This day may have been inevitable, but now it’s finally here. In its attempt to take over the world -- or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world -- Amazon is launching an art gallery.

There aren’t many available details yet about the endeavor, but an email announcement for an informational event was forwarded to Hyperallergic. It reads:

This summer, Amazon is planning to launch a Fine Art Gallery where customers will be able to purchase original artwork offered by a select group of invited galleries via Amazon.com. You are cordially invited to a special event in New York where we will introduce the Amazon Art marketplace to New York galleries … We have received overwhelming support from the galleries that have already joined the platform, and we would love the opportunity to offer your gallery’s selection in the Amazon Art store.

We reached out to Amazon for more information, but a public relations representative at the company replied, “We’re not able to comment at this time but stay tuned.”

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A few months ago, on a February evening in Grand Central, Brooklyn-based artist Enrico Miguel Thomas carried his drawing board a few paces away from where he had been set up, illustrating from a counter  — leaving behind a bag full of markers and a folded-up easel. After a brief moment of gathering the necessary detail on his subject, a process he characterizes as having taken no longer than five minutes, he turned to find a swarm of police officers gathering near his bags, which were less than ten feet away. After approaching the officers, claiming the bags, and identifying himself as an artist, the MTA police insisted on “clearing” his property with a K-9 bomb-sniffing dog.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Pollution and health have been on the Chinese mind as of late. From dead pigs in Shanghai to tips for avoiding bad air in Beijing, a clean environment can be difficult to find. Smog and water pollution have become a feature of China’s urban landscape, creating a hazard not just for Chinese citizens but people all over the world.

Traditional Chinese ink paintings are often known as shanshui, or mountain and water. Unfortunately, much of China’s water is no longer drinkable, and its mountains are difficult to find behind the smog. It’s a topic ripe for creative exploration.

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While staggering auction record peaks were summited this week by some talented human artists, a more amateur representative of an underrepresented artist species is expected to gain some auction attention of his own. Photographs by Mikki the chimpanzee that show blurry views of Moscow are estimated to fetch between $75,000 and 100,000 at Sotheby’s.

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André Malraux, the prolific French critic and Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, once wrote that art is an “anti-destin,” a revolt against destiny. And by that measure, the country’s recently-released report calling for a tax on internet-connected devices to fund cultural production qualifies simultaneously as artless and a work of art in itself. The generally well-intentioned document, authored by Pierre Lescure, a special advisor on France’s “exception culturelle” doctrine, was presented to President François Hollande on Monday, and Le Monde reported that it marks a departure from the aggressive copyright-protection tactics previously favored by Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative government.

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During the recent restoration of Pinturicchio‘s Resurrection fresco (1494) on the wall of the Hall of Mysteries in the Borgia Apartment at the Vatican has revealed what may be the first images of Native Americans in European art. Vatican Museums Director Antonio Paolucci believes a detail in the artwork refers to the natives of the American continent that explorer Christopher Columbus encountered when he travelled to the New World for the first time.

”Just behind the Resurrection, behind a soldier who is enthralled by the incredible event he is seeing, you are able to discern nude men wearing feathers who appear to be dancing,” Paolucci said.

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“Wilt thou not chase the white whale! Art not game for Moby Dick?” And as Captain Ahab demanded this of chief mate Starbuck in Herman Melville’s 1851 novel Moby-Dick; or, The Whale, so you are asked to go on your own treacherous whaling adventure in Moby Dick, or, The Card Game.

If you’re already panicking about the lack of proper punctuation in the table top game’s title, don’t worry, a great effort is being made by the game designers and artists to instill the game with the true spirit of Melville’s novel. The title is actually meant as a tribute to the whale itself (unhyphenated in name), and aboard the Pequod of the game, you, too, hunt whales. Currently in the midst of a Kickstarter fundraiser, the project from NYC-based games company King Post will include all of the action in Melville’s sprawling novel (presumably with the condensing of some of his denser writings on whale structure and knot tying techniques). The visuals were majorly influenced by the Barry Moser woodcuts in the Arion Press edition of Moby-Dick from 1979, an edition of which there were only 250 copies (there is also a trade version which this author owns and highly recommends), as well as ephemera of Melville’s own time.

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OAK PARK, Illinois — You’re driving to a suburb that you don’t know well, and you whip out your iPhone to quickly punch an address into Google Maps. In this case, that address is 704 Highland Avenue, home of Sabina Ott and John Paulett, who run Terrain Exhibitions, a once-a-month-ish, home-turned-cozy gallery experience. Every artist who shows work here must wrap it around the concept of the artist-writer couple’s home.

