Back in January, we passed on news of the sparkling new pay-per-use public toilet, the first of its kind in New York City, in Pentagram's backyard—that is, Madison Square Park. The self-cleaning Jetsonian marvel, which features Paula Scher's endlessly versatile identity for the park and which we lovingly referred to as Pentagram's "intern toilet," is a hit!

According to The New York Times, the seven-month-old, newsstand-sized, "high-end outhouse...has proved to be a popular attraction, with about five people each hour popping in a quarter to use it during its hours of operation, 8 a.m. to 8 p.m." (But how does the City employee tasked with emptying the coffers resist the urge to "reinvest" those quarters at the nearby Shake Shack?)

Constructed by Spanish firm Cemusa, the toilet is the first of 20 slated for New York. And while the pioneering Madison Square Park version is a success with most people, one architect was befuddled by its workings. According to the Times, "Jayson Durango, 27, a regular user of Starbucks and Quiznos bathrooms when he is on the go, said he was confused by the array of buttons inside the toilet—one to flush, one for emergencies, another to open the door."

It's a good time to be street-influenced artist KAWS, a.k.a. Brian Donnelly. As we mentioned last week, his work (including human-size versions of the JPP toys pictured at right) fills the Miami penthouse hideaway of Pharrell Williams, currently featured in Conde Nast's fall Fashion Rocks supplement. KAWS also collaborated with i-D magazine on a special version of its July "stepping stone issue" and was the subject of Rob Walker's most recent 'Consumed' column in The New York Times Magazine. Walker focuses on Donnelly's rather late entry into the traditional "art world" via a trio of imminent shows at galleries in New York, Miami, and Los Angeles, allowing people a rare glimpse of his work in person, as opposed to online. Why "KAWS"? "There was a point in my life when I was really interested in having my name on the street," says Donnelly in the below video created by i-D. "K-A-W-S is something that worked. You couldn't really pin it down to any other existing words."

While it seems as though it has become law that nearly every blog and news outlet on earth most report on a story of some new building in Dubai, or some gigantic collection of art in Qatar, and so on and so forth, Times writer John Arlidge has stopped to ask if all this wealth and spending will equal good taste in the end and what exactly some of these multi-billionaire oil tycoons are doing to try avoid the curse of looking too "new money." And it doesn't just stop there, as the question arises of what do you do once you're done building these cities lined with gold, how to lure Westerners in to come experience it all while they're guarded with tense feelings about anything even remotely related to the Middle East. The piece asks a lot more questions than it answers, but it provides for a nice "Let's step back and look at all of this" sort of feeling, which seems like just the remedy for yet another post about a potentially-fake-PhD and his insane spinning building.

Earlier this year, we told you about photographer Chris Jordan's keynote presentation at the Greener Gadgets conference in New York City. A few weeks after that event, Jordan (who we've described as "an eco-warrior version of Andreas Gursky") addressed the 2008 Technology, Entertainment, Design (TED) conference crowd, presenting his "portraits of American mass consumption" that help people to wrap their brains around staggering statistics such as the 40 million paper cups used daily. Stand back from one of his works depicting the number of people who die from cigarettes and its 400,000+ tiny cigarette boxes form "Skull with Cigarette" the 1886 Van Gogh painting that also happens to grace the Chip Kidd-designed cover of David Sedaris's new book, When You Are Engulfed in Flames. Below we've posted the newly released video of Jordan's TEDTalk.

To Banksy, he's "a force of nature" and "a phenomenon. And I don't mean that in a good way." Shephard Fairey describes him "an enigma," albeit an "infuriating" one. His passport reads Thierry Guetta, but he prefers "Mr. Brainwash," MBW for short. Whatever you call him, tonight he unleashes his graffiti-style, pop culture-saturated creations on Los Angeles in his first exhibition, an affair that he is staging himself in a former CBS studio complex on Sunset Boulevard. He has long been ready for his close-up.

