BRIDGEHAMPTON, New York — The car wound down the hilly entrance to the Sculpture Fields at Nova's Ark, the expansive art lawn in Bridgehampton, and stopped in front of the massive ArtHamptons tent, erected for the fifth consecutive year. The floor of the fair's lobby was splattered with paint — a recreation of the Springs, New York studio of Jackson Pollock, the artist whose work is the theme of this year's fair. 

"Are you from JP Morgan?" the woman at the desk asked.

This was a perplexing question to get at the front of an art fair, but upon entry, a quick walk to the plush VIP nook in the back confirmed that the bank was hosting a little happy hour at 2:00 in the afternoon. The space was littered with photos Pollock painting in his studio — always cigarette-in-mouth — alongside some of his sketches. Even the VIP tables had spatter-paint table cloths.

It's unclear whether the nametag-bearing bankers had stopped by the booths at ArtHamptons to snap up a piece or two, but many choice offerings were certainly there to be had. ArtHamptons boasts 3,000 works of art by 400 artists, represented by 77 galleries from around the world. There are Warhol Polaroids (at Danzinger), Michael Childers's pictures of Hollywood legends like Paul Newman and Dennis Hopper (Michael H. Lord gallery), Lisa Jack's famed pictures of president Barack Obama as a young man at Occidental College (Mark Borghi Fine Art), and a Cheech Marin-curated booth of works by his favorite Chicano artists (Thomas Paul Fine Art).

But the ghost of Jackson Pollock, whose house now stands as the lasting legacy of all painters who have worked in the Hamptons, loomed large. Art historian Gail Levin was on hand to discuss Pollock's wife — and painter in her own right — Lee Krasner, the subject of her latest book. Later on Friday, the highlight of the three-day fair was a celebration of the artist's 100th birthday.

Elsewhere, there was a panel moderated by artist Dan Rizzie entitled "The Last Taboo: The Nexus Between Money and Art." "Do you remember Tulipomania, in Holland?" Rizzie asked the crowd. "The price of a simple Tulip skyrocketed. There were people selling their house for a bulb. And then it went bust!" He was talking about the art market.

Among the living, Cheech Marin, who is being honored as Arts Patron of the Year, held court. Hamptons.com threw a birthday bash for the "Cheech & Chong" actor in the Polo Lounge, another posh corner of the tent. 

Meanwhile outside, a performance took place in which a male model and a female model — both covered head-to-toe in white paint, both naked from the waist up — stood in the front of a blank screen as a man with a bucket splattered yellow, blue, and red paint on them. That's right: Here, even people were canvasses for Jackson Pollock homages.

"It's very festive and very arty," Marin told ARTINFO, of the party and the performance. 

Did he consider getting up there himself?

"No, I'm chicken," he said. "I didn't want to get paint all over me. Plus, I've seen enough naked women in my life."

Around 4:20, a big chocolate cake came out, and instead of birthday candles stuck into the frosting, there were what appeared to be joints. This was not exactly a JP Morgan party.

Marin lit one.

"Make a wish!" someone yelled.

Swatting the smoke toward his face, Marin broke into a big smile. Perhaps that wish had already come true.

No doubt, nail art is seriously having a moment. But we're already at a point where certain patterns have become passé (accent finger anyone?). To keep your tips covered in fresh, fantastic looks, we've compiled Nail Art's New Wave, a collection of our...

Dutch photographer Rineke Dijkstra is perhaps best known for her breakthrough “Bathers” series, a collection of large-scale, full-length portraits of teenagers standing on beaches all over the world, poised on the precise line between surf and land. Displayed in solemn rows on the first floor of Dijkstra’s current Guggenheim retrospective, the classic photographs prove themselves worthy of their star status. The teenagers’ bodies are eloquent expressions of their emotional states, some attenuated and unsure like Mannerist Madonnas, others stock-solid and mountainous. They are all overwhelmingly larger than life, as sensitive and empathy-inspiring as the lanky Adam and Eve of Jan van Eyck’s Ghent altarpiece.

