Our most-talked-about stories in Visual Art, Design & Architecture, Fashion & Style, and Performing Arts, November 5 - 9, 2012:

With the election over, consumer confidence at its highest in years, and the fiscal cliff still on the horizon, there may be no better time to hit up sales — before the onslaught that is Black Friday.

- Yves Saint Laurent had started to be thought of in historical terms by the time the 1980s rolled around, becoming the first fashion designer with a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum, the brainchild of Diana Vreeland. The iconic French couturier was still, however, more than capable of pushing the envelope, delivering landmark collections well into the late ’70s. Lynn Yaeger, the respected fashion journalist and Vogue contributor, has curated a selection of vintage YSL gems — apparel, accessories, jewelry — for Yoox.com. But be quick, these one-of-a-kind items are going fast. 

- Alexander Wang’s sample sale made news when, at its launch on Election Day, a number of would-be voters may have waited in the wrong line. Sales also have consequences, it seems. But we can think of worse things than scoring up to 70% off edgy classics from the last several collections from the New York wunderkind. The sale continues through 7 p.m. today, as well as 10 a.m.-6 p.m. on Saturday, November 10. 131 Greene Street, New York City.

- Don’t laugh, but eBay is muscling (sashaying?) into the world of designer collaborations. If Target can do it, why not the people’s auction house? The eBay Holiday Collective features original collections from seven designers: Chris Benz, FALLON, Ruffian, Steven Alan, Jonathan Adler, Tibi, and Billy Reid. Tailor-made for gifting, the lower-priced (not auctioned) items of clothing, jewelry, and home decor will be available for hoarding online via eBay’s Fashion Vault (November 12) and on the eBay Fashion app (November 11). 

- Meanwhile, new deliveries are streaming into avant-retailers worldwide. The downtown men’s store Project No. 8 (38 Orchard Street, New York City) has announced arrivals from art-world favorites Dries Van Noten, Maison Martin Margiela, Bless, Siki Im, Tom Scott, and Walter Van Beirendonck. Over in London, Dover Street Market will soon get pre-spring, if you can believe it, from Céline to McQueen. But you really must wait for Black Friday on November 23, or at least be cool about it and hit up Colette’s “Blue Friday” online sale. The French know their colors.

Lee Carter is editor-in-chief of Hint Fashion Magazine.

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

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It’s been a crazy year for Jim Shaw. In January, having drastically downsized his legendary atelier community in the wake of the economic crash, he moved out of the studio that had produced some of Los Angeles’s most ambitious and monumental artworks of the past decade. He took the opportunity to deaccession much of his equally legendary hoard of pop-cultural ephemera — we’re talking tons of pocketbooks, vinyl LPs, vintage magazines, religious pamphlets, board games, collectible figurines, and so on — much of which had served as source material for his feverish postmodern appropriations. Two days later, the body of his longtime art comrade (and collaborator in the seminal noise band Destroy All Monsters), Mike Kelley, was discovered, an apparent suicide that the L.A. art world has not yet fully digested. So much for clearing the decks.

Named an executor of Kelley’s estate, and the only artist on the board of the Mike Kelley Foundation for the Arts, Shaw found himself enmeshed in the minutiae of his good friend’s legacy when he was supposed to be not only producing new work for solo exhibitions at Metro Pictures, Simon Lee, and his new L.A. dealer, Blum & Poe, but also sorting out the particulars for a large-scale midcareer survey that opens November 9 and runs through February 17 at the Baltic Centre for Contemporary Art, in Gateshead, England, where last year’s Turner Prize exhibition was held.

I caught up with Shaw in the midst of his hectic schedule at his new, streamlined work space, sandwiched between a liquor store and a beauty salon in a strip mall in Altadena, a few minutes northeast of downtown L.A., and asked him how Kelley’s death had affected him. He declined to go into detail about his legal responsibilities but was forthcoming about the personal impact.

“One thing it’s done is make me realize that for a lot of my life as an artist, I’ve looked at the people that came before me and thought they were really good, but they made this mistake, and I don’t want to make it,” he says, glancing up from daubing paint on one of his signature torn-photorealist portraits. “Of course, I made other mistakes, but — looking at Mike and what he achieved…he achieved a lot, but he paid a huge price for it, and I don’t want to pay that price. I don’t want to continue to kill myself to make this art and let the rest of my life go down the tubes.

“It’s made me less materialistic, too, looking at Mike’s library, his fabulous library, then looking at my fabulous collection of crap. I was already getting rid of it at the time because I had to move out of that studio. But now I’m even more like — if I read a book, I’m not going to keep it forever; I’m going to recirculate it. I’ll just keep the ones that have reference material that I need to keep going back to. That’s why I don’t want to get caught up in making the prog-rock opera if it means going into debt. I’ll keep it as an ideal, but it may never get completed.”

