The Biennale des Antiquaires is poised for a historic edition this year, with Karl Lagerfeld providing not only scenography but also star power to the prestigious fine art, antiques, and jewelry fair. In short, director Christian Deydier has delivered on his promise to transform an event he had lamented as “dull” in his campaign to reclaim the presidency of the Syndicat National des Antiquaires in 2010.

“Putting Lagerfeld’s name on the Biennale has brought an enormous number of requests for booths and visitor passes,” Deydier told Art+Auction. “Last time,
 the gallerists were demoralized and didn’t want to invest much. They preferred to do it on the cheap and protect themselves. Now, despite the financial crisis, the attitude is to show some guts, to bring out the best of ourselves.”

From September 14 through 23, the Grand Palais will house 123 exhibitors presenting €50 billion ($61.3 billion) worth of fine antiques, artworks from the Renaissance to the contemporary era, and luxurious jewelry. The number of participants is up from only 86 in 2010, 
with the reopening of the classic Salon d’Honneur—for the first time since 1937—along with new space under the mezzanine’s balconies giving the fair more room. Although the event remains resolutely French, some 45 exhibitors are first-timers.

All will be set in Lagerfeld’s vision of fin-de-siècle Parisian window-shopping, with large windows reviving the feel of the boutiques inside the long-lost Grand Bazar on the Rue de Rennes and a tribute to the Rue de Rivoli on the mezzanine. At the heart of the Grand Palais, under its Beaux Arts glass nave, a giant hot-air balloon will be re-created from period blueprints, echoing one of the Palais’s very first exhibitions.

“When Karl does something,” says Dominique Lévy, of L&M Arts, “you know that it’s going to be exceptional, so you want to rise to the occasion.” Some dealers are building nods to the fashion legend into their shows. François Léage will anchor his booth with a rare two-tier Louis XVI Martin Carlin table whose upper tabletop holds a drawer that swivels open to reveal a writing case. The form recalls a fan like the one Lagerfeld used to carry. New York’s Marlborough and JGM Galerie,
of Paris, are mounting the Biennale’s first solo booths
 by living artists. At Marlborough, Manolo Valdés, in a kind of Gesamtkunstwerk, created everything from the paintings to the library of carved-wood books.

Gallery president Pierre Levai chose the Spaniard because his “work is very much a commentary on Old Masters, the school of Fontainebleau, and modern artists like Kirchner or Picasso. And Lagerfeld has a certain baroque taste that will fit well with Valdés.” JGM will present Claude Lalanne.

As many as 30 of this year’s participants specialize in modern and contemporary art, more than twice as many as in 2010. Bowing
to historicity, Tornabuoni Art, of Paris, will hang masterpieces from each decade of the 20th century, anchored by a 1919 Picasso and
a 1984 Basquiat, while Geneva’s Krugier has an outstanding Cézanne canvas, Tasse, verre
et fruits, II, 1877. David Ghezelbash, of Paris, presents a bronze statue of Isis/Aphrodite, likely from Alexandria between 100 b.c. and a.d. 100, while Charly Bailly Fine Art, of Geneva, is unveiling a rediscovered Francisco de Zubaran.

But the fair’s bread and butter is antiques, and dealers have been hoarding their best examples since the last edition. After memorably presenting a 19th-century-French-flavored Oval Office in 2010, the Parisian furniture specialist Maison Kraemer this year gives over its entire booth to a museum-caliber show of master cabinetmaker Jean-Henri Riesener, who designed Marie Antoinette’s writing desk. Steinitz is offering
an ornate, eight-legged desk, circa 1692–95, by Riesener’s predecessor André-Charles Boulle, made with the inlay for which he is famous. Advancing an argument for the Deco period, Vallois is showcasing 1920s masterpieces in a booth designed by Joseph Graf. François Laffanour’s Galerie Downtown counters with a display of the custom-tailored contents of a Paris apartment furnished by Charlotte Perriand.

Asian art, a genre close to Deydier’s heart, has a handful of notable entries. Paris’s Jacques Barrère will gather important Song Dynasty Buddhist sculptures, among them a trio of 10th-century bodhisattvas from the temples of Shanxi. Deydier himself will show Tang Dynasty earthenware figures.

The fine jewelry section is particularly dynamic with the arrival of Hong Kong’s Wallace Chan, Bulgari, Boucheron, and Chaumet, who join regulars Piaget, Harry Winston, Cartier, Dior, and Van Cleef & Arpels, which is bringing 20 creations inspired by birds of paradise. “Knowing that Karl was involved, all the great jewelers have prepared specific collections,” notes Deydier, with some opting to debut new wares here rather than during Paris Fashion Week. He adds, “We’re expecting an excellent, memorable Biennale.” 

New York Fashion Week came to a close yesterday and several designers found inspiration in art. ARTINFO surveyed the collections and found that Prabal Gurung instilled the ruby red hues that appear in Anish Kapoor’s sculptures into his garments, N.Hoolywood’s Daisuke Obana transferred his love for grafitti and Banksy on to his streetwise menswear collection, and Proenza Schouler’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez felt so moved by a Gerhard Richter exhibition they saw in Paris that they put prints similar to his photorealist images on a few of their skirts and jackets. Check out the slide show to see a selection of art-inspired looks from the spring/summer 2013 collections in New York.

Click on the slide show to see the art-inspired looks of New York Fashion Week S/S 2013.

