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Protests Against Stop and Frisk Infiltrate a NY Design Icon

Milton Glaser’s “I Love New York” logo is one of, if not the most, classic symbols of the city; tourists can find it emblazoned on T-shirts sold at street vendors all around town. But visitors passing through these days might see a version of the I Love New York T-shirt that they weren’t quite expecting, and which they may not even fully understand: “I Stop and Frisk New York.”

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Artist Brings “Sleeping Beauty” to Life

If you thought Spain’s Eskimo Jesus was the only controversial art story happening these days, think again: artist Taras Polataiko has taken it upon himself to realize the fairy tale classic Sleeping Beauty at the National Art Museum of Ukraine. The gist of the performance is: Polataiko dresses “beauties” who have volunteered for the part in white gowns and makeup. They lie sleeping on a bed in the museum for two hours each day. Anyone who visits the exhibition may kiss a beauty, and if she opens her eyes while being kissed, the two must marry each other.

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Tourists Line Up to Visit Beast Jesus

Not only does the internet love Cecilia Gimenez and her Beast Jesus restoration job — so do real life, flesh-and-blood people! Apparently hundreds of tourists have begun making pilgrimages to see the work and take pictures with it, after the apparently well-intentioned octogenarian Eskimo-fied Elías García Martínez’s 19th-century fresco of Jesus. The painting sits on a column between two altars in the Iglesia del Santuario de Misericordia church in Borja, Spain, a small town with a population of around 5,000. Who said the internet was only good for weak ties?

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Some Italian Americans Call Columbus Project “Disrespectful”

Some of us are really excited about the Public Art Fund’s upcoming project Discovering Columbus, for which Japanese artist Tatzu Nishi will construct a living room around the statue of Christopher Columbus in Columbus Circle. A living room six stories above the street, mind you, bringing visitors nose-to-nose with the Italian explorer himself (or at least, his likeness). But some Italian-Americans are less than thrilled about it; in fact, they’re pissed.

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Picasso the Playwright

Picasso is renowned and celebrated for his paintings, prints, sculptures, ceramics and even stage designs. But it turns out that Picasso also wrote — two plays and hundreds of poems, to be exact, mostly during the 1940s and ’50s.