On Monday, April 7, the Varnish Fine Art gallery and bar in San Francisco will host an exhibit called Infected Art. The works represent what worms, virus and spam attacks such as Storm, MyDoom and Netsky look like when put through a "computational art" algorithm. Above, see "MyDoom," named for the W32.MyDoom@mm virus, which in 2004 became the fastest-spreading e-mail worm ever. We're not sure what a "computational art" algorithm is, but the images, look sufficiently icky to pass for malicious things like worms and virus. Five more are embedded below.

Carla Bruni, who recently married noted ladies' man Nikolas Sarkozy and became the First Lady of France, used to be a model. A naked model. A nude—and relatively tasteful—portrait of Bruni by the photographer Michel Comte is up for sale at Christie's in April. The press duly reported on the upcoming sale, but there's been an admirable sense of maturity about it across the board. By contrast, imagine the prospect of a nude Hillary Clinton portrait surfacing. Or not. The Bruni photo is expected to sell for about $4,000, but you can see it for free, after the jump. NSFW, although it is art.

If you're one of those ratty Brooklyn kids but are not blessed with the obligatory trust fund and you really, really want any tiny piece of fame, you're in luck. Casting agents for HD Gallery-which is a cable channel you might have-are looking for two artsy types willing to live by their wits and creative talents alone. "Art Race" will feature "Two Artist/Art Racers" who "must cross the US in 40 days, surviving only on Art. Armed with art materials, cameras and a $1 dollar budget, the Artist/Art Racers must 'trade' Art for food, shelter and other art-works."

Angel Hess, the partially homeless Williamsburg dude/ artist who lives in an old purple truck charitably called "Purple 53," otherwise known as "that raggedy purple truck in the polluted lot across from the Turkey's Nest," wants to come visit your family! "Does anyone have friends or family in Alabama or Louisiana? I'm looking for some people to visit in Alabama or Louisiana," he writes today on Williamsboard.com. Williamsboard responds: "Get a job you fucking hippie," and then it gets worse from there. Well to be fair, Angel even hit Gawker up for money once! So maybe not the most gracious houseguest for your aunt in Birmingham. Decide for yourself; here's an inside and out look at his stylistic home on wheels:

When Nick wrote about New York's cheeky Spitzer cover earlier today, I thought it looked like a ripoff of the work of legendary conceptual artist and designer Barbara Kruger. Turns out, per New York's Jesse Oxfeld, the cover is by Barbara Kruger. So between this and the high-minded smut of February's "Lindsay Lohan naked but photographed by Bert Stern," we have to wonder who else New York can employ to lend a classy sheen to baser-minded content. Maybe they can get Claes Oldenburg to make their next "sex and love" issue 50 feet long! [NYM]

Here are some ways to know you've arrived: Winning an award, having your own Wikipedia page and getting your photo taken by Annie Leibovitz. You remember Annie, the one who takes all those photos for Vanity Fair and HBO. But as beautiful as her staged photos look on the cover of a magazine or on the side of a bus, her second major gallery show has more or less proved that their appeal is just commercial.

The New Museum has been officially welcomed to the Bowery: it's been graffiti'd (near the back of the buildling, not the front.) Let's all judge its wack artistic merit.

It would probably be better if Photoshop had never been invented. Not only does it distort our mental image of what the human body looks like, but, when wielded incorrectly, it can actually destroy bodies altogether. Some parts get weirdly erased; some get warped beyond reason; and sometimes, unrelated parts of other bodies materialize in pictures like traces of a poltergeist. From a long list at the Photoshop Disasters blog, we bring you the five most grotesque works of Photoshop hackdom you will ever see—unless the monster strikes again.

Above: the February 15 cover of staid journal Science, showing the structure of the ion clouds around the NH3-HCl hydrogen bond; the February 29 cover, showing atoms trapped in a lattice of optical microtraps; and the March 7 cover, a photo of a spray-painted flower, the work of insufferable British graffitti art-prankster Banksy. A reader reports: "I got my mail today to see what is clearly a piece of Banksy art on the front of Science, and I exclaim to my roommates, 'what the fuck is Banksy doing on the cover?!' When my roommates starting asking 'What does his lab study?', I realized that I was going to have to bring this to the attention of someone else." Click to see the incongruous cover lineup in full.

