WHAT: “F*CK ART”

WHEN: Through January 21, 2013, Sunday – Thursday 10:00 a.m. – 8:00 p.m., Friday – Saturday 10:00 a.m. – 9:00 p.m.

WHERE: Museum of Sex, 233 5th Avenue, New York

WHY THIS SHOW MATTERS: Public art has had a long-standing relationship with the intimate lives of its creators. Roman graffiti is a prime example, wherein politics and cultural issues were addressed through various degrees of suggestive public scrawling, defining the society's stance on sexuality, identity, and public space. The Museum of Sex’s current exhibition seeks to do no less, curated by Emilie Baltz and Mark Snyder with chief advisors Meghan Coleman and Alex Tanaka (of the gallery Mighty Tanaka). They recruited 20 international street artists to set up shop on the third floor and make work about space and fornication.

The artists have ended up creating something that resembles an adult playground: a combination of more conventionally installed wall works and site-specific sculptures crafted specifically for the exhibition. Andrew H. Shirley and William Thomas Porter’s 14-foot “Fuck Bike #001” greets visitors at the entrance, a hybrid dildo and stationary bike contraption. That particular installion is complimented in the same room by another re-interpreted piece of technology, this one from Wonderpuss Octopus, titled “The Future Tools Collection,” which sex toys, turned into psychadelic objects via elaborate patterns of paint and glass beads.

The exhibition is not all whimsical sex toys, though — but it is in fact mostly fun and games. Miss Van’s soft and feminine female figure paintings are rococo-esque, while WOLFTITS’s painted floor mural depicting a fuzzy pink she-bear with multiple rows of exposed breasts isn’t exactly for kids. El Celso creates a fun riff on Tom Wesselman's classic "Great American Nude," while the great DICKCHICKEN returned from retirement to present a wheatpaste wallpaper called “Dreams of Childhood,” featuring a plethora of classic cartoon characters with the artist's signature penis motif sprouting from their heads.

To see work from the exhibition click the slide show. 

– Wifredo Lam Sets New Record at Sotheby's, But Rivera Bombs Big Time: The Cuban surrealist's 1944 canvas "Idolo" fetched $4.56 million at last night's Latin American sale at Sotheby's, more than doubling the artist's previous auction record. Lam's was among nine new artist records set at the sale, which achieved a total of $21.8 million, the house's highest-ever result for an evening sale of Latin American art. There was, however, one very big disappointment: The top lot, a painting by Diego Rivera expected to sell for up to $6 million, failed to find a buyer. [Reuters]

– Are Budget Cuts to Blame for Museum Thefts?: In the wake of high-profile art thefts in Britain, Greece, and elsewhere, experts are asking whether waves of budget and staff cuts have made museums more vulnerable to crime. Still others attribute the thefts — many of which target Chinese artifacts — to the flurry of publicity surrounding the demand and high prices for certain works. [BBC]

– Heat on Whitney Over Sotheby's Auction Grows: In the latest of a series of satirical pranks targeting the institution, the Whitney Museum of American Art was again hit this morning by activists issuing a fake press release in its name. This time, the object of the attack was the museum's rumored partnership with Sotheby's on a charity auction to raise money for its new headquarters. The popular blog Art Fag City has recently initiated a call to artists not to participate until Sotheby's resolves its grievances with its locked-out art handlers. [ITA]

– Street Artist and Alleged Brooklyn Bomber Freed: Takeshi Miyakawa, the Brooklyn-based designer and street artist whose playful guerrilla installations of glowing "I [Heart] NY" bags landed him in jail as a potential terrorist threat, has been released. After a several day stint at Riker's Island — unusual for suspected street artists, who are typically released within hours of their arrest — Miyakawa was set free yesterday afternoon. [Hyperallergic]

– Frieze Masters Exhibitor List Released: The inaugural outing of Frieze Masters, which will coincide with the ninth edition of the contemporary fair in London, has released a list of its 96 exhibitors. Looking to compete with the well-established Tefaf Maastricht, the list includes Old Master veterans Jean-Luc Baroni, Moretti Fine Art, Sam Fogg, and Ben Janssens, as well as a smaller selection of 20th-century art dealers. [TAN]

– Huntington Library Plans $2.5 Million Renovation: Next month Los Angeles's Huntington Library will close its main exhibition hall — where its displays of treasured books like a 15th century Gutenberg Bible and a First Folio of Shakespeare's plays from 1623 haven't changed in 25 years — for a major $2.5 million renovation. New touchscreen displays and an audio tour will add a digital component to the library's collection of nine million printed artifacts. [LAT]

– Zuma Portrait Defacers' Court Date Postponed: Barend la Grange and Louis Mabokela, the two men who painted over Brett Murray's controversial portrait of South African president Jacob Zuma with his genitals exposed at Johannesburg's Goodman Gallery have had their trial pushed back to June 28 — while the president and painter face off in court. "A high court must get involved for a painting?" asked la Grange. "It took me 15 seconds to get rid of the painting." [All Africa]

– Talk About an Expensive Installation: In order to safely place Henry Moore's seven-ton sculpture "Large Two Forms" (1966) inside Gagosian's Britannia Street gallery for its exhibition of the artist's monumental sculptures, a team of builders had to demolish an entire wall of the building. The wall will be rebuilt and then destroyed again during deinstallaton. [ARTINFO UK] 

– Depardieu Drops Million-Euro Miro: A 1969 painting by Joan Miro from the collection of the Frenchest of French actors, Gérard Depardieu, sold at a Christie's auction in Paris yesterday for €1,050,600 ($1.3 million). The colorful horizontal ink and gouache composition "The Lizard with Gold Feathers" sold to an American telephone bidder who beat out a Japanese collector bidding via the Christie's Live online service. [La Presse, Libération]

– Hong Kong Auctions Test Asian Luxury Goods Market: This week's sales at Christie's in Hong Kong include a slew of luxury goods, from a Qing dynasty vase to a treasure trove of wine, watches, and jewels, which the auction house estimates could fetch a total of up to $260 million despite slowing growth and China's increased regulation of imports. "From the number of hotel bookings and reservations for our dinners from Chinese," said Christie’s François Curiel, "it seems to be business as usual." [Bloomberg]

– Cherry and Martin Takes on T. Kelly Mason: The Los Angeles gallery Cherry and Martin announced yesterday that it now represents the L.A.-based artist T. Kelly Mason. Mason, whose "Jump" collaboration with Diana Thater was one of the standouts of the 2006 Whitney Biennial, will create a site-specific installation at the gallery's Art Basel Miami Beach booth in December before having a solo exhibition in the spring of next year. [Press Release]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Watch artist Rashaad Newsome perform at Feast Projects in Hong Kong. (To see our ARTINFO Questionnaire with Newsome, click here.)

