Round-Up: Genius Alison Bechdel, L.A. expansionism, artist dating app

The MacArthur Foundation names this year’s crop of geniuses, L.A. may get a bit bigger, crowds rush to the Corcoran before closure, the urban planning mess that is New York’s World Trade Center site and artist-designed dating apps. It’s all in the Round-Up:

— Let’s start with the good news: The MacArthur “genius” grants have been announced. Very excited to see Alison Bechdel, the author behind the deeply psychological memoir “Fun Home,” on the list (she’s the second graphic novelist to win the award), as well as social practice artist Rick Lowe, whose Project Row Houses in Houston have shown that art has the power to change lives as well as entire neighborhoods.

— Now onto the hard stuff: A painting in the holdings of the Gustav Klimt Foundation is declared Nazi loot.

— Plus, attendance at Washington’s Corcoran Gallery quadruples as closure looms.

— L.A. may add 40 acres, a stretch of weed-filled vacant lots alongside the Jordan Downs Housing Projects in South L.A. (LAist)

— Architecture critic Mark Lamster’s writings about Dallas and its freeway addiction are essential reading, even more so if you live among a sea of them. (I’m lookin’ at you L.A.)

— Plus, more reports from the annals of urbanism. Jason Farago of the Guardian nails the planning disaster that is the World Trade Center site in downtown Manhattan: “From the start, the new World Trade Center could not be a living place that also memorialised the dead. It had to make their deaths visible at demagogic scale, 180 feet square times two.” (Seriously, read every word of this story.)

— Related: design writer Karrie Jacobs offers her own smart take on the whole WTC mess in Fast Company.

— New rule: Don’t shine any light on the Metropolitan Museum of Art when David H. Koch is in town or you will be totally detained.

— Speaking of the 1% … Art Basel, the blingiest of the world’s art fairs, has established an initiative to support crowd funding of nonprofit arts instititutions. And Art F City isn’t buying it. They are right. Art Basel should just set up a philanthropic arm and put its vast piles of money where its mouth is.

— On to the fun stuff: Siren, an artist-designed dating app with elements of sculpture, performance art and social experimentation.

— Kriston Capps has a delightfully cranky piece about why the giant floating rubber duck art installation sucks. Co-sign.

— A remarkable story about Hugh Mangum, a late 19th century portrait photographer in the American South who showed just as much care and respect in creating images of his black clients as he did with his white subjects.

— “Hahaha…Is the Pope Catholic?” And other answers to the question on whether the art world is biased against women. (This list, incidentally, desperately needed to include L.A. gallerist Susanne Vielmetter, who is so smart on this topic.)

— These days, even artist studios are super-sized: German sculptor/painter Anselm Kiefer has a 200-acre compound full of stuff. (Yes, 200 acres.)

— And because the art world doesn’t already suffer from questions of decadence: the next Performa festival gala will contain a “food performance” by Jennifer Rubell, who is known for doing stuff like nailing donuts to walls and taking over dilapidated houses to serve oatmeal.

— Artist Roxy Paine has created an entire TSA checkpoint out of wood. And it looks incredibly, wondrously weird.

— Throwback Wednesday: In the 1960s, California devised a plan to get water from Alaska. (P.S. My dad worked for Parsons at one point, the company that conceived the engineering on this brilliant idea.)

— The New Yorker has discovered Google Art Project, an online initiative that allows you to look at museums virtually.

— A series of photographs show Robert Smithson’s “Spiral Jetty” disappearing and once again re-emerging as the water of the Great Salt Lake rises and falls. This is geeky cool. (Zach Alan)

— And I leave you with a moment of McSweeney’s: A handy quiz to determine whether you’re ready to get that MFA in writing.

Find me on the Twitterz @cmonstah.