Rarer than the images is the story behind the exposed vulnerability of Dijkstra’s young bathers. While working as an editorial photographer on assignment, the artist got into a serious accident. Doctors warned her that if she didn’t exercise extensively she might lose the use of her legs, and so she took to swimming. One day after climbing exhausted out of the pool, she noticed that her eyes were rimmed with red, as if she had been crying. Dijkstra decided to turn that moment into a self-portrait, and the resulting image hangs on the Guggenheim’s gallery wall. A predecessor to her own Bathers, Dijkstra is seen standing against a geometric tiled wall, eyes staring straight ahead at the viewer, worn out yet ferociously self-possessed.

It was then that the photographer realized the power of shooting her subjects in moments of distress or suspension, times when the wall between the individual and society comes down and the soul is bared. The strategy pays off viscerally in Dijkstra’s series of portraits of new mothers shot just after birth. The women stand in the hallways of their homes (where Dutch women often give birth) cradling their newborns, faces communicating a captivating mix of shock and bemused joy. (One has a trickle of blood running down her leg — no one ever said soul baring would be clean). Across the first-floor gallery, young men grin wildly, collars tattered and skin scratched. They just completed the Spanish running of the bulls. 

Dijkstra’s passion for the human character is also on display in her longer term documentary projects, for which she has followed a soldier through the French foreign legion and a Bosnian refugee settling in Amsterdam over years of their respective lives. Still, the upper floors of the exhibition have a difficult time matching up to the pictographic clarity of the knockout first space, however. That is, until viewers are treated to Dijkstra’s recent video work.

A veteran of dance clubs, the photographer decided to take on the habitués of two Liverpool discotheques, the Krazyhouse and the Buzz Club. The resulting videos, in particular “The Krazyhouse (Megan, Simon, Nicky, Philip, Dee)” (2009), follow up on the intimate exposure of the earlier bathers. The four-channel piece shows four teenagers shot individually, each dancing against a white backdrop, the pounding music of the club filtering in through a wall. The dancing, removed from the context of a sweaty crowd and packed basement, is hypnotizing — the teenagers are at turns shy, pausing to smoke a cigarette or grin bashfully at Dijkstra’s camera, and lost in the moment, dancing without any regard for who might be watching.

We, of course, are the voyeurs caught spying on their moments of grace. Yet Dijkstra’s accomplishment is that she doesn’t sexualize, idealize, or exoticize what she captures. We don’t so much desire the subjects of the videos, who are normal-looking kids dressed up in ostentatious club gear or just jeans and a t-shirt, as desire to be them and take their place on the screen, to let ourselves similarly go. Dijkstra’s portraits, capturing as they do moments when the self is raw and open to the world, inspire a vertiginous desire to emulate and break down our own walls.

“Rineke Dijkstra: A Retrospective” runs at the Guggenheim museum through October 8. Click on the slide show for a tour of the exhibition. 

“Snow Piercer,” potentially one of the most intelligent and evocative comic-book movies coming our way, has completed principal photography in Prague.

Screen Daily reports that director Bong Joon-ho’s $39.2 million sci-fi thriller is South Korea’s costliest movie yet. Kang Je-gyu’s $24.5 million war movie “My Way” was previously the country’s most expensive film, writes Jean Noh.

The multi-language “Snow Piercer,” based on the French comic book series “Le Transperceneige,” stars Chris Evans (“Captain America”), the Korean star Song Kang-ho (from Bong’s 2006 “The Host”), Alison Pill, John Hurt, Tilda Swinton, Ed Harris, Octavia Spencer, Jamie Bell, and Ewen Bremner.

“Transperceneige” is set in what remains of Earth following a devastating world war and global glaciation. Nothing like the futuristic bullet train of Wong Kar-wai’s “2046,” the eponymous passenger train ploughs its way through a desert of snow and ice on a circular track.

The few survivors of the war exist on it in a class-divided microcosm of society. According to the Twitch website, which gleaned its information from an interview Bong gave Cine21, “while the poorest live in pathetic conditions, suffering the cold and hunger, those living in the ‘premium class’ lust, party and live like kings. The Transperceneige continues to travel in this vicious circle, but one day one of the ‘miserables,’ Proloff, decides to change the status quo, discovering all the secrets behind Earth’s last train.”

The three-volume “Le Transperceneige” (1984-2000) was originated by writer Jacques Lob (who died in 1990) and artist Alexis (died 1977) and completed by writer Benjamin Legrand and artist Jean-Marc Rochette. Bong met with Legrand to discuss the project and has been endorsed by Rochette.