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Although, make sure you don’t confuse it with ‘British wine’ – that’s a grape juice concentrate best left for cleaning brass. The English wine scene is small but growing. You can now find Sussex fizz in Buckingham Palace, while William and Kate are known...

It is hard to imagine that a discrete body of work by one of the 20th century’s most famous sculptors could go unseen and scarcely acknowledged for over 50 years. But a series of sculptures and jewelry that Alexander Calder made while traveling in India for three months has not been seen publicly since it was exhibited for three days in 1955, the year it was made — until now.

The vibrant, geometric works will go on view for the first time in the West at the exhibition “Calder in India” at London’s Ordovas, from May 31 through August 3. Over several years, gallery founder (and Gagosian aluma) Pilar Ordovas worked to track down 10 sculptures Calder made during and in anticipation of his time in India, all of which have since found homes in private collections.

“Even though the sculptures were shown twice — once privately and once publicly — there are no records of either of those exhibitions,” Ordovas said. “Trying to locate photographs of these works in their natural settings has been practically impossible.” The difficulty of tracking works that have been largely lost to art history, despite the prominence of their creator, illustrates just how differently museums and galleries approach their work today than they did 50 years ago. “I think the mentality of archiving for the future was different then than it is now. It seems unimaginable today that a major sculptor would have an exhibition in any country and it wouldn't be documented.”

Calder’s hosts in India, the textile-producing family the Sarabhais, frequently welcomed prominent artistic figures to their home in Ahmenabad, including Le Corbusier, Isamu Noguchi, John Cage, Charles Eames, and Merce Cunningham, among others. Calder accepted the family's invitation enthusiastically in 1954, writing in a letter that he was particularly intrigued by a kite-flying festival that took place every January in their hometown. 

Before he set off to travel around the country with his wife, Calder worked for several weeks in a studio on the family’s compound, creating mobiles and free standing sculptures in vibrant reds, bright whites, and deep blues. “Calder explored and traveled in the world,” Ordevas said. “He took his pliers, but nothing else, and adapted his working methods to work wherever he set up.”

Though the exhibition is non-selling (as are many at her gallery), it is particularly timely in light of Calder’s recent red-hot sales. An artist record was set for the sculptor earlier this month at Christie’s when “Lily of Force,” 1945, sold for $18.6 million, above a $12 million high estimate and nearly triple his previous record of $6.3 million.

Yesterday’s announcement at Cannes that the actor-director Mathieu Amalric will adapt Stendhal’s 1830 “Le Rouge et le Noir” (“The Red and the Black”) means that three of France’s greatest 19th-century novels are being made into new movies. The others are Gustave Flaubert’s “Madame Bovary” (1856), and Émile Zola’s “Thérèse Raquin” (1867). (Tom Hooper’s upcoming movie of “Les Misérables” technically can’t be added to this group since the source is not Victor Hugo’s five-volume 1862 novel but Claude-Michael Schönberg's 1985 stage musical.) Read the full post on Spotlight.

PARIS — Under the watchful eye of auctioneer François de Ricqlès, Christie's totaled €12.9 million ($16.5 million) during two sales in Paris this week: The Moch collection and another, unnamed private collection were auctioned off on Tuesday, while Wednesday saw the auction house's Impressionist and Modern sale. Works by Giacometti, Miró, and Renoir were among the top lots.

On Wednesday, the Impressionist and Modern sale totaled €9.4 million ($12.1 million; all prices include buyer's premium)."Pilastre," a lamppost by Alberto Giacometti, was made in 1936 but had never before been sold at auction. A European collector purchased the piece for €1.4 million ($1.8 million), after it zoomed past its €300,000-500,000 ($383,000-638,000) estimate. Joan Miró's 1969 work "Le Lézard aux Plumes d'Or" ("Lizard with Gold Feathers") was the object of a heated battle between a Japanese collector and an American collector, with the latter winning the piece over the telephone for €1.05 million ($1.3 million). The work was consigned to auction by the iconic French actor Gérard Depardieu.

Headlined by the Fernand and Jeanne Moch collection, which has been shown in many museums over the years, Tuesday's sale achieved €3.5 million ($4.4 million). The top lot was a charming 1895 work on paper in red chalk and charcoal by Renoir. Titled "Gabrielle et Jean," it depicts his son Jean Renoir, who would grown up to become a renowed filmmaker, with his nanny. Estimated at €200,000-300,000 ($256,000-384,000), it was bought by an Asian collector for €481,000 ($615,758). Another Renoir, "Femme Dans un Paysage à Cagnes" ("Woman in a Landscape in Cagnes"), bathed in the light of southern France where the painter resided for his health starting in 1903, went for €457,000 ($585,034).

Other jewels of the Moch collection included two Pointillist-style works by Camille Pissarro. "Paysanne Attaching son Soulier" ("Peasant Woman Putting on Her Shoe") sold for €433,000 ($554,310) to an American collector and "La Gardeuse d'Oies" ("The Goose Keeper"), a masterpiece on silk that dates to 1888, fetched €445,000 ($569,672). Marc Chagall's 1926 work "Le Ruisseau" ("The Stream") sold for €205,000 ($262,433), and a Bonnard landscape, "Paysage du Cannet," was acquired by the Bonnard Museum in a preemptive sale for €187,000 ($239,390). An oil painting by Matisse, "Paysage de Corse," which was painted in 1898 during his honeymoon in Corsica, missed the mark on its €180,000-250,000 ($230,000-320,000) estimate and went for €121,000 ($154,900).

Fernand Moch was an important textile merchant in the 1920s and helped to revive the textile industry in Reims after the Second World War. The Moch collection includes other iconic works that were not sold at auction, such as Claude Monet's "Rouen Cathedral" and "Charing Cross Bridge," as well as paintings by Paul Gauguin and major works by Vincent van Gogh, including the 1889 painting "Heure de Midi" ("Noon").

