Art exhibits don’t grow on trees. No, a lot of hard work goes into putting them together. Such is the case with the massive Sol Lewitt retrospective opening at MASS MoCa on November 16 of this year. One hundred of the artist’s wall drawings are currently in the process of being re-created on nearly one acre of wall space in an abandoned mill building on the MASS MoCa campus personally chosen by Lewitt prior to his death in 2007. Charged with the monumental task of bringing the works of the multi-floor installation to life are 24 of the senior assistants who worked with Lewitt, as well as a collection of 30 students from Yale University, Williams College, North Adams’s Massachusetts College of Liberal Arts, and a few other schools. To get a unique sneak peak at the progress of the exhibit, you can head over to Hello Beautiful where there’s quite the inside scoop on the whole affair.

Though art is truly in the eye of the beholder, sometimes our brains can lead our eyes to a certain conclusion. An artist’s reputation, how hot the gallery is that they’re showing at, or a good review, can all predispose us to liking something we may not have if we’d seen it without any context at all. Do you really like that Picasso, or do you just think you should like it… because you know it’s a Picasso?

That’s the exact question being confronted at the recent multi-media exhibit “Untitled, Anonymous” sponsored by the London-based office of ad consultancy agency Naked Communication. Everyone working at Naked, from the founding partners to the cleaning staff, was given carte blanche to create a piece of art. They were free to choose whichever topic and medium they wanted. The works were put on exhibit without any info: no artist, no title, and no explanation. Each work had to be considered purely on it’s own artistic merit. A week later, a special online gallery was launched revealing who had done what and why they’d done it.

“Untitled, Anonymous” stripped the act of viewing art down to its purest form and allowed people to judge and interact with each piece without any bias. If you liked what the cleaning lady did more than the creative director, why should your opinion change once you know which artist did what? After that, perhaps the ultimate goal of the exhibit was realized: if your opinion did change, then what does that say about you?

The combination of glitter, resin and Japanese pop iconography are the three characteristics that put Japanese artist Atsuo in his own realm. There isn’t a whole lot of info on the guy, and even the Sao Paulo gallery that supports him, Choque Cultural, admits they don’t know much about the elusive artist. But it’s clear Atsuo doesn’t work in a vacuum, because his work refers to the world around him. It received a lot of play in a recent group show at the street art venue, an exhibit that showcases Japanese pop art renditions from native artists. Whether or not you can find him, at the very least Atsuo seems to be destined for transatlantic greatness.

After enjoying a successful month-plus long run in the hills of L.A., The Storefront for Art and Architecture recently folded up the tents to its Pop-Up Store so they could sprout in another city. This time they’re taking the show across the pond to London as part of the London Festival of Architecture 2008. Their temporary display is opening June 20th and running through July 27th on Exhibition Road and will feature The BIG CPH Experiment, a series of design projects and building models created by the Copenhagen-based architecture firm BIG/Bjarke Ingels Groupe. Known for infusing living essentials such as leisure time, working, and shopping in their work, CPH’s first showing at the Storefront’s New York base was in October 2007, highlighting the housing needs for those of differing attitudes and economical backgrounds. At its center is an impressive rendering of LEGO towers, constructed from 250,000 of the plastic blocks. We’re sure you’ve made some pretty sweet things out of LEGOs in your day, but we’re almost positive these towers dwarf the castle you constructed when you were ten.

While we consider ourselves the most appreciative of art lovers, there are always a few pieces within an exhibit that don’t necessarily arouse our interest. If we had our way, we’d have the final say over what pieces get displayed so we didn’t have to spend the entire day in the gallery searching for the works that pique our aesthetic fancy. It seems that the folks at the Brooklyn Museum have read our minds. Their newest photography exhibit Click! A Crowd Exhibit, puts the power of the curator in the hands of those who pay to appreciate. Inspired by “The Wisdom of Crowds”, a book by New Yorker business and financial columnist James Surowiecki that raises the argument that a diverse crowd is often wiser at making decisions, Click! asks potential visitors to evaluate some of the works that have been submitted during the museum’s open call in order to decide which pieces end up in the show. Art experts and art lovers alike can vote until May 23rd on the Brooklyn Museum’s website and see if their wisdom has been heeded when the exhibit opens on June 27th. So head on over to the Brooklyn Museum site and let your taste speak for itself.