"I remember it was around the end of 2004,” the director said in an interview published by the Yonhap News Agency in 2008. “ It was when I finished 'Memories of Murder' and was working on 'The Host.' I went to a comic book store near Hong-ik University. I go there once or twice a month when I am stressed out. 'Le Transperceneige' suddenly came into my sight, and I read the whole trilogy standing there. I could not wait until I got home to read.

"This train has enraptured me,” he continued. “I believe everyone has a fantasy about trains giving off chugs and puffs, and landscapes viewed from the window. What you can see from the window in this story, however, is only the world icebound, with minus 80 degrees outside. Survivors live in the train, but they can't stay in harmony even at a time of adversity.

“It's going to be tough work. I need to use a lot of visual effects and special effects. There is a lot to prepare. During making 'The Host,' I had such a hard time. I am not fond of making blockbuster movies. As for 'The Host,' it was inevitable, since we had to make the monster.

"Le Transperceneige is going to be much more spectacular with all the trains and frozen scenery,” Bong said. “But the spectacle is not what I really want to show. The mood and sentiment you can feel inside the train, the desperateness. The exterior should be only groundwork to show all that."

Two New York-based jewelry dealers have pleaded guilty for offering and selling illegal elephant ivory, Manhattan District Attorney Cyrus R. Vance, Jr. announced this week. In a public statement, Vance placed the retail value of the small sculptures, charms, pendants, and jewelry seized at $2 million, calling the pleas from defendants Mukesh Gupta and Johnson Jung-Chien Lu "a small, but important, step in protecting endangered and threatened elephant species." New York State law requires anyone attempting to sell ivory and ivory-based goods to obtain a license from the Department of Environmental Conservation and carry proof that the items were made or obtained before Asian and African elephants were placed on the endangered species list in the 1970s.

The case has drawn broad attention to the issue of illegal elephant poaching and ivory smuggling, a niche market that has expanded at a discouragingly fast rate in the past decade. A report by the Geneva-based Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species indicates that illegal killing of elephants has steadily been increasing since 2006, reaching its highest level last year since record-keeping began in 1989. Seeking to explain the trend, the report highlights an increasing demand in China and Japan, noting that the wholesale price paid by carvers and ivory processors for illegal raw ivory in China has risen 500 percent since 2002.

According to their plea agreements, Gupta, Lu, and their respective businesses will have to forfeit approximately a ton of ivory goods. This is in addition to a total of $55,000 they will have to pay to the Wildlife Conservation Society, an organization involved in combating the illegal ivory trade and protecting species frequently targeted by ivory poachers. “Poachers should not have a market in Manhattan,” District Attorney Vance said. “This is an international problem that requires local solutions. In order to curb the poaching of elephants in Africa and Asia, we need to curb the demand side of the illegal ivory trade right here at home."

Steven Klein’s provocative photography often takes something sinister or controversial — Tom Ford buffing a model’s bare bum, for instance — and turns it into an image so strikingly beautiful, one almost forgets about the bizarre circumstances of the photo.

Now through September 8, CWC Gallery in Berlin is hosting a show of the fashion photographer’s work, traveling through his massive portfolio.

A partial exploration of dominance, the 2006 “Valley of the Dolls” image of Ford mentioned above touches upon themes of eroticism and power with a cinema-like quality, as the designer plays an evil villain polishing the model to perfection. Another photo – from the much-talked-about 2005 “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”-themed W magazine editorial – portrays Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt lazing in bed with a gun (the shoot was based on the film in which the couple plays a husband-and-wife team of spies). In the 2002 image “X-static Pro=cess 03,” Madonna poses like a rag doll in fishnet stockings and tatters. In a haunting 2011 portrait, Kate Moss sits poised and veiled with black lace, like a Mafioso widow in confession.

While the images do have shock value, Klein’s work is more than sleazy celebrity photography — his talented eye and skillful composition keeps clients wanting more.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from the Steven Klein exhibition at CWC Gallery in Berlin through September 8.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news.

This is shaping up to be a pretty great year for New York City museum exhibitions. Visitors to the city have some great options to choose from, ranging from the Whitney’s Yayoi Kusama retrospective to the Museum of Modern Art’s Alighiero Boetti showcase. But when it opens on July 18, the New Museum’s new exhibition “Ghosts in the Machine” may just take top honors. The three-floor exhibition is a historically minded survey of humanity’s fractious relationship with technology, mixing mystical outsider artists from the early part of the 20th century with contemporary media makers.