A version of this article appears on ARTINFO France.

It has been a whirlwind week for the Latin American art market, full of both new records and a few high-profile buy-ins. Newcomers in the first category include Matta, Wifredo Lam, Jesus Rafael Soto, Armando Reveron.

At Phillips de Pury on Monday evening, Brazilians had a good run, especially Neo-Concretist Hélio Oiticia. Two works from his "Metaesquema" series (1958), number 169 and 179, sold for $230,500 and $266,500, respectively. However, the auction as a whole suffered from a high buy-in rate. Overall, only 61 percent of lots sold, with a 66 percent sell-through rate by value. The top lot of the $3.5 million sale was Fernando Botero's white marble sculpture "Reclining Woman with Drapery" (2004), which hammered down at a respectable $722,500, in the mid-rnage of the $600,000-800,000 pre-sale estimate. The insanely popular Colombian artist, though accounting for the top two works in the sale, wasn't a hit across the board. With buyers likely put off by the incredibly recent date on "Lying Woman" (2009), the reclining nude sculpture in bronze failed to sell, despite its considerably lower estimate of $180,000-250,000.

The most successful sale of the week was at Christie's on Tuesday, where 222 lots fetched $27.7 million, with 74 percent sold by lot and 84 percent by value. The star work was a 1944 abstract painting by Chilean modernist Matta, which had never before been sent to auction. "La révolte des contraires" was touted by department head Virgilio Garza as "one of the best [Mattas] that has ever been offered" in an interview with ARTINFO prior to the sale. Estimated at $1.8-2.5 million, it was sold for just over $5 million — a record for the artist and the third-highest price for a work in the Latin American category. Records were also set for the work of Brazilian artist Candido Portinari, Argentinian Emilio Pettoruti, and Venezuelan Carlos Cruz-Diez, showing a pan-national enthusiasm for Latin American artists, and particularly Latin American art from the modern period. All works that set records at Christie's were more than 45 years old — most were painted in the 1940s, and the latest, Cruz-Diez's "Physichromie 164," was completed in 1965.

Wednesday at Sotheby's was a mixed bag in that the $21.8 million sale was the highest result ever in the category for the auction house, but was dragged down slightly by a high-profile buy-in of a rare Diego Rivera painting. Overall it was 82 percent sold by lot, but only 73 percent by value. Cuban Surrealist Lam's 1944 "Ídalo" canvas brought $4.6 million from a South American buyer (est. $2-3 million), a record for the artist at auction. But bidding for the much-hyped Rivera cover lot, "Niña en Azul y Blanco" (1939), stalled at $3.7 million. It wasn't enough to break the reserve (minimum price the seller will accept) on the estimated $4-6 million painting. However, according to Reuters, several Latin American buyers stepped up after the sale, hoping to score a private deal for the work.

To see more works from this week's Latin American auctions, click the slide show.

When Steve Reich walked into the giant marble ballroom at Capitale for the Kitchen’s annual spring gala, the dim interior of the old bank building was cheered only by twinkling little screens set at each dinner table. As we approached, walking next to the guest of honor, we could better make out these electronic rectangles through the tie-clad crowd. But we weren't sure what they were until we sat down. They were iPads, three or four to a table, and they were all synced to play performances of works by Steve Reich and the other honoree, video artist Joan Jonas.

Reich’s works make good dinner companions: The endless repetition inherent in his work struck us as a fine analog to gala season, with its the non-stop parade of finger food and little forks.

“I’m working on a piece now called ‘Radio Rewrite,’ which is a rewrite in my own terms of two songs from Radiohead: ‘Everything Is In Its Right Place’ and the other one is from the ‘In Rainbows’ album, ‘Jigsaw Falling Into Place,’” the composer told ARTINFO. “You may or may not recognize the tunes in my pieces, you sort of encounter them now and then and then they’ll disappear. It’s my piece.”

He went on about his friendship with Radiohead guitarist Johnny Greenwood, and walked off to his table. He was about to be introduced.

“One day, Steve walked into my office and said, ‘I’ve heard you don’t like minimalism,’” Nonesuch Records President Bob Hurwitz said, standing on stage. “And then he said, ‘Well, neither do I!’” Hurwitz went on to compare Reich to Beethoven (not a minimalist), and invited him up.

“Steve will never stand there alone when his musicians are onstage, so this is rare,” Hurwitz said.

We stayed for Jonas’ speech and the spirited performance by David Cossin of Bang on a Can, but there was still time before the afterparty, so we decided to stop by the Lincoln Center Institute Junior Spring Benefit, just up the street at the Bowery Hotel. Young members of the board — budding socialites in Diane Von Furstenberg dresses or power ties, all smiles and handshakes — milled about with cocktails or smoked on the patio. Others paid respects to this scene's queen bee Zoe Kazan, the actress and Hollywood royalty who’s dating Paul Dano.

Soon we left the young and moneyed set to amble back down the Bowery to Capitale, and when we arrived the old patrons of the Kitchen had been replaced by its new ones. Twenty-something gallery assistants spilled out onto the steps, passing out cigarettes to their friends, and the place was packed with people dancing. Inside, James Murphy was DJing, so we stopped by to say hello.

“I just got over bronchitis, so you might want to wash that,” he said after giving us a handshake. “Use alcohol — the 1935 version of sterilizing!”

Then we clinked our vodka and sodas, which would not be the night’s last, for either of us.

“Hold on,” he said. “ I gotta change the record.”

Is fashion art? The age-old question returned to the spotlight last week when designer Karl Lagerfeld told the Telegraph, “I am against museums and exhibitions in fashion. One woman said to me — ‘In my world, the world of art’ — so I said: ‘Oh, don’t you make dresses anymore?’ A thin smile and then: ‘If you call yourself an artist, then you are second-rate.’”

With fashion becoming the focus of an increasing number of museum exhibitions and a multitude of artists now collaborating with luxury labels, the distinct line that once separated fashion and art is more blurred. A handful of notable designers throughout history have stated unequivocally that fashion is art, but the topic continues to be debated and designers, as well as art and fashion historians, remain divided. The question is even the focus of an imaginary dialogue between Miuccia Prada and Elsa Schiaparelli in the current Met exhibition “Schiaparelli & Prada: Impossible Conversations.”