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Celebration was the theme of Cynthia Rowley’s spring 2013 collection — held in the nine-story atrium of a gorgeous abandoned building on New York City’s Beekman Street — and what’s more festive than pastel dresses covered in foil confetti? “We actually photographed the walls in here and then layered on the confetti and foil prints,” Rowley told ARTINFO of the custom pattern splashed across her latest designs. “So it’s like a print and then a foil and another foil bonded. It’s all these layers of processes.” The designer kept the party going with thick, hollow gold bangles that held a secret  — flasks! “You can put water in it,” Rowley said, before we could ask about her bracelet-filler of choice. “It’s just meant to be inventive. It’s artistic.”

Color Palette: Rose, pale blue, cream

Silhouettes: Tiered tank dresses, oversize tees, formal shorts

Materials: Foil-embellished fabrics, sequins, beaded trim

Accessories: Eyeglass chains, trucker hats, flask bracelets

Inspiration: Celebration

The Venue: “Late last year, I saw it but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work so that I could have a lot of people here,” Rowley told us of her spring 2013 presentation venue. “You can’t have a lot of people up there and it seemed sort of silly to just have a runway show here, because you could be anywhere. It’s all about upstairs.” Throughout the show, models stepped off the presentation platform to be led upstairs to the upper balconies where they were photographed. Snapshots of the models were projected on a screen to the partygoers below, who viewed the photos through a shower of foil confetti. 

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Natalie Portman is being sought to play the Virginia-born Nazi mistress and Soviet spy Martha Dodd in “In the Garden of Beasts,” which, reports Deadline, “The Artist”s director Michel Hazanavicius will likely make for Tom Hanks’s company Playtone and Universal. The script is to be adapted from Eric Larson’s 2011 non-fiction book.

It’s tempting to think that Alfred Hitchcock fan Hazanavicius is drawn to Martha Dodd as a character because of her resemblance to the unstable, promiscuous Alicia Huberman (Ingrid Bergman) in “Notorious.”

Hanks, who will produce “In the Garden of Beasts” with his Playtone partner Gary Goetzmann, will supposedly play Martha’s father, William Dodd (1869-1940), a Chicago professor and the American ambassador in Berlin from 1933 to 1937. Apparently swayed by anti-Semitism among American State Department officials and holding suspect views himself, Dodd recognized the extent of Hitler’s plan to exterminate Europe’s Jews too late, though even when he began to denounce their persecution, as well as the Nazis’ totalitarian rule and aggressive expansionist policy, he was consistently rebuffed in Washington.

Martha (1908-90), naively attracted by the sense of ferment in mid-thirties Berlin, was, as she later wrote, “temporarily an ardent defender of everything going on" who was excited by the "glowing and inspiring faith in Hitler, the good that was being done for the unemployed."

She enjoyed a spectacular sexual career. Among her many lovers were Ernst Udet, a World I flying ace who was a senior officer in the Luftwaffe; the French diplomat Armand Berad; Rudolf Diels, the first head of the Gestapo; Louis Ferdinand, the grandson of the Kaiser; and the businessman Ernst Hanfstaengl, who encouraged her, in vain, to sleep with the Führer, whom she found “excessively modest and gentle in his manners.”

After the Night of the Long Knives in 1934, both Dodds became disillusioned with Nazism. A newly avowed Communist, Martha began an affair with the NKVD agent Boris Winogradov, a Soviet attaché in Berlin, that probably lasted until his execution in the 1938 Great Purge. Winogradov, whom she hoped to marry, hired her as a Soviet spy and she leaked American Embassy and State Department Secrets to her masters.

In 1938, she married the American millionaire Alfred Stern, recruiting him as a Soviet spy four years later. It wasn’t until around 1948 that the FBI had her under surveillance, but despite the attention of Senator Eugene McCarthy she was never brought to justice, living out her life in Mexico, Cuba, the Soviet Union, and Czechoslovakia, settling in Prague with Stern for the last three decades of her life.

She wrote several books. According to her obituary in the New York Times, “In 1941, after her father's death and nine months before the United States entered World War II, Mrs. Stern and her brother, William E. Dodd Jr., published the Ambassador's diaries. Critics said that by failing to edit the comments of Germans who were opposed to Hitler they endangered the anti-Nazi underground.

“In the last days of the war Mrs. Stern published ‘Sowing the Wind,’ a novel that dealt with the moral degradation of Germans under the Nazi hierarchy.”

Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC)  kicked off on Thursday morning, dropping its former preclusion towards a pan-fair theme and expanding into a third hall of Berlin's Station center. Though sales have not been particularly brisk, foot traffic is heavy and, most importantly, the work on display represents the highest quality the fair has seen in recent memory.

Structured booths or walls have been dropped for a modular framework of scaffoldings and temporary partisians. ABC also does away with the migraine-inducing florescent lighting of most fairs in exchange for film spotlights directed on the works. These touches both add up to create a more exhibition-like feel — certainly much more so than during it’s “curated” years. Visitors have responded positively. While ABC 2012 is the most international that the fair has ever been, the strongest booths mostly originated from Berlin galleries, with the minimal shipping requirements and freedom of installation space allowing for works of truly impressive scale for an art fair, especially coming from some of the younger galleries. ARTINFO scoured the offerings to pick out the 10 best booths from the overall strong offerings on view.

