I've always been oddly fascinated by datacenters — the rectilinear racks of servers, the curving twists of cabling. Turns out I'm not alone. Royal Pingdom has assembled a collection of creepily organic, eerily beautiful shapes of datacenter cabling. (Photo by tim_d)

As undergrads, Silicon Valley tycoons didn't have the time to appreciate the finer things a liberal arts education had to offer. They were far too busy coding away in their dorm rooms and plotting to take over the world. Now these poor lads and lasses face a Herculean task whenever they're confronted with, say, Rodin's "The Thinker" at the Legion of Honor — they just don't know what to make of it.

Philippe de Montebello, the highest-paid museum director in the US, is leaving New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art, according to Michael Gross.

Was Portfolio's production team projecting just a smidge when they chose to illustrate a column this month about the city's declining commercial real estate market with a "foreclosure"-stamped photograph of the Time-Life, Simon & Schuster News Corp and McGraw-Hill buildings? The buildings house most of Portfolio's big competitors: Time Inc.'s Fortune and Money, as well as McGraw-Hill's BusinessWeek. While we wouldn't put a little petty retaliation past editor Joanne Lippman, a bored (or clueless) photo editor is likely behind this one. Artful art there, kids!

Punk houses have finally been classed up and commodified! Not only in a book of fancy photos by a SELL-OUT 29-year-old artist who documented life in 42 punk houses for purchase and prominent display on your fancy mahogany coffee table in your comfortable, single-family home or apartment full of professionals found on Craigslist, but also in a lengthy Times "Home & Garden" section plug of said book, which will help explain the entire concept to your grandmother. We were going to follow that with a representative, forehead-slapping line, but an entire paragraph jumped out at us as too hilarious to break up, so we'll just stick the whole thing after the jump (Ron Paul).

Dan Crowe, an art school grad turned author and editor, is providing some well-off parents with the greatest gift of all: vaguely tongue-in-cheek but suitable-for-framing critical essays analyzing their child's paintings of ponies written in a high-falutin MoMA exhibition catalog style. All for a little more than $250/pop ($380 w/ "good quality frame"). Among the celebrities who've had their tykes' work evaluated are Kate Moss, Tilda Swinton and one of the guys from Blur that's not Damon Albarn or Graham Coxon. The service is called "Kinbote's Bespoke Art Commentary Service," after Charles Kinbote—the increasingly insane academic who unreliably annotates Nabokov's Pale Fire—in a little joke drenched with so much precious fuckwittery that the whole enterprise could only have come from England.

Sometimes, the idea of cutting-edge art is worth more than the actual existence of said art. In the case of the new "luxury lofts" of 151 Wooster, the virtual proximity of a mural by Basquiat and friends might be worth a lot. The apartments are going for about $8 million (with a maintenance of $42,000 a year). The Times reported back in June: When they were tearing into the place, a mural was discovered on the eighth floor behind layers of sheetrock and plumbing. It was, if you're into this sort of thing, beautiful—a collaboration between Jean Michel Basquiat, Fab 5 Freddy, Futura 2000 and others. Basquiat was friends with a previous dweller, art-magazine editor Edit deAk, who lived there in the early 80s when it was probably little more than a coldwater flat. The mural has been renamed "The 151 Wooster Wild Style Wall" and is now the centerpiece of "Gallery 151." And last night was the grand opening!

Caroline is an NYU film student currently working on her final project. Her movie is called Phantom Vibrations and Caroline refers to it as "a freestyle mumblecore piece." It seems to be mostly about her roommate drinking beer. All shot on expensive, precious 35mm. Roving videographer Alex Goldberg went over to meet the future of independent film/food service.

(Full disclosure: I actually dropped out of NYU's Tisch School of the Performing Arts, where I was studying playwriting and screenwriting until I realized no one paid for the former and, as pictured above, no one thought they needed the latter. If I'd followed my dreams, though, I might be on strike right now. Sigh...)

"Did you get the press release? Everything sounds better with 'of art' after it, don't you think?" Filip Noterdaeme said from his bed, where he was under the covers. He wore a glued-on beard and squinted into the light at a tiny slide in his hand. "I'm smoking a Vermeer," he said, dropping the slide into his pipe. A taxidermied coyote, the museum's publicity director, sat in a pram with a microphone in front of its muzzle, and I could see myself on a closed-circuit TV on the other wall. There was a girl in the corner behind a tripod, videotaping us, as well as another guy with a camera. Are they are part of The Homeless Museum—now The Homeless Museum Of Art!—too? (They are not. They are journalism school kids from Columbia, making a project.)

