You may at some point in your local travels have stumbled upon the art of prvtdncr: Working primarily in spraypaint on somebody-else's-building, the sloganeering graffiti artist throws up provocative phrases that are meant to hold a magnifying makeup mirror up to certain, unseemly facts about the true nature of Hollywood. As our friends at The WOW Report point out, BUTT magazine's current L.A.-themed issue devotes eight pages to some of his creations, including a less-than-generous sentiment regarding the Most Powerful Gay in the Universe.

The national housewife superego has lady feelings? Yes, maybe. Via the Post, the AP reports that Former Inmate 55170-0549 might soon become Mrs. Martha Helen Kostrya Stewart Simonyi (evidently, WASPiness works by the one-drop rule). Her omnibeing notwithstanding, Martha is currently in Kazakhstan to cheer on and/or get married to her space-tourist manfriend, who's set to blast off today. Unfortunately, he is not Lance Bass. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the Post, and half a world away, a New York City subway car yesterday was attacked and transformed into "a cozy living room with curtains, flowers, throw pillows and rugs" in a "guerrilla installation, dubbed 'No Train Like Home.'" No signs indicate that these heinous transportation/decoration acts are related, but that's because Martha Stewart is a evil genius, like Marilyn vos Savant without the ILF part.

Every weekend around this time, we ask ourselves, "why are we here?" Then we crack open the Times and learn about places that remind us "at least you aren't there." Take Los Angeles, featured in tomorrow's Arts section. Not only does the town seem to lack necessities like zoning laws and a newspaper, the ocean's garbled vomit by the shore also leaves rather anemic the lifeblood of any respectable post-industrial metropolis: i.e., art-school grads! Yet, reports Edward Wyatt:

Hollywood's art-collecting community breathed a sigh of relief on Saturday, when the FBI announced that Steven Spielberg was an "unknowing victim" of a dealer who sold him a Norman Rockwell painting that was stolen from a Missouri gallery 34 years ago, freeing them from the paranoia that each high-end piece the discriminating director once admired in their homes might soon disappear under mysterious circumstances and "accidentally" surface in his office. Reports the LAT:

Susan Hancock spent $236,000 on art at last week's Armory Show fair, according to today's Times, avoiding all the while the pictures with sexy parts because her niece comes to visit sometimes. The 55-year-old Orlando transplant—recently divorced, flush from selling her company to Barry Diller—has spent the last seven years getting in good with the high-end art dealers. In the age of fake waiting lists for big-name art and extreme price inflation, and since the art world (and the Times) is insanely dismissive of moneyed non-New Yorker middle-aged women, how does a lady get on the good list? Easy—you pay a homo to escort you around. (And they say the role of the walker is extinct!) Hancock settled on Eric Shiner—Yale! Fluent in Japanese! Highly developed sense of camp!—as her art walker. Who could be better? Shiner's Friendster page self-description, after all, is "Socialite, Taste Maker, Style Guru, Art Terminator." It's the perfect example of nature's trend toward mutualism.

This weekend's must-see movie isn't anything out of Hollywood — it's "Living Pictures/Men in Gold" at SFMOMA, a 40-minute video homage to seven Silicon Valley rich dudes. Created by French artist Sylvie Blocher, the video includes interview-montages with Snocap's Rusty Rueff, former Apple exec and "recovering assoholic" Jean-Louis Gassée, Eventbrite's Kevin Hartz, McDougall Creative's Eric McDougall, Eight Inc.'s Wilhelm Oehl, and Mayfield Fund's Chamath Palihapitiya (pictured). Yep, that's only six — no idea who the seventh is, though Kathy Levinson, formerly of E-Trade, had her footage rendered unusable due to "technical problems." Mmmm-hmmm. Read the Chronicle story for several good sexmoney quotes from the stars, and let us know your opinion if you see the exhibit.

As a (perhaps) final coda to the Googleplex map errata, lots of readers phoned in with declarations or speculations regarding the acrobat statues outside Building 45. Were they in fact leftovers from when Adobe lived there, and did they have some nominal relationship to Adobe's Acrobat products? Or did early explorers find these statues in the Spanish colonial days and decide this would be an excellent place for an office park?

Regarding our map of the Googleplex, commenter Spastic Colon notes:

Item 10 on our map of the Googleplex is a pair of circus-y statues outside Building 45. A reader reminisces:

They may be pinching pennies when it comes to paper and pens, but MTV Networks isn't afraid to toss around the big bucks for the things that matter. The company just announced the newest recipients of its Labs Seed Money - "tax-free grants awarded to MTV Networks employees to further their private creative work" - and one of the lucky winners happens to be Ryan Kitson of Nickelodeon Creative Resources, who was given five grand to

Following up on a report in yesterday's Times about the sale by David Geffen of Jackson Pollock's "No. 5, 1948," to a mysterious Mexican, the Guardian says, hey, wait a second:

Why bother visiting the Museum of Modern Art when you can own the entire collection for $20? Jason Polan's The Every Piece Of Art in The Museum Of Modern Art Book is exactly what it sounds like — 50 pages of tiny sketches depicting everything on public view at MoMA for two weeks in January 2005. The "deluxe" edition ($100) comes with admission to MoMA, a tour by the author, a free sketch, and a "hotdog or pretzel."

Saul Chernick wants to put ads in the Village Voice and on Craigslist offering individualized tattoos for Jews based on their religious experiences. He wants to conduct interviews, design the tattoos, go with participants to get inked and document the entire process as a work of art.

A new video raises the bar for the "we make crazy not art" set. Christophe Bruno feeds keywords into Google, which returns search results that are fed through a text-to-speech program to a human wearing headphones. The human spews out the text stream. The net result feels like watching Rocketboom.

Here's part of the press release from the Ariel Foxman-sponsored art show we told you about the other day:

This morning's news of the Observer purchase got us wondering: Just how far does ten million bucks really go in this town? We assembled a crack team of experts who put together the helpful chart you'll find after the jump.

New York commuters are likely familiar with this year's round of ads for the School of Visual Arts. "How Bad Do You Want to Be Good?" is the theme, with various posters and subway-car ceiling ads taking the theme in strange new directions. After the jump, the Williamsburger reaction, as sent in by a reader from Lorimer Street, "the second (or perhaps first) hippest subway stop in New York."

After an outrageous attempt at price gouging that rivaled even the purchase of the painting itself, the Neue Galerie has aborted its plan to charge fifty bucks a pop to see the Klimt recently acquired by Ron Lauder for $135 million. The Galerie - or, as we like to call it, gallery - had envisioned the plan as an opportunity for the public "to come on Wednesdays for $50, when it would be less crowded." But after an Associated Press piece mentioned the new pricing structure, Neue cancelled the idea, "saying the offer was misread by the public."

hot to head to a museum? Let blogger David of Ironic Sans take you on a tour of the badly Photoshopped art created for the website of New York radio station 1010 WINS. Here's a sample:

New York art-lovers with too much class (or the lack of a corporate A&E card) to skip making the suggested donation are going to be a little lighter in the wallet: The Met is jacking its admission price up by five dollars, to a $20 total. Spokesman Harold Holzer justified the hike by saying, "Ever since 9/11, the museum has faced the ongoing challenge of a structural, operating deficit. This is a solution that helps us defray the cost of running essentially the largest museum of the country."