A few weeks ago, a local gallery unveiled an "Oprah burial mask" by Indiana native Daniel Edwards. Now a gallery in NY has what appears to be the same bust, only this time with stuff on top. Art! Sometimes we don't get it.......

Liar, liar, half-man half-goat sculpture on fire! Turns out the Art Institute's "Faun" sculpture is a big fat forgery. The sculpture is not in fact the work of French post-impressionist painter Paul Gauguin but is instead a fake, made by Shaun Greenhalgh, whose family has been running an international art forgery business from England for the last 17 years. The Art Institute bought the statue from a private dealer in 1997, and the dealer......

The cover story of the Red Eye today is the age-old topic of public smooching. The article itself is nothing special, but some of the quote are too good to pass up: "Licking each other's fingers and making out on a packed train is too much." "No one wants to see that...Everyone likes to get their groove on, but come on." "Back where I'm from, in nightclubs you can basically do what you want. I......

A few minutes walk from Bubba Gump, Shakespeare Theater and the IMAX is this weekend’s Exposition of Sculpture Objects and Functional Art (SOFA) Chicago, bringing around 100 similarly eclectic galleries to Navy Pier’s Festival Hall. Considering the show’s artistic star power and the stacks of bills changing hands, Friday afternoon seemed positively mellow. Visitors seemed more intent on finding that perfect trinket for their living room or personal adornment than investing in the next Picasso.......

That last hour on Fridays always seems to take forever. At least there's plenty of cool stuff cooking this weekend: Don't forget: Daylight Savings Time ends Sunday. Get ready to fall back. Blade Runner: The Final Cut is playing at the Music Box. Local critics have been shitting their pants over how great it is. The SOFA Expo is in town. That's the Exposition of Sculpture Objects & Functional Art, and it's tickle your......

There's a November-y chill in the air already, and the rolling out of Christmas decorations drives home the fact that winter is rapidly approaching. This year, Jack Frost is bringing more than just snow and seasonal affective disorder, though: Canadian artist Gordon Halloran is building a enormous ice sculpture in Millennium Park. Halloran's piece, "Paintings Below Zero," will be unveiled February 1, and will be a 95-foot long, 12-foot tall wall of pigmented panels......

Chicago Calling, a collaborative festival linking Chicago-based artists with international friends and counterparts, continues tonight and Saturday, the exclamation point to Chicago Artists Month 2007. The festival as exchange program is perfect for an age where Skype, Google Talk, and unlimited wireless plans have dissolving the distance between us and our European, African, and Asian friends. If you’re commuting through the Thompson Center tonight, stop by the front plaza to hear Jennifer Karmin’s “Beast Poem,”......

Starting Saturday, the MCA is free for all for 40 days to celebrate 40 years of bringing fun, engaging, and occasionally frustrating contemporary art to Chicago. Through November 14, your visit involves nothing more frustrating than remembering where you put your coat check tag and fighting massive crowds to see your favorite Warhol and Murakami. It’s a gift to Chicago to be sure, but also a chance to reflect on four decades of freaky sculpture......

We're all down with sculpture gardens. But are garden-gardens art? That’s the question artist Chapman Kelley (warning: pdf) is putting to the Chicago Park District — via a federal suit. Kelley alleges that the garden he designed and planted in Daley Bicentennial Plaza is art protected under the federal Visual Artists Rights Act. Not everyone agrees, saying that the flowers have run wild and that the garden occupied too much space. The park district reduced......

Here are some other news items of note while we're at Millennium Park enjoying Muhal Richard Abrams and Reginald Robinson: The U.S. attorney's office has joined an ongoing Cook County probe into the rogue actions of an elite squad of the Chicago Police Department . Blue Line passengers can expect (more) delays starting this weekend. The sculptor who created Berwyn's spindle claims that the shopping plaza where it sits is "prostituting" the sculpture under......

What's 50 feet tall, weighs 162 tons, was forged in Gary, Indiana and has no name? No, that's not the start of a really bad joke, it's a description of the statue that Pablo Picasso gave to Chicago in 1967. Many of us local yokels know it as The Picasso. And it just turned 40. Untitled (the official name) was dedicated on August 15th 1967, just two years after the Richard J. Daley Center was......

This sounds pretty cool -- the State of Illinois' third annual small-business challenge cited 13 winners for its $10,000 Innovate Illinois grant program. You can find out more about the program here. Don't stop believin' in anonymity when it comes to the mob -- as the much-anticipated Family Secrets mob conspiracy trial opens, jurors will share their backgrounds, views on issues and reading habits-but not their names. It's Police Superintendent Idol! Three and "possibly......

There's a stretch of freight train track and pothole-marked road that runs parallel to 41st Street that makes a great shortcut to the southwest side via bicycle, particularly on days where we don't want to fight the congestion of Archer Avenue. A service road at 41st and Ashland allows freight rail employees easy access to the rails. It also dumps us off at the Ashland Avenue Swap-O-Rama. If you've never been to the Swap-O-Rama,......

While we love art, we’re not huge fans of the occasionally pricey admission costs to get into museums and exhibits. Fortunately, ARTropolis is all about letting the public see some of the most important new artwork on the cheap. For just $15, you’ll gain access to the two main shows, Art Chicago and the Merchandise Mart International Antiques Fair, as well as three satellite exhibits showcasing work from independent and emerging artists. Art Chicago will......