Are the Miami art fairs, going on now, doing something bad to Miami? "'You've got all these new Miami collectors who used to be happy shopping at Neiman Marcus,' says Wynwood gallerist and Basel exhibitor Kevin Bruk. 'They went to Basel for the novelty of it, saw all these beautiful people down from New York going crazy for art, and now they want in.' Dealers and collectors now prowl the halls of the city's two art magnet high schools like NBA scouts." [NY]

Oh, New York Public Library, with your commission of understated and nuanced portraits of the characters our modern times. If you're going to put a big ol' bullseye that says "Tap Me" smack dab in the middle of the Rose Reading Room, at least Photoshop Cheney into a cleavage-baring scarlet saloon number.

Jeff Koons' sculpture, "Diamond (Blue)," a huge-ass, seven foot wide fake diamond made of stainless steel, sold for only $11.8 mil at Christie's Post-War And Contemporary Art Evening Sale last night. Sadly, its sale fell short of expectations—they were hoping for $12 to $20 million. (Thank God for Rothko. He always fetches a high price!) [NYT]

What was it like writing the book "Our Dumb World," Onion editor-in-chief Scott Dikkers? "What was it like? Do you know what it's like to bang your head against a concrete wall until you die of a brain hemorrhage? That's similar, I would say, to what it was like to make this atlas. There's really nothing inherently funny about land masses...." [Fishbowlny]

In an otherwise charming story about a stolen painting recovered in a trash pile 20 years later, it's kinda hard to escape the mounting evidence that the 'hero' is utterly insane. To wit: Elizabeth Gibson, age unmentioned (though looking like a well-preserved 50?), "self-professed Dumpster diver," found a 38-by-51-inch painting in a pile of trash on the Upper West Side. So she took it home (it had a "strange power") and hung it up. Three years later, she realized it was a FAMOUS STOLEN MASTERPIECE. So, naturally, she built a false wall in her "crammed" apartment and wrapped the painting in old shower curtains.

The American Society of Magazine Editors revealed the finalists of their second annual Best Cover Contest today. We find out the winners next week! Oh boy! 9/11 covers from The New Yorker and New York, the day Time decided to just run a huge picture of an elephant's ass (it's a metaphor!), and a cover from Skiing with the headline "secret powder" that is apparently actually about skiing and not coke are just some of the highlights of this year gone by. Overall, as this sampling of the nominees suggests, you had a winner on your hands if you featured the inescapable Stephen Colbert, a lady on a roof somewhere, or a disembodied sphere of lady-part on the right half. Also we're glad to see that New York's coverline question "What If 9/11 Never Happened?" just still refuses to resonate.

2007 Best Cover Contest [ASME]

Yahoo has gotten itself into trouble with Sunnyvale and an artist whom the company hired to satisfy a public-art requirement of new corporate property in the Silicon Valley city. It turns out that the grass-cum-wire landscape became more overgrown than intended, so Yahoo took a weed whacker to the whole thing. The butchery "devastated" the artist. Maybe she can get a motivational speech from Jerry Yang as a pick-me-up? [WSJ]

This is an occasional column from one of the authors of The Underminer: or, The Best Friend Who Casually Destroys Your Life. That's right, a book! Weren't you working on one of those? Whatever happened with that?

"Art has become a thing, a life accessory, which one must become knowledgeable about. In that sense it is a lifestyle and status marker—being aware of art implies that you are refined, interesting, and possibly... rich." [David Byrne]

Are you on pretty and somewhat plastically-reconstructed Times reporter Alex Kuczynski's email list? If you are, you'd better get cracking, because she has some columns coming up over there and she's got absolutely nothing. Her plea includes this priceless bit: "Next subject: Art! Any thoughts on art would be greatly appreciated." P.S. Later today we are writing some posts about things! Any of your thoughts on "things" would be totally appreciated!

You read Us Weekly for the articles. You can't help but be interested in what Lindsay Lohan snorted, ran her car into or slept with this week. But, you went to college, you read the new Chabons and Lethems as soon as they come out! You're not a vapid person! Good news: Celebrity is not only a major driver of the economy, it's a subject worthy of academic scrutiny. University of Southern California professor Elizabeth Currid, PhD., explains the sociology of fame and pop culture.