Bits: 03.15.11

Ocupeacidade, Projecto Kombi, São Paulo, 2009

• In 2009, the Brazilian art collective Ocupeacidade created a life-sized VW bus from paper and then "brought the van into the streets of their city, moving it as it were a car from the Flintstones, just with their feet. They executed this performance in order to raise awareness regarding environmental topics and to make people critically consider traffic and car-based transport culture."

• A visibly saddened but optimistic Yoko Ono spoke of the Japan earthquake: "With a big challenge I’m sure that some big, big beautiful result will happen." Here's her Mar. 11 message to her "dear people of Japan."

• Deborah Clearwaters, education director at the Asian Art Museum San Francisco, blogs about the museum wrestling with how to talk with visitors about the earthquake and tsunami.

• Tons of artists and designers are making work to fundraise for Japan relief, including Minneapolis' Erik Brandt. The Imprint blog runs down some, while Osocio offers a series of posts.

• Julian Schnabel's Miral (trailer) -- which screens this Friday night at the Walker Art Center, with an introduction by Schnabel himself -- screened at the United Nations in New York last night despite efforts by the American Jewish Committee to shut it down. Harvey Weinstein, the Jewish-American producer and distributor for the film, countered criticisms: “The simple answer is if you don’t tell the story from both sides, you will never understand…I know you’re not supposed to be political, but you can’t exist in this world if you aren’t.” Said Schnabel when the film -- about an orphaned Palestinian girl growing up in the aftermath of the first Arab-Israeli war -- debuted at Venice: "Coming from my background, as an American Jewish person whose mother was president of Hadassah [the Women's Zionist Organisation of America] in 1948, I figured I was a pretty good person to try to tell the story of the other side."

• Meanwhile, the British Committee for Universities of Palestine is urging Joel and Ethan Coen to refuse acceptance of the $1 million Dan David Prize, which will be awarded in Tel Aviv at a May 15 presentation attended by Israeli president Shimon Peres.

• Museum 2.0's Nina Simon on why Welcome to Pine Point, by my former Adbusters cohorts Paul Shoebridge and Mike Simons (aka The Goggles), is "the best multimedia history project I've ever seen."

• The pro-union demonstrations in Madison, Wis., are so historic the Smithsonian has sent a curator to document the posters and placards in use. Brooklyn Street Art looks at some of this art.

• Trailer: Alper Cagatay and Christopher Thompson's How to Sell a Banksy.

• A group of artists takes over a billboard in LA, replacing all the ad's text with the group's name, Desire Obtain Cherish.

• Your moment of Turkish hair museum.