Yes, you read that right: Prog. Rock. Opera. The crowning Gesamtkunstwerk in Shaw’s long-term project exploring the mythological, historical, and cultural manifestations of a fictive 19th-century new American religion called Oism, the long-rumored multimedia extravaganza was gearing up to full production mode in 2008 when the Wall Street apocalypse struck. The originally envisioned debut of the work at the CAPC in Bordeaux morphed into the acclaimed “Left Behind” exhibition there, dominated by Shaw’s ridiculously complex allegorical paintings on gigantic found theatrical backdrops, predicated, at least in part, on an inspired associative leap equating the fundamentalist Christian rapture with the plight of the American working class — a curiously topical leitmotif that seemed to have been lurking in the material all along.

Shaw is certainly no stranger to acausal connectivity. Most of his long-term or large-scale projects — most overtly the “Dream Drawings” and “Dream Objects,” but also “My Mirage,” Thrift Store Paintings, and Oism — have drawn much of their power from the articulation of paranoiac dream logic using commercial popular and outsider vernacular symbolic vocabularies. This might be mistaken for a mere reboot of Surrealism were it not for the intricate fecundity of Shaw’s unconscious mind; the dream transcriptions found in Jim Shaw: Dreams (Smart Art Press, 1995) and elsewhere read like a mash-up of Brett Easton Ellis’s cultural laundry-list fictions, Alice in Wonderland, and the Comic Book Price Guide. In recent work, the artist has been consciously constructing pictographic palimpsests that mimic the revelatory absurdity of dreams, visions, and conspiracy theories.

“I decided that I might as well get going on making these irrational correlations,” Shaw explains. “In one of the books,” the three-volume Left Behind catalogue from Les presses du réel, “I wrote this essay that explained everything I did — it wasn’t intended for publication; it was for critics to read through—and I called it ‘Spoiler Alert.’ Because saying everything is like revealing what’s behind the curtain of Oz, and then you can go, ‘Oh so that’s what it all means.’ But if the audience looks at it, and they’re trying to make the connections — it’s nice that there’s an explanation, but I would prefer the irrational connections that people make.

“I got a call many, many years ago when I self-published the Distorted Faces book, and it was this 18- or 17-year-old girl who’d seen my book,” he continues. “She never bought it, but she was fascinated with it — and then she told me she thought it was the story of this girl who’d been raped. And there’s no story in the book whatsoever; it’s just a series of faces. And I thought, well, yeah, I guess these people’s faces have been distorted and fucked over. But the fact that some one could jump to a conclusion like that was pretty interesting to me.

“And I think we can all jump to some conclusions from something like Duchamp’s Large Glass, but it’s clearly meant to be incomprehensible in many ways. It’s like a springboard. So if I’m going to make springboards, I like that there are complex things behind them, but also I like that you could look at them and get something without knowing the frickin’ story behind them.”

Still, the frickin’ story can be pretty frickin’ amazing. Take the prog-rock opera, which, like the Baltic survey as a whole and one of the quasi-gatefold album-art backdrop paintings included therein, is titled The Rinse Cycle. Inspired in equal parts by Yes’s disastrous 1973 double LP, Tales from Topographic Oceans, and the Osmonds’ Mormonist concept album, The Plan (released the same year), The Rinse Cycle outlines the mythological underpinnings of Oism. It is a more or less symmetrical (one might even say schizophrenic) unfolding of events beginning with the birth of a virgin from herself in an age before written language or agriculture.

This is followed by the revolt of underworld-dwelling dwarfs against an aristocracy of Atlantean priestesses, the discovery of a crystal power, the appearance of an interdimensional male trickster named “I,” and the use of time-travel wigs to bring the technology for weaponizing the crystals back from the 1940s, resulting in a gravity increase that sinks the land beneath waves. At least that’s what I can reconstruct from my notes. And that’s just disc one!

“I sometimes excuse my methodology as being similar to the methodology of Godard, the way whatever he was reading got thrown into whatever movie he was making at the time,” says Shaw. “I just finished this book called Madness and Modernism [by Louis A. Sass, published in 1992], which had me thinking more and more about madness in myself and society.

“It’s hard for me to articulate this feeling about madness. I’ve had momentary madness that didn’t last very long, so I have an interest in the relationship between madness and creativity. I’ve been interested in William Blake for a long time,” the artist continues, “and he had visions of angels, conversations with angels. That seems like something worth pursuing. But I’m also interested in the art world of a few years ago, when people would say, ‘It’s different now; it’s a worldwide art market, it’s never going to crash like it did back in the ’80s.’

“But I could see that the art market was going to crash; the only question was when. And I could see the people who were the ‘experts’ not knowing—they were either lying to themselves or engaging in magical thinking. These are the kinds of everyday madness that I find interesting. But when it comes to things like climate decisions, they end up killing people just by staying with the status quo long enough. The art world’s not going to kill anybody by being wrong about something—that’s the great thing about postmodernism. But government policies enacted by the Koch brothers will.”

