ARTINFO got one of its presents early this year: A dedicated Los Angeles correspondent. To celebrate, we've asked a few Los Angeles art notables what they would like to give or receive this year, and rounded up their answers.

In case you happen to run into one of them, keep these in mind. Otherwise, perhaps it will inspire you, as you get ready to wrap presents for your loved ones.

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China Chow (actress, collector, model)

“Give:

— Alex Israel's Sky Backdrop Painting

— Ted Muehling's Celadon Egg Vase

— Hugs

Receive:

— A silver painting by my father

— A private exercise class for my friends and I taught by Richard Simmons”

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Catherine Opie (artist)

“The first gift would be to give all the parents in Connecticut their children back.

Second gift is to hypnotize the world against violence once and for all.

Third gift is my crazy herding dog puppy should be given to a good home on a farm.

My present: one year (only) living with Picasso's portrait of Gertrude Stein — please, MOMA.” 

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Andrea Fiuczynski (president, Christie’s Los Angeles)

“Undo all random (and not-so-random, especially those cunningly premeditated and deliberate) acts of 'art vandalism,' such as the most recent vandalism of the Tate’s Rothko. Because works of art, like human lives, should not have to be subjected to violence.

Locate and return the paintings stolen from the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in 1990, because it’s the right thing to do.

Shadow Andy Warhol on a Saturday night prowl in 1967 with 2012 Warhol market knowledge. Because Andy Warhol’s seemingly infinite 15 minutes of fame and universal appeal never cease to amaze, dazzle and... baffle!

Commission Cy Twombly to create a suite of site-specific Blackboard Paintings for the minimalist penthouse lighthouse loft with sweeping views overlooking the azure waters of Formentera that exists only in my head! WHY? Why not?!”

***

Bettina Korek (founder of ForYourArt)

“A Weekend at The Lightning Field

An overnight stay is 'de rigueur' at Walter De Maria’s remote and seminal work of Land Art. The sparse cabin on the edge of the field — 400 polished stainless steel poles arranged in a grid measuring one mile by one kilometer — is sure to be even more difficult to reserve after restoration (made possible by Larry Gagosian and Miuccia Prada) is complete in June.

Do It, edited by Hans Ulrich Obrist

Do It began in Paris nearly 20 years ago as a conversation. The original publication has artworks in the form of do-it-yourself text instructions to be completed by the reader, exploring Marcel Duchamp’s idea that 'art is a game between all people of all periods.' It’s available online (the current price reflects the fact that art books are collectible), and Independent Curators International is celebrating the project with a special edition by Marina Abramovic. It’s art you can make every day.

Teuscher Champagne Truffles

Swiss über-gallery Hauser & Wirth is known for having these truffles on hand — it doesn’t get any sweeter than this.”

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Maggie Kayne (co-owner of Kayne Griffin Corcoran)

“—I would love to trash a Ferrari 458 while breaking the record at the Gumball 3000 Rally. 

—A Joseph Beuys Felt Suit 

—A Turrell Gasworks Meditation room in my home

—To reserve Peter Zumthor's Therme Vals for an exclusive retreat with only my closest friends and family

—An unlimited budget for my boyfriend, Aaron Sandnes, to build me the custom Yamaha sr500 brat tracker motorcycle we've been planning.”

***

Perry Rubenstein (owner and founder of Perry Rubenstein Gallery)

“There's one gift (we gave to our daughters) that I would love to give back. The new Furby. It may be revamped but it is every bit as annoying at its vintage predecessor. Or more.

The copper mouth from Danh Vo's 'We the People.' Sealed but sensuous, she speaks volumes.... As does the artist.

A sponsorship from Under Armour. I live in their clothes. They should pay me.”

***

Franklin Sirmans (chief curator of contemporary art at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art)

“Because of the job and the nature of contemporary art, I have been fortunate enough to travel, a lot, and to diverse places. I’d like to be able to give an airline ticket for two months travel to absolutely anywhere imaginable.

John Baldessari’s 'Tips for Artists Who Want to Sell' magnet (yes, it can be purchased at the LACMA gift shop and Dagny Corcoran’s Art Catalogues). Baldessari’s work often traffics in the absurd. More young artists should try to create in that fertile space. Life is absurd. Baldessari’s magnet reminds you of that and how making good art can’t be taught and has very little to do with what actually sells. 

In terms of artwork, Sam Durant has made significant installations that would be great for museums, but I wouldn't mind receiving one of his smaller sculptures. A [Jesus Rafael] Soto “Penetrable” for my backyard wouldn’t hurt either.

It would be great for chef Govind Armstrong to come to my house and cook for my family.”

BRUSSELS — The 29-year-old French-Moroccan artist Mehdi-Georges Lahlou has had an eventful early career. A piece in which he projected Bible and Koran verses onto his naked body caused a scandal in Morocco without even being shown in the country (shortly before the artist's other works were displayed at the 2011 Marrakech Art Fair, local media voiced outrage over the piece, illustrating articles with images of only the Koranic part of the 2010 diptych, “Koranic Inlay”). And his installation “Cocktail or Self-Portrait in Society,” in which Lahlou’s oft-worn red high heels stand on a prayer rug, also caused some outrage.