1) Slavs and Tartars at Kraupa-Tuskany
“Pray Way” was an unrivaled hit at the New Museum triennial, “The Ungovernables,” this past winter. At ABC, it was one of a series of artworks that give the Fair a more institutional than commercial feel. One could see the tendency in the attitudes of many gallerists as well, who seemed to be using the fair as a networking and social opportunity with the press and fellow dealers as much as a platform for raucous sales (of which there were few on the first day).

2) Eddie Martinez at Peres Projects
After last year’s theme, “about painting,” most galleries gave a wide berth to canvas and oil. Not so for Javier Peres, whose three monumental paintings by Eddie Martinez yell definitively that painting is not dead. Produced on Long Island not far from Jackson Pollock’s former studio, where the artist has been spending time away from his usual base in Brooklyn, the thickness and materiality of the paint and mix of figuration and abstraction set them apart.

3) Ulf Almide at Tanja Wagner
One of the youngest gallerists on the ABC, Tanja Wagner’s video installation by Berlin based artist Ulf Almide was one of the biggest drawers of crowds during the first day. Almide filmed heroin addicts in the process of nodding out, the point on the verge of overdose, while standing on the street. Playing on seven flat screens that stand up in portrait orientation as if the subjects are standing in the room with you, they create a disturbingly affective response in the viewer that goes far beyond the plague that is addiction touching on what is perhaps a more pan-societal feeling of burden and overload.

4) Florian Miesenberg at Wentrup
Wentrup’s installation of recently New York-based artist Florian Miesenberg universally was deemed the most creative at the ABC. The large-scale canvases were arranged in something of a tower, supported by the scaffolding which other galleries had covered with sheetrock. Miesenberg told ARTINFO that the work has gotten much more minimal since he moved to New York. Most canvases feature a single, central subject. Well priced, at around €10,000, they were selling at a rapid rate, with three going in the first three hours and another on reserve by two different collectors.

5) Jeff Wall at Johnen Galerie
Berlin’s Johnen Galerie brought Jeff Wall’s “Authentication. Claus Jahnke, costume historian, examining a document pertaining to an item in his collection” to ABC. The photo work in four parts documents the Vancouver collector who focuses specifically on garments produced by the Nathan Israel department store in Berlin which was forcibly closed by the Nazi’s. The photographs are incredibly intimate, with the gallery further strengthening their effect by installing three mannequins with garments from Jahnke’s collection (not for sale) to create a direct conversation between referent and representation.

6) Wolfgang Laib at Buchmann Galerie
Possibly the largest installation in the fair, Laib’s untitled work from last year is an exacting exercise in contrasts with countless small piles of rice grains surrounding three “houses made of granite” as he calls them, which look somewhat like the cement blocks that sit at the end of parking spaces. The effect is strangely anxiety-inducing, playing on the suggestion that the perfect equilibrium could so easily be tipped.

7) Christoph Keller at Esther Schipper
Kellers’s “Expedition-Bus and Shaman-Travel” is not only a convenient place to sit down while traipsing through this year’s significantly larger ABC. It poignantly critiques ethnographic study in the context of Shamanic rituals, suggesting that both are equal in their pursuit of something outside of normal experience and that neither is superior to the other. Olfactory nostalgia sitting in Keller’s restored VW Bus combines with the cut-up educational film about the Other implicates the viewer deeply within the predigested identities given in its minute-long run. 

8) Isabelle Le Minh at Galerie Christophe Gaillard
Perhaps the most self aware work at the fair, Isabelle Le Minh’s “Listing I  You know, the artist who…” takes a shot at the circular conversations about art that it is embedded in at the fair. The constantly running dot matrix printer makes vague references like, “photographed a tarantula” followed by the answer, “Robert Mapplethorpe.” We smell a new art-themed parlor (or drinking) game in the mix.

9) Dirk Bell at BQ
Stemming from his project at Berlin’s Volksbuhne, “Bitte Danke,” Dirk Bell’s two works on view, mix a roughly hewn stencil of box letters spelling “Work Utopian” and “Burn Utopian” on what appears to be bed sheets. They mix a strange confluence of intimacy and aggression that is further complicated by the geometrically abstracted walls covered in the word “End” on which they hang. It’s all a bit in-your-face and uncomfortable, but in a good way.

10) Mogg & Melzer
Maybe it’s not art in a traditional sense, but in a world of mediocre-at-best art fair food, Mogg & Melzer’s artery clogging but amazing Ruebens, bagels with lachs, and assorted other culinary offerings are truly blue chip. That results in some fairly epic lines, however, so don’t expect a quick bite.

To see images of the Best of Art Berlin Contemporary, click on the slide show. 

The former Essex Market warehouse on the Lower East Side seems like an unlikely (and uncomfortable) place to hold an exhibition. It’s dark and dank, conjuring the feeling of being in an underground tunnel, but that’s what makes it the perfect location for the “Imagining the Lowline” show. On view through September 27, the exhibition illustrates a radical proposal by architect James Ramsey and former PopTech strategist Dan Barasch to convert a long-abandoned underground trolley station into a lush public park, complete with thriving plants and actual sunlight, funneled by high-tech fiber-optic lenses from above ground. If they could successfully pull it off, it would provide Manhattan's East side with an underground answer to the High Line, the elevated West side park that cities around the world have sought to emulate.

