station, looked more like Mussolini than the late pontiff.

• The day in gore: While photos of the late Michael Jackson on a gurney came out in the trial of his physician, the White House is urging a court to reject a Freedom of Information Act request that’d make public 52 “gruesome” CIA photos of Osama bin Laden after he was killed in the May 1 U.S. raid. Judicial Watch filed suit in May to get the images released.

• Not unrelated to the aforementioned is Rick Poynor’s essay, “Should We Look at Corrosive Images?” Posted today but coming from the 2008 edition of Colors Notebook, the essay ponders the rhetorical, moral and psychological issues related to viewing ultra-violent images of war, concluding, in part, “It is doubtful, though, that anything positive can come from consuming a continuous flow of obscenely violent war pictures. From both a psychoanalytical and a political perspective, the conclusion is the same: we need to regulate our exposure to violent images.” For me, the essay conjures not images of bin Laden but of Thomas Hirschhorn’s overwhelming, immersive installation, Abstract Resistance (last on view at the Walker at last year’s group exhibition of the same name). The piece, as Jerry Saltz put it, is made up of “hundreds of astonishingly gory color images, gleaned from the Internet and specialty magazines, of mainly Arabs in Iraq and Afghanistan who have been blown to bits, bodies utterly destroyed — ‘bodies,’ as Hirschhorn has hauntingly put it, ‘in abstraction.’”

• Walker director Olga Viso took to the airwaves of Minnesota Public Radio’s Art Hounds today to recommend the Weisman Art Museum’s new expansion, which adds 8,000 square feet of gallery space. Frank Gehry’s first museum, the Weisman is an “an architectural landmark that we’re really, really lucky to have,” says Viso. It reopens Oct. 2.

• As Fair Labor in the Arts launches a campaign and petition on behalf of locked-out union workers at Sotheby’s, Unbeige posits that the auction house might prefer that your attention be diverted to Your Art World, a documentary series on Sotheby’s work. The first installment, launched this week, features artists Jeff Koons, Ronald Ventura, Cai Guo-Qiang and Amy Granat.

• Video: Your moment of non-word vocalizations in pop music.

• Of the Museum of Contemporary African Diasporan Arts’ new show, Saying No: Reconciling Spirituality and Resistance in Indigenous Australian Art, Hrag Vartanian asks, “Is Australian Aboriginal Art Part of the African Diaspora?” The reply from MoCADA: They’re not claiming, as some do, that Aboriginal Australians come from Africa, but they are linking the spiritual and civil rights issues of that group and African Americans. MoCADA’s Kalia Brooks:

There has existed a Black Panther Party in Australia as well as a Black Power Movement. It is the recognition of blackness and the struggle over the rights to representation that fuel our interests in the exhibition. Both of these themes are issues that are embedded in the concept of an African diaspora.

• Tyler Green wonders why Woman IV isn’t in MoMA’s big de Kooning retrospective, which shows five other paintings of women from the ’5os (here’s our piece, Woman, a pastel and graphite work on paper from 1952). Owned by the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, the 1952–53 painting is too fragile to handle the move. Says museum conservator Elisabeth Batchelor: “De Kooning used charcoal to draw and scratch into the paint on our painting, so there are little chunks of charcoal lodged into and stuck into the paint surface. They could fall off. … The second problem is where he painted on the jute. The fiber is like a kind of burlap — it’s not linen or cotton and it’s a very cheap material. It becomes very brittle with age. Where the canvas wraps around the stretcher, one can see small slits that have started to appear. The slits could get bigger with vibration. Furthermore, this [Woman] hasn’t been lined, which, on one hand, makes it very prisitine and original. But on the other hand, yes, it’s much more vulnerable to vibration.”

• The Centre Pompidou’s new Patrick Bouchain–designed mobile museum is hitting the road, bringing its first exhibition, Color, around France, starting in Chaumont next month. The show will include an Olafur Eliasson installation, plus works by Leger, Braque, Matisse, Picasso and Calder. The center’s director Alain Seban discussed the idea with ArtInfo last year.

• MoMA, like LACMA and MFA Boston, acquires Christian Marclay’s The Clock, a 24-hour moving-image work made up clips from TV and film that reference time or timepieces.