The two works hit on several sensitive issues in Muslim culture: the prohibition on modifying one’s body, nudity, sexuality, and improper use of the Koran and religious objects. Today, the artist thinks that if he had omitted the holy verses from his penis, the controversy might have been a minor one. “Even in Morocco, many people wanted me to come back after the controversy. I’ve kept a bit of distance for now, because I don’t think I should add fuel to the fire. My thinking about my work has been a bit affected, but I’m not throwing in the towel. I’m picking it up again in a different way.”

On a Sunday afternoon in Brussels, Mehdi-Georges Lahlou arrived to meet ARTINFO France on an old scooter. He is easily recognizable from his big smile and because of his habit of depicting himself in his art — wearing a hijab with a watermelon on his head, or eating a banana with the Koran balanced on his head. He molds his body to create busts, or, in the case of “Salât, ou Autoportrait Dirigé” (“Salât, or Directed Self-Portrait”) (2011), to create nine white plaster figures in prayer position — displayed recently at the “Unlimited Bodies” exhibition at Paris’s Palais de l’Iéna.

With his loose combination of religious iconography and incongruous objects, the ambiguous humor in Lahlou’s work is often misunderstood. But his approach is never casual — rather it blurs the boundaries between personal commentary on his subjects alongside artistic thought.

“I’m not an activist shouting. I am truly respectful of religions and beliefs, except when they kill or hurt people,” Lahlou explains. “As a person, I have a political opinion, I take a position or I don’t. But in my work, I don’t want it to be like that. I want people to be in an awkward position and not know what’s happening, whether it’s humor or reality, true or false. I lean toward being stupid [in my work] because I don’t want to make people think that I am saying bad things. You can have criticisms, but that doesn’t mean that you’re against something. You can have fun with everything — but can you really have fun with everything?”

Lahlou was born in a seaside town on France’s Atlantic coast to a Muslim father, a jeweler, and a Catholic mother, a flamenco dancer. Having grown up in France and Morocco, he was raised with dual traditions that he considers rich though sometimes problematic. Though Catholicism doesn’t openly discuss the pleasures of the flesh, it does allow for nudity and religious ecstasy — “not a pleasure between flesh, but a pleasure with God,” Lahlou explains. Whereas in Islam, the body and God have no intermediary.

His series of Madonnas, “It’s More Sexy or Vierge à l’Enfant” (“It’s More Sexy or Virgin With Child”), 2010, layers mosaics from the Muslim world over paintings by Leonardo da Vinci and other Old Masters. Through December 23, Lahlou’s installation “Construction Cubique ou la Pensée Confuse” (“Cubic Construction or Confused Thought”) is on view in a square in Brussels as part of an exhibition by the Musée Ianchelevici. At the center of the cube is a Madonna, which replaces the Muslim image Lahlou had initially planned, upon request from the mayor’s office to change it in order not to offend voters.

As seems appropriate for an artist living and working in Belgium, Surrealism has helped Lahlou defuse his initial ideas of dogmatic commentary on religion and cultures. His first artwork, made in 2009, was titled “Ceci N’est Pas Une Femme Musulmane.” “Everything I create is false. The image is not real. That’s why I associate myself somewhat with Surrealism, the question of the fabulous, and the attainable utopia — but in the end it’s utopia, and therefore unattainable. In the fabulous, there is humor.” Art critic and author Christine Vuegen has called this approach “Lahloutopia.”

Lahlou’s essential poetry lies in his video performances. There, he operates between endurance and transcendence, meditation and mediation, taking advantage of his training as a dancer. The body has become his artistic tool, which in itself makes a statement beyond image and aesthetics.

In performance pieces, he’ll belly-dance in high heels while breaking teacups, as the audience throws couscous. In 2009, he walked the 18.5 miles between Mechelen and Antwerp in his signature red heels, a nine-hour journey during which his appearance in little villages brought people out of their houses. “There were old women saying to me, ‘Oh, you’re my hero, look at my heels, they’re much shorter and they hurt a lot.’ Then there were North African men who ran after me and insulted me, and other Arabs who were happy.” Lahlou repeated the performance in Venice for the 2011 Biennale.

“Having your arms in the air for seven hours — I’m telling you, at the end, you have to go see a physical therapist, your back is out,” the artist says. For the performance “Devout with the Niqab” (2011) in the south of France, he put on a niqab (a cloth with which some Muslim women veil their faces) and then kept up ecstatic movement seven hours a day for three days, in temperatures that reached 110 degrees in the sun. “There was also the problem of dehydration, of martyrdom, but what was important to me was really the question of endurance. I really question the stupidity of endurance or stupid endurance.”

The performances are brought to life through their audience, who come and go as the hours go by. “I am there, but all alone, I am no one, I am nothing,” Lahlou says. “What’s important to me are the questions that people will ask themselves while watching my work. The first time they see it, they’re charmed, they think it’s beautiful. When they leave and come back, the second time, they’re stupefied. By becoming disinterested, there’s a re-interest.” Even more striking is his “Henna, ou Hommage à Nous-Mêmes” (“Henna, or Homage to Ourselves”), for which Muslim women put him in a traditional dress and gave him henna tattoos during Ramadan, oblivious to the cameras that filmed them.