“The Rinse Cycle”—the exhibition — will involve a generous portion of Shaw’s apophenia-generated sociopolitical critiques (and, with luck, a subsequent live version of The Rinse Cycle: The Prog-Rock Opera), but for the time being Shaw is focusing on the work in front of him, which seems to be taking the whole finding-meaning-in-random-patterns thing to a surprisingly personal level. He shows me a new series of barely started canvases, primed with the kind of gestural abstractions that form the ground for many of the Oism works from the past decade. “In these paintings I’m going to bring out faces, and then I’m going to cover them up. This one over here already has a pretty nice sort of Burgie Beer guy. I have no idea how they’re going to turn out. I decided to start working with the same beginning point but different end points, because they’re fun. I just want to go into unknown places and see what happens.” Spoken like a true madman!

To see works by Jim Shaw, click on the slideshow.

This article originally appeared in the November 2012 issue of Modern Painters.

In addition to the big-name photographers at this year’s Paris Photo, which opens on November 15, the 16th edition of the annual event also features some rising stars who are taking print photography to new levels by experimenting cross-discipline with alternative techniques. Tucked away in the corners of the Grand Palais, the event’s main exhibition space, will be classic prints but also experimental mixed-media work such as explorer-photographer Adam Jeppesen’s Xerograph-processed and montaged landscapes, Alex Prager’s slick, voyeristic views of accident scenes, and Matthew Brandt’s "Lakes and Reservoirs" C-prints of landscapes, which are broken down in color tone through immersion in lake-water baths. If not headliners of this year’s event, these figures are definitely the names to watch for in the future. 

To see ARTINFO France’s selection of work by our favorite up-and-coming photographers at Paris Photo, click on the slideshow.

Downtown hot spots Acme and Indochine are pitching in to Sandy relief efforts by donating 50 percent of patrons’ checks on November 12 to volunteer organization New York Cares. So head out to either restaurant tonight for prime people watching, a great time, enticing dishes like Vietnamese bouillabaisse or chicken and eggs, and decadent cocktails. Call the numbers below to reserve a table.

Acme, 9 Great Jones Street, 212-203-2121, acmenyc.com.

Indochine, 430 Lafayette Street, 212-505-5111, indochinenyc.com.

While getting a Bentley for everyone in your family may take an insane amount of cash, the British automaker is doing their part to spread the love around in other ways with their latest Holiday Gifts Collection. Including items for adults, the home, and

Topless option only makes this supercar better If flashy-exoticar curb appeal and organ-bruising ride are at the top of your supercar requirements, cross the McLaren 12C Spider off your list. From some angles, the car might be mistaken for a $25,000...

PARIS — When ARTINFO France sat down with Espace Pierre Cardin’s Nicolas Laugero Lasserre at the art and culture venue (which he’s headed since 2008), the collector-turned-art executive had just purchased a new piece. “I fell in love with it,” he said, glancing knowingly at a gallerist who managed the sale.

A phrase that seems all the more credible knowing Lasserre’s background collecting, and cultivating, “contemporary urban art” — a term he much prefers over “street art.” A former actor, the now-37-year-old Lasserre developed an interest in visual art after moving to Paris in 1996 to study theatre. As he turned from the stage to more behind-the-scenes work directing museums and other cultural venues, he also began collecting — first with any and all pieces that interested him, and after later meeting gallerist Magda Danysz, with more focused purchases of both original works and prints by artists such as JR, Speedy Graphito, Miss. Tic, and Invader.

A truly self-taught expert (often considered a disappearing breed), Lasserre’s tastes often run towards those produced by artists who aim for access to the world at large. “I’m really into the idea of cultural democratization,” he explains. “Urban art is still accessible to the general public, outside the auction room. Shepard Fairey, for example, still sells limited-edition posters on his website for only 50 euros! Everyone can afford them.”

Since taking the helm at Espace Pierre Cardin (Lasserre is also the founder of art-and-culture website Artistik Rezo), he’s upped his collection to include most of the historic names in the street art movement, many of which are being showcased in a show at Vasari Auction in Bordeaux. The one-month show includes pieces by legends such as Blek Le Rat, Futura 2000, Jef Aerosol, and Speedy Graphito, along with auction-house darlings such as Banksy, JR, Invader, and Shepard Fairey, and upstarts such as Ludo and Swoon. 

Other works from his collection (now at a cool 300) remain propped in his office in the 8th arrondissement — blood-red propaganda posters by Fairey, as well as a Rero piece announcing hate for Serge Gainsbourg in the artist’s usual crossed-out letters.

Now seasoned as an authority and as a collector, Lasserre knows what he’s doing when he buys a piece, though he still makes the occasional impulse purchase. “I try to construct groups of series, of works by a single artist, and to give a coherent direction to my collection,” he said. And why such a focus on urban art? In short, it’s by “committed artists who react to and resist the present,” Lasserre says.

NEW YORK — Friday night, art dealer wunderkind Joseph Nahmad and graffiti-artist-cum-downtown-hipster renaissance man Nemo Librizzi joined forces to curate “Deep Space,” a multigenerational survey of “vernacular street art.” Their playful, if apocryphal, vision posed Chilean modernist Roberto Matta as the artistic grandfather of New York-based graffiti scribes Futura, Phase II, and Rammellzee. Housed in a raw space on the ground floor of the trendy High Line Building, the vernissage felt more like a scenester playground than a conventional gallery opening. The partygoers — a motely crew made up of artists Futura, Phase II, Lee Quiñones, Kenny Scharf, Richard Hambleton; members of the billionaire art dynasty David and Helly Nahmad; restaurant and nightlife impresarios Matt Abramcyk and Serge Becker; art dealer and billionaire scion Andy Valmorbida; and Wu Tang Clan affiliate Papa Wu— enjoyed the splashy abstract paintings alongside generous portions of champagne and free jazz.