The first part of the show is just a tease, part “Tron,” part “Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.” Upon entering, visitors see a metal, laser-cut lattice on the ceiling that maps the New York City Subway lines. On the floor, neon-hued lights trace the grid of the city’s streets. To the left, screens project images from “Experiments in Motion,” an initiative by Lowline sponsor Audi that explores the future of urban transportation, as imagined by students from the Columbia University School of Architecture (who actually studied the Lowline in class). It’s nice enough, but coupled with the lights dancing on the walls (reminiscent of those that reflect off of swimming pools), the recognizable smell of fertilizer conjures the distinct feeling of walking through a sewer.

A few steps further and a turn around the corner, however, and the change is night and day. On the other side of a dark curtain, a miniature meadow appears; bright sunlight shines down onto a Japanese maple and a small mound of living, breathing ferns, mosses, and delicious pearl oyster mushrooms. Oh, so this is what we came to see. (It's also where the smell is coming from.)

The sun isn’t pouring through a skylight; instead, a system that involves a system of panels on the roof that catches the light of day and funnels it through lenses on the ceiling, where hexagons of reflective material shine it on the room below. The exhibition is the culmination of a year's work and the product of an unexpectedly successful Kickstarter campaign that not only exceeded fundraising goals — $155,000, when they had aimed for $100,000 — but also grabbed the frenzied attention of the media. That, plus a partnership with Audi, allowed Ramsey and Barasch to put on a much more elaborate show than they had originally envisioned.

“We planned something really modest, where people could wander into this warehouse, poke their head behind this curtain, and see this sculpture,” Ramsey told ARTINFO. He still foresees another five years of work ahead, including fundraising (to the tune of $30-$50 million). The technology shown here is not the exact technology that would be used in the park, nor are the plants the exact plants. At least a year of research needs to be done in the actual proposed space — just a block north of the exhibition — which is more humid and has a different chemical composition than an above-ground warehouse.

Though the exhibition is only the first step and fairly small in scale, it accomplishes its main goals. It 1) illustrates the sensory details of the proposed subterranean park, from sight and feel to sound (a laughtrack of children’s voices plays in the background), and 2) shows that a living, growing, plant-filled park could exist underground, and actually be pleasant — once they fix the pungent aroma, which Ramsey assured us can be offset by more agreeably woodsy cedar oils and a company called Big Ass Fans.

“Imagining the Lowline” is on view at the Essex Market Building D from September 15 through the 27th.

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, September 3-7, 2012:

ART

— Julia Halperin parsed the list of galleries participating in this year's Art Basel Miami Beach fair, remarking on notable absences like New York dealers Tony Shafrazi, Zach Feuer, and Marc Jancou.

— Chloe Wyma recapped the latest episode of Bravo's art world reality TV show "Gallery Girls," which included a visit to the International Print Center and a cameo by the Sucklord, one-time star of Bravo's other art-related reality TV show, "Work of Art."

— Judd Tully looked into the resurgent market for Surrealist art, noting spikes in demand for works by René Magritte, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, and Joan Miró, among others.

— Alanna Martinez checked out the "Artists for Obama" print portfolio, which included pieces by John Baldessari, Julie Mehretu, Richard Serra, Jasper Johns, and more, benefiting the U.S. President's re-election campaign.

— Coline Milliard tried out ArtStack, a visual arts-based social network launched late last year by Ezra Konvitz, Alex Gezelius, and James Lindon.

DESIGN & ARCHITECTURE

— Janelle Zara visited "Imagining the LowLine," a new exhibition that offers a glimpse of the possible subterranean park on Manhattan's Lower East Side.

— Kuwait's Sheikh Majed Al-Sabah picked Dutch starchitect Rem Koolhaas's firm OMA to design a glassy new luxury mega-mall in Kuwait City.

— The National September 11 Memorial & Museum moved to take over control of the popular 9/11 memorial "Tribute in Light" from the Municipal Arts Society.

— ARTINFO France picked five must-have design objects for fall.

— Danish architect Bjarke Ingels Group's proposed luxury pyramid condo development on Manhattan's West side was shot down by the local community board.

FASHION & STYLE

— Katharine K. Zarrella looked back on the highlights of New York Fashion Week, including the conspicuous number of designs that might be described as "biker chic."

— The three members of Threeasfour — Adi Gil, Angela Donhauser, and Gabriel Asfour — explained the sources of inspiration behind their otherworldly showing at New York Fashion Week.

— Caitlin Petreycik praised the celebratory spring wares shown off at Cynthia Rowley's New York Fashion Week show.

— From Banksy and Gerhard Richter to Anish Kapoor, Ann Binlot catalogued the many art allusions made by designers during New York Fashion Week.

— Karl Lagerfeld shed light on his vision for this year's La Biennale des Antiquaires fair at Paris's Grand Palais.

PERFORMING ARTS

— England's National Media Museum realized that it was in possession of the earliest color film ever shot, from 1901, by inventor and early cinematographer Edward Raymond Turner.

— Cynthia Nixon was cast to star in a long-planned biopic of the poet Emily Dickinson.

— Phillip Glass discussed "Einstein on the Beach," his epic opera colaboration with Lucinda Childs and Robert Wilson, which is being revived at the Brooklyn Academy of Museum.

— J. Hoberman reviewed the Toronto International Film Festival's two biggest tickets: Paul Thomas Anderson's "The Master" and the Watchowski Brothers' "Cloud Atlas."

— Avant-garde choreographer Yvonne Reiner discussed her classic interactive performance piece "The Shining," which is being revived this month at Brooklyn's Invisible Dog Art Center.