From Francois Morellet’s randomized red and blue pixel patterned wallpaper decorating the lobby to Stan VanDerBeek’s epic “Movie-Drome” multimedia theater on the fourth floor, the exhibition is a dynamic testimony the impact of machinery on visual art. The show’s curators, Massimiliano Gioni and Gary Carrion-Murayari, have created a cabinet of curiosities that includes Utopia-seeking outsider artists from the 19th century, a Japanese collective of audio-visual poets, healing metal mobiles, and kinetic light sculptures.

Neither wholly optimistic nor pessimistic, “Ghosts in the Machine” casts a careful analytical eye on artists’ engagement with the technological avant garde over the past century. It might be best to just continue on to our slide show, however — in the words of Phillipe Parreno’s appropriated mannequin writing machine that makes an appearance at the museum, “What do you believe, your eyes or my words?”

Click on the slide show for a tour of the New Museum’s “Ghosts in the Machine” exhibition, and stay tuned for our review of the show.

Say what you will about Jeffrey Deitch’s L.A. MOCA: The guy knows how to put on a show. For the last few weeks, the MOCA Meltdown has been the best story in the land.

Ed Ruscha resigned on Monday from the institution’s board. That makes him the last of the artists on L.A. MOCA’s board to quit in disgust with its direction, following fellow L.A. icons John Baldessari, Barbara Kruger, and Catharine Opie. All this was seemingly touched off by the sudden dismissal — or “forced resignation,” or whatever you want to call it — at the end of June of well-liked curator Paul Schimmel, alongside a spate of other terminations, as well as months of rumors of continued financial strain at the storied institution and a variety of other high-level defections.

Let’s step back for a moment, though, and take a trip through time back to the hazy, barely remembered days of 2008, when the long-simmering budget woes of L.A. MOCA came shrieking into the open. The museum had been overspending for years, borrowing out of its endowment to cover operating expenses. Then the global financial crisis set in, and all hell broke loose. Eventually, director Jeremy Strick was out, and L.A.’s bigfoot art maven Eli Broad stepped in to save the museum.

Even more than Brandeis’s attempt to sell off its Rose Art Museum, the L.A. MOCA Crisis of 2008 was the emblematic art story to fit that particular moment of generalized economic turbulence. It had the elements you needed to resonate: backroom financial slight-of-hand, the suggestion that a beloved American institution had been living beyond its means, last-minute cobbled-together rescues.

Time moves on. In the general economy, as many pundits have pointed out, the true problems that caused the 2008 economic collapse were never really dealt with. Nothing was done, for instance, about the overbearing power of bankers and their gambling ways. Now you have the JPMorgan’s ever-expanding losses on unsupervised speculation, and the Barclays LIBOR-fixing scandal. Meet the new bankers, same as the old bankers.

At the same time, instead of actually learning the meaningful lessons of the crisis, the powers-that-be have used it to pursue ideological projects that really have nothing to do with the crisis at all. I’m thinking of the rage for cutting government spending, which has now sent several parts of the world — Greece, Spain — into Depression-style tailspins, and actually made the project of putting the world economy right more difficult in the long run.

What does this have to do with MOCA? As Christopher Knight and many others have commented, the Broad rescue now appears to be an example of pursuing a solution that has nothing to do with the problem, and is more of a pet ideological agenda of one man, Eli Broad. In 2008, the institution had a finances problem, not a curatorial problem. (In fact, one of the underreported aspects of the crisis is how savior Broad’s own outsized art ambitions had contributed to L.A. MOCA’s fundraising problems. The L.A. Times speculated at the time that MOCA’s impulse to overspend on programming may have come from the fact that it had a new rival for fundraising dollars in the flashy Broad-funded Broad Contemporary Art Museum at LACMA, and didn’t want to be seen as “retrenching.”)

