Looks like some of the local NYC graffiti artists have begun to object to Banksy's massive billboard project. When we walked by this morning, the piece on Howard and Broadway had been hit with this big "damn rats!!!" piece. Can the fire-extinguisher tags be far behind?......

Internationally acclaimed British artists Gilbert & George are getting their first American retrospective in more than two decades with an exhibition at the Brooklyn Museum that opens tomorrow. On view are more than ninety pictures produced since 1970, including more than a dozen that will be seen only in the Brooklyn. The exhibit will be on view through January 11th and is the final stop an acclaimed international tour organized by the Tate Modern. Since......

The Haven Arts Gallery in the Bronx has adorned their walls with reimagined MTA subway maps. The exhibition, titled Men on Maps, ends on October 10th and presents "the unique aesthetic responses of over 40 male artists when presented with the Metropolitan Transportation Authority’s map of the New York Cities subway system as a base upon which to create." NYMag says that it's definitely the show for "those of us who have ever felt the......

If you happen to see a young Asian woman sitting in a display window basking in a pink neon light sign that reads: "All Your Nut Needs," don't be too alarmed. The girl is Annamarie Ho, and she's the artist behind the display, which is located on the west side of Cleveland Place, south of Kenmare Street. Boing Boing clarifies, noting that "Betelnut is a popular stimulant sold by scantily-clad young girls in streetside......

Photos by Jen Carlson/Gothamist. Artist Kylin O'Brien is painting giant monsters around town for the NYC public school kids in a collaborative effort titled The Monster Project. "Still in its early stages, the monster project is launching its first huge public creatures at the 12th Annual Art Under the Bridge Festival" this weekend. Two of the monsters in the DUMBO area are pictured above, and before you start grading--keep in mind that the creatures......

Rendering courtesy of Madison Square Park Conservancy. Starting next week artist Tadashi Kawamata will make the above rendering a reality in Madison Square Park. His "tree huts" represent his "interest in the architecture of shelter and of the insertion of private objects into public spaces as a method of renegotiating the meaning of both." But how long do you think it will take until someone tries to climb into or inhabit one? Stay tuned......

For a good six years, the mysterious Swoon has been pasting her evocative and eye-catching cut-outs on walls around town, slowly and steadily establishing herself as one of the more intriguing street artists in the game. The work eventually won her gallery showings at prominent venues like Deitch Projects, where she returns Sunday with a solo show at the gallery's Long Island City satellite. The installation is part of a bigger, collective project called......

The four waterfalls installed by artist Olafur Eliasson and the Public Art fund at various spots on the East River are supposed be taken down on October 13th, but some Brooklyn residents fear that could be too late. In response to mounting concerns that spray from the salty, semi-polluted East River is blowing onto trees and slowly killing them, Judy Stanton, head of the Brooklyn Heights Association, is calling for the falls to be stopped......

Reports are coming in that NYC street artist and Graffiti Research Lab founder, James Powderly, has been detained in Beijing for planning a pro-Tibet protest via a L.A.S.E.R. Stencil art piece. When Boing Boing reported the news at nearly 8 this morning, he had been held for around 19 hours already. They were tipped off by Students for a Free Tibet, who learned of it via a Twitter message that read "held since 3am." There's......

Swoon's Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea officially set sail last Friday, and the fleet is slowly making their way to the final destination of LIC--where the artist will have an exhibit set up at Deitch. The NY Times checked in on Swoon and the collective joining her on the floating art adventure, consisting of "artists, carpenters, musicians, filmmakers, seafarers and hangers-on." She told the paper that the boats were built with the environment in mind,......

File this one under: Fun! Artist Mina Karimi is looking to pull together "a large performance art piece that requires 6-8 hundred people recreating the parade scene from Ferris Bueller [video] at the Deitch Art Parade in Soho." She says she is "recruiting secret agents in the audience of the parade to mimic the extras in the movie as my Ferris float approaches. In order to fully reproduce the spirit of the scene I will......

There's an update on the intriguing story of William Milliken Vanderbilt Kingsland, "a threadbare eccentric and an amateur genealogist of the Upper East Side" who died in 2006, only to leave behind a world of confusion. To sum up this UES Man of Mystery, the NY Times explains upon his death "it was discovered that his birth name was Melvyn Kohn, that he resided not on Fifth Avenue but in a small apartment on East......

The Montauk Monster is still in the news (and on the Colbert Report), with the East Hampton Star now reporting that the mystery carcass is missing! More disturbing than that and the fact that the nation has been staring at a dead, bloated dog for a week, is the fact that the two locals holding the remains were planning to profit from the dead body. The duo were planning on reducing it to bones, creating......

Swoon has a new installation coming up that will take her work to the sea, or at least the Hudson River. Swimming Cities of Switchback Sea "is a flotilla of seven intricately hand crafted vessels that will navigate the stretch of the Hudson River between Troy and the New York harbor this August 15th - September 7th." The vessels are powered with alternative energy sources and will be making stops in towns along the way;......

Jen Dunlap, a painter, and Celia Rowlson-Hall, a writer-director-choreographer, decided to combine their many talents for a one-of-a-kind art show. Wanna Come to My Place? will saturate Supreme Trading with their art, performance and everyday life tomorrow night. They even traveled all the way to Coney Island to create a video invite. How did you come up with the idea to combine paintings and performance? We respect each other's work, have a fun time together,......

digg_url = 'http://digg.com/arts_culture/More_Inflatable_Creatures_Around_New_York_City'; More creatures have, literally, popped up around town! Joshua Allen Harris has been making the inflatable street art and surprising passerby with it -- most recently there was a subway Loch Ness monster on 21st Street...and the latest look more like aliens. That's one creative way to recycle your plastic bags.........