Schiaparelli: You know, Miuccia, I've always felt, and after talking to you I'm even more sure: fashion is art.

Prada: I always said, for me, fashion is not art.

ES: Oh, of course it is! That's why I collaborated with these other artists — the greatest thrill of my career, oh my God, the things I did with Dali! Lobster dresses, skeleton dresses, shoe hats, desk suits…

MP: I was taught, and I agree, that your collaboration with Dali and other artists of your time was the only real relevant experiment that really was meaningful. It was not a joke, it was a serious moment when serious minds were collaborating.

ES: If I don't say so myself, it was revolutionary. You should try, Miuccia.

MP: Today everything is so contrived and anything you do is under observation. So in a way, there is not even the same freedom to work with artists because immediately you think about what the comments will be. ‘Ah, yes, art and fashion…’ So I avoid that subject completely.

ES: For me, if I hadn't been a designer, I would have liked to have been a sculptor. Coco even said of me that I was that designer who wanted to be an artist…

MP: Fashion is art, fashion is not art. But at the end, who cares?

There are several arguments that support the idea that fashion isn’t art. Fashion functions with the purpose of clothing the human body and protecting it from environmental elements. It serves as an aspect of commerce and is produced at regular intervals. At the hands of mass-market retailers like H&M and Macy’s, it merely becomes a commodity to sell and profit from. Art, on the other hand, while also commercial in some aspects, is less fleeting and is created at the whim of the artist.

Those who are on Prada and Lagerfeld’s side – who don’t think fashion is art – include Marc Jacobs, Comme des Garçons’s Rei Kawakubo, Coco Chanel, and Harper’s Bazaar editor-in-chief Glenda Bailey.

“I don’t think of fashion as being an art form,” Bailey told ARTINFO last fall. “I think sometimes it can look very artful, and we always want it to be creative, and we want it to be inspiring, and we want it to be desirable.”

“A lot of fashion designers deny that fashion is art,” Valerie Steele, fashion historian and director and chief curator of the Museum at the Fashion Institute of Technology, who regularly lectures on the topic of whether fashion is art, told ARTINFO. “Then that would make that very difficult for other people to announce that it is when you’ve got people at the caliber of Karl Lagerfeld and Miuccia Prada and Rei Kawakubo saying, ‘no it’s not art.’”

These varying points of view are worth consideration, but it may have been a bit impulsive for Lagerfeld to call fashion designers who consider themselves artists “second-rate.” In many ways, the Oxford Dictionary’s definition of art as “the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination, typically in a visual form such as painting or sculpture, producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power,” puts fashion in the same realm as art. Fashion, when executed at the hands of certain designers, like Rodarte’s Kate and Laura Mulleavy or the late Alexander McQueen, can be expression or application of human creative skill and imagination.

Those who agree with that notion are designers like Schiaparelli, the late Paul Poiret, who fancied himself an artist, Ralph Rucci, and John Varvatos.

Varvatos, who doesn’t think of himself as an artist, told ARTINFO: “If you’re creating and you’re new, and you’re pushing the envelope – I definitely think it’s a form of art.”

And then there are those who fall somewhere in between, like Yves Saint Laurent co-founder and partner Pierre Bergé, who doesn’t consider fashion to be art, but believes that some of the biggest names in the industry are artists.

“Fashion exists only when it’s worn by women,” Bergé told ARTINFO earlier this year. “Otherwise, it is nothing. It’s not an art. But Yves Saint Laurent was an artist, like Balenciaga was an artist. And Chanel, too. And Christian Dior, too. And Schiaparelli was an artist. Fashion is not an art.”

And what about the artists whose work has appeared in fashion, like Dali, who collaborated with Schiaparelli on her 1937 lobster dress, or Mondrian, who inspired Saint Laurent to create his 1965 day dress? Their contemporary counterparts include artist Takashi Murakami, who put his smiling flowers on Louis Vuitton handbags in 2003, and Liam Gillick, who placed his brightly-hued bold lines on knitwear for a capsule collection with Pringle of Scotland that debuted this spring.

“We didn’t attempt to merge anything,” Gillick told ARTINFO via email, when asked about his Pringle of Scotland collaboration. “I worked as an artist — curious about the production processes and semiotics of design. It was an encounter between two related species that recognize each other but shouldn’t really be allowed to produce too many offspring.”

Artist Olaf Breuning, who created a line of accessories with Bally of Switzerland that debuted last December during Art Basel Miami Beach, agrees that the two are separate. “Fashion is mostly commercial,” Breuning told ARTINFO via email. “For me it is a collaboration, just to expand my normal art activity.”

Adding to the debate, against Lagerfeld’s wishes, is the fact that fashion is increasingly making its way into art’s most sacred institution — the museum — with exhibitions like last year’s “Alexander McQueen: Savage Beauty” at the Met, the traveling “Yves Saint Laurent: The Retrospective,” and the roving “Fashion World of Jean Paul Gaultier: From the Sidewalk to the Catwalk” all attracting record-breaking crowds.

“It’s certainly contributing to the discourse about whether fashion is an art,” said Steele of the phenomenon. “The more you show fashion in art museums, the more there’s some kind of focus being made directly or indirectly on whether it’s art.”

While fashion has many believing it is an art, it still has a long way to go before it convinces both industries and the public at large of its place in the field.

“Traditionally everyone has accepted that certain kinds of cultural production are art, like Old Master paintings and classical music, and then gradually other things like film, and photography, and jazz started to be accepted, and now fashion is in this phase where it’s possibly transitioning into being considered art, but that transition is by no means fully accomplished yet,” said Steele.

While a definitive answer to the question may never be reached and the tug of war between both sides will certainly persist, perhaps it’s best to think of art and fashion as having a symbiotic relationship — two different entities that feed off of one another.

As Lagerfeld told the New York Times in 2008, “Art is art. Fashion is fashion. However, Andy Warhol proved that they can exist together.”

Author and designer Chip Kidd's first Batman comic, slated to hit stores on May 30, reveals its architecture-centric plot in its title: "Death by Design." "Gotham City is undergoing one of the most expansive construction booms in its history," reads the novel's synopsis. "The most prestigious architects from across the globe have buildings in various phases of completion all over town." Kidd sets the stage for a series of architectural catastrophes, inexplicable explosions and collapses that send chairman of Gotham's Landmarks Commission Bruce Wayne sprinting for his cape and armor.