Whatever the case, after engineering his rescue, Broad insisted on hiring New York dealer Jeffrey Deitch to replace Strick. Well, it turns out — by his own admission — Deitch is a better dealer than a fundraiser. He’s definitely put his stamp on the place in terms of programming, though, with his popular (though not unproblematic) street art blockbuster, and showy events like the gala where an increasingly out-of-touch Marina Abramovic served L.A.’s elite a meal of low-paid nude female dancers, with skeleton garnish. A promotional video MOCA put out to celebrate this controversial event had Abramovic cooing about the largesse of “industry,” “business,” and “banks.”

This kind of flashy stuff apparently pleases the Jeff Koons-loving Broad — he suggests as much in his recent Op-Ed defending his support of Deitch — though it also likely contributed to the friction that led Schimmel to part ways with his longtime employer. Broad writes that the last crisis made it clear to him that the institution needed a “populist” approach that would bring in the crowds, and so presumably draw donations. But here’s the thing: This is exactly the same logic that Strick was criticized for having pursued, the idea that L.A. MOCA could “grow out of its problems” through flashy shows, something one expert compared to hoping you’d win the lottery. Meet Eli Broad’s bold new plan for L.A. MOCA, same as the old plan for L.A. MOCA.

Tackling the wrong problem, meanwhile, has now demonstrably hurt L.A. MOCA’s chances of setting itself right in the long run. Charles Young, who served as interim chief when the institution was trying to return to health, emphasized in May to the L.A. Times that what was needed was for fundraising to approach a point where L.A. MOCA’s comeback became a “positive story” that could inspire further donations. This would then help vault it on towards an endowment level of $100 million that could be longterm sustainable. This has not happened, and is actually probably farther away than ever after all this bad press.

When Broad proposed his rescue offer in 2008, some board members were reported to be wary because, as the New York Times put it, the move would “put him in the position to control the museum or its collections if the museum is not able to complete its fundraising efforts.” Now he’s pretty much totally confirmed these worst fears — and indeed four trustees publicly rebelled, issuing an open letter attacking Jeffrey Deitch’s “celebrity-focused program.” Not exactly the “positive story” the museum needs.

Like Deitch, Jeremy Strick was apparently not up to the challenge of fundraising. But you know who stood up for him when he was shown the door? The same artists who now are distancing themselves from the institution as fast as they can, among them John Baldessari and Kruger, who said then, “Jeremy understands the absolute centrality of art and artists in a contemporary art museum, and I think that’s rare.” In her righteous letter of resignation with Opie, on the other hand, Kruger very clearly links the new atmosphere under Deitch-Broad with the speculative predations that have ravaged our economy, connecting the museum's present climate with “the morphing of the so-called ‘art world’ into the only speculative bubble still left floating (for the next 20 minutes).”

Last time it hit rough waters, fans actually mobilized and wore “SAVE MOCA” armbands. That probably won’t happen again. Distancing the museum from the people who are most likely to rally for it — art lovers — is a solution that has made the underlying problem more intractable. And in that sense the MOCA Meltdown once again looks like a pretty apt emblem for our crisis-plagued times.

Interventions is a column by ARTINFO executive editor Ben Davis. He can be reached at bdavis[at]artinfo.com.

In 2010, Patrick Page was about to leave for San Diego to appear in “The Madness of King George” and “King Lear” when he got a call from his agent, who said, “Don’t get on that plane — we got an offer for  ‘Spider-Man.’ ” Little did Page know that being cast in the dual role of  Norman Osborn/The Green Goblin would put him at the cynosure of the most controversial production in Broadway history, one that continues with both commercial success (the musical grossed $1.7 million last week) and bitter litigation between the producers and the original director, Julie Taymor. After two and a half years, Page leaves the $75 million production on August 5th in order to play the Comte de Guiche in this fall’s Roundabout Theatre revival of “Cyrano,” starring Douglas Hodge. (The role of the Green Goblin will be taken over by Robert Cuccioli of “Jekyll and Hyde” fame.)   

Page’s presence will be missed. In a statement, producers Michael Cohl and Jere Harris praised him as “a colleague, friend, brother, confidante, mentor and star.” After the 50-year-old actor dons the green costume for the last time, he will be taking with him bittersweet memories and hard lessons, some of which he recently shared with ARTINFO.