I stole a moment with Librizzi to ask about the inspiration for the show. “I think all great ideas, if I may call it a great idea,” he said, “came from playing around. Joseph and I really wanted to do something together. And the name Matta came up. We knew we wanted to do something around Matta because he’s an artist that not that many people outside of the art world talk about. So we wanted to kind of rediscover Matta for our generation. And then I thought about Futura, Phase II, and Rammellzee, and there were obvious correlations.” When asked if any of these street artists ever claimed Matta as an influence, he cheerfully responded, “No. That’s the funny thing. They had never seen his work. He had never seen their work. And yet, if you look around you, it looks like it was painted in the same studio.” A small black light room juxtaposing Rammellzee and Matta’s glow-in-the-dark neon paintings was the perfect venue for whimsical, anachronistic juxtapositions: “I knew Rammellzee had painted in black light,” said Librizzi, “but then a Matta specialist told me, ‘oh, well, Matta was doing that in the ’40s.’”

Click on the slideshow to see images from the opening party for "Deep Space." 

TURIN— The 19th edition of Turin's contemporary art fair Artissima closed this past Sunday with 50,000 registered visitors in just four days. Open to the public from November 9 – 11, this year’s fair title was “It’s Not the End of the World” — a reference both to the Mayan prophecy as well as the ongoing economic meltdown. And given its turnout (a significant increase over its prior editions), chances are that most of its attendants, with financial straits in mind, agreed with the sentiment.

Having lost Francesco Manacorda to Tate Liverpool, Artissima is now under the direction of Sarah Cosulich Canarutto, who this year shifted its focus to a more pronounced emphasis on global art. Of the 172 participating galleries, two-thirds were international (versus 53 Italian galleries), with representatives from Morocco, Guatemala, Israel, and Eastern Europe.

International collectors were comparatively high in attendance, particularly guests from countries impacted less from the global financial crisis, such as Turkey, Brazil, and Saudia Arabia. This likely played into the fair’s 2012 success, which was an important factor not just for Italy’s contemporary art market, but for Turin: the city’s economic outcome in 2011 amounted to €4 million ($5.1 million).

Its Thursday-night VIP opening was relatively tame, with just a few sales and no headline-making transactions. Collectors abstained from monumental works (and matching price tags) in favor of small pieces and works by young artists. A few of those seemed to be keeping financial woes in mind: such as bank foundation CRT (which annually purchases artwork for Turin museums Galleria d’Art Moderna and Castello di Rivoli), which reduced this year’s purchasing budget from €600,000 to €350,000 ($750,000 to $446,000).

Prices of sold works were generally on the lower end, ranging between €5,000 and €30,000 (circa $6,000 to $38,000). But there were some more expensive works offered: such as those by Antony Gormley at Galleria Continua, which reached €300,000 (circa $380,000), and by Roni Horn at i8 Gallery, which were priced at €280,000 (circa $360,000).

The most successful sales during opening night were those at Galleria Continua by young Italian artist Giovanni Ozzola (born 1982), who currently has a show with Ai Weiwei at the gallery’s space in San Gimignano. A giant black-slate engraved map of ancient navigation by Ozzola sold for €22,000 ($28,000); the artist’s smaller works started at around €4,000 ($5,000). Weiwei was also represented at Artissima with a new work, a helmet made of marble, priced at €60,000 ($76,000).

In addition to its Roni Horn pieces, i8 Gallery from Reykjavík presented works by Icelandic artist Ragnar Kjartansson, ranging between €6,000 and €23,000 ($7,600 to $29,000). The artist has been held in high esteem at earlier fairs, by collectors such as Patrizia Sandretto, who bought the 150 paintings created by Kjartansson at the Icelandic Pavilion during the 2009 Venice Biennial (which are currently on view at the Fondazione Sandretto Re Rebaudengo through January 6). Kjartansson was also featured in Artissima’s parallel program, with a music performance at the Fondazione on Sunday morning.

Also headlining the parallel program was Dan Perjovschi, who created a site-specific work for Palazzo Madama, and whose works were offered by Berlin/Ljubljana-based gallery Gregor Podnar. A composition of 80 postcards that the artist sent to Cosulich Canarutto during the curator's earlier position at Villa Manin went for €40,000 ($51,000).

Another Berlin-based gallery, Peres Projects, presented three new artists: Italy’s Marinella Senatore, who currently has a solo show running at Peres’ Berlin space, represented at the fair with a photograph from her current film project at €6,000 ($7,700); Belgian artist trio Leo Gaben, at prices ranging €8,000–15,000 ($10,200-19,000); and Canadian Brent Wadden, from €5,000–12,000 ($6,300–15,300). The gallery managed sales on opening night of works by Wadden, Gaben, and Los Angeles-based artist Alex Israel.