Team Gallery owner José Freire makes a habit of selecting emerging artists that a) you may not of heard of and b) you should hear of. Past collections have included upstarts and established artist alike: Cory Arcangel, Pierre Bismuth, Slater Bradley, Brice Dellsperger, Gardar Eide Einarsson and Ross Knight (plus a dozen other talented names that we don’t have space for) have all passed through this Soho space. From now through May 3 you can check out photographer Ryan McGinley’s ode to naked, misspent youth, I Know Where the Summer Goes. The collection title, ripped from a Belle & Sebastian song, follows his nudist models on a cross country trip, evoking the ephemera of underground nudist rags of the late ’60s and ’70s.

We’ve been unabashedly devoted groupies of Japanese artist Takashi Murakami for quite some time now, so it should come as no surprise that we’ll be amongst the throngs of art fans rushing over to his awe-inspiring retrospective beginning tomorrow, April 5th at New York’s Brooklyn Museum. The exhibit, organized by LA’s Moca, is the most complete retrospective to date on the widely admired artist. Unlike the recent LA exhibition that put a great deal of onus on his sculptures, the Brooklyn Show leans more heavily on Murakami’s paintings, many of which are peppered with seemingly innocuous images of fantastical fungi and flowers paintings but represent rather perverse and ponderous themes. The exhibition is a sensory overload of sorts featuring entirely too many wrinkles to discuss in this short space, but amongst them is Louis Vuitton boutique of sorts with limited edition bags designed by Murakami on display as well as a room where you can view his Kanye West video. It’s a good thing the exhibit will be around until July 13th, because you may have to go several times to see everything.

Jessica Joslin is the kind of artist who would worry Darwin: bones, brass, glass, and pieces of musical instrument are all soldered together to form impossible skeletal animals that either, a) you’d find in a backwater taxidermy shop from the future; b) a circus freakshow run by the HR Giger; or c) Disney’s Bambi, directed by David Fincher. You can catch her weird wonderfulness in the Scottsdale, AZ area today through April 26 as she premiers her Curiosa collection at the Lisa Sette Gallery and a book signing for Strange Nature tomorrow, from 1-3pm.

New York is the city that never sleeps, Los Angeles is the City of Angels, and Paris is known as the City of Lights…but Peter Kozma may beg to differ on that last one. You see, any city where the Hungarian artist happens to be putting on one of his stunning public light art installations might just pilfer that moniker, at least temporarily. Kozma has previously projected massive images onto plazas, streets, and buildings to transform city environments such as Helsinki, Budapest, and Essen into spectacles of shape, light, and color. Next up, Kozma is seeking to unleash his several state of his art high performance “Pani Slide” projectors on the fair city of Denver, Colorado, thanks to a sponsorship by local Denver arts organization, The Invisible Museum. Before Kozma turns the Mile-High City into a Mile-High movie screen he’ll be visiting from April 3rd to 13th to select a location and plan the installation. If you happen to be in Denver on those days, we recommend checking out Kozma’s speech at the Denver Art Museum on April 8th, as part of the museum’s Design Council Lecture Series. It’s sure to be enlightening…(oh yes we did).

Dave Eggers is a modern day renaissance man. Not only is he responsible for founding McSweeney’s, but he’s got a few impressive books under his belt and also runs a writing program for underprivileged kids amongst other things. Eggers continues to make our worldly contributions feel a little less significant with his latest venture, a collaboration with Apex Art entitled Lots of Things Like This. The upcoming exhibit explores an unnamed crude, often funny, and certainly irreverent form of contemporary art that ranges from one paneled cartoon illustrations to text-based art best exhibited in the works of people like David Shrigley, Raymond, Pettibon, Nedko Solawkov and Tucker Nichols. If you’ve got a twisted sense of humor, and you find yourself in New York between April 2nd and May 10th we recommend making your way to Apex Art on Church Street in NYC to check it out.