Heiress and TV starlet Ally Hilfiger, you will recall, is part of an exciting new generation of multimedia artists and as such likes to "have all my creative outlets exposed." Lately, Hilfiger seems to be most interested in having her painting outlet exposed, but her work was only formally exhibited this one time as part of a weird music video type thing. All that is about to change. After the jump, details on the Tuesday event that will mark a new dawn for the art world, and a sampling of the paintings involved. Hint: the number 8 plays a big role.

"Photographer Brian Finke infiltrates various hipster-hating A-crowds (i.e. frat boys and cheerleaders) for a hilariously poetic look at social hierarchies and, in this case, alcohol tolerance. His solo exhibition is currently up at Chelsea's ClampArt." Related: New Yorkers continue to be amazed by and terrified of the rest of the nation. Also everyone at the show will surely be making the exact same original and knowing and CONTROVERSIAL remarks about repressed homosexuality, and then they will go home and jerk off. [NYM]

"It was about how we all have different consciences and voices in our head that tell us what to do and how to react. They're not good or bad, they're just voices that we hear, telling us how to behave. That's what the other figures are in the painting." [Page Six]

Drinking and slutting your way through your twenties on the downtown artclub scene? Party on! But listen, if you get famous, your NYT obituary will most definitely remember you as a wild one. Like Dorothy Podber, "artist and trickster", whose obit ran today. The first sentence tags her as "wild child of the New York art scene in the 1950s and '60s who is probably best known for brandishing a pistol and putting a bullet through the forehead of Marilyn Monroe's likenesses on a stack of Andy Warhol's paintings." That's a helluva reputation, sugar!

A long-lost painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat was found on the Upper East Side, in a warehouse. It's worth $8 mil and had been smuggled out of Brazil. (However, the painting's owner is in jail). His work does have the tendency to mysteriously resurface... [New York Sun]

Before humans took pictures of cats, added funny captions, and spent their free time viewing said photos on the internet, our early ancestors enjoyed painting depictions of dogs. These early LOLDog paintings lacked captions and are much rarer than LOLCats—which is probably why the painting to the left fetched $66,000 at an auction last night. Click for more early LOLDog analysis, and their evolution into the LOLCats we know and love today.

The metaphor is made incarnate. Nick Denton has always credited himself with starting Julia Allison's career through Gawker's constant coverage of her every professional and personal move. Of course he can argue that the young media personality makes herself a target by writing forty blog posts a day, mostly with photos of herself, or photos of herself holding photos of herself. Conversely, the more Allison rises to fame, the more Denton's profile rises as a star-maker. All of which is perfectly expressed in this photomosaic, in which commenter Heather Watson combined 625 Julia-pixels to make one big portrait of Nick. Watson provides a poster-sized version for your bedroom wall.

"Art" is just another headline-filler word for "amazing." At least for children, who are the future, and geeks, who are the new trendsetter-influencer-coolhunters. Since K-12 art education is virtually dead, and no one reads books, these heavy Internet users have no preconceptions of art and they don't follow that world's big names. A new Cy Twombly or Lucien Freud painting won't get attention on Digg (Chris Ofili maybe, for the controversy), but a painted Lamborghini is one of the social news site's all-time favorite "art" posts. But it's not all bad. The Diggbrow movement isn't destroying art any more than the Dadaists or post-modernists did; it's reinventing it.

American sculptor Daniel Edwards has unveiled his latest work: a bronzed sarcophagus featuring a nude, large-breasted woman called "The Oprah Sarcophagus." Some would say they can't see the resemblance, but look how regal! Look how noble! We would not be surprised if Oprah secretly commissioned it herself. After all, she has a big photo of her Beloved scars in the lobby of her office. Plus, Stedman needs something to look at when she's off cavorting with Gayle. [Daily Mail}

As if the art world isn't cutthroat enough, a new reality show featuring Sarah Jessica Parker is planning to up the ante. The boilerplate here is "Project Runway," natch, and artists will compete against each other and create works in a variety of mediums. (Hey, remember ArtStar, which ended up airing on an obscure satellite channel?) The Magical Elves team, behind "Runway" and "Top Chef," are developing the show with Miramax. Will it be set in one of the few places that real artists can still afford to live, we wonder? Long Island City, perhaps. [Variety]

The latest dish on Tommy Hilfiger's daughter, Ally, begs the question: is the Underminer actually based on her? Check it out: she splits her time between Manhattan and Berlin, has a "multimedia installation" showing at the Chelsea Art Museum, and she paints. (Mostly she paints the number 8, because it's lucky—as Jennifer 8. Lee already knows). "I like to have all my creative outlets exposed," she tells the Daily Intelligencer.