Italian gallery Massimo Minini also had an impressive run on opening night, with immediate sales of new works by Letizia Cariello for €12,000 ($15,300) each. Other artists in high demand at Minini included Hans-Peter Feldmann, with C-prints sold for €24,000 ($30,000) each; David Maljkovic, with works at around €9,000 ($11,500); and Italian artist Alberto Garutti, who is scheduled for a major retrospective in Milan starting November 17, with one work offered at €24,000 ($30,000).

– Rihanna's SNL Performance Upsets Web Artists: A small group of Web artists are up in arms over the garish 3-D animations that accompanied Rihanna's performance on "Saturday Night Live" over the weekend. Los Angeles video artist Jerome LOL claimed the graphics — which showed up on a green screen behind the pop star for the duration of her set — were drawn from a video he made in 2010. Others deny any impropriety. "Far from a 'rip off' the graphics are more of a homage to Internet and computer aesthetics than anything else," wrote Gizmodo's Mario Aguilar. "These styles never really belonged to the self-aggrandizing appropriators who call themselves artists in the first place." (Though, it must be mentioned, Rihanna was forced to admit that she ripped off art photogapher David LaChapelle just last year.) [Buzzfeed, Gizmodo]

– Performance Art Flashmob Aims to Prevent Moore Sculpture Sale: The outspoken artist Bob and Roberta Smith organized a flashmob demonstration outside Tower Hamlets council yesterday to protest its controversial plan to sell Henry Moore's public sculpture "Draped Seated Woman." Seated women, draped in green outfits to resemble the bronze statue, struck poses reminiscent of Moore's figure outside the council, which hopes to raise funds for key services by selling the beloved public artwork. [London24]

– Christie's Sues Rival "Chritrs": Christie's has sued similarly named Chinese auction house Chritrs for allegedly infringing on its Chinese trademark. The American auction house says its clients were being "misled and decieved" by the Asian house, which shares one of the Chinese characters used in the translation of Christie's. (The two names are also pronounced almost identically in Chinese.) For its part, Chritrs claims collectors are capable of distinguishing between the two businesses. In 2008, Sotheby’s won a similar case against Chinese company Sichuan Sufubi, a transliteration of Sotheby’s Chinese name, that had been holding auctions in China since 2003. [TAN]

– Finland Pick Venice Biennale Rep: Curators Miko Elo, Marko Karo, and Harri Laakso have selected conceptual artist Antti Laitinen to create a new installation in Finland's Alvar Aalto-designed pavilion — which was damaged by a falling tree in 2011 — for next year's Venice Biennale. Laitinen, whose installations, videos, and performances often investigate man's relationship to nature, will also create a performance on the Finnish pavilion's grounds, documentation of which will hang alongside a selection of his earlier work. [Press Release]

– Bank Takes Over Deutsche Guggenheim: Germany's largest bank has announced that it will continue to run the Berlin contemporary art museum that it oversaw for 15 years alongside New York's Guggenheim Foundation, which pulled out in Feburary. The new institution will be renamed the Deutsche Bank Kunsthalle and operate under new management. Rather than serve as a venue to display the bank's vaunted corporate collection, the venue will "be a place where young, promising talent can be seen first," according to spokesman Stefan Krause. It will debut with a solo exhibition of Imran Qureshi in April 2013. [ITA]

– Christie's Andy Warhol Sales Begin: Yesterday, Christie's kicked off the first in a series of auctions to raise money for the Andy Warhol Foundation. The inaugural sale featured more than 350 works by the Pop art pioneer and fetched more than $17 million. (The rest of the foundation's inventory will be sold off in a combination of live and online sales over the next few years.) A print from Warhol's "Endangered Species" series — "San Francisco Silverspot" — fetched $1.2 million, while most lots sold for five- and six-figure sums. [BBC]

– Crystal Bridges First-Year Attendance Exceeds Expectations: In its first year, Walmart heiress Alice Walton's Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art saw an impressive 604,000 visitors — nearly 2,000 per day — more than doubling administrators' expectations. Contributing factors no doubt include the big box giant's pledge of $20 million to pay all visitors' admission fees and the museum's partnership with Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Louvre. [AP]

– Seaport Museum Mops Up: The South Street Seaport Museum is still struggling to recover from damage caused by Hurricane Sandy. The water surged to six feet at the lobby entrance, wiping out the building's electrical systems. The timing couldn't have been worse: Last January the museum reopened after being closed for almost a year for the expansion of its galleries. Repairs will likely take months, though the institution hopes to reopen around Thanksgiving and run on generators. Since the storm, it has raised $25,000 via donations from the public. [NYT]

– Mining Museum Reopens After Gold Heist: After a Wild West-style heist of $2 million in gems and gold forced its closure in late September, the California State Mining and Mineral Museum in Mariposa has reopened. Though the hooded, pickaxe-armed robbers were in and out of the museum vault in two minutes flat, they weren't able to lift one of the museum's prized possessions, the Fricot Nugget, a 14-pound mass of gold. The bandits remain at large. [Modesto Bee]