A friend involved in the production said you kept up company morale during the darkest days, the nadir obviously being when Chris Tierney, a stunt Spiderman, was nearly killed in a mishap during a performance. How’d you do it?
I remember crying when Chris fell and feeling terrified and praying that he would be all right. Those are real stakes. I certainly didn’t feel the same stakes about the show itself. It was a traumatic and devastating event for the company and by then the narrative in the media was that this was show that hurts people. I realized that it would be an easy thing to get caught up in that narrative and become terrified by it, irrespective of the actual facts in the building.

The accident came in the wake of other injuries. How did you calm the company’s fears and your own?
When I was a kid and our family took long trips, my father would ask us to count orange VWs. It would seem as though there were no orange VWs, until you started to count them. Then when you did, it seemed as though there were nothing but orange VWs. When you have real people in a real space and something like Chris’s accident happens, you can’t start seeing nothing but orange VWs. We needed to know that the media was just seeing orange VWs, and we had to not let that terrify us.

What did this teach you about the media?
I imagine I got a little ticked off, but they were just doing their jobs. They’ve got a story to tell, and its an “A , B, C, D” narrative, and one that has to continue in a certain kind of  linear way. If it ceases to have a “hook” then it cease to be interesting. If that narrative becomes “out-of-control train wreck,” it becomes very difficult to change. But you can’t allow yourself to get caught up in that narrative. The story outside the theater didn’t have to become our story. We got to create our own experience no matter what a critic or gossip columnist might write.

What did you learn about yourself, personally and as an actor?
Nothing prepared me for that level of public scrutiny, but I learned that you don’t have to become part of that whirlwind if you choose not to. You can keep your eye on the ball. The other thing I learned, and what I’ll take with me now to everything I do, is that you can’t possibly know the whole story. Withholding judgment is something that’s much easier [for me] to do than before. I have no opinion about Kim Kardashian or about any politician on any given story. Because I am much more aware that the situation is probably much more complex and on some level, likely unsayable. There were some aspects of “Spider-Man” that were impossible to communicate.

Like what?
You had to be there! [Laughs.] There are hundreds of tiny personal dynamics behind every event. That’s what makes Shakespeare such a great writer: In  "Julius Caesar," it's one man’s envy against another man’s personal ambition against another man’s narcissism against another person’s human frailty or pride. There are two or three hundred things that go into making one event and we always want to ascribe one cause to it. But it’s all these tiny things.

Will  those “tiny things” might be revealed in the behind-the-scenes documentary on “Spider-Man” [by Jacob Cohl, the son of the producer Michael Cohl]? That is, if it ever comes to light. It’s caught up in litigation.
I don’t know. Sometimes we were aware of them filming and some times not, and some times I’d tell them to go away if I was trying to work on something and the camera got too close. When you’re working on a show, you feel so vulnerable and silly. If you don’t feel silly, you’re not doing  your job. I just hope they got my good side and not my nasty bits.

Nasty bits?
[Laughs.] I’m just sure I’m a jerk 90 percent of the time.

Can you take that into another villain, the lusty and vengeful Comte de Guiche in “Cyrano”?
When I was playing Cyrano [in 2009 at San Diego’s Old Globe], I loved De Guiche. He’s the anti-Cyrano. Unlike Cyrano, who is a man who never compromises his integrity, de Guiche does nothing but compromise in his life and on the battlefield. In his last scene, he says, “I don’t think that I’ve ever felt that I’ve done anything truly wrong, and yet I feel somehow dirty.” I think we can all identify because we’ve all made compromises in our life like that. That’s why it’s always difficult when I hear somebody say, “I have no regrets.” Life being what it is, there always moments of compromise, some of them regrettable.

Read more theater coverage on Play by Play

The ailing beast known as American film criticism took another blow this week when Rotten Tomatoes was forced to pull a review of “The Dark Knight Rises” on Monday because of the hate mail it engendered.

At Marshall Fine’s request, the aggregate website temporarily took down his mostly negative review of the Batman film because the volume of vitriolic responses – including anonymous death threats and warnings that his personal website would be destroyed – crashed his server. The review was quickly restored to Rotten Tomatoes and can be read there. (I refer you, however, to this site’s analysis of the film by J. Hoberman.)

When further reviews by Christy Lemire of the Associated Press and Nick Pinkerton of the Village Voice criticized Christopher Nolan’s movie and were met with more nastiness, Rotten Tomatoes suspended reader comments. It’s a sad day when Gotham City fanboys (or anyone else) can exert enough power to derail public discourse in a democracy. Fine’s commentary is more reasoned than one might think given the rabid reaction to it, but as a functioning reviewer he had every right to disparage this or any other film in the strongest possible terms.