VIDEO

— Teresita Fernández revealed the disparate sources of inspiration for her new exhibition at Lehmann Maupin, from Napoleonic sign language to astronomy:

Two new movies of James Ellroy novels are in the works. According to Deadline, Vincent Sieber and Clark Peterson will produce (and Ellroy will executive-produce) “Blood’s a Rover,” the most recent book by the self-styled Demon Dog of American literature. “Harry Potter” producer David Heyman is meanwhile setting up “The Big Nowhere” with co-producers Jeffrey Clifford and Maurizio Grimaldi; Luca Guadagnino, director of the elegant Tilda Swinton vehicle “I Am Love,” is attached to the latter project.

“The Big Nowhere” (1988) is the second novel in Ellroy’s “L.A. Quartet,” following “The Black Dahlia” (1987) and preceding “L.A. Confidential” (1990) and “White Jazz” (1992). Set during the Red Scare in 1950, when anti-Communist fervor was exploited to break organized labor at the movie studios, it follows the interlocking fortunes of three protagonists: West L.A. sheriff’s deputy, Danny Upshaw, who’s investigating a gay sex murder and mutilation; Mal Considine of the D.A’s office, who’s involved in a child custody case; and disgraced former cop Buzz Meeks, a heavy working as head of security for Hughes Aircraft (and as Howard Hughes’s pimp) as well as gangster Mickey Cohen. The corrupt and murderous Irish LAPD lieutenant Dudley Smith (played by James Cromwell in “L.A. Confidential”) also features in the sprawling plot.

Following “American Tabloid” (1995) and “The Cold Six Thousand” (2001), “Blood’s a Rover” (2009) concluded Ellroy’s “Underworld USA” trilogy. It starts in 1968 in the aftermath of the Martin Luther King and Robert Kennedy assassinations and during the buildup of black militancy in southside L.A. Like “The Big Nowhere,” it has three protagonists.

The book’s official press release smacked of Ellroy-ese: “Dwight Holly is J. Edgar Hoover’s pet strong-arm goon, implementing Hoover’s racist designs and obsessed with a leftist shadow figure named Joan Rosen Klein. Wayne Tedrow – ex-cop and heroin runner – is building a mob gambling mecca in the Dominican Republic and quickly becoming radicalized. Don Crutchfield is a window-peeping kid private-eye within tantalizing reach of right-wing assassins, left-wing revolutionaries and the powermongers of an incendiary era. Their lives collide in pursuit of the Red Goddess Joan—and each of them will pay ‘a dear and savage price to live History.’”

“Blood’s a Rover” was eight years in gestation. “I was that long between books for a variety of reasons, all of which are determining factors in the Beethovian greatness of Blood’s a Rover,” Ellroy said on the Random House website at the time of its publication. “One, my marriage had to go in the shitter – as I rigorously held on to the friendship of my beloved ex-wife and most astute critic, Helen Knode.

“Helen convinced me to write a more emotionally and stylistically accessible novel – one that plumbed the murky recesses of my tortured, tender and perverted heart!!! Two, I had to become deeply involved with the transcendent woman, Joan, who re-taught me American history from the ground up. Three, I made a conscious decision to write an entirely different kind of novel – one that explored spiritual and political conversion on all-new level, while, of course, adhering to readily identifiably and identifiably groovy Ellroy shit!!!”

On Friday, when the movie was announced, he had this to say: “My most recent novel is – not surprisingly – my best. The story is no less the psychic inventory of America from 1968 to 1972. I have no doubt that Clark Peterson and Vincent Sieber will fashion a splendid motion picture from this noir epic.”

This may not be so simple. Whereas Curtis Hanson’s 1997 film of “L.A. Confidential” made a successful transition to the screen, “The Black Dahlia” (2006) fell flat, despite the intermittent brilliance Brian De Palma brought to his retro-noir visualization of 1947 L.A., particularly in such set pieces as the Zoot Suit Riots and the discovery of Elizabeth Short’s body.

Not only was the film miscast (aside from Mia Kirshner as the tragically pathetic Short), it lacked the intensity of Ellroy’s prose and the calculated luridness of his narrative. Fashioning a rhythmically appropriate screenplay from the even more staccato “Blood’s a Rover” will be a formidable challenge.

FLORENCE, Italy — Many of us have a signature fragrance that we spritz on daily, but few think about what goes into producing a bottle of perfume.

Five years ago, during a conference in Montreal, a group of men approached Chandler Burr, a leading fragrance expert and curator of the Department of Olfactory Art at New York's Museum of Arts and Design. The men represented the interests of Indonesian patchouli farmers and wanted to tell Burr about the lives of the of the patchouli cultivators used in perfumes. The curator had a realization — in addition to its raw ingredients, every fragrance contains human stories from around the globe. “Perfume is filled with the lives of these people, their work, and their cultures,” Burr told ARTINFO.

That moment that gave Burr the idea for “Every Bottle of Perfume Contains a World,” an installation that ran from September 14 to 16 at Pitti Fragranze, a fair dedicated to the art of scent in Florence, Italy. “There are millions of people across the planet — farmers, nomads, tribes people, who pour their lives into and earn their livelihoods, feed their children, and house their families by cultivating, harvesting, and in many cases, processing these utterly beautiful natural raw materials that comprise the palette of the olfactory artist,” Burr said at Pitti Fragranze.