– Pompidou Returns to the Dali Well: The Centre Pompidou's 1979 Salvador Dali retrospective set an attendance record for the museum that stands to this day, but the institution hopes to surpass it this winter with its first exhibition devoted to Dali in 32 years. The blockbuster show, running November 21 to March 25, 2013, features not only photographs, paintings, films, and objects from the museum's permanent collection, but nearly 200 paintings on loan from the four foremost Dali collections in the world. [Le Figaro]

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Tal R makes paintings, drawings, and sculptures, working with unique materials like rabbit-skin glue to create images that are both recognizable and unnerving. His exhibition “The Shlomo” was set to open November 1 at Cheim & Read, in New York (now opening November 15). Scott Indrisek visited him in his Copenhagen studio to eat strawberries and discuss destruction.

Scott Indrisek: Do you have your own paintings on the walls at your house?

Tal R: Never. My house is full of objects. My work always arises from the private, but it goes through this carnival of other images, objects that I have around. Let’s say there is a certain thing you experience in your life. It’s not really productive in images. You need something in between. You need doormen. You need this distance so that it can be an image for other people. Otherwise it’s just therapy.

You’ve said that one should be able to explain a painting over the telephone.

It’s a rule, but then I also ask for trouble. Every artwork should have a certain “hand” that reaches out for the audience, but the physical experience is completely beyond what you can explain on the phone. You can almost explain Donald Judd or Bruce Nauman over the phone. But when you see the pieces, they work on you in a different way. I want there to be normal things in my paintings that everybody can pick up, but when you stand in front of them you get insecure about what you’re watching. It’s like getting the viewer to the dance floor with a very cheesy pop song. If you ask people, they won’t admit that they like the song, but when they hear it, they move. Or like when you put french fries on the table. People will say, “No, I don’t like french fries.” But then everybody’s picking at the french fries. That’s how the painting should work.

Can you describe the character of the Shlomo, who is the focus of your show at Cheim & Read?

He’s a bit of an orientalist. A dreamer. Shlomo is the name of an uncle I never knew. So he’s perfect to project romantic things onto. He’s a wanderer. In the next few years he will walk around in different forms: falling asleep, taking a nap in different paintings, disappearing into elevators, going into doors he shouldn’t go through. You try to create paintings where the viewer can wander around; now the Shlomo actually takes the position of the viewer. He’s going to get lost on our behalf. Shlomo’s always the secondary character. If you have a film, there’s Brad Pitt and then there’s the friend who is actually just taking care of the garden. And we don’t follow his destiny, we follow Brad Pitt’s destiny. But it’s the gardener that’s the most interesting.

Is there a narrative in your mind, a progression of where he’ll go?

There is a clear progression to the images I pick up, but it is beyond my language. You invent something and afterward you talk about it. I think artists should watch out; they should admit that their work will always be faster than language. And I think art should be beyond language—otherwise go and write a story, go and be a poet.

What about some of your other works that are more abstract?

Those paintings are just small details, ornaments, fractions. They are so broken down that they start to create another language. But these kinds of paintings come from something very concrete. I went on a boat with my friend, the artist Daniel Richter, to a very remote part of Greenland. For three weeks we were just drawing every day. Clouds, mountains, and sea. So I did this whole group of drawings in Greenland and I took them back to the studio and I started working with them, just paint on paper. You pull out stuff. You take it one step away from the drawing you made in front of the sea and the mountains and the clouds. And what now looks like a weird line is actually a detail of clouds, mountains, and the reflection of the sea. You pull it through a system, and then at the end something beautiful happens: It’s completely not connected anymore to Greenland. It’s just in itself; it’s close to not even being art. It’s just a very simple gesture and then it’s gone.

You’re moving constantly between different media.

With some works, you don’t start at a point where you know that they will be successful, that they will really rise up and be a grand sculpture—you start from a place where they really look like shit. You want to do a certain sculpture or figure, and while you’re doing it you get red cheeks because you know this is a grand failure. But pay close attention to that moment, because although something is failing, great possibilities are right around the corner. Also, in an artist’s production there are works that you can only understand because of something else the artist did. Not all of the works are main works. Some of the works are what the artist did to go from A to C.

I think my way into painting came from missteps. For many years: having a great idea, disappointment, destroying it. The only thing that happened to me was that I got a little tired, so I started destroying slowly, and a lot of my painting style arose from this destroying slowly.

What do you mean?

I mean when you do a painting and it’s awful and you want to step on it. After some years of this circle of disappointment, you’re tired, so you take the painting and just put dots on it. A very slow, aggressive way of destroying it. But then something happens: The painting looks back and says, “Maybe I am possible.”

What other painters do you feel an affinity with?

There are certain painters over the years that I continue liking. I just went to Paris and saw Georges Rouault again, who painted clowns and also nuns, priests, Jesus. But at the moment I’m more into these painters who are trying to develop narrative spaces: Bonnard, Balthus, Vallotton. That’s really heavy weight for a painter, to try and do a space where you can maneuver, to try and do faces, figures. I want to make concrete rooms where the experience is absolutely abstract.