Kidd is certainly not the first comic book author to profess an interest in architecture. A more recent issue of Daredevil finds its titular hero perched beneath New York's High Line, while the Avengers Mansion, home to "Earth's Mightiest Heroes," is evidently inspired by the one-block-wide stone mansion that houses The Frick Collection. But Kidd's Batman novel sources its twists and turns directly from the real Gotham's built landscape: "I started thinking about living and working in New York, and one of the great tragedies was the destruction of the original Pennsylvania Station in 1963, because it was a beautiful building needlessly torn down," he told iO9. "And there were these Manhattan crane collapses in the spring of 2008. I thought, 'How could these two things possibly be related?' Batman is very much about architecture, as he uses the buildings as transportation and defense."

In Kidd's comic, architecture becomes both ally and damsel in distress. Readers will find the Caped Crusader struggling to save Wayne Central Station, which has been callously marked for demolition while the graphic novel's token femme, Cyndia Cyrl, spearheads an appeal for its preservation. Meanwhile, Batman’s latest nemesis, Exacto, is "a Batman villain as architectural critic," joked Kidd. His ominous warnings about structurally unsound buildings mysteriously always precede their collapse. Is Gotham plagued with corruption, foul play, or just flawed construction? The city is left to sort through the rubble, while Batman swoops in to investigate, navigating a landscape of jagged skyscrapers and crooked developers.

In tandem with Kidd's plot, illustrator Dave Taylor gives a strong nod to architecture’s distinctive visual culture, referencing architect Hugh Ferriss's charcoaled visions of Manhattan and sets from Fritz Lang's "Metropolis" in his panels. After a sneak peek of the book, Comics Alliance writer Andy Khouri describes an especially impressive double-page spread depicting a magnificent glass-floored nightclub suspended in the space between four skyscrapers. Taylor's conspicuous architectural references conjure a dated but timeless "metropolis of tomorrow" and portray the city of Gotham as nothing less than sublime.

As both Kidd and Taylor illustrate so well, a city in the midst of a building boom is an ideal setting for a superhero saga. A rising metropolis is witness to the clashing egos of architects, the profit-hungry schemes of developers, and the oft-ignored appeals of the community. Citizens can do little but watch as the future is being built (or demolished) before their very eyes. It seems that in these times, only a caped superhero can deliver justice.

Click the slide show to see pages from "Batman: Death by Design."

Before Alyson Shotz knew she wanted to be an artist, she wanted to be a scientist. She recalls being bowled over by the concept of black holes in her freshman year physics course at the University of Colorado, Boulder. “It was the bending of space and time, the fact that without space, there is no time... but then there’s another strain of thought that says time is happening all at once,” she says, her eyes lighting up. One change of majors and three decades later, her practice is still informed by a scientist’s wonderment and curiosity, from her affinity for chameleonic materials to her disruption of our assumptions about knowledge and the senses.

The artworks recently on display in Shotz’s exhibition “Geometry of Light” at the Espace Louis Vuitton in Tokyo attest as much. The luxury retailer’s towering glass cube gallery was dominated by the show’s namesake sculpture, a 50-foot-wide suspension featuring graduated disks of Fresnel lens strung on beaded stainless steel wire. The disks — made of the same kind of ridged plastic found in cheap drugstore magnifiers — shimmer on their strands and snatch glimpses of the surrounding skyline. In the daytime they suggest the roiling interior of a cloud in formation; at night they take on a weightier, opaque quality, like icicles caught in mid-melt. Shotz was delighted to learn that visitors would arrive and sit, watching as the sun crossed the sky, or return at different times of day.

It’s a neat trick for a stationary sculpture to engage viewers the way a film would, but that is just the kind of work in which the artist specializes. Shotz has built a reputation for absorbing, ethereal pieces that capitalize on natural phenomena to tweak perceptions of the surrounding environment. Often monumental in scale, they are as notable for their range of materials — glass, string, acrylic, aluminum, digital prints, and, recently, animation — as they are for their thematic consistency. Shotz, who spent most of her childhood west of the Mississippi River, has a special reverence for the geological miracles of the American West. “Nature is such a big part of what I do,” she says. “I believe strongly that the physical world has a lot to teach us. There are things that I see happen when I’m working with a material that tell me something about gravity, space, force. I’m interested in showing that idea through the artwork.”

Shotz is reprising elements from “Geometry of Light” at the Indianapolis Museum of Art, where the main sculpture has taken over the enormous lobby until January 6, 2013. It is paired with a dual-channel video animation, "Fluid State," 2011, based on the movements of a mesmerizing sea of silver beads and set to a commissioned soundtrack by British electronic musician Simon Fisher Turner, a self-described “one-man sound clash between La Monte Young and Iggy Pop” who has scored feature films for Derek Jarman.

Shotz’s studio of eight years in the Red Hook section of Brooklyn, not far from the waterfront, is surprisingly small, considering that some of her best-known artworks — such as the clever "Mirror Fence," 2003, a picket fence fronted with highly polished aluminum that both reflects and blends into the grass that surrounds it, and "The Shape of Space," 2004, a monumental patchwork wall of 18,000 Fresnel lenses that anchored a 2007 group exhibition at New York’s Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum — stretch to 130 feet or more. These she often creates in pieces, assembling them on-site and adapting them as she goes; their DNA is evident in the smaller-scale artworks in the studio, which are instantly familiar though I’ve never seen them. Shotz is inclined to work in series, with slight variations, and her oeuvre can be loosely grouped into three types: intricate, process-intensive, handmade pieces; shiny minimalist sculptures in acrylic or steel that she executes with fabricators; and abstract photographs or digital designs based on photographs.

A kind of cross-fertilization informs the towering inkjet prints on vinyl that she has been experimenting with in the past few years. Cherry-picking snippets of flowers, trees, water droplets, antennae, and webs from her own photographs and sculptures, she digitally combines the elements into trippy, squirming compositions evocative of CAT scans set against black grounds. “I think of the digital photos as imaginary structures that live in a world without physical laws,” she says. “Large things can become small and small things become large; organic things sprout from inorganic things.” And, she adds, the density of the image compels people to keep looking.