The interactive exhibition allows visitors to experience leading fragrance ingredients from around the globe by smelling the actual essences made from raw materials. A journey through the olfactory map shows that masculine-scented vetiver is collected with an ox-pulled cart in Haiti; warm vanilla bean pods have to bake for three months outdoors before being extracted in Madagascar; and, that cardamom oil is produced from the seeds inside pods in Guatemala.

The installation isn’t just about the people who cultivate the ingredients used to make scents, but also how essential it is for fragrance companies to protect the environment and land needed to produce the raw materials. 

“The healthier the earth, the cleaner the water and air, the more profitable and qualitative the harvests are, and the more beautiful the raw materials are, which means the more beautiful and more exciting and aesthetically interesting these olfactory artists' palettes are,” said Burr.

Summer's parade of neon accessories was fun while it lasted, but now we're ready for more subdued styles. Enter Clare Vivier's minimalist rectangular clutch, which mixes casual caramel leather with sporty stripes. The Los Angeles-based designer will even monogram the pouch for an extra dose of preppy flair that pairs perfectly with fall mainstays like skinny jeans and oxford shirts. 

Clare Vivier Striped Flat Clutch, $184 at clarevivier.com. 

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Today is S17. That’s the alphanumeric shorthand, for those who don’t know, for the one-year anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, the chaotic and inspiring anti-corporate/anti-capitalist movement that sprang up in Zuccotti Park last year, holding the center of discussion for two long months before being dispersed by the NYPD in the dead of night. New York’s artists and creative laborers were enthusiastic participants in the encampment and the various affinity groups that swarmed out of it — which is hardly a given. Not every protest movement inspires so much artistic passion. So maybe this birthday can be occasion to ask the question of why it had such great cultural cachet.

At least part of the answer is obvious. Theorists tend to overstate the United States’s transition towards some kind of new “creative economy,” but there is some truth to the observation that the issues that detonated the anarchic OWS protests — increasing job insecurity, low paid or flexible work, and the plight of overeducated youth with few real prospects — are essentially the classical concerns of bohemia. No surprise, then, that neo-bohemians found it an appealing reference point. 

But there’s another factor that is less straightforward — still political, but in a less self-evident way. Most contemporary culture feels flattened and corporate; OWS offered a taste of authentically alternative culture that people hadn't had in a while. Here, in effect, was something that no artist could invent on her own, a sui generis counter-cultural iconography to relate to: the call-and-response “human mic” technique; “twinkle fingers” to signal consensus; the slogans “We Are the 99%” and the appelation “Occupy” itself; the low-fi aesthetics of handmade cardboard protest signs and raggedly tents; the bustling solidarity of the Occupy library and the Occupy kitchen.

“The constant problem for the Western artist is to find themes for his art which can connect him with his public,” John Berger once wrote. Well, I think that most visual artists today at least subliminally feel that the language of contemporary art is pretty sterile, pretty insular. The art world is great at generating parties; pretty weak when it comes to connecting with a large public on a deep and human level. So of course the sudden emergence of a whole new, electric social imagery, full of righteous significance — of course art would be drawn to that like a plant towards a new sun.

Thus, in the past year, even after the dispersal of the camp, cultural references to Occupy have become common. The New Yorker reports on a current production of Shakespeare’s “Timon of Athens” in London that begins with a stage tableau centering on an Occupy London tent, serving as a kind of shorthand to root the production in the concerns of the moment. Among the more ridiculous examples of Occupy chic was Chilean designer Sebastian Errazuriz's Occupy Chairs, seating made bearing the slogans of OWS (“Kill Corporate Greed,” “Hungry? Eat a Banker!,” etc.), on sale to the monied visitors to the Armory Show earlier this year. The Occupy Chairs concept, we were told, was meant “to occupy the homes of the 1% with the message of the 99%” — a formulation that stretches the definition of meaningful political intervention to the point where it explodes in a rain of festive party confetti.

Therein lies the danger embedded in OWS's cultural magnetism: Symbols this potent can easily be hijacked into cultural theater. Dwelling on its artistic resonances may also divert the need for constructive criticism of the movement as a political (that is, non-artistic) process in favor of treating it as an appealing spectacle.

Still, there have also been artworks that show how the imagery of Occupy has seeped into the culture, how it opens up new imaginative spaces. One of my favorites is fairly low-key and subtle: painter Mira Schor’s small series of diagrammatic canvasses dedicated to Occupy at Marvelli gallery in March. The sequence of paintings depicted a boxy, dreaming figure, suggesting someone camped out in a plaza at night, surrounded by the fragmented sentence, “The Dreams of All of Us.” The color scheme of each variation on this image reflected the emotions inspired by a stage of the movement, passing to black to represent the sense of loss when the encampment was evicted, and then through to an unexpected yellow to represent optimism about a potential comeback — a kind of political process painting.

About the same time that the whole movement took the stage, Creative Time was staging the Nato Thompson-curated “Living as Form” conference in NYC, a polemical survey of cultural producers who “emphasize participation, challenge power, and span disciplines ranging from urban planning and community work to theater and the visual arts.” If this ambitious initiative didn't get the attention it deserved, that is likely because its arty radicalism was somewhat superceded by the actual radicalism of OWS — the juxtaposition pretty much forced the question of whether or not it was all just radical chic. And indeed, at the time, Martha Schwendener reported that at a conference associated with the event, a woman stood up and blurted out the obvious question: if people actually cared about socially engaged cultural practice, why didn't they just go down to Zuccotti Park? And, to their great credit, a bunch of people did.