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Three months ago I attended a discussion at Hunter College called “…towards meaning in a plural painting world.” The panel sought to examine today’s multiplicity of painting styles and determine if this is a positive or dilutive development for painting’s meaning as a whole. Last Wednesday, the Pratt Institute took on similar subject with a panel titled Painting Matters Now: a Conversation.

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A growing focus has been how to preserve these historical sites and objects, when no earthly country can own the land or space they are on. Leonard David with SPACE.com explored this emerging extraterrestrial preservation concentration this week, focusing on the gathering of several of its academic proponents at the annual Society for American Archaeology meeting that was held earlier this month in Honolulu. For example, Beth O’Leary of New Mexico State University elaborated on how to turn the site where the 1969 Apollo 11 lunar lander touched down into a protected national historic landmark, using funding from NASA. Joe Reynolds of Clemson University pointed out the similarities in preserving these types of sites to places like Antarctica, where groups like the Antarctic Heritage Trust oversee historical exploration bases and sites, while the land remains possessed through an international treaty.

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JR’s photo booth truck

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“It’s a national tragedy simply because there are not that many Frank Lloyd Wright design commissions left in America — and truly not that many in New York City,” Simeon Bankoff, the executive director of the Historic Districts Council in New York, explained over email. “There were three, now there are two. Frank Lloyd Wright is arguably America’s greatest architect — he’s definitely our country’s most famous one. Even given a question of the individual significance of the showroom within Wright’s extant oeuvre, it should not have been casually thrown away, but rather studied and discussed.”

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Tens of thousands of the visitors who mob the Louvre each day drawn by those sirens the slightly smiling Mona Lisa, the amputated beauty the Venus de Milo, and the windswept Winged Victory of Samothrace had their hopes dashed like ships against the rocks by a staff strike in response to pickpocketing. Adding to France’s storied history of disruptive strikes of questionable impact, the Paris museum was shut down Wednesday with a 200 member staff walkout, the AFP reports. Reportedly, there have been roving bands of pickpockets of up to 30 members strong, swaggering through the stately galleries, infiltrating the crowds that stop to balk at the priceless works of art, twirling mustaches no doubt as they eye the hapless tourists taking photos with iPads or rummaging through their purses jumbled with passports and multiple types of currency. These gangs even sometimes include children (taking advantage of the museum’s free admission for the young, like sly Oliver Twists).

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20-year-old artist Jennifer Pawluck was arrested Wednesday morning at 10:30am after posting a picture of anti-police street art on her Instagram feed a few days before.

“Many of my friends do not like the police,” Pawluck told the Huffington Post Québec in French. “I thought it would be funny to put the picture on Instagram. I do not even know who he is, Ian Lafrenière.”

Pawluck took the photo in the Hochelaga-Maisonneuve neighbourhood of Montreal, where she lives, and police arrived early yesterday with a warrant accusing her of uttering threats to the Montreal police spokesperson Ian Lafrenière.

The photo in question depicts a hand-drawn image of Ian Lafrenière with a gunshot wound to the head flanked by the words “Ian Lafrenière” and “ACAB” — a popular graffiti acronym that stands for “all cop[per]s are bastards.”

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PARIS — For a brief time, a former Catholic seminary on Paris’ classy Boulevard Raspail was overtaken with a psychoanalyst’s jubilee of art from self-taught creators who worked in secret or seclusion, in mental asylums or hospitals, or just from their own particular perspective of the world. The Museum of Everything is a traveling exhibition started by British filmmaker James Brett in 2009 that’s been widely successful in its unique curation of overlooked art, having now collaborated with the Tate Modern and the Missoni fashion house. Its Exhibition #1.1 popped up from October 2012 to March 2013 in the Saint-Germain space of the Chalet Society, a project of Marc-Oliver Wahler, the former director and chief curator of the Palais de Tokyo in Paris. I was lucky enough to catch it in its last days, and it was one of the most fascinating experiences I’ve had of viewing “outsider” art, as it’s usually classified, from the sheer overwhelming density of the work to the truly talented, and truly bizarre, artists corralled into one alternative arts space.

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PARIS — As I’ve been wandering the streets of Paris this week, one artist seems to be haunting my path with his dark and elegant street art. Fred le Chevalier, as he signs his work, has paste up drawings of red-lipped pale women posed with strange creatures like owls, large cats, and anthropomorphic suns. Each has its own identity while being immediately recognizable for their hand-drawn details and illustration style. And they’re prolific. I’ve come upon them all over the Marais, Bastille, and Montmartre neighborhoods, each work blending in with Paris’ own identity of beauty, but one that is often dark and strange, with its long twists of history winding through its alluring streets.

Paste ups by Fred le Chevalier

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