Entitled "Life is Beautiful," the sprawling show promises paintings, sculptures, and prints (200 will be handed out free to first comers), as well as an installation made from 100,000 shoes and an outsized recreation of Edward Hopper's "Nighthawks" (who frankly, we always suspected of having kicked off their shoes beneath that starkly appointed bar). Writer Shelley Leopold, who brilliantly describes the makeshift gallery space as "the faded mocha edifice that until last year housed CBS's Columbia Square studios," recently got up close and personal with MBW for an LA Weekly cover story that touches on how he went from making a documentary about street artists such as Banksy and Fairey to wielding the wheat paste for himself. "The film, meanwhile, remains unfinished," notes Leopold, while "Banksy...is threatening to do a movie about the documentary Guetta never made."

As for the "Nighthawks" homage, it remained a work in progress when Leopold visited and may tonight take the form of a pop art-infiltrated tabluau vivant. "I was going to put skeletons in there dressed as the original characters, but that's too negative," Guetta said. "I'm a positive guy! Life is beautiful. So my idea is changing again. Maybe I'll get actors to dress up as Warhol and stand in there, or maybe I'll break the window and make it an abandoned building—like modern times!"

Who knew that the fates of many Olympic venues mirror the narrative arc of an E! True Hollywood Story? While cities such as Albertville and Calgary continue to make full use of their Olympic facilities, other host cities have seen the massive infrastructure built for the games abandoned as quickly as it appeared. And we're not referring only to Sarajevo. In today's Telegraph, Malcolm Moore tells London the cautionary tale of Athens. The host city of the 2004 games is home to once shimmering Olympic venues that are now "fly blown, closed to the public, and covered in graffiti." Turns out that spending over $15 billion on the games failed to spark an enduring Greek interest in such sports as kayaking and beach volleyball.

The infrastructure, which was installed in such haste, has proven to be far too extravagant for the city....A few miles outside the city centre, the sprawling Faliron complex that once hosted the beach volleyball and taekwondo competitions is deserted and a lone security guard has not been able to deter youths from spraying the walls with slogans.

Elsewhere at Hellenikon, piles of rubbish are mounting behind heavily padlocked gates and electrical cables hang loose from the walls. On one bridge, every light fitting has been wrenched out, while crumbling concrete is ubiquitous, a sign of the speed at which the complex was built.

New York's Times Square teems with souvenir shops that cater to insatiable tourist appetites for things like Statue of Liberty foam hats, city landmarks sloshing around in snowglobes and floaty pens, I ♥ NY shotglasses, and appliqué t-shirts as far as the eye can see. While many creative types shy away from these emporiums of kitsch, artist-designer Chris Rubino is setting up one of his own. Opening next Friday, May 30, at Chashama's space in the heart of Times Square is "The Center of Something," a solo show that exhibits Rubino's take on New York as a destination for both visiting and living. The "limited tourist attraction" is on view through June 15.

The idea for a souvenir shop-themed show came when non-profit arts organization Chashama approached Rubino with two possible exhibition spaces, one in downtown Manhattan and one in Times Square. "I was immediately interested in the 44th Street location," Rubino told us of the rare opportunity to show his work at the so-called crossroads of the world. "I love New York and wanted to play around creating a little bit of a love letter/love lost New York theme...[and] also to give the foot traffic in Times Square a look at the New York that we live in everyday."

The installation will consist of souvenirs as well as hand-drawn screenprints that recreate pieces of the New York daily visual language, including maps, ads, and signage. Among Rubino's favorite works are the 20 postcards he created from his photos that capture "pieces of the city that a tourist would most likely never experience." As for the goods sold by neighboring shops, Rubino favors a souvenir "that shows a little pride, possibly having a large rating on the kitsch scale," he told us. "I recently saw a statue of liberty holding a snowglobe and inside there is another lady liberty holding a snowglobe containing a third statue. Amazing."

"The Center of Something" opens on Friday, May 30, with a reception from 6 to 9 p.m. at Chashama (112 West 44th Street, betwixt 6th Avenue and Broadway).