Except for an art teacher over in Evergreen Park. Bruce Lupori, a sixth-grade teacher over at Southwest Elementary School allegedly participated in a "joke gone bad" whereby he apparently put a plastic bag (with a hole cut in it) over a student's head. The incident happened in February, but the school only heard about it when kids told administrators about it on March 23. That seems a little odd. Did they not tell because it......

Normally we are proud of the fact that we don't own a car, what with auto fatalities rising, global warming, and the always increasing dependence on oil. But, those things mean nothing when the wind is nipping at you like a thousand angry piranhas. So this weekend we are going to get re-acquainted with our four wheeled counterparts. After that we are going to reserve a car here, or here, and enjoy our weekend. As......

No. 5 is "Agoraphilia - Stage VIII" by only-connect. Magdalena Abakanowicz's "Agora," a sculpture installment composed of 106 9-foot-tall human shapes, minus the heads and arms, was unveiled in Grant Park in November.......

While we are huge supporters of art, we have to admit: the giant faces on the art installations in Millennium Park freak us out a bit. While the idea behind them is excellent — a work of art that reflects the city and its people, and provides fun entertainment for kids in the hot summer months — we don’t particularly like to be stared down by 50-foot-tall faces. However, the giantific portraits became even creepier......

Federated is cutting 200+ jobs in Chicago right after the holidays. Hey, but did you know Frango is expanding past candies and into beauty products? The Chicago Police deny they are hiding homicides. A judge ruled that it is ok for Batavia school children to make fun of Italian-Americans. Or something. There was a big architecture competition today. Eight teams had 4 hours to present their visions of what Chicago might look like in......

Alain Roby, pastry chef at the Hyatt Regency Chicago, set the world record for tallest chocolate structure last week in New York when he created a 20-foot, 8-inch tall replica of the Rockefeller Center, the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building. Roby was in NY as part of the "Food Network Challenge," which also saw challenges for best pizza dough tossing and popcorn sculpting. Chicagoist didn’t know there were that many people who......

We know, we know, you had planned on going to Ikea today to stock up on the new holiday gear. It is October 7 after all. But, damn, there is so much to do here this weekend. How about this? Take this quiz; if you pass, you may proceed to the nearest Ikea location and have at it. If you fail, check out some of these events. Feel free to add more events in the......

On a recent road trip out to St. Charles, Chicagoist believes we spotted no less than three Portillo's restaurants on I-64. Being a sucker for a killer breaded chicken sammich and an equally lethal chocolate shake (their fries ain't bad neither), we yearned to pull over for a little anti-diet naughtiness. It's turning out to be a good thing we didn't, for on Friday Portillo's recalled 3,703 pounds of roast beef. The pre-sliced, fully-cooked roast......

Everyone's heard now, the guy who ran over the cabbie with his own cab - he got 15 years in prison. Hey, Quinn, way to piss off the Post Office with your tea bag protest! John Ronan wants to turn the old abandoned post office in the Loop into the largest municipal cemetery in the world. Lyric Opera Radio. "Sculpting" via Blank Campbell. The Photographer notes that the description of the sculpture explained that......

Today’s CTA Tattler discusses this morning’s RedEye article on the oft-heard but rarely understood CTA public address system. The CTA promises that new fiber-optic cables will soon allow you to know exactly how slow the Red Line is moving today. The Tattler also gives another plug for its CTA wireless alerts system and the transit status website run by friend of Chicagoist Tony Coppoletta. The CTA itself plans on evaluating its online CTA Bus Tracker......

Direct from the 16th International AIDS Conference, the Keiskamma Altarpiece, sharing a message of suffering and triumph, has arrived in Chicago. Over 120 South African women and men from a region particularly stricken by poverty and AIDS collaborated on this massive, multi-paneled work of embroidery, beads, wire sculpture, and photographs. The 13 foot by 22 foot collaboration was inspired by the Isenheim Altarpiece, painted around 500 years ago in Alsace, France during a horrible poisoning......

When we first heard they were doing iPod audio tours of Millennium Park, we were psyched. We like the idea of an audio tour; we can go at our own pace and listen to headphones that drown out screaming children and double-decker buses. We also like to see Chicago through someone else’s eyes; see a different Chicago than the one we’re used to seeing every day. So we checked out Audissey Guides. Audissey Guides has......

Since “Project Runway” didn’t start till nine; we decided to do something educational to pass the time. We traipsed our hot, sweating, rear-ends over to the Chicago Architecture Foundation to hear Meredith Mack, VP of Finance and Operations of the Art Institute, discuss its new addition. And man, it was almost better than the Runway. Almost. The new wing, designed by Renzo Piano, will (hopefully) be finished in Spring, 2009. The three floor building is......

Motorola is the corporate brand rated most valuable in Chicago. Boeing came in 2nd, McDonalds 3rd, Walgreens 4th and Caterpiller came in 5th. The IL Assn. of Realtors reports that home prices in the area kept climbing during the 1st quarter even though sales of houses and condos were down. Sun-Times has an interesting look at how the neighborhoods of Portage Park, Uptown, Lakeview, Near South Side, and West Lawn are changing. Salvador "Tony"......

The Bean is finally finished, and it’s getting the royal treatment today at a dedication ceremony. The sculpture has already become a Chicago icon and will be featured on the uniforms of Team Chicago at this summer’s Gay Games VII. Team Chicago’s logo, unveiled last week, also pays tribute to the Chicago skyline and, it seems, the city’s namesake band. The uniforms consist of light blue jackets and matching T-shirts featuring the new logo. Can......

Blutt, Street Artist...