Clad in jeans and clogs that reveal bright pink socks, the artist is thoughtful in describing her process. When embarking on a new idea, Shotz explains, “I look for materials that serve a particular idea or behavior. Many times I just begin to work, modifying as I go. Because much of my sculpture is created in unison with light and gravity, conceiving it as a drawing or on the computer doesn’t always work as a way of starting out.” She rifles the iridescent black strands of a work in progress that hangs from the ceiling like the splayed guts of a fiber-optic cable. The suspended sheaf of steel wire threaded with tiny glass beads reminds me a bit of her 2009 installation "Equilibrium," at Derek Eller Gallery, in New York, whose concentric curtains of silver-beaded piano wire took on jellyfish-like shapes and movements from their own weight. A similar piece, "Wave Equation," was featured the following year at the Nasher Sculpture Center, in Dallas.

A kind of motion is nearly always present in Shotz’s works, even in the highly reflective surfaces of her stationary sculptures and wall pieces. She gestures to a new wall piece in undulating dichroic acrylic, a colorless film that can be applied to Plexiglas or metal and refracts light in the same way that oil on water does, producing a rainbow effect. She started working with the material in 2007, pleased to find a medium that physically encapsulated the mutability that she had been trying to harness with her transparent and mirrored pieces. The light-bending dichroic is likely to figure in her MTA Arts for Transit project for the elevated Smith–9th Street station in Brooklyn when it reopens later this year. “I really like an element of changeability,” she says, comparing the ideal experience of her work to “being caught up in a weather event.”

Shotz’s accessible blend of phenomenology and aesthetics has won her many plaudits. Her work is represented in the Whitney Museum of American Art and the Guggenheim Museum in New York, the Hirshhorn Museum in Washington, D.C., the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. She has been awarded Pollock-Krasner Foundation grants in 1999 and 2010, a Saint Gaudens Memorial Fellowship in 2007, an artist-in-residence stint at the Yale University Art Gallery in 2005–06, and, currently, an appointment as the visiting artist at Stanford University’s Department of Chemical and Systems Biology, which has commissioned a permanent piece.

Born in Glendale, Arizona, Shotz had a peripatetic childhood as the daughter of an Air Force pilot and a teacher, and recreational artmaking was one of her few constants. Long interested in science, too, she entered the University of Colorado and gravitated toward glaciology — “I was fascinated by the patterns determined by soil and ice” — but found herself more at home in the art department. Halfway through, she applied to art school, enrolling at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1984. She studied painting but was exploring photography and sculpture by the time she earned her BFA, in 1987. Returning to the West Coast for graduate school at the University of Washington, in Seattle, “I was all over the place,” she recalls. “I was officially a painter, but I was making photographs, digital images, small sculptures.” Although such interdisciplinary investigation was “frowned upon” at the time, she earned an MFA in 1991.

Shotz doesn’t paint today (“I never rule anything out for the future”), but a lingering interest in the relationship between figure and ground is evident in her approach to objects in space. Her breakthrough came in 1996 with "Untitled (Reflective Mimicry)," a video she shot with a model clad in a full-body suit armored in small mirrors, groping her way through a wooded glen, camouflaged even as she seems to animate the surrounding leaves and snatches of sky. “I wanted to create a situation in which there was an optical continuum between the figure and the ground, which is what I’ve done in a number of projects, but it started here.”

The video’s connection to seminal works by Dan Graham or Nancy Holt and Robert Smithson is obvious now, but Shotz wasn’t thinking about those at the time. She came to the Conceptual art of the 1960s and ’70s relatively late in her studies, she says, and cites Smithson’s "Enantiomorphic Chambers" and Ana Mendieta’s “Silueta” series as influential to her development in grad school. “Now that I think about it,” she muses, “maybe this was an indication that I would become interested in a kind of displacement or shifting of the body in relationship to the space around it.”

Shotz is as interested in the physics of bodies or objects in space as she is in our experience of them. She gestures to a telling stack of reading material on her worktable: "A Topological Picture Book," "Ultimate Book of Knots," "Mathematical Origami," and "Pseudograph Associahedra." The latter, she explains, are essentially topographical shapes, the n-dimensional generalization of the pentagon. “You’re seeing things in action, in a way,” she says, casually mentioning the research of Williams College mathematics professor Satyan Devadoss, with whom she explored the lemniscate, or infinity symbol, in a dialogue that ran last year in Esopus magazine. “I think I like the fact that there’s this natural structure that looks so unnatural.”

She moves over to a far wall and shows me a new pair of “Thread Drawings,” which she’s been making since 2008. Composed of thousands of tiny pins wound with cotton string, their torqued shapes evoke the fluid motion of a plastic grocery bag riding a gentle breeze. The “Thread Drawings,” like her "Wave Equation" curtains of beaded wire, exemplify a strain of repetitious, crafted works that can seem at odds with her hard-edged sculptures, such as the “Transitional Objects” — freestanding puzzle-sculptures produced entirely with digital technology — that she began in 2010. But Shotz doesn’t make a distinction. “There’s a polished quality even in my handmade stuff,” she notes. Some critics have proposed a feminist reading of her work, seeing in its tendency toward more delicate materials and translucency an opposition to the kind of monumental art exemplified by Richard Serra’s “Torqued Ellipses.” Shotz shrugs off the idea. “I don’t view my work in gendered terms,” she says. “I do sometimes consider the integration of ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine,’ but I think of them as concepts and not qualities that are limited to one or another sex.” Likewise, she adds, “Nature and technology are interconnected. We are nature and we have created technology. Maybe technology is natural as well. In any case, there is something very interesting that happens in the liminal space between the two.”

Shotz is satisfied if her work can blur such binaries for the viewer. “Changing perceptions is one of the primary goals of being an artist,” she says. But it’s even better if her own hypotheses are disproved. “If I make a sculpture that surprises me, I’m very happy.”

To see more works by Alyson Shotz, click the slide show.

This article appears in the May issue of Art+Auction.

The radical arts collective Macao's brief occupation of the Palazzo Citterio in Milan came to a swift end early this week after local police raided the area. The police intervention occurred only days after Macao's members first set up in the Palazzo, having been evicted from Milan's Galfa Tower, the site of a now vacant Banca Popolare di Milano. 

Macao first occupied the tower on May 5, according to the Italian news site La Stampa, and the demonstration quickly grabbed national attention. "All of us strongly believe that the participative process we are living," members wrote in a press release, "finally represents the birth of a new perspective, that will allow us to create and re-think the concept of culture itself."