• The first reviews of Gary Hustwit’s new film Urbanized — which screens at the Walker next Tuesday, followed by a Q&A with the director — are in. The LA Times‘ Christopher Hawthorne calls it a “sharp, good-looking documentary” that’s “both a love letter to urban life and a cautionary tale about what happens when more newcomers crowd into a city, or the slums on its outskirts, than the place can begin to comfortably absorb.” He also notes a “blind spot” in the film: Sprawling Los Angeles doesn’t get a mention. “But it’s not the omission itself that’s worth pointing out; it’s that Hustwit seems not to have made even theoretical room in his otherwise wide-ranging approach to cities and architectural history for megalopolis like ours, with its decentralized, medium-density and freeway-linked character.” Here’s the trailer.

• For its exhibition FLOW: Can You See the River — “a city-wide public art project that reveals how the ordinary activities of citizens affect the health and future of the White River water system” — the Indianapolis Museum of Art has developed a smartphone app to illustrate the point that “all property is riverfront property.” That is, the app tracks the route of raindrops after they hit the ground and make their way to the local river.

• Video: Dr. Cornell West tells activists from at the ongoing Occupy Wall Street protests their presence has got him “spiritually breakdancing.” A look at the sign he carried.

• Occupy Wall Street members also infiltrated an auction at Sotheby’s last week as a statement of solidarity with members of the art handlers union who have been locked out since Aug. 1.

• From MCAD students: Rick Poynor animated gifs.

• Artnet.com interviews Creative Time curator Nato Thompson on “participatory art,” activism and the new exhibition, Living as Form: Socially Engaged Art from 1991-2011. A taste:

I like to use the phrase “socially engaged art,” not to start a new genre but just to refer to people who have some kind of political interest and like to use culture in that. I am not just interested in the visual arts but rather in all facets of culture. That includes realms like architecture and theater, but also things like CAS — community source agriculture — or community gardens. The idea that artists are the only ones that make cultural production is increasingly not the case. These days, almost every kid takes pictures on their iPhone, or has a Flickr account. The idea that only specialized people are photographers is insane. People are culture makers as a way of being in the world, and I think the artistic community is much bigger than people think.

• This Sunday is the Trespass Parade, a celebration of “art, music, and community activism” in Los Agnelese. It’s the culmination of the Trespass project by artist Rirkrit Tiravanija, musician Arto Lindsay and West of Rome Public Art. In a video announcement Tiravanija says shirts  by LA-based artists, including John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger, that “reflect the unlimited possibility of free speech” will be for sale.

• MoMA’s de Kooning retrospective is “the most piercing, inexhaustible and relentlessly intense full-on career survey I have ever seen in this country,” writes Jerry Saltz. “It could only be better by being bigger”

• Art:21 looks at what artist and experimental geographer Trevor Paglen — who was in the just-closed Walker show Exposed and will be featured in our forthcoming graphic design show — is reading.

• The Met’s new website, launched Sunday, emphasizes “scholarship and accessibility,” according to director Thomas P. Campbell. The first site redesign in over a decade, it has an interactive museum map and a beefed-up collections section. The Times: “About 340,000 comprehensive entries for objects are included on the revamped site, 200,000 of which have been created over the last nine months.”

• As the Walker preps its own new website, which will be more like a news site than a traditional museum web page, Barcelona’s Latitudes posts every edition of the newspaper it produced in the galleries of the New Museum’s The Last Newspaper last winter. Made up of former Walker curatorial fellow Max Andrews and Mariana Canépa Luna, Latitudes invited former Walker staffers to be involved: designer Chad Kloepfer designed the papers and former curators Doryun Chong and Yasmil Raymond and former chief curator Richard Flood were among contributors.

• The Barnes Foundation’s controversial move to Philadelphia may have gone against the wishes of its namesake, but the new logo for the museum comes straight from the late Alfred C. Barnes. From Pentagram, which designed the mark:

The identity’s form was suggested by a sketch by Barnes of one of his signature arrangements, a symmetrical row of paintings. Miller recognized the layout as “the DNA of Dr. Barnes’ vision,” a motif that captures the museum’s unique environment and Barnes’ singular view of art. The logo consists of a row of rectangles that recall the centered, axial hanging at the Barnes, each form containing a letter of the museum’s name. The letters play with positive and negative space, referencing the Barnes’ intention to read across works and make connections.