Lahlou takes inspiration both from Fluxus and the burlesque. “When Josephine Baker went out on stage, she knew that they were going to take her for an animal, but at the same time, she played with the fact that others were observing her. Then, it was the others who were the animals, it wasn’t her anymore. You play with your origins and your culture, and in the end it’s the others who find themselves in a somewhat strange position, asking themselves questions about what they are watching.”

Lahlou’s work also brings to mind feminist artists of the 1960s and 70s, such as Valie Export and Gina Pane. His cross-dressing is often erroneously and superficially read as an end in itself, or a commentary on femininity. “I worked right away on the deconstruction of the male gender,” the artist said. “That’s why I always kept my male attributes, like my beard. But I hung six and a half feet from the ground chanting poems by Ronsard, or I went to drown myself in the sea in a wedding dress. Alberto Sorbelli, Pierre Molinier, Andy Warhol, and Marcel Duchamp already made cross-dressing come alive — but what I bring to it is my Arab mug.”

Lahlou’s sculptural works have so far revolved around prayer or philosophical thought integrated into belief. “Messe pour un Corps ou Autoportrait aux Livres” (“Mass for a Body or Self-Portrait with Books,” 2010, is a headless body with skin made of fabric patterned with mosques and minarets, which sits on books beside a matching ball; “Fontaine,” 2010, is a basin of moving water where gold-leaf hands wash themselves in perpetuity; and “Sans Titre, Paradise,” 2010, consists of pairs of hands and feet made of wax emerging from a prayer rug, as if the worshiper had fallen inside. “For me, it was a perpetual prayer, but in the end not really to Allah, more to the supernatural,” the artist reflects. “Perhaps my God is the supernatural.”

Even though it represents a central element of religion, prayer remains something separate for Lahlou. “I think prayer is something magnificent. I’ve done a lot of praying, and I was a dancer and I associate it with choreography. For me, it’s really a gift of the body. When you have 150 people — on Fridays, 1,000 or more — who are doing the same motion at the same time, it’s something generous.” Although Lahlou may involuntarily cause division, the act of prayer he represented in “Salât” is activated five times a day, “in harmony with the whole world.”

By veiling himself entirely, Lahlou references Greek sculpture, but in plaster instead of marble. The multiplication of images in his most recent work, “72 Vierges” (“72 Virgins”) — “a family portrait where I am unmade” — also has a parallel in El Greco, who reproduced the same face several times in his “Assumption of the Virgin.” “Ultimately, all the figures that are reproduced, I have the impression that they are canceled out. It’s one, or nothing,” Lahlou says. “By multiplying, there is a sort of absence.”

Lahlou settled in Brussels, a new favorite city among young artists, after graduating from the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Nantes in 2007. He jokes that it’s because he got on the wrong road after missing a flight from Amsterdam to New York, but the real reason was a desire for change and the need to avoid the enclosed and competitive artistic atmosphere in France. “I had to stick with it or do something different. And doing something different was going away, packing my bags and coming back with my suitcases full,” he says.

Galerie Transit in Mechelen was soon interested in his work, followed by Hélene Lacharmoise’s Galerie Dix9, which currently shows his work in Paris. Paris’s Arab World Institute has been a staunch supporter, though the first institution to acquire Lahlou’s work was the regional art collection Frac Midi-Pyrénées, which purchased the first edition of “Salât.” “My first collectors were women and homosexuals,” Lahlou says. “Now it’s everybody.” His prices run from €1,700 ($2,200) and €45,000 ($58,000).

Although Brussels is more relaxed and less expensive than Paris, it’s not always easy for Lahlou to live there. “Already with all these controversies, these death threats, I’m not very calm. It’s a good place to work, but sometimes I don’t feel comfortable,” he says. “I don’t walk like all the North Africans in Molenbeek [a heavily Muslim neighborhood near the center of Brussels], I don’t act like them, I don’t dress the same way, I don’t talk about the same things. I look like them, but they can see that I am different and they don’t appreciate it. Because I can be a bit of a disruptive element.”

Lahlou plans to reduce his physical presence in his work. “There is the fear of repeating myself, even if everything I do is different. Since I am the basis of my work — I’m often the model, even if I’m not there — I get a bit tired of myself. Today, I want to think more, to be a bit less present,” he says. “But I think that I will still have things to say for 30 more years.”

Personally, this year has been a topsy-turvy one. Since assuming editor duties back in March, I’ve written less, as my energy goes into directing a website that has grown, and grown again, and now has a staff some five times what it did when I began here just two years ago. I've done work I'm proud of, but it all amounts to barely 18 articles, not a lot in a year with so much interesting art and important news (you can review them all, here). In 2013, my resolution is to get to writing more, and with a capable features editor, Lori Fredrickson, I think I have more than just my own resolve behind me.