Your studio looks like a domestic space, like a living room.

If you’re here for long periods, it’s nice to be able to fall asleep. Before, I used to lie on the floor among the works, stand up and continue. There was this elegant warp between walking and sleeping, working and walking and sleeping. So I have two beds here now and I’m building a third. To find routes, to find new paths into the work, you have to be around them a lot. You want to really, at the end of the day, surprise yourself, because what surprises you will surprise the viewer. Unpredictable moves on the dance floor.

Ever since Diego Della Valle announced his plans to relaunch Schiaparelli earlier this year, the rumor mill has been spinning with supposed candidates for the house’s creative director. But who could possibly follow in the footsteps of Elsa Schiaparelli, the designer who, as illustrated in the Met’s recent “Prada and Schiaparelli: Impossible Conversations” exhibition, was one of the most compelling fashion figures of the 20th century? And more importantly, will this mystery designer and Della Valle be able to bring back the iconic house with dignity?

From the moment she launched her line with a range of trompe l’oeil knitwear in 1927, it was clear that Elsa Schiaparelli was a pioneer: a trailblazer of the bold, the beautiful, and the bizarre. The queen of sartorial surrealism, she was a close friend of Salvatore Dali, with whom she collaborated on the famed Lobster dress worn by Wallis Simpson in a 1937 issue of Vogue. Chanel, one of Schiaparelli’s competitors and contemporaries, reportedly called her “that Italian artist who makes clothes.” But Schiaparelli’s witty designs, from her shoe hat to her monkey fur heels to her skeleton dress, resonated with artists, eccentrics, actresses (Mae West and Marlene Dietrich were among her clients), socialites, and editors alike. And her influence on fashion has been unwavering.

Early on, there were whispers that John Galliano was up for the Schiaparelli job. From a strictly creative standpoint (let’s take his racist-rant heard round the world out of the equation for a moment), and considering he’s a visionary in his own right, one could see him succeeding in the role. Sadly, Della Valle’s rep dismissed the rumor. Last week, British Vogue reported that Canadian born, London-based designer Erdem Moralioğlu and Nicolas Ghesquiere (who will be leaving Balenciaga at the end of this month) were rumored to be in the running. The house declined to comment. But while taking over Schiaparelli would indeed be a thrilling challenge for any inspired designer, history has proven that restoring a sleeping fashion house to its original prowess is no easy task.

Just look at the gaggle of houses that have been pushed from the archive to the runway in the past few years. Vionnet was first brought back in 2006 under the direction of Sophia Kokosalaki. The house, founded in 1912 by Madeline Vionnet – who was best known for inventing the ever-flattering bias cut ­– has had a revolving door of designers ever since. Rodolfo Paglialunga found some success from 2008 to 2011, his first collection championing Grecian draping, a Vionnet signature. Upon his departure, Barbara and Lucia Croce, a set of Italian twins, hustled in for only three seasons before severing their relationship with the brand. The spring 2013 collection was designed by a house team, which turned out clothes that looked more like bridesmaids dresses than frocks born out of a pioneering couture house.

Then there’s the House of Worth. Charles Frederick Worth, an Englishman who launched his house in Paris in 1858, is largely regarded as the father of haute couture. His made-to-order gowns were worn by everyone from Empress Eugenie to Sarah Bernhardt and he was the first designer to sew labels into his clothes. The house was relaunched in 2010 with Italian designer Giovanni Bedin at its helm. And Bedin’s first two couture collections, which fused Worth’s impeccable Edwardian corsets with thigh-skimming structured skirts or tulle tutus, showed promise. But for autumn 2012/2013, the designer turned out a range of ill-fitting jumpsuits and boned one-pieces with 19th-century details that looked better suited for last week’s Victoria’s Secret show than a couture runway. The clothes were skimpy, costumey, and stuck in another era. As a result, Worth has failed to break into the upper echelons of contemporary couture.

Another prime example is Halston, which has relaunched and changed hands several times since Roy Halston’s death in 1990. Harvey Weinstein bought the house in 2007, placing Marco Zanini at the creative helm. Then, for some reason, Sarah Jessica Parker got involved and began consulting on the diffusion line, Halston Heritage. Marios Schwab tried his hand designing the main line, but left in 2011. And now, all that is left are high street-quality designs that have nothing to do with the glamorous ’70s gowns Roy Halston designed for the Studio 54 set. The house was recently bought by a former BCBG exec, Ben Malka, and yet another rebirth is in the works. But from its celebrity collaborators to the sub-par designs, the relaunch attempts have made a mockery of the house. Perhaps we should just let Halston and his legacy rest in peace.

It must be noted that it’s not impossible to bring back a house with integrity. It was famously done in 1983, when Karl Lagerfeld returned Chanel to super-brand status with an irreverent collection that showed the house’s classic tweeds in the form of sexed-up mini skirts and played with the iconic double C logo. And most recently, Guillaume Henry breathed life back into Carven, a 1940s couture house that relaunched to great acclaim in 2010. Founded by Madame Carmen Tommaso in 1945, the house was an alternative to the formal aesthetic perpetuated by Dior. Today, Henry’s clothes speak to that carefree, feminine spirit, but cater to a forward-thinking, contemporary woman’s needs. 