• At Index on Censorship today, sculptor Anish Kapoor discusses his vocal support of artistic expression in China: He pulled out of a show in Beijing in protest of the detention of Ai Weiwei earlier this year, and dedicated his sculpture Leviathan to the artist/architect. In a Q&A he says, “The art world is extremely fragmented. It is a place that’s also infiltrated by money and other instruments of influence. And it never finds itself in a place where it can shout. I think we need to learn how to do that and find a way to have singular voices.”

• Danish collective Superflex looks at seats of power in a new series that replicates key restrooms. In The Netherlands, it’s a replica of the toilets used by members of the UN Security Council in UN headquarters in New York, “one of the most secure buildings in the world.” And in a Greek restaurant on the Lower East Side, the public restrooms are now identical to those used by execs at J.P. Morgan Chase’s HQ. (Superflex’s video Flooded McDonald’s in on view in the Walker’s John Waters–curated exhibition Absentee Landlord.)

• War reporter Janine di Giovanni, who spoke at the Walker in 2007 (video here), has a new book out, Ghosts by Daylight: Love,War, and Redemption. The Guardian has an excerpt; here’s my interview with di Giovanni from her last visit to Minneapolis. She has a book signing tonight in New York.

• British design thinker Rick Poynor — now writing at Design Observer — is speaking at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design on Oct. 5.

• At the Minneapolis Beer Fest this weekend, we spotted a Spoonbridge and Cherry tattoo. It’s not the first: here’s one we blogged on a few years back.

• While we’re at it, some other contemporary art tattoos: Andy Warhol, Kiki Smith, Diane Arbus, David Shrigley, Charles and Ray Eames, Barry McGee, Shepard Fairey, Keith Haring, and, of course, Banksy.

• The Creative Time Summit, “Living as Form,” is going on now. Watch it live or follow the tweets (#ctsummit).

• Triple Canopy on the late David Wojnarowicz’s journals.

• Pedro Reyes — whose entertainingly pedagogical puppet-based exhibition Baby Marx is on view at the Walker through Nov. 27 — tweets a link to a letter to the Guardian by British writers, professors and comedians calling on educators to teach philosophy in schools.

• A 340-ton granite boulder will soon depart a California quarry for LACMA, where it’ll become the centerpiece of Michael Heizer’s Levitated Mass, “a 456-foot-long slot carved into the earth, over which is placed a 340-ton monolithic granite boulder.” The 85-mile journey — which will move at a rate of around seven miles a day and occur only at night — will take 10 days and is expected to begin Oct. 3.

• Northern Lights posts video documentation of a Christopher Baker piece that was part of this spring’s nuit blanche festival, Northern Spark, here this June: A real-time video projection, it visualized the amount of trash that accumulates in Minneapolis each day.

• For his installation for New York’s High Line, David Byrne presents a classroom globe expanded nearly to its breaking point, wedged between trusses supporting the former elevated train line. Dubbed Tight Spot, the piece — installed at the site of the next new Pace Gallery space –is on view through Oct. 1.

• National Geographic offers a fascinating look at teenage brains. (Thanks, Veda.)

• Musician Adam Ben Ezra performs the opening and closing sequences of the Showtime show “Dexter,” filmed to mimic the blood-curdling closeup camera work of the original. Created by Minneapolis College of Art and Design graduate Eric Anderson, the title sequence is part of the upcoming Walker exhibition, Graphic Design: Now in Production, which opens Oct. 21, and its forthcoming catalog.  Here’s Anderson discussing the titling with Art of the Title.

• Twenty-four historic sites — including the Minneapolis art venue the Soap Factory — are vying for your votes in a Partners in Preservation contest that’ll give $1 million in preservation grants to the winning site. You can vote once per day on Facebook, now through Oct. 12.

• William Poundstone on the Weisman Art Museum‘s namesake and “the best [art collection] in L.A. that practically no one’s ever seen.”

• Lars von Trier has retracted his apology for controversial statements made about Adolph Hitler at the Cannes film festival earlier this year.

• The Greg.org test kitchen tried out John Cage’s cookie recipe and found them to be “very good, as good as anything made primarily of almonds, cinnamon, maple syrup, and homemade raspberry jam could be, anyway.”

• Ten terra cotta warriors that once stood guard at the tomb of China’s first emperor are coming to the Minneapolis Institute of Arts next fall as part of a 120-object exhibition of artifacts from Qin Shi Huang’s burial site.