In the meantime, it hasn’t all been pushing papers in circles. In particular, what has made this year worthwhile has been the chance to work with a tremendously talented staff of writers, who have, week after week, labored hard to turn out essays, reviews, and reports that have been a joy to edit. I've put together a list with a few of my personal favorites:

* Architecture critic Kelly Chan kicked off an excellent series of think pieces — including a report from the Bronx’s new Via Verde Housing project and some illuminating thoughts on the practice of the late Lebbeus Woods— with a wide-ranging essay on the craze for pop-up architecture and what it meant for changing notions of urbanism.

* Former assistant editor Kyle Chayka— now decamped to rejoin the staff over at Hyperallergic — honed his voice with a sharp series of stories about art and technology. Among my favorites was his look at how artists were using hacked Xbox Kinect controllers to push the boundaries of photography.

* Back in June, Terri Ciccone— our social media director and also a contributor — put together a thoroughly reported piece, with dealers and artists weighing in on whether Bushwick had already passed the point of diminishing returns as an art neighborhood, given the sheer velocity of gentrification.  

* Rachel Corbett offered the best analysis I know of the issues involved in the recently passed “New York Arts and Cultural Affairs Law,” which seeks to provide increased legal protections for artists in their interactions with dealers. Given recent scandals, that's important information indeed — and Rachel's story also happens to have one of the most memorable kickers I can remember, to boot.

* Kate Deimling, who doubles as our French translator — to her you owe one of the year’s most amusing stories, on Paris’s attempt to discourage noise pollution by deploying highly trained squadrons of mimes— also tackled a variety of news from the international arena. The one that stands out is her lengthy report investigating, and calling into question, the hype around the hunt for a supposedly “lost” fresco by Leonardo da Vinci. 

* Market reporter Shane Ferro— who left the site at the beginning of fall for a sojourn on the West Coast — offered a sharp analysis of the auction market, showing how headline-grabbing records at the top end masked stagnation lower down. You can expect more such analysis in the new year — Shane returns to our team in January.

* Julia Halperin really did too much significant work this year to try to break out item by item, from her assessment of the forces driving smaller galleries out of Chelsea to multiplereports on the toll of the new “event-based” art economy of fairs (she even uncovered typical booth prices for 13 of the most important fairs). As evidence of sheer reportorial gumption, however, Julia's series of stories on the issues faced by New York galleries in the wake of Hurricane Sandy are probably the place to start (here, here, and here).

* In response to the Anne-Marie Slaughter’s hotly debated story in the Atlantic on the struggles of contemporary women trying to balance family and career, Alanna Martinezsolicited stories from prominent women working in the arts. The feature touched off so much interest that we published a follow-up highlighting the full essay-length texts we received from a variety of important artists, curators, and museum directors.

* Allison Meier launched our new “Emerging” column spotlighting worthy artists who are on the rise, adding an important element to the ARTINFO mix. Already she’s profiled Firelei Baez, Serra Bothwell Fels, Juliette Losq, and Martin Roth.

* Reid Singercaught early on the story of the Casoria Contemporary Art Museum, a small Italian institution whose director captured international headlines by burning items from his own collection in a protest against austerity measures hitting the cultural sector. I also found his recent feature on archaelogists in Jerusalem who fear that their work is being hijacked by settler politics particularly worthy of note. 

* What can I say about Ben Sutton? Essentially, he is editing a publication all of his own, having taken charge of our In The Air newswire (you can see his own picks for some of the year’s best entries, here). I wouldn’t want people to think that he was just the guy who provided a meticulous history of the mustache in art last month, though. His review of the recently reopened Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia shows his critical chops.

* For market watchers, Judd Tully’s many, many, many impeccable auction and fair reports continued this year to provide essential analysis. I wouldn’t know where to begin in picking one (“The Scream” sale?) — but I will say that it was a pleasure to actually get to see him in action in a pair of video reports from Frieze and Art Basel Miami Beach.

* For sheer amusement, I come back to “Cool Girls Got Off at Contemporary,” Chloe Wyma’s riff on the behind-the-scenes office culture at Sotheby’s (extrapolated from an n+1 report by Alice Gregory), as well as her survey of Yelp reviews of Chelsea galleries. For intellectual verve, however, one of the standouts from the year overall is Chloe's dissection of Richard Phillips’s paintings at Gagosian. A joy to read. 

* In the wake of Sandy, Sara Roffinoventured to Greenpoint to document the damage to the studios that called the neighborhood home, offering a poignant look at the toll the storm had taken on artists, some of whom lost their life's work to the waters.

* Design writer Janelle Zara taught me a thing or two, that’s for sure. As for favorites, I recall her lengthy examination of how 3-D printing technology promised to transform design, from back in March, and her opus on the trend towards increasing incomprehensibility in men's watches, from April. But I am equally equally enthusiastic about her year-end essay on how irony is eating design alive, from just yesterday.

* Finally, any assessment of 2012 wouldn’t be complete without mention of the many projects for which the entire team has pitched in on, in various ways. The most notable was our ranked list of “The 100 Most Iconic Artworks of the Last 5 Years,” which the full staff helped assemble before it was voted on by a team including ARTINFO UK's Coline Milliard, ARTINFO China's Madeleine O'Dea, and Modern Painters editor Daniel Kunitz, alongside outside judges Jen Graves, Martha Schwendener, Walter Robinson, and Christian Viveros-Faune.