It's been plastered on t-shirts (3 for $10, last we checked), bumper stickers, salt and pepper shakers, even a particularly garish Gucci handbag, but for Milton Glaser the sheer endurance of the I ♥ New York logo he developed, gratis, in the late 1970s, is still difficult to fathom. "It is one of those peculiarities of your own life where you don't know the consequences of your own actions," Glaser told The New York Times recently. "Who in the world would have thought that this silly bit of ephemera would become one of the most pervasive images of the 20th century?" Earlier this week, the paper of record focused on efforts to "reclaim the symbol itself, which...has become devalued...through overuse." Initiatives include a difficult-to-reproduce hologram that will mark the logo's licensed use while sellers of unauthorized I ♥ New York goods (no doubt created at home, with help of Courier and Wingdings) will receive a cease-and-desist letter from an Albany law firm.

According to Thomas Ranese, chief marketing officer at Empire State Development:

"We have been reviewing anything found by our licensing agent," said Ranese. Undesirable products include ashtrays ($6.99) and cigarette lighters ($3.99) because the state wants to discourage smoking.

Marshall Blonsky, 70, who teaches semiotics at Parsons the New School for Design, expressed skepticism at the state's new efforts. "Oh, boy! That's very odd!" he exclaimed. "They're trying to re-proprietize this thing." The brand is battered, Mr. Blonsky said. "What was absolutely original and therefore thrilling in 1977," he said, "is now an empty signifier, nothing in it, no communication, zed, zero. It moved from poetry to banality, from red to pink, like a coin that has been rubbed smooth from so much usage."

Lest you think that New York's "Best of New York" issue is worthy of your attention for its cover(s) alone, we thought we'd highlight some of the magazine's design-related picks (that said, it's also worth picking up a hard copy, as the "Best of" feature is strewn with some excellent photos by Jamie Chung, including the above one of a pair of chocolate-dipped spectacles). But onto the best of the Big Apple...

In the "home and help" section, the magazine chooses chairs for design obsessives ranging from "the modernist" (CB2's Hippie Arm Chair) and "the chic parent" (Lisa Albin's Mod Rocker for kids) to "the classicist" (the cane-seated Carimate designed by Vico Magistretti) and "the innkeeper" (Anthropologie's painted wood Madeline chair). Some retail newcomers are singled out as worthy destinations for those shopping for contemporary home furnishings (Soha Style in Harlem), mid-century modern wares (Brooklyn's GalleryQB), and lighting (the new Tom Dixon shop-in-shop at ABC Carpet & Home). Taking home the honors for Best Shoestring Architect is Thread Collective, the "five-member architecture-and-design collective that specializes in stretching puny spaces on the cheap," while Creative Signs and Awnings is your best Gotham source for Oddball Decor (it's where Bruce Nauman gets his neon signs made).

continued...

"The city is a fact of nature, like a cave, a run of mackarel, or an ant heap," wrote Lewis Mumford. "But it is also a conscious work of art, and it holds within it communal framework many simpler and more personal forms of art." Emphasis on the art, not the mackarel, at New York's Anna Kustera Gallery, which tonight hosts opening festivities for "Urbanity on Paper," a group show that takes the city as its subtext. The works on view include graphic designs by Ju$t Another Rich Kid, photographic works on paper by Charles LaBelle and Laure Leber, and a mixed-media installation by Regina Joseph.

We asked New York-based artist and designer Ju$t Another Rich Kid (a.k.a. Ken Courtney) to describe his piece in the show (pictured above), an untitled diptych in black inkjet and red acrylic ink that features a blood-spattered flyer for a New Year's Eve party headlined by the The Heartbreakers and The Ramones. "How would I describe it? Actually, I wouldn't," he told us. "It's a visual piece and not a conceptual one." A frequent appropriator of images, he particularly likes the look of those related to music (see also his fetching Bauhaus t-shirt and his Depeche Mode project for Bon magazine). As for the blood, it's part of an ongoing series called "Blood Simple." So, did Courtney ring in 2008 with a rocker-studded "Champagne Party" of his own? "Went to a friend's party in Greenpoint, then another friend's party in Williamsburg, then an after party at a friend's photo studio," he says. "I won't tell you what happened after hours. That's a secret."