Quoted: Random House imprint Vintage is redesigning the paperback versions of Thomas Pynchon’s novels [...] -Design Week.

Vandals broke into the Musée d’Orsay early Sunday morning, punching a 4 inch hole in a famous Monet painting as well as leaving "various bits of filth" before fleeing security guards.

Quoted: Intruders left a tear close to four inches long in the painting “The Argenteuil Bridge,” at the Orsay Museum.

The Seattle P-I has a wonderful exploratory piece on the failures of the new library. Lauded for "[...launching] both the image and substance of the Seattle Public Library into a new era" while chastised for lacking spaces "conducive to intimacy with a book," this is a fair and well-executed opinion piece placing its finger on a distinct lack of warmth. Indeed, I have found that the mixing chamber looks a little too inspired by Gilliam's "Brazil." This is a building which focuses on the design of access to information without much thought to the ingestion of that information.

I love taking visitors to see the new library but I've never actually gone there to read even though it's a scant two blocks away from my work. This seems odd to me considering that I spend about an hour a day reading at one of several local coffee shops. I do want to try going for a good read on the 10th floor, if for nothing other than the view, but I'd love to see what the author of this piece is calling for - a timely reconsideration and re-examination. Many of the issues (furniture / warmth) are with superficial and not structural elements, they can be changed.

Quoted: I'm beginning to suspect that the building's celebrated splotches of weirdness -- the red sea-monster-bowel corridors on the fourth level, the bile-yellow elevators and escalators, the vertiginous canyon overlooks on the upper levels -- exist to draw attention away from the fact that most of its work and pleasure spaces are actually cheaply finished or dysfunctional. And that the building's working viscera are failing at fulfilling the promise of its stunning skin.

Are you sure they're not just filming Ocean's 18?

Quoted: Police said the two oils, “Maya With Doll” and “Portrait of Jacqueline,” are estimated to be worth about $66 million.

I knew it! We made Mona Lisa smile!

Quoted: Millions of invisible dots lie behind the enigmatic smile of Leonardo da Vinci's famous painting.

This art looks really cool. A reformed graffiti artist is outlining shadows of objects in bright daylight within New York city.

Quoted: His signature reads "© Ellis G. 2007" and he's behind the distorted chalk outlines all over Park Slope and Carroll Gardens in Brooklyn.

I like it. Won't exactly fit on my mantle, but it's nifty to look at as a piece of geometric sculpture.

Quoted: "The island of Robert Smithson was formed over about a week, in a ragged-looking barge yard on Staten Island, shaped by a public art group, a landscape architect, a contractor, an engineer, a project manager and various other dedicated conceptual art workers using a 30-by-90-foot flat-decked barge, 10 trees, 3 huge rocks, a bunch of shrubs, rolls of sod, a whole lot of dirt and even more ingenuity."