Among the more amusing of our team projects was our round-up of amusingly vitriolic art world reactions to reality show “Gallery Girls,” harvested from a screening of the program's debut episode that we held with various colleagues. There were also fun projects like the stories where we offered our picks for artworks we actually liked from craft website Etsy and fantasy art site DeviantArt, or our graded list of art by musicians from David Byrne (A-) to Ringo Starr (D).

Last but not least, who could forget our blockbuster Thanksgiving feature “24 Artists’ Childhood Hand Turkeys as Imagined by the Staff of ARTINFO?” I'll let you guess who did which.

Desirable trends littered 2012’s lush, slightly oddball fashion-scape. There was Cadillac kitsch at Prada, snarling tiger reliefs at Kenzo, baroque flourishes blooming across the catwalks, and Japonisme flexing its draped, steely jaw. We also saw a bigger shift this year than in the previous five combined, with designers entering and exiting each other’s houses like it was a bona fide block party (snag up that Ghesquière Balenciaga or Pilati Yves Saint Laurent while you still can). Here, ARTINFO runs down the standout sartorial moments of 2012 (stay tuned for our predictions for 2013 later this week) — “out with the old and in with the new” has never felt more apt than now.

To see ARTINFO’s 2012 Fashion It List, click on the slideshow. 

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

BLOUIN Fashion is now on Twitter. Follow us @BLOUINFashion

We have come to terms with the fact that the Internet was created as a vehicle to connect people across the world using cat images, cat videos, and cat memes. But this holiday season let's reflect on a simpler time, a time when people left their computers to immortalize their kitty companions on city walls rather than the ephemeral abyss of YouTube. 

We’ve taken a moment to round up this ancient art practice — we’re pretty sure some of the first hieroglyphics translated from the Rosetta Stone read “I can has cheezburger” — and bring them to you all wrapped up as one big shiny present. Yes, here, gentle reader, are the cats of street art. Don't say we didn't get you anything for Christmas.

To view our round-up of “The Cats of Street Art,”click on the slideshow.

As the curtain draws on 2012, we can’t help but to ponder — nay, obsess — over what’s yet to come. New trends emerged on the Spring/Summer 2013 runways, but whether or not they’ll stick (and whether or not we even want to see them stick) is another question. With the scope and interconnectivity of the modern fashion model forevermore accelerating, ARTINFO breaks down the best and the brightest of what we think we’ll see tomorrow. 

Dries Van Noten’s Spring/Summer 2013 Collection, Everywhere

If social media had a vascular system, it would’ve been white-capped with adrenaline when Dries Van Noten showed his S/S13 collection, a lineup that garnered what must have been 99.9% praise. Yet the e-gushing was totally deserved — Van Noten’s collection was the standout of the season, with its modernized take on grunge and its androgynous pattern-clashing. Smells like well-dressed teen spirit. 

For Better or For Worse, Céline’s Fluffy Footwear

Say hello to spring’s cutest hypebeast: Céline’s Muppet footwear. Expect to see stylists violently banging down Céline’s PR door to get ahold of these cushy accoutrements. Hate ’em or love ’em, they certainly incite bloodlust. They also beg the question — to what extent are designers consciously toying with the street style try-hards?

Incandescent Iridescence 

From twinkling crepes to matte satins, reflective fabrics will see a notable resurgence in 2013. The lynchpin in the light brigade? Raf Simons, who, for his debut Christian Dior ready-to-wear collection, showed a series of full-bodied skirts that crackled with static electricity down their spot-lit stage. The world was watching, thus sheen will surely be in demand. Keep an eye on Burberry Prorsum and Jonathan Saunders, too. 

Python is an Un-Endangered Species

Snakeskin — in authentic, synthetic, or printed form — slithered its way onto Spring/Summer 2013’s runways. Cavalli is probably breathing a sigh of relief, like, “Finally!” But the imminent reptile invasion won’t necessarily be all Roberto. Proenza Schouler showed diamondback patterning with color-blocked neons, and Erdem worked in boa scales over dainty lace. This trend will certainly be widely mimicked across High Street — it’s easy, and everyone loves a little exoticism. 

Instagram, Out

Everyone’s favorite party drug, Instagram, sunk its claws into the fashion elite’s skin this year (selfies with Derek Blasberg, anyone?). Then it hit a little snafu, proclaiming and then retracting its intent to own and possibly capitalize on every image ever posted on the app. Given Instagram’s hype, and the fact that it’s basically a glorified on-the-go vanity project for so very many people, perhaps the bubble will soon burst. At least give us an update, or a dislike button!

Brave New Internet

It’s been the year of the World Wide Weird, and things are only getting wilder. We’re talking next-gen collabos and cross-cultural, cross-gender, cross-media mash-ups. Take Dis Magazine, the online publication where micro-trends and invented fads are explored in fetishistic detail, and superstars like Fatima Al-Qadiri and Mykki Blanco reign supreme. We’ll definitely see more of this post-post-postmodern aesthetic in fashion and beyond as we head into the 20-teens. 