“As expected, we saw a mountain of comments come in about his review, and we’re policing them to make sure they’re in line with out TOS,” wrote Matt Atchity, the editor in chief of Rotten Tomatoes. “Broadly speaking, threats and hate speech will get your commenting privileges revoked.

“But Marshall has the right to not like the movie, and people have the right to express their disagreement with him (although if you haven’t seen the movie, your arguments may be on shaky ground). And we have the right to pull your comment down and ban you if we think you’re acting inappropriately.”

Atchity further noted that Rotten Tomatoes would probably move to a Facebook-based commenting system that doesn’t allow anonymity.

He is concerned there could be a similar backlash to negative reviews of “The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey” when it opens in December.

“There are a lot of options on the table,” he told the Associated Press. “We may do away with comments completely or get to a place where comments are only activated after a movie opens.”

Rotten Tomatoes had never previously suspended user comments despite there having been previous occasions when they went beyond the pale. As the Comics Journal’s Abhay Khosla (via Tucker Stone) reported in May, Box Office Magazine’s Amy Nicholas met with viciously misogynistic abuse when she awarded “The Avengers” only three out of five stars. Khosla predicted, albeit hyperbolically, that the first negative review of “The Dark Knight Rises” would be greeted by murder.

The issue is particularly embarrassing for Rotten Tomatoes because the site is owned by Warner Bros. (though Flixster.com). Warner is the co-owner and distributor of the Batman franchise. In a piece headed: “Warner Bros. Civil War? Its Rotten Tomatoes Suspends Comments On Its “Dark Knight Rises After Movie Reviewers Threatened,” Deadline’s Nikki Finke observed, “Now the studio finds itself with the weird and rare dilemma of protecting movie reviewers who hated the movie from furious Rotten Tomatoes readers.”

There is no indication, however, that Warners put pressure on Rotten Tomatoes to censor the lopsided dialectical argument involving the naysaying reviewers and its audience. As of 12:40 pm today, “The Dark Knight Rises,” which opens Friday, has an 86 percent approval rating – 74 positive reviews, 12 negative – on the Tomatometer. Of 346,941 users, 93 per cent say they want to see the film.

Read more culture news on Spotlight

Last week, Lenny Kravitz made a surprising announcement to CNN. The guitarist, Officer of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, and featured actor in the film adaptation of “The Hunger Games,” is set to expand his interior and product design firm, Kravitz Design, beyond buildings and into the world of fashion.

“The plan is to make it a lifestyle brand,” he said. “In the same way you would see Ralph Lauren or Giorgio Armani.”

Kravitz’s eco-resort, on his farm in Brazil, will factor in somehow, but apart from that it’s hard to imagine what a Lenny Kravitz fashion line might look like. He played Katniss’s stylist Cinna last year, but his look has always been more standard rocker-chic than that character’s flamboyant fashionista. He hasn’t changed up his outfits too much over the course of his career — leather, long scarves, silver rings, bracelets, and a lot of denim.

Perhaps it’s the dedication to the standard rock look that’s plagued other musician-helmed collections in the past, and there have been a lot of them.

Oasis front man Liam Gallagher has his Pretty Green line, which has expanded to denim footwear and accessories. It looks like, well, clothes a rock star would wear. “The Beatles, the Stones, the Kinks, the Small Faces – all that era. 1967 to 1969 bands,” Gallagher told Rolling Stone, when they asked for his influences.

Scott Weiland, the singer of ’90s mainstay Stone Temple Pilots, designed a small line for English Laundry that fares slightly better, if only in its modesty. But the shirts are cut in like Jimi Hendrix’s, and there is a lot of paisley. “From early on, I was inspired by rock icons like David Bowie and Keith Richards, who helped in molding my personal sense of style,” he said.

