Courtesy Stephen Zeigler

You're probably more likely to see a floating body than waterfowl in the Los Angeles River. But things are improving.

The federal government declared it a "traditional navigable waterway" in 2010 and L.A. River Expeditions will take you for a boat trip this summer. The improvements haven't stopped an artist from making a little light of our favorite liquid jungle, though:

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RedBall Project

A huge red ball on the streets of downtown? Is it a stray from Coachella? Did the beach just move east?

No, it's an art project from New York called RedBall. And it's here through Thursday:

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Banksy at MOCA by Finger Food / LA Weekly Flickr Pool

Only a week after the Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) said no to a potential takeover by the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), it appears we know why.

While MOCA had suffered a financial drain that had it on the reported brink of death, the museum today reports that it now has means.

According to MOCA ...

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Art or commerce? Somebody may be the judge.

The Internet is about to radically change, and hardly anyone knows it.

Think about it like a phone system: The Internet operates on just a handful of top-level domains (TLDs) -- like .com and .org -- that function like area codes. Right now, the internet needs more of them. And pretty soon it's going to thousands of them: .law, .house, .gay, .soccer, pretty much anything you can think of. But that's not the radical part. See, unlike area codes, TLDs need someone to run them -- and the saga of .art is a microcosm of what that might mean for the artistic community, and for the Internet itself.

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Gregory Bojorquez / 'Art in the Streets' at MOCA

Updated at the bottom: MOCA says no. First posted at 5:25 p.m on March 7. Headline has changed.

The L.A. County Museum of Art is proposing to takeover the struggling Museum of Contemporary Art downtown.

LACMA CEO Michael Govan confirmed the proposal in a statement today. He calls it a possible "merger," an idea he says was first brought up by MOCA.

He says:

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Samuel Bayer

You usually don't see art worth $50,000 just sitting on the street.

In this case, however, it was a Samuel Bayer portrait remixed by artist Phil Frost that happened to double as a massive billboard above Sunset Boulevard east of Crescent Heights Boulevard near the Sunset Strip.

And it's gone:

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Courtesy John Elwell

Image of surboard pioneer Bob Simmons from Pacific Standard Time.

Pacific Standard Time, that wide-ranging and largely successful program of left coast, postwar art, will be reprised in 2017 with another ambitious show:

This one, the J. Paul Getty Trust announced today, will reach south of the border. It will be called "Pacific Standard Time: L.A./L.A.," for Los Angeles/Latin America.

The idea, say Getty folks, is to explore L.A.'s significant and historical connections to Latin America. Getty President and CEO Jim Cuno:

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Courtesy Stephen Zeigler

Update: Despite our afternoon note yesterday that the art had been taken down, we found one piece that's still up. Photo at the very bottom. First posted at 2:25 p.m. Thursday.

If you need help finding a hipster in downtown Los Angeles just spit and you'll hit one.

Just in case however, with tongue firmly in cheek, it appears that street artist Wild Life has added some public service announcements to a pair of "Historic Downtown" street signs that feature stacks of arrow-driven directions to such places as the "Reagan State Bldg," "Grand Central Market," and "LA Theatre Center:"

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@JalouseClub

Updated at the bottom: We figured out who the artist is. First posted at 6:09 a.m.

Leave it to Los Angeles, the street-art capital of the nation if not the world, to come up with graffiti satire in the wake of cyclist Lance Armstrong's doping admission.

This Banksy-esque take on the controversy, and other versions like it, have popped up around Melrose Avenue.

London's JalouseClub says it is the work of the world-famous street artist. But ...

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Howie Stier

The world speaks.

Everyone is a critic. Even taggers. Shepard Fairey, a widely known street artist who often garners mixed reviews, has been panned with graffiti spray-painted over a fifty-foot wall piece on 2nd Street and La Brea Boulevard.

At the scene, a property manager was noticeably disturbed by the tagging over the art piece. The words, "Lousy," "Ugly," and "Crap" were written in black spray paint. Then late yesterday afternoon, the graffiti was cleaned up to restore the mural. Store owners had no idea it had even been fixed. Fairey might be getting used to it:

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SMPD

Prosecutors have charged the man they say was the break-in artist behind that amazing, $10 million theft of Santa Monica investor Jeffrey Gundlach's A-list art collection.

It was Darren Agee Merager, 43, who dunnit, the Los Angeles County District Attorney's office said today.

But they claim he couldn't have done it alone:

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LAPD

'Brother Dave.'