Fashion Grows Up

Recent seasons have seen a more grown-up look come back into favor, with grungy, model-off-duty slouch appeal giving way to something a bit more structured. As a new wave of designers comes of age, their collections are evolving right along with them. (Don’t believe us? Just look at Alexander Wang’s evolution from T-shirts to his latest offering, subdued suiting — a momentum he’ll have to continue at the hallowed house of Balenciaga.) And while we’ll always have a place in our hearts for studs and leather, here’s looking to polished tailoring, pastels, and pointed pumps.

The New, New Fashion Map

This year cemented the status of fashion’s latest international hotspots. Leading the pack are Sydney and Tokyo, where hometown designers like Dion Lee and Phenomenon have more and more editors paying attention — while cities from São Paulo to Moscow to Berlin are nurturing young talent of their own. And don’t underestimate the influence of purchasing power, as the high-end market courts the consumer hubs of Asia and the Middle East.  

Shake-Up Shockwaves

Between designer hires and major magazine moves, 2012 was the year of the shake-up. Could the shockwaves continue in 2013? This year we saw Sally Singer’s return to Vogue; maybe Anna’s exit is next? Could this be the year Karl finally retires? Who will helm the Schiaparelli relaunch? Will Hedi’s (Y)SL sell? The questions are endless.

Toned Down Luxe

With the global economy precariously perking up, major luxury brands are rethinking how they do business. While bags and shoes are still moneymakers, the new retail model is becoming a bit more sustainable and subdued. Whether it’s Dior’s streamlined couture, the Row’s label-less essentials, or PPR’s young designer grab, expect less theater and more pragmatism — and more salable clothing. 

For an illustrated guide to our 2013 fashion predictions, click on the slideshow.

As a child, Prince Ravivaddhana Sisowath went into exile in Europe with much of the Cambodian royal family when the Khmer Rouge assumed power in the early 1970s. He returned to Cambodia for the first time in 2000. Today he devotes his energy to advancing the appreciation and protection of Cambodian culture. Noah Charney spoke with the prince in Rome.

What is the path that looted Cambodian art typically travels?


The first market for stolen art is either Saigon or Bangkok, and after that it goes to London, New York, or elsewhere.

It appears that the majority of looters are Cambodians who sell the art abroad.


Yes, but I would be very tolerant about the Cambodian people. The preservation of ancient things is not a part of our traditional culture.
The average Cambodian would rationalize that if our ancestors made these things, arts and crafts, and gave them to us, it was to ensure our livelihood. Since the restoration of the monarchy in 1993 and with the efforts of UNESCO, especially since December 1995, when Angkor was registered as a World Heritage site, we’ve promoted the concept of cultural patrimony. After that, a deeper consciousness developed among the people of Cambodia, who began to take pride in their antiquities.

How would you advise 
a collector or museum that wishes to acquire Cambodian art legitimately? I always say that it is best to go to Cambodia. Go to the National Museum, in Phnom Penh, and the Ministry of Culture. Meet with the leading experts to learn where to 
look and what to look for. In Paris, you’ve got the Musée Guimet and its president, Olivier de Bernon, who is one of the leading specialists in the ancient art of Cambodia. Beginning in the 1960s Cambodia established institutions in which artists are trained in traditional techniques to make fine copies of ancient sculptures. I tell my friends to buy them. I would like artists to go further, to create new things that will go into contemporary art galleries. For such objects, you can visit the website of Les Artisans d’Angkor.

In June you addressed the Association for Research into Crimes Against Art about the case of a 10th-century Khmer figure withdrawn from asale at Sotheby’s New York in 2011 following charges that the sculpture had been looted from the temple at Koh Ker. Do you see progress in the protection of Cambodia’s cultural heritage?

I’m naturally optimistic, but I’m not completely unrealistic — 
I’d like to raise the national consciousness about preserving patrimony. But the people are still very poor, and having all these objects available is a temptation. I hope for a cleaner market and greater morality, especially on
the part of people who are buying these objects.

Cambodia is seeking to recover a pair of statues from the Metropolitan Museum of Art. What is the story behind this request?

If I remember well, those statues were acquired legally — the trade was made through the last U.S. ambassador in Saigon in 1975. Still, the return would show the goodwill of the U.S. But do
you want to know my personal opinion? I would be happy for the statues to stay in the Met. Remember, I came through that very hard period during which we Cambodians were convinced that our culture was going to die. In Paris we were glad to see our art in the Musée Guimet. Whatever American museums have of Cambodian art, I believe they should keep. This gives good visibility to Cambodia for foreigners and for second- and third-generation Cambodians who live abroad. It is a way for the world to see the glories of Cambodia.

What message would you like to send to lovers and collectors of Cambodian art?

First of all, go on loving Cambodian art. It should be seen more broadly and appreciated more widely. Beyond that, I would say please be careful not to hurt the culture. But as far as I’m concerned, I’m very happy to see some masterpieces of Cambodian art in foreign museums. It’s part of the world’s patrimony.

In the auction world, 2012 was a banner year for trophy hunters, thanks to “The Scream,” Richter, and Rothko. But the occasionally staggering prices did little to the alleviate mounting anxieties: that a price bubble is swelling, that the Imp/Mod market grows sicklier still, and that China’s once inexhaustible buying power is starting to grow a bit drowsy. With a rocky year winding to a close, here’s a look back on 10 artworks that show the major market shifts of 2012. (To see some the artworks associated with our top market stories of the year, click on the slideshow.) 