Over the years, left-leaning Italians have grown accustomed to expressing discontent through civil disobedience. Students of history vividly remember the "autnno caldo" (or "Hot Autumn") of 1969, when workers occupied the Fiat factory in Turin to protest conditions there. Since then, young people have frequently taken to occupying university buildings to express their grievances. Now, with social disquiet in Italy taking an increasingly tense turn in the wake of the international recession and the European sovereign debt crisis, artist groups like Macao are demonstrating a desire to be part of the conversation. (Occupations, of course, are not the only way Italians are displaying their discontent with the state of culture in their country: radical Italian museum director Antonio Manfredi made headlines with his controversial decision to burn works of art to protest cultural funding cuts across the country, while museum directors have protested their low salaries.)

On their Facebook page and in public statements, Macao's members lament chronic reductions in government funding for cultural industries, describing themselves as "precarious workers in the fields of artistic production," dedicated to "liberating" space in which artists can work and improving working conditions for Italians in creative fields. Last month, a like-minded artist group occupied the Garibaldi Theater in Palermo, Sicily, a space that has been out of use for more than a year. (In the process, they won the vocal support of the actress Franca Rame and her husband, the Nobel Prize-winning playwright and nobelist Dario Fo.) "We want the city council to take note of how they are governing theater spaces like these," an occupier told the news site il Fatto Cronaca. 

Similar demonstrations have since taken place at cultural institutions in Rome, Naples, and Venice. The demonstrators have united under the umbrella group Art Workers, a loose union of art collectives across Italy. "We denounce the political interference in arts management and the shameful public governance of culture," reads a statement on the group's Web site. "Issues like income and welfare need to be part of the critical debate within the visual arts field."

LONDON — Hot on the heels of its first New York outing, London’s Frieze Art Fair has just released the full list of exhibitors for 2012. The fair will take place, like every year, in Regent’s Park from October 11 through 14.

This 10th edition promises to be busier than ever. Besides the 170 exhibitors in the main part of the fair, Focus — a section dedicated to galleries established after 2001, first introduced at Frieze New York — will continue in London. Focus exhibitors are encouraged to present a curated booth displaying up to three artists. Newcomers for this edition include Algus Greenspon (New York), Chatterjee & Lal (Mumbai), and One And J. Gallery (Seoul).

The Frame section, devoted to solo presentations by galleries less than six years old, is curated this year by Rodrigo Moura and Tim Saltarelli. It will feature 21 galleries, 16 of which are appearing at the fair for the first time. Among them, Kolkota’s Experimenter will be presenting Bani Abidi, Paris’ Galerie Crèvecoeur will show Xavier Antin, and New York’s Ramiken Crucible will display works by Lucas Blalock.

A stone’s throw from the big tent, designed once again by architects Carmody Groarke, Frieze Masters will make its debut with 99 galleries presenting what fair co-director Amanda Sharp described as “pre-21st century art.”

Sharp and her partner Matthew Slotover are as confident as ever: “Having successfully launched Frieze New York in May, we’re now looking forward to our two UK fairs,” they stated. “Together Frieze London and Frieze Masters promise to make London in October one of the most anticipated moments in the international art world calendar.”