The long, strange trip of a painting called "Brother Dave," commissioned by Peter Marshall of Hollywood Squares fame more than 30 years ago, has a Hollywood ending, it seems.

The LAPD late yesterday announced that the beloved portrait of Marshall's son has been recovered after it was stolen in a January 30, 1983 burglary of Marshall's Encino home.

It was picked up recently at a Long Beach flea market, cops say:

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SMPD

Just some of the stolen goods.

It's official: Jeffrey Gundlach is the luckiest man alive.

Not only has the CEO-investor been living a life of riches known only to the 1 percent (and to other friends of Mitt Romney -- house north of Montana Avenue in Santa Monica, museum-worthy paintings on his walls, Porsche Carrera 4S in the garage, Patek Philippe watch on his wrist), but when all that finery was stolen ...

... he got most of it back!

Hot damn:

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Shepard Fairey was right.

But then he was wrong.

The L.A.-based king of street artists was sentenced in New York to two years of probation after he tried to conceal the fact that he used an Associated Press photo as the basis of his iconic "Hope" rendering of President Obama.

The thing is, he wanted to fight the AP's 2009 copyright infringement lawsuit (since settled) on the merits of "fair use" -- borrowing someone else's creation for art's sake. But he sort of f---ed that all up. Today Fairey admitted his mistake:

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@NBCLA via Twitter

Oh, snap.

That amusing cardboard cutout of Clint Eastwood, installed by Glassell Park artist Justin Stadel on a San Rafael Hills hiking trail last spring to inspire the cowboy in all of us (and especially freeway commuters on the 2 below), is finally complete:

As of this afternoon, according to NBC4, "someone added chairs." Not one, but two empty chairs -- one apparently of the 3-D wooden variety, and another in cardboard-cutout form, to match the Eastwood original.

Genius! The Los Angeles Times confirms this report, and points out the obvious:

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Nanette Gonzalez/LA Weekly

Sight was fired for opening up to L.A. Weekly about his very unfortunate situation.

The star of L.A. Weekly's current cover story -- a talented and gentle young man named Bryant Mangum, aka UPN member "Sight," fresh out of four years in state prison for scratching up the L.A. bus system as a teenager -- has been suspended from his job as a result of the story.

As we revealed in "Los Angeles' War on Street Artists,' the only job Sight was able to get with 10 counts of felony vandalism on his record was, ironically, buffing out graffiti for a company contracted by L.A. City Hall. (He applied to hundreds of other workplaces, but due to his scary-looking record, potential employers all "thought I was a terrorist," says Sight.)

And now even that employer has turned him away:

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Our long-lost "H" is coming home.

Thank god for nostalgic Hollywood fanboys in the Upper Midwest! As the Associated Press revealed last Wednesday, if it weren't for Minnesota artist and memorabilia hoarder Bill Mack, the original "Hollywoodland" sign, erected in 1923 and replaced in 1978, might have ended up a pile of scrap metal in a junkyard somewhere.

Mack tells LA Weekly that he purchased the 45-foot by 33-foot sign from a mysterious collector...

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Courtesy of Stephen Zeigler

This sign went up in protest of the buff.

Man One and Vyal -- two of L.A.'s most respected graffiti artists -- got a slap in the face yesterday in exchange for beautifying a tagged-up brick wall downtown.

Last week, with the permission of Sun Buster Inc., a sunglasses shop at Winston and Los Angeles Street, the OG writers spent two days collaborating on a piece that ran down the side of the Sun Buster building. According to Vyal, the business owner said the mural was attracting new customers, and "everyone in the community loved it."

Everyone, that is, but a city worker with a bucket of paint and a power washer:

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@mannycastronow

So the Chick-fil-A graffiti artist turned out to be Manny Castro, the self-proclaimed "Robin Hood of street art."

After "Tastes Like Hate" was found artfully rendered on the side of a Torrance Chick-fil-A last week, Castro came forward via the Huffington Post to take credit.

So far, however, cops, who told us Friday they were investigating the art as a vandalism crime ...

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Nancy Rosenblum

"Mama Rosa"

On Saturday, July 28, ONE National Gay & Lesbian Archives will have an opening reception in West Hollywood for a new exhibit, Latent Images. It features the contemporary photography of Leah DeVun along with images from ONE's vast collection of gay and lesbian art.

The exhibit connects queer culture from the past with today's. Other featured artists are Nancy Rosenblum, Miles Everett, and David Greene. The above photo was taken by Rosenblum in 1979.

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