1) Zhang Xiaogang is one of China’s top-earning contemporary artists, but he became an emblem of the country’s flagging market when a string of his works failed to sell at Sotheby’s Hong Kong during its generally bleak Contemporary Asian Art sale in October. “Brothers” was one of three works by the artist that was bought in, though others did find buyers.

2) In the biggest auction news of the year, Edvard Munch’s famous pastel “The Scream” sold at Sotheby's in May for $120 million — the highest price ever paid for a work of art at auction. (The titleholder had been Pablo Picasso’s “Nude, Green, Leave, and Bust,” which sold for $107 million in 2010.) The mystery buyer was the target of brief, but intense speculation before the Wall Street Journal revealed his identity as New York financier Leon Black.

3) This Edward Hopper painting became the most expensive artwork ever auctioned online in November when it sold for $9.6 million on Christie’s LIVE. The website already saw a 25-percent rise in bids in 2011, and we can expect to see more online activity in the future. This year, Christie’s has already added a number of online-only sales in new categories, such as wine, couture, and prints.

4) The $34-million price tag on Gerhard Richter’s “Abstraktes Bild (809-4)” set a record for the highest auction price ever paid for a work by a living artist. It also outdid Richter’s previous record of $22 million. The painting’s provenance also may have added to its star power: The primary-pigment beauty was previously owned by guitarist Eric Clapton, who, as it happens, paid just over $3 million for it in 2001.

5) Pablo Picasso’s bronze “Coq” became one of the more painful failures at this fall’s dreary Impressionist and modern auctions when it failed to find a taker at Christie’s $10 million to $15 million estimate. After the sale, Judd Tully reported that Diana Picasso seemed confused: “It’s a magnificent work and was properly estimated.” Meanwhile, the house also bought in a $7-million Marc Chagall, a similarly priced Degas pastel, and a Bauhaus-influenced Lyonel Feininger painting.

6) Said to be one of Jackson Pollock’s final paintings, “Red, Black, & Silver” was pulled from a Phillips de Pury sale in September after a Vanity Fair article raised questions about its authenticity. Pollock’s widow, Lee Krasner, refused to authenticate the work, which was brought before the board by Pollock’s late mistress, Ruth Kligman. Phillips has tentative plans to reintroduce the work for sale early next year, pending “further study of the painting,” according to the executor of Kligman's estate.

7) Thirty-one-year-old trompe l’oeil artist Tauba Auerbach broke her auction record three times this year, first with a blocky black-and-white “Binary” painting at Phillips de Pury’s March contemporary art sale, which doubled its estimate at $86,500. Then, in November, one of her signature “Fold” paintings — a canvas spray-painted and stretched to look like wrinkled fabric — went for $290,500.

8) A chalk drawing by Raphael became the auction world's most expensive work on paper when it fetched $47.8 million at Sotheby’s London earlier this month. That narrowly beats out the previous record, another drawing by Raphael that went for $47.6 million in 2009. The Duke of Devonshire purchased the “Head of a Young Apostle,” a study for one of the figures in “The Transfiguration,” some 300 years ago, and it has remained in the Chatsworth collection ever since. 

9) The Andy Warhol “Jackie” print more than doubled its estimate, reaching $626,500 at Christie’s last month, but is even more significant because of the historic auction in which it took part. The sale was the first in a series of forthcoming online and private sales of inventory from the Andy Warhol Foundation, which moved to disband its authentication board and sell the work earlier this year in order to redirect the funds to its charitable missions.

10) One of Rothko’s most searing paintings must have burned a hole through the pocket of one Christie’s client, who ponied up nearly $87 million, double its pre-sale estimate, in May to purchase “Orange, Red, Yellow.” In addition to setting a record for Rothko, the sale also set a new record for postwar art, which had previously been held by Francis Bacon.

Name: Asim Waqif

Age: 34

Occupation: Artist

City: New Delhi

Current Exhibition: "Bordel Monstre" at Paris’s Palais de Tokyo with the support of SAM Art Project, through January 21, 2013.

What did you want to create at the Palais de Tokyo?

This work mostly revolves around trash. To me, looking in a garbage can is almost like doing archaeology. You can learn a lot about a community or an individual from the trash that they produce. When I visited the Palais de Tokyo three months ago, they were in the process of changing exhibitions and there were huge piles of materials from the previous show that were going to be destroyed (officially described as “eliminated in complete security”). That made me think about what, with artistic systems, we create as trash. Today development and progress are often closely associated with a consumer economy. And it’s as if we could repair the damage from excessive consumption by throwing everything into the provided containers. I wanted to shed light on these containers and recycle them into an art object.

Describe a typical day in your life as an artist.

My days vary. When I’m working, it’s like I’m possessed and the days and weeks disappear in a cloud. Other times, I hardly work at all for weeks. It’s a balance; I have to take a break after having worked hard and vice-versa. For the Palais de Tokyo show, I got up around 8 a.m., started working on location at 10, and stayed until 7 p.m., with an hour break for lunch.