From Ed Templeton to the Art Dump and stretching back to the Dogtown days, the world of skate plays a big part in the creative process, one that runs parallel with the sport itself and constantly reinvents itself as long as its progenitor does. Maze Skate Shop, with sponsorship by Adidas Skateboarding here in Brazil, is putting on the first-ever dedicated show of art as was specifically influenced by skate with its Expo Skate Obsession. The excitement kicks off tonight. Participating artists include Apo Fousek (who recently did a stint at Eastpak), Prozak, Paulo Ito and Tinho. They’ve given paintings, drawings, photos and other designs to commemorate the show, with a percentage of all sold works going to a charity. Later, a book archiving these works and the show will be released in Portuguese and English. The show will sit inside Maze’s new space that will become the site of its new girls-only extension after the show ends.

In 1982, I was busy wandering around my house wearing kickass Spiderman pjs with footies and learning to put sentences together. Not far away in New York City, the Storefront for Art and Architecture, a not for profit organization ‘committed to the advancement of innovative positions in architecture, art and design’ was being founded. Twenty-five years later, we’re both still here. Coincidence? I think not. While after twenty-five years I’ve ditched the Spiderman PJ’s and can string sentences together a little better, the Storefront for Art and Architecture continues to be one of the city’s only ‘alternative platforms focusing primarily on architecture and the built environment.’ To celebrate their longevity the organization is expanding their reaches beyond the New York City Metropolitan area with Pop Up storefronts hosting exhibitions in cities all over the world. The first of these opens on April 11th in Los Angeles, and will feature Frédéric Chaubin’s CCCP: Cosmic Communist Constructions Photographed exhibit in a partially disused printworks space. The exhibit will show for five weeks before it disappears into thin air…or at least is carried away by truck. We recommend seeing it before the latter happens.

Nude dancing harlots, erotic circuses, bare-breasted revolutionaries and crocodile strangling. Now that’s culture. These are all examples of characters currently inhabiting West Hollywood’s art gallery Moral Punch. During the “Studying Character” exhibition animation artists like Tim Beard, Eliza Frye, Leo Matsuda, Christian Robinson and Nic Sweet bring their weird, abstract, and cartoonish figures to the fore. Whether influenced by folk tales, pop culture, or deviant imagination, the art is playful and personal. We highly recommend checking it out.

We’ll admit that there have been times when we’ve wanted to chuck our color wheel out the window. We’ve stood in Home Depot and really tried to discern the different between antique, eggshell, and albino ferret white. So, we can certainly appreciate MOMA’s new exhibit (running through May 12th) which explores the early days of processed color; when artists like Warhol and Stella accepted Pantone’s domination and used the solid, sterile, industrial colors for their own subversive gains. The site is pretty brilliant as well, incorporating the aesthetic of the exhibit and giving a lot of room to explore the forty-four artists. It also kind of makes us hungry for Skittles.

Have you ever wanted to see the Queen of England…IN YOUR FACE?!? Thanks to revolutionary light artist Chris Levine’s heralded series of Royal 3D and light based portraits, entitled The Lightness of Being, now you can. Not previously recognized for his portraiture prowess, Levine seemed an odd choice when commissioned by the Jersey Heritage Trust to mark 800 years of the British Isle’s allegiance to the Monarchy. However, due to his innovation in the fields of light and modern image making, he got the job. Levine had the rare honor of being granted two sittings with Queen Elizabeth II, in which he utilized the latest in holography equipment to fashion an ‘original holographic stereogram portrait’ employing a host of still photographs taken from a multitude of different angles. The resultant image garnered praise from Mario Testino as the most beautiful image of the Queen he had ever seen. Now that’s an endorsement. The Queen is not the only royal who gets Levine’s light-based treatment. If you want to see who else has been revolutionarily rendered, we suggest heading down to the StolenSpace Gallery at The Old Truman Brewery in London from March 14th to the 23rd. You won’t be disappointed.