Participating Galleries 

303 Gallery, New York


Galería Juana de Aizpuru, Madrid


Galería Helga de Alvear, Madrid


Andersen’s Contemporary, Copenhagen


The Approach, London


Laura Bartlett Gallery, London


Galerie Catherine Bastide, Brussels


Galerie Guido W. Baudach, Berlin


Marianne Boesky Gallery, New York


Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, New York


Bortolami, New York


BQ, Berlin


The Breeder, Athens


Broadway 1602, New York


Gavin Brown’s enterprise, New York


Buchholz, Berlin


Cabinet, London


Campoli Presti, London


Canada, New York


Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne


Sadie Coles HQ, London


Contemporary Fine Arts, Berlin


Pilar Corrias Gallery, London


Corvi-Mora, London


Galerie Chantal Crousel, Paris


Thomas Dane Gallery, London


Massimo De Carlo, Milan


Elizabeth Dee, New York


Galerie Eigen + Art, Berlin


galerie frank elbaz, Paris


Konrad Fischer Galerie, Dusseldorf


Foksal Gallery Foundation, Warsaw


Galeria Fortes Vilaça, Sao Paulo


Marc Foxx, Los Angeles


Carl Freedman Gallery, London


Stephen Friedman Gallery, London


Frith Street Gallery, London


Gagosian Gallery, London


Annet Gelink Gallery, Amsterdam


A Gentil Carioca, Rio de Janeiro


Gerhardsen Gerner, Berlin


Greene Naftali, New York


greengrassi, London


Galerie Karin Guenther, Hamburg


Jack Hanley Gallery, New York


Hauser & Wirth, London


Herald St, London


Hotel, London


International Art Objects Galleries, Los Angeles


Taka Ishii Gallery, Tokyo


Alison Jacques Gallery, London


Galerie Martin Janda, Vienna


Johnen Galerie, Berlin


Annely Juda Fine Art, London


Casey Kaplan, New York


Georg Kargl Fine Arts, Vienna


Galleri Magnus Karlsson, Stockholm


Kerlin Gallery, Dublin


Anton Kern Gallery, New York


Galerie Peter Kilchmann, Zurich


Tina Kim Gallery, New York


David Kordansky Gallery, Los Angeles


Tomio Koyama Gallery, Tokyo


Andrew Kreps Gallery, New York


Galerie Krinzinger, Vienna


Kukje Gallery, Seoul


kurimanzutto, Mexico City


Yvon Lambert, Paris


Lehmann Maupin Gallery, New York


Lisson Gallery, London


Long March Space, Beijing


Kate MacGarry, London


Mai 36 Galerie, Zurich


Giò Marconi, Milan


Matthew Marks Gallery, New York


Mary Mary, Glasgow


Galerie Meyer Kainer, Vienna


Meyer Riegger, Berlin


Victoria Miro, London


Stuart Shave/Modern Art, London


The Modern Institute, Glasgow


Murray Guy, New York


Galleria Franco Noero, Turin


Galleria Lorcan O’Neill, Rome


Pace, London


Maureen Paley, London


Galerie Perrotin, Paris


Galerie Francesca Pia, Zurich


Galerija Gregor Podnar, Berlin


Galerie Eva Presenhuber, Zurich


Project 88, Mumbai


Rampa, Istanbul


Galleria Raucci/Santamaria, Naples


Almine Rech Gallery, Brussels


Anthony Reynolds Gallery, London


Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac, Paris


Andrea Rosen Gallery, New York


Salon 94, New York


Aurel Scheibler, Berlin


Esther Schipper, Berlin


Galerie Rüdiger Schöttle, Munich


Micky Schubert, Berlin


Sfeir-Semler, Beirut


Galeria Filomena Soares, Lisbon


Sommer Contemporary Art, Tel Aviv


Reena Spaulings Fine Art, New York


Sprüth Magers Berlin London, Berlin


Standard (Oslo), Oslo


Stevenson, Cape Town


Galeria Luisa Strina, Sao Paulo


Galerie Micheline Szwajcer, Antwerp


T293, Rome


Timothy Taylor Gallery, London


Team Gallery, New York


The Third Line, Dubai


Vermelho, Sao Paulo


Vilma Gold, London


Vitamin Creative Space, Guangzhou


Waddington Custot Galleries, London


Wallspace, New York


Galerie Barbara Weiss, Berlin


Michael Werner, New York


White Cube, London


Wien Lukatsch, Berlin


Max Wigram Gallery, London


Wilkinson, London


Alex Zachary Peter Currie, New York


Zeno X Gallery, Antwerp


David Zwirner, New York

Focus

Algus Greenspon, New York


Altman Siegel, San Francisco


Ancient & Modern, London


Jessica Bradley Art + Projects, Toronto


Casas Riegner, Bogota


Chatterjee & Lal, Mumbai


Chert, Berlin


dépendance, Brussels


Elastic Gallery, Malmo


Fonti, Naples


Hollybush Gardens, London


Karma International, Zurich


Kimmerich, New York


Andreiana Mihail Gallery, Bucharest


MOT International, London


Office Baroque Gallery, Antwerp


One And J. Gallery, Seoul


Galeria Plan B, Cluj


RaebervonStenglin, Zurich


Raster, Warsaw

Frame

47 Canal, New York: Josh Kline


Arcade, London: Anna Barham


The Box, Los Angeles: Sarah Conaway

Bureau, New York: Matt Hoyt


Carlos/Ishikawa, London: Ed Fornieles


La Central, Bogota: Carolina Caycedo


Galerie Crèvecoeur, Paris: Xavier Antin


Experimenter, Kolkata: Bani Abidi


Galerie Cinzia Friedlaender, Berlin: Jeronimo Voss


François Ghebaly Gallery, Los Angeles: Mike Kuchar


Kisterem, Budapest: István Csákány


Ignacio Liprandi Arte Contemporáneo, Buenos Aires: Magdalena Jitrik


Maisterravalbuena, Madrid: Maria Loboda


Mendes Wood, Sao Paulo: Adriano Costa


Galerie Mor Charpentier, Paris: Milena Bonilla


mother’s tankstation, Dublin: Kevin Cosgrove


Take Ninagawa, Tokyo: Yukiko Suto


NON, Istanbul: Günes

Terkol
Ramiken Crucible, New York: Lucas Blalock


Société, Berlin: Josh Kolbo


SVIT, Prague: Lukas Jasansky & Martin Polak

KIEV — The first Kiev Biennale opened on Wednesday evening — well, it was supposed to. By press conference time — pushed back from 11am to 4pm — droves of construction workers could still be seen traipsing in and out of the newly renovated Arsenale with scaffolding and electrical equipment.

For his introductory remarks to the exhibition — whose title “The Best of Times the Worst of Times” is taking on added notes of irony with every passing hour — a defeated and exhausted-sounding curator David Elliott began by apologizing to the participating artists and the visitors assembled from as far as New York and Tokyo. “It’s not the way I usually handle things,” he said.

Explaining the lack of organization he continued, “There are things that you can’t plan for: like having to install for 36 hours with minimal electricity and no light. In the Tate Modern or even the Louvre these things tend to cramp your style. Anyway, the body of the show is there.” Kind of. After having to push through security guards to get a look at the exhibition, the first hall — featuring sculptural installations like a series of Louise Bourgeois cells and Ai Weiwei’s “Zodiac Heads” — made Elliott’s supplications seem unnecessary.

However, about a third of the way through the first floor, passing by a trio of bubble-wrapped paintings on the floor, things started to go a bit haywire. Wall markers dropped to the floor and then disappeared altogether. More and more works weren’t hung. Projectors showed blue screens and dancing Samsung and Pioneer logos in place of video art.

Upstairs galleries were even more bleak. Where the first floor may have been 90 percent complete and 24 hours away from being ready for the public, on the upper level about a quarter of the pieces were not ready or not there at all. The organizers needed another 72 hours, at least. During a first circuit of the top floor, art handlers were still working with power drills, running extension cables, and tinkering with audio.

Most alarming yet was what couldn’t be seen. Hidden behind curtains were several rooms where work had been torn out, allegedly due to artists who had pulled their pieces because of this state of affairs. Most prominently, a massive stage for Bill Viola’s “The Raft” (2004) lay empty (it is unconfirmed whether the work was pulled or just not ready).

“It will be remembered (for those involved at least) as a truly dreadful experience,” Tanya Leighton Gallery director Robert Fitzpatrick told ARTINFO. There to assist Aleksandra Domanović with her video contribution to the biennale, he continued, “Major organizational oversights led to one of the most chaotic set-ups I have ever witnessed, with most of the artists, and even some gallerists (me included) having to step in to install their own works. We even had to help David Elliott unwrap several of the works (just hours before the VIP Preview).” Domanović’s piece was finally ready about halfway through the opening event.

One major factor said to be contributing to the chaos was that the Ukrainian government has not yet provided its half of the Biennale’s funding — the other half was provided by corporate sponsors and private individuals. Apparently, the government’s involvement came with the hopes of furthering their goal of joining the European Union. But because of the country's tenuous political situation and allegations of human rights violations against former president Yulia Tymoshenko, those chances look ever more slim — not unlike the Biennale’s.

To see photos of the Kiev Biennale still being installed, click on the slide show.