All things considered, it’s fair to say that despite the numerous examples of failure, it is possible to revive Schiaparelli with dignity. But it’s going to take a great talent to do it — someone who understands how to lift the house out of its historical surreal vacuum and into the 21st century. Someone who, like Lagerfeld, can be respectful, playful, and push away from literal interpretations of Schiaparelli’s groundbreaking garments. And, to avoid the game of musical chairs that so many of these revival houses have endured, it will take savvy, patient corporate management to entice said talent to stay. “I think it’s possible to do an incredible, small, charming luxury business,” Della Valle told the New York Times last May, adding that he’s not looking to turn Schiaparelli into a big brand. With that in mind, it would seem that Della Valle is on the right track.

I hope that the businessman and the designer he chooses (who, it should be noted, was supposed to be revealed in September but has yet to be named) will succeed. But I also hope that they’ll have enough of a vision to push the house forward, and won’t revert to doing something like, say, an enamel lobster bag. Elsa Schiaparelli will roll in her grave. Let’s not wake the dead without good reason.

NEW YORK — M&Ms filled the air as RxArt, the organization dedicated to placing fine art into healthcare facilities, took over the gallery at Milk Studios last night for the 12th annual RxArt party. Artists Dustin Yellin, Aurel Schmidt, and Will Cotton joined a stylish crowd that included model Arizona Muse, Proenza Schouler’s Lazaro Hernandez, and art collector Adam Lindemann to imbibe, socialize, and bid on the silent auction and live auction to benefit RxArt.

The event honored artist Dan Colen for his ongoing work with RxArt and his upcoming permanent installation at Kings County Hospital in Brooklyn. Colen described the pieces he plans to install in the children’s ward. “It’s these drawings I’m doing with M&Ms, and these sculptures I’m making out of rocks that I paint to look like M&Ms, so I just thought the kids could make some fun relationship to it,” he said.

RxArt founder and executive director Diane Brown explained why the organization honored Colen. “He’s just so filled with joy and his art is, so what do you want in a hospital but to change the whole energy, right?” she said, before adding that she had her eye on a couple pieces. We asked if she could tell us which ones. “Absolutely not!” she replied.

Then we bumped into gallerist and RxArt board member Bill Powers as he was admiring Colen’s colorful “Untitled” M&M drawing, which was to be auctioned off. “It’s beautiful, right?” Powers said. “Melts in your mouth, not in your hands, but apparently on paper.”

Moments before the live auction we caught the charming auctioneer C.K. Swett, who was going to take the stage after fellow auctioneer and Paddle8 founder Alexander Gilkes. “He’s going to make them smile with his charm and his verbal agility, and I’m going to tug at their heart strings and get some direct pledges,” said Swett.

Gilkes certainly flexed his verbal agility with an interesting choice of words to introduce Colen. “We are here to stand behind the man who has huge talent and huge heart — Dan Colen, the pharaoh of the New York art scene — the man who made precious bird shit and bubblegum,” said Gilkes.

Brown finally revealed which work she had her eye on — the M&M drawing by Colen, which she did not bid on till the end. “At $19,000 it is the last chance for all of you to take part,” announced Gilkes. “It looks like Diane, our generous hostess is then the proud owner of this work — going once, going twice — sold!”

Click on the slideshow to see guests at RxArt's 12th Annual Party honoring Dan Colen.

David Lynch’s “Mulholland Drive”-inspired Parisian club Silencio will be bringing its unique brand of eccentric glamor to Miami during Art Basel, in a collaboration with Morgans Hotel Group.

Silencio Miami will be residing at the Delano South Beach for the duration of the fair. The hotel’s nightclub will be transformed into a salon-type atmosphere similar to the original location on rue Montmartre, with a parallel style of bespoke lighting and cocktails, running a program of music, film, art, and fashion throughout the duration of the art fair. As at the Paris location, Silencio Miami will be accessible to members only. 

Opened in August 2011, Silencio was modeled by Lynch after the sinister cabaret featured in his 2001 film. Planned to be much more than just a drinking den for its members, the underground space regularly hosts concerts and performances related to art and design, including movie retrospectives as well as premieres, guest DJs, and artists-in-residence. Lynch took strong control over the creation and the program of the nightspot, having designed the furniture and interiors as well as curating finer details ranging from the books on the shelves to the selection of movies played.

Silencio has previously staged pop-ups at highly coveted events such as the Cannes Film Festival and played co-host to the Serpentine Gallery’s annual Future Contemporaries Party. Each has successfully captured the original spot’s air of hypnotic mystery. This should be no exception — unless, of course, it turns out to all be an illusion. 

While the East Coast was being ravaged by hurricane Sandy, a separate freak storm was lashing the diagonally opposite African shores of the Atlantic in Morocco, pounding the country with horizontal rains strong enough to provoke flash flooding and wreak...