On the opposite end of all this is Kim Gordon, bassist for Sonic Youth. In 1992 she and Daisy Von Furth started X-Girl, a women’s wear answer to the men’s line the Beastie Boys had designed for X-Large. It combined the street-style of a 17-year-old skate rat and Sassy intern named Chloe Sevigny with the sensibilities of the young designer behind Perry Ellis – a kid named Marc Jacobs. Gordon and Sonic Youth have remained entrenched within the inner circle of fashion for decades now, and this year she’s designing a capsule collection for Surface to Air. It’s set to feature “cropped neon-tangerine pants, black, brown, and snakeskin boots, a soft leather jacket, and T-shirts printed with Gordon’s own illustrations,” T reports. It will certainly be a lot more legitimate than the lines by her guitar-wielding peers.

So which side will Kravitz fall on? He does have nearly a decade of experience with his design firm, and his convincing take on Cinna the stylist is encouraging. But his best move might be to look to his daughter, Zoe Kravitz, who’s often the best-dressed person on the red carpet.

Visit Artinfo.com/fashion for more fashion and style news.

Things have taken a small dive for the excessive around the wheels - they're 20-inch fronts and 21-inch rears with carbon inlays. Nice tyres, though - 255/30 and 345/25 on the back. Power's also got a kick in the bullock. The V12 gets a new air intake, e

NEW YORK — In Tuesday night's sweltering heat, over 200 patrons gathered  in Red Hook in a freshly manicured sculpture garden to sip iced Brooklyn Lagers. Visitors arrived in support of Downtown 4 Democracy, an organization whose modest goal is welding arts professionals into a unified (likely liberal) political voice. The inaugural D4D event was “Dining for Democracy,” the first in a series of social events geared towards facilitating creative exchange and raising funds for political action. For the occasion, sculptor Dustin Yellin lent his project space, known as the Intercourse, a 19th-century warehouse tastefully revived by Trimble Architects and recently debuted, just down the street from the Brooklyn Cruise Terminal.

“Dining for Democracy” delivered nicely on its name, offering treats by a host of local foodie favorites: Frankies Sputino, Vinegar Hill House, Home/Made, Fort Defiance, and the Good Fork. D4D spokeswoman Audrey Gelman said she hoped to have as many events as possible before November to bring attention to “what’s at stake for young people and creative professionals in the upcoming election.” She postulated that D4D will “counteract the stereotype that people who are young and creative are too busy caring about themselves to care about politics.”

At Tuesday night's event, young, hip opinion leaders perused artworks by Intercourse artists Adam Green (of the Moldy Peaches), Yellin, and Joey Frank (Frank’s show opens September 15). Outdoors in the garden, artists and architects mingled with tastemakers from all disciplines, from Gibby Haynes (a musician, of Butthole Surfers fame) to James Fuentes (of the eponymous gallery). At the end of the perfect night, Green complimented “Cartoon and Complaint,” his exhibition currently on view at Yellin's space, with a final acoustic performance.

“The spirit of Downtown 4 Democracy is all about collaboration,” Gelman affirmed, commenting on the positive turnout and energy of the evening. She had some words of enthusiasm for Yellin's contribution as well: “We are all about experimentation and creative collaboration, so it [The Intercourse] was the perfect place to host an event that brought together a diverse group of foodies, politicos, and artists to celebrate something bigger than themselves.” 

To see images of the first  “Dining for Democracy” at The Intercourse, click on the slide show.

FBI agents recovered "Odalisque in Red Pants," a painting by Henri Matisse that had been missing for nearly a decade, in an elaborate sting on Tuesday. The Daily Mail reports that two suspects attempted to sell the painting to agents posing as art collectors at the Loews Hotel in Miami Beach. Currently valued at £2 million ($3.1 million), the canvas had originally been bought by the Sofía Imber Contemporary Art Museum in Caracas, Venezuela for $400,000 in 1981, and was included in exhibitions at prestigious museums around the world.

It was during one of these tours that suspicions began to arise over whether painting had been swapped with a forgery. These reached a peak in 2002 when Miami-based art collector Genaro Ambrosino approached Sofía Imber director Rita Salvestrini after hearing the painting was up for sale. When the painting failed an authentication test, agents from Interpol, Europe, and Latin America were soon recruited to track down the missing Matisse original.

Since the discovery, many have wondered how the painting could have been replaced by a fake so easily distinguishable from the original to the naked eye. Speaking to the Mail, Salvestrini openly referred to "inside complicity" when asked to explain the switch. In other words, it may have been an inside job. We shall see if the bust of the Miami couple yields any further details about the mystery.