The latest art project to be plopped into a public space is Zaha Hadid's Chanel Pavilion, a 7,500-square-foot temporary, traveling art gallery that has a number of stamps on its passport already. The spaceship-esque pod will land in Rumsey Playfield in Central Park by October 20th, and be open through November 9th -- housing artwork (including a piece by Yoko Ono) inspired by the Chanel handbag, of course. The NY Times took a look at......

The political news cycle yesterday was dominated by the controversy surrounding this week’s New Yorker cover; called “The Politics of Fear,” it depicts Senator Barack Obama and his wife Michelle as America-hating radical terrorists gloating in the Oval Office. New Yorker editor David Remnick, who celebrates his tenth anniversary helming the magazine with this issue, spent the day making the interview rounds and getting some great publicity for the magazine; speaking to Wolf Blizter on......

Barack Obama’s campaign spokesman Bill Burton is calling this week’s New Yorker cover art “tasteless and offensive.” The illustration by Barry Blitt depicts the Illinois senator in the Oval Office wearing traditional Muslim garb while doing a “terrorist fist jab” with his wife Michelle, who is dressed in fatigues, with an Afro and an AK-47 slung over her shoulder. To complete the scene, there’s a portrait of Bin Laden over the fireplace, in which an......

With a recent uptick in gentrification griping in Carroll Gardens, Candy Chang’s interactive art project in the window of a vintage furniture store on Court Street was well-timed. For one week, passersby were invited to share their apartment info and rent costs on Post-it notes. After culling 151 responses, Chang tallied the info and found that:One resident has lived in a studio in Carroll Gardens for 43 years with a current rent of $146.Another......

Yesterday's overcast skies were not the optimum conditions for documenting the launch of Olafur Eliasson's NYC Waterfalls; photographs from the first day tended to deemphasize the falls amid the uniformly gray background. But that's part of what's compelling about the work; it's never the same waterfall twice, being constantly affected by the light, air and your point of view. And as we suggested yesterday, while the project may seem underwhelming when you stare straight at......

No matter what you think, these falls are going to be big in Japan. Now that we've all had a chance to see the NYC Waterfalls, at least in pictures, from the land and water, let us know what you think so far. Keep in mind that there is still the nighttime perspective to come, during which the falls with be lit up until 9 p.m. And while the NYC Waterfalls are obviously no match......

(Le) Poisson Rouge somewhat quietly opened the doors to 158 Bleecker Street a little over a week ago. The renovated space is still undergoing some final touches before their grand opening in September, but they are currently partially open and hosting shows (view the calendar here). The venue has a pretty legendary history, from the press release:"The Village Gate operated at 158 Bleecker Street from the late '50s until 1993, and played host to icons......

The Dia Art Foundation announced the hire of a director yesterday; Philippe Vergne, will be joining Dia starting September 15th. Vergne co-curated the Whitney Biennial in 2006, and will be leaving his position at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis for the job. While Dia has one area of New York covered with a sprawling space in Beacon, their Chelsea space closed in 2004. Vergne's main challenge will be to find a permanent place to......

Everyone’s a curator at the Brooklyn Museum’s Click! exhibition. Last March, the museum invited photographers to submit one photo that addressed the theme of "Changing Faces of Brooklyn." Inspired by James Surowiecki’s book The Wisdom of Crowds, organizers uploaded the 389 responses to the museum’s website for the general public to evaluate. Each photograph was displayed without artist attribution and at random for each evaluator, and artists were unable to forward links of individual submissions......

And then there were four. A tipster just sent us this shot of Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson's Brooklyn Bridge waterfall, being tested this afternoon. This completes the teaser set for all the NYC Waterfall aficionados out there. Also seen below are the Governors Island test, the Pier 35 test in Manhattan, and the other Brooklyn waterfall between Piers 4 and 5. The NYC Waterfalls – which are not being paid for with city money, but......

Mark Gibian's sculpture in Brooklyn (entitled "Crescendo") became the latest part of the Williamsburg waterfront in mid-May; "the four-ton, crescent-shaped stainless steel sculpture was hoisted over the East River and installed on new 400-foot pier that's been constructed at Northside Piers." The sculpture is functional, providing shade and including a bench; the Brooklyn Eagle reports that a shade structure was required under the zoning. While an exact date hasn't been set, the Piers (a direct......

Following her collaborative show opening at Honey Space, street artist Swoon adorned her hometown cityscape with some new pieces. Last year some of her work fell victim to the Splasher, which she responded to by redoing the pieces. Hopefully these new cutouts will stay unharmed for a while.......

Coinciding with the opening of Governor's Island, the Emergence Art Show launched on May 31st; the exhibit is housed in a couple of the abandoned mansions on the island. The summer exhibition includes:Experimental and participatory art involving more than 30 artists/collectives, with a strong emphasis on audience and artist interaction. Using the theme, "Creative Pioneers in Uncharted Territory," exhibitors will use the context, history, and recent steps towards revitalization, or "emergence," of Governors Island as......

Delayed spoiler alert: This photo reveals what the upcoming East River waterfalls will most likely look like. Although artist Olafur Eliasson’s ambitious art project doesn't officially start until June 26th, apparently they do need practice turning the spigot. One eagle-eyed Curbed reader caught them in the act late last night and snapped this photo, which depicts the waterfall at Pier 35 by the Manhattan Bridge. Now some may be inclined to look at the photo......