Bits: 06.22.09

Still from John Baldessari's 1971 film I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art via Wrong Distance

• The Big Picture looks at the continuing democracy protests in Iran, including a screen grab of the death of Neda Soltan, a protester shot in the heart. The video of her death is likely the most disturbing thing I've ever seen and for reasons too complicated for me to understand or explain.

• The Asian Art Museum, noting the Neda's name means "divine message, voice, or calling" in Farsi, offers a quiet homage to the fallen Iranian woman, likening a c.1100 mother-and-child vase in the museum's collection to Michelangelo’s Rondanini Pieta. "Somewhere in Iran, a mother is also grieving for her child."

• Chicago Exhibition: Anne Elizabeth Moore's Dismantling the Corporate State, and Other Amusements at Columbia College Chicago, now through August 22 (via).

• LA Exhibition: Olga Koumoundouros: Demand Management, opening June 26 at REDCAT in LA. (See her reworked "terror" installation here.)

• NYC Exhibition: Red Lines Housing Crisis Learning Center, "a large-scale installation that explores how we finance our living environments," at the Queens Museum, now through Sept. 27.

• Following up La Machine's giant arachnids and Royal de Luxe's massive marionettes, here's Estuaire 2009, featuring, among other spectacles, a gigantic walking deep-sea diver.