• The first dung paintings made by Nigerian-English artist Chris Ofili have been discovered in the vault in a gallery in Bulawayo, Zimbabwe.

• Two defenses of the Oxford comma.

• They’re not in the Walker’s upcoming show Graphic Design: Now in Production — which includes FUEL Design & Publishing’s book Russian Criminal Tattoo — but a photo series by photographer Sergey Maximishin hits on a related theme: photos of items removed from the stomachs of Russian inmates, including improvised prison weaponry and sets of dominoes.

• The Minneapolis Institute of Arts is returning an illegally excavated Greek vase to Italy. The “volute krater,” dating to the 5th Century BC, has been part of the MIA collection since 1983. It “matched a photo Italian police had seized in a crucial 1995 raid on the Swiss warehouse of Giacomo Medici, an antiquities dealer who subsequently was sentenced to eight years in prison for conspiring to sell looted artworks,” according to the LA Times.

• Trailer: Corinna Belz’s Gerhard Richter Painting.

• Iraninan filmmaker Mojtaba Mirtahmasb never made it to last week’s Toronto film festival — he was apprehended by authorities at the airport — but his new film, This is Not a Film, will be able to find larger audiences: Palisades Tartan has picked up U.S. and U.K. distribution for the film, which is a documentary about director Jafar Panahi. Panahi was handed a six-year sentence and remains under house arrest for “colluding with the intention to commit crimes against the country’s national security and propaganda against the Islamic Republic.” That is, he planned a fictional film about the contested reelection of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in 2009. Panahi is banned from filmmaking for 20 years, so This Is Not a Film captures his daily life under house arrest using an iPhone. It was smuggled out of the country in a USB drive stuck in a cake.

• A million dollars in small donations to working artists has come in during the first nine month of USA Projects, the online “microphilanthropy” initiative of United States Artists.

• MoMA’s Willem de Kooning retrospective not only places the artist in the pantheon of American art stars, it “turns his career into a kind of Rose Bowl float of creative exuberance and invention.”

• Art world: “Relational aesthetics, I can’t quit you.” (Via MAN.)

• David Byrne, just back from jurying the Venice Film Festival, blogs on the experience, sharing his thoughts about the winners as well as some as-yet-unattributed quotes from other jurors. A taste:  “The bum stroking represented a kind of contact with nature,” and “The end of the world happens every time somebody dies.”

• Thirty-four cultural projects from St. Paul to Harlem will get funding through a new NEA-spearheaded initiative to be announced today: ArtPlace, the New York Times reports, will use foundation and corporate funds to help “integrate artists and arts groups into local efforts in transportation, housing, community development and job creation as an important tool of economic recovery.”

• The Minneapolis College of Art and Design is 125 years old this year, and to commemorate the occasion, it commissioned five posters by student designers. Geotypografika shows two, by designers Anton Pearson and Brian Mueller.

• Modern Art Notes on the “obvious” and ” jaw-droppingly clever” move by museums like the Walters and LACMA to make high-res images of art in their collections available  to all for use however they please, copyright-free.

• Rick Poynor reflects on the death of Richard Hamilton, dubbed “my great decipherer” by Marcel Duchamp.

• Mashable looks at how three museums — the Smithsonian, the Museum of Jewish Heritage and Sydney’s Powerhouse Museum — are using mobile device apps to change the museum experience. Mentioned: the app developed for the Walker co-curated exhibition Yves Klein: With the Void, Full Powers, which was presented at the Smithsonian’s Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden in 2010.

• Congrats to the winners of the Graham Foundation’s 2011 organizational grants. Among the 47 grantees, who’ll receive a combined total of $560,000 for projects on issues of architecture and spatial practices, are the Art Institute of Chicago, The Center for Land Use Interpretation, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, Serpentine Gallery and the Watts House Project, a neighborhood development project spearheaded by artist Edgar Arceneaux in the Los Angeles neighorhood surrounding Simon Rodia’s Watts Towers.

• Artist Mike Leavitt, whose series of artist action figures already included the likes of Shepard Fairey and Barry McGee, has just added a few timely additions to his “Art Army”: Chinese artist Ai Weiwei morphed with his sculpture of a Coke-logo-covered Han Dynasty vase; the late Cy Twombly (“with ‘drawn’ body and removable paintbrush and Dada fan”); and the late Lucian Freud, with “separate falcon and fox sidekicks.” (Via Animal NYC.)