As a parable about art and Occupy Wall Street, I love this. Who knows that the future of OWS will be, or what forms the activism that has come out of it might take? But it's worth remembering that whatever artists bring to the movement, the movement gives at least as much back — because real movements are messy and difficult, angry and optimistic, challenging and inspiring and confusing, and those are the conditions that nuture the only culture that matters.

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

The drama in this week's episode of Gallery Girls swirls around the well-known mega-fair Art Basel Miami Beach, a must for all aspiring gallerinas and socialites. The End of Century ladies try to export their downtown cool aesthetic to the land of bikinis, bronzer, and perpetual springbreak. Amy tries to help them. Liz tries to win over her withholding collector father, Marty Margulies. Maggie, Kerri, and Angela come along for the ride. 

We first catch up with Liz, who is dining with her mother at Sushi Samba in the Village in NYC. In a scene that is both very real and very derivative of episode 3's lobster-boiling vignette, Liz complains about her inattentive and emotionally distant father to her somewhat blasé mother over seafood. This time, however, Liz’s daddy issues are Basel-centric: “Every time I go to Miami, my dad ignores me. You know how many times my dad picks me up from the airport? Zero.”

“My dad supports me because I’m his child. Other than that, there’s not any sort of affection or love. My mom always tells me my dad loves me in a different way. I don’t really know what that means.” Woah. Shit just got heavy.

Amy Bites the Dust, Eli Throws a Party

Over at yee old  Coplan Hurowitz Art Advisory, boss lady Sharon calls Amy into her office for an awkward meeting. She confronts her about the list of errands she had delegated to Kerri last week. “It’s not professional. I don’t know what games are being played. And I really just can’t have it in my office. It’s led me to feel like this isn’t going to work out.” That's right: Amy got fired from her unpaid internship!

Meanwhile, Rymag (that’s a power couple portmanteau of Maggie and Ryan) is getting gussied up for Eli’s annual pre-Basel swankfest at his apartment, which, as everyone in the New York art world knows, is THE pre-Miami meetup. The guests at Eli’s shindig include Eli’s dad, Eli’s brother, a Chinese art collector named Mark, and the entire Gallery Girls cast. Angela chats up Eli about her photography show. “One thing I learned from my show is as an emerging artist, you need to self-promote.” Eli tells her she’s got the potential to be a very successful photographer, but even Angela smells a rat. “I’m not sure I believe in Eli’s flattery, but I love hearing good things about myself.” Don’t we all?

Claudia and Chantal show up, which, as per usual, sends Liz into a minor rage. (Liz getting irrationally angry when Claudia and Chantal show up at things is starting to become a big Gallery Girls trope.) “Sorry I got distracted by Dumb and Dumber.” She’s upset both by their presence, and by the fact that they didn’t even say hi. “I mean come on, there’s rude and then there’s rude.” Speaking of rude, Liz then interrupts the girls' convo to invite Angela (and only Angela) to her dad Marty’s breakfast in Miami. “I definitely think I can connect with Angela on another level,” she says. “We both like photography and she just seems like a cool girl.” Claudia and Chantal kibbutz about their shared insult in a corner. “She’s just laden with insecurities,” says Claudia. “Liz is just a bitch,” says Chantal.   

Amy's Sexual Secret, Chantal and Claudia’s Fallout 

Meanwhile, Amy reflects on her stint working for Sharon. “It was a learning experience for me, because I leaned that I’m done interning.” She vows to get out there, make something of herself, and prove Sharon wrong.

Step one on her networking list is going with Claudia, Angela, and recurring guest-star Jane Holzer to the Brant Foundation Art Study Center in Greenwich, Connecticut. In the car, Amy reveals that she went out with Eli two years ago. She claims they never slept together, but admits that they made out once. Claudia is incredulous: “My hunch is they hooked up. They went home together, had really dirty sex and he didn’t call her the next day.” Amy offers to help the EOC girls put on a pop-up exhibition in Miami. Angela immediately jumps on the Basel bandwagon, suggesting that she can show her photos in the space. Claudia is intrigued and slightly terrified at the prospect of working with Amy.

Allison Brant (Brant Foundation Director and Peter Brant scion) takes the group on a tour David Altmejd’s sweeping show of werewolf taxidermy and clawed wall installations, and hall of mirrors, the latter of which Angela calls “a narcissist's dream” (which she would know!) “Claudia and Angela are my favorite girls,” Amy decides. “We bonded though our appreciation for art.” Amy makes a second overture towards the pop-up gallery. Claudia agrees: “I’m totally going to take you up on that, and you’re totally going to regret it.”

Claudia returns to EOC to find Chantal researching Michelin-starred restaurants in Miami. She then proposes they set up a pop-up store in Miami, an idea Chantal greets with hostility, and — for some reason — tears. “You can do it. I don’t want any part in it,” she says curtly. She tells Claudia she lacks focus, doesn’t know what it takes to open a store, and “should get off the Adderall or something.”

Kerri goes to the Allegria Hotel in Long Beach for some family time. “Whenever I get stressed out, I just need to go home and relax. It helps me breathe.” Nothing says “home” like a four star waterfront resort hotel. Kerri and her relatives clink mimosas to toast her not-so-new-anymore West Village apartment. Caroline, Kerri’s 10-year-old cousin looks beleaguered. We are so sick of Kerri’s whole apartment narrative.

The Girls Descend on Miami, Marty Gives Liz the Cold Shoulder  

Following a montage of the girls stuffing things into suitcases and a dollop of Chantalian sass ("Claudia surprised me about her idea to do a pop-up in Miami, not in a good way"), the girls land in Miami. Team Brooklyn sticks out like three sore, Opening Ceremony-clad thumbs in the 305. “You can definitely tell we’re not any part of the local flavor,” says Claudia, increasingly the most refreshingly self-aware character on the show. The tension between Chantal and Claudia seems to have blown over a little. Chantal is still militantly dead-set on chillaxing and not working on her trip to Miami: “I don’t want it to be a business trip with Claudia’s last-minute pop-up.”  

Meanwhile, Sharon and her favorite (and as of now only) intern Kerri scope out the scene in Basel. “This is like the biggest art convention in the world.” She’s not in Long Beach anymore! The dynamic duo marvel at a piece by Romanian woodcut artist twins Gert and Uwe Tobias.

Back at the hotel, Angela has a problem. She only has like six outfits, but must go to 1,700 parties. #gallerygirlproblems. Claudia advises that if she dresses the same, everyone will remember her. “You need one LAMD,” Angela says. A LAMD is, Angela explains, is a “look at me device…Usually it’s my big hats, or pink pants, or nipples.”

We meet Amy on her home-turf at an event at men’s luxury boutique Duncan Quinn. “I’m excited to be back in Miami. I’m a Miami girl!”

Liz resolves to be nice to Amy because, after all, she’s not a horrible person. “I’ve got some kind of heart buried deep down inside there.” Former colleagues Amy and Kerri give each other a firm hug, trying to stamp out the lingering awkwardness between them. Chantal is still miffed about the pop-up store. “I’m just going to put on a brave face, and blame Claudia when it all fails.” Claudia and Angela are on the lookout for future ex-husbands when they spot Eli. “Welcome to Miami,” he says, inadvertently quoting Will Smith and giving off the erroneous air that he runs the whole town. The EOC girls begin to talk about their pop-up store. “We actually recruited Amy,” Angela says. “Do you know Amy?” The mention of his ex-paramour’s name makes Eli pretend to see someone important and sprint to the other side of the room.

The next day, Liz pays a visit to her childhood hairstylist, Michael Carroll. “Do you remember when you were a little girl, and you said you were never going to be blonde?” he reminisces. He suggests she get her “vayjayjay” waxed. She agrees. This is Miami, after all. In the back room, a sassy beautician says, “Whatever name you feel like you need to call me right now, you go for it mama. Cause there ain’t shit I can do about the pain.” In Miami even bikini waxes are a barrel of laughs.

Meanwhile, Amy plays host to Angela, Chantal, and Claudia at her parent’s house in Carol Gables. Unlike her off-puttingly upper-crusty Upper East Side townhouse, her Miami home is fun and bright and filled with child’s artwork. Even those picky EOC girls are impressed. The foursome strikes up an unlikely friendship, smoking cigars by the pool. Things are going smoothly until Chantal belittles Amy’s taste in coffee. “This is like, Folgers.” “What’s wrong with you?” says Claudia. “I can’t take you anywhere.” “Yeah, I need to learn manners.”

Amy takes them on a tour of possible pop-up venues (though, since ABMB is ongoing during the filming, one wonders what exactly their timetable is on this project). First, they visit artist Rosario Bond’s studio, which is filled to the brim with folksy junk assemblages. The EOC crew is not exactly impressed: “The whole thing looks like Pink threw up in it,” says Claudia. The next option, the rather swishy Cafeina Lounge, is a little more to their liking but panic sets in they consider logistics like lighting and installation.

We catch up with Liz, where else?, but at the Margulies Collection at the Warehouse. “I definitely got my interest in art from my dad. There’s no world without art in it, for me.” The family drama between Liz and her absent father takes place under Ernesto Nesto’s testicular hanging installation, symbolizing a looming paternal presence. She wants to Marty to go to dinner with her and her boyfriend Bobby, but he says he has to attend the Whitney dinner instead. We've all been there, Liz.

Elsewhere in the Margulies Collection, Maggie admires all the neon artwork. Apparently, her dad helped create the chemical reaction that makes neon lights possible. (Wait... what?) Ryan, the show's token "ordinary guy" and art world outsider, asks Liz how long her dad has been collecting. “Since before it was cool to like art. He bought Lichtensteins and whatevers for like $10,000.”

Guess what? Liz is not pleased when Claudia, Chantal, and Angela enter. “I didn’t even invite them, and they come here and don’t say hello.” (Tip on pleasing Liz: say hello!) Liz laughs at Claudia’s oversized floppy hat. “They’re trying to be Miami, and they don’t know what people wear here.” Claudia, for one, is totally uncomfortable: “I feel like I’m on the wrong turf. Its like the Bloods and the Crips and I’ve crossed over into the wrong land. I’m going to get shanked.” Unfortunately, due to deceptive editing in the promo, the Claudia/Liz showdown we’ve been waiting for is deferred. Claudia does in fact say the much-anticipated phase, “Your dad can create a collection but you can't even dress yourself.” Alas, Liz is regrettably out of earshot. The stage is set, but we’re going to have to wait until next week for a proper face-off.

Next week on Gallery Girls: Spencer’s erotic dream fulfilled?, pop-up debacles, and Amy faces eviction.