What is your favorite place to see art?

I don’t have one. What’s important is to know if the artist in engaged with the space where he is showing his work.

What’s the most indispensable item in your studio?

Knives and blades. I have a lot of different tools for each artwork idea.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

Ideas emerge from life and from observing life/society.

Do you collect anything?

I collect a lot of things, but I’ve never tried to make a collection. I like collecting things that people throw away. Sometimes I collect my own trash. Among other things, I also have a weakness for collecting airplane ashtrays, which are like fetishes.

What is the last artwork you purchased?

I’ve bought crafts. For me they are a lot more relevant than a large portion of contemporary art.

What was the first artwork that you ever sold?

A sculpture that I made for myself in 2010.

The weirdest thing that you’ve seen in a museum or a gallery?

The weirdest thing in most museums and galleries is that you’re not allowed to touch most of the art. Commercial value has eclipsed experimentation.

Do you have an art world pet peeve?

That people consider the best art to be the most expensive. This implies that rich people control what is good in art. There’s nothing wrong with being rich, but I notice that they generally live a very protected life and are usually not aware of what's going on.

What’s the last great book you read?

Raymond Queneau’s “La Saint-Glinglin.”

What work of art do you wish you owned?

None.

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

None.

What artists, galleries, or artworks do you think are undervalued?

None to my knowledge, but I’m determined to keep the art world at a certain distance.

Any hobbies?

I do a lot of hiking in the Himalayas, alone or with friends, without guides or porters. I like crafts and learning new techniques. The boundary between my work and my leisure time is rather fluid.

As in past years, Modern Painters presents a list of emerging artists whose work we — and the artist-nominators we’ve collaborated with — find especially promising. In previous lists, we have showcased as few as nine artists and as many as 100. This time we’ve opted for two dozen, which allows us to describe and reproduce work by each while remaining broad and international in our reach. We remain convinced that other artists are the best spotters of talent, and so again this year we’ve relied on the expert aid of a group of seasoned artists: Rita Ackermann, Dike Blair, Sarah Cain, Anne Collier, N. Dash, Thomas Demand, Natalie Frank, Coco Fusco, Samara Golden, Susan Hefuna, Adam Helms, Glenn Kaino, Ali Kazma, Sam Moyer, Lisa Oppenheim, Erik Parker, Tal R, Kirstine Roepstorff, Tino Sehgal, Katrin Sigurdardottir, Fiona Tan, Nari Ward, Jonas Wood, Erwin Wurm. Erik Wysocan.

Benjamin Hirte

Born 1980, Aschaffenburg, Germany. Lives in Vienna.

A sculptor, Hirte thinks in a complex way about presentation and the ideas behind exhibitions, both for his art — which draws on the history and audience of the spaces in which he shows his work — and in his curatorial practice. Even though the artworks themselves seem like formalist sculptures and found objects, he sees them as a collage bringing together diverse elements from sculpture and the world of objects. 

Lisa Oppenheim — who exhibited a work in a recent show Hirte curated at Drei Gallery, in Cologne — says, “What is remarkable about Hirte’s work is the way in which collage functions as a structuring logic rather than simply a way of describing formal aspects of individual pieces. A central theme in his practice seems to be the way in which ideas are in themselves collages, sourced from different media and historical and physical spaces.” And indeed, the uniting methodology in Hirte’s work draws on ideas that belong to linguistics: wordplay, syntax, and semantics. “But with an undertone of parody,” the artist adds.

Margaret Lee

Born 1980, Yonkers, New York. Lives in Brooklyn.

“All of my work is human-scale, scaled to real life, and appropriative of the banal and everyday,” says Lee of her photographs and sculptures, which often fixate on subjects as unremarkable as the potato. “They’re handmade readymades — which, I know, is a contradiction.” Her show last year at Jack Hanley Gallery, in New York, included a watermelon fabricated from plaster and a faux zebra skin made with painted linen. The artist, who runs the New York gallery 47 Canal and is the founder of 179 Canal Gallery, currently has work in “New Pictures of Common Objects,” curated by Christopher Lew and on view at MoMA PS1 through December 31. “While Margaret’s work is rooted in handmade sculpture, it speaks to concerns of life in the 21st century,” explains Lew, “especially how the intangible online world is never that far from the physical.”

Edgardo Aragon

Born 1985, Oaxaca, Mexico. Lives in Oaxaca and Mexico City.

“My work speaks about how power in high places is used to corner a large segment of society,” says Aragon, whose videos deal with conflict in his home country. “I am currently making a video whose origin lies in the social protest against mining on the continent. The result of my investigation is an action executed by a male choir that sings in front of a mine that was abandoned during the colonial period in Oaxaca. The musical composition is made from the street protest slogans, with stylistic hints of Baroque. Another project consists in metaphorically re-creating a ‘death flight,’ which was something that the government used to disappear tortured bodies of peasants.” The tossing of people from planes into the ocean was a tactic, he tells us, that originated in the South Pacific during the 1970s. “This despicable practice was subsequently adopted by the South American dictatorships to eliminate their rivals,” Aragon says. “And for another recent project, I made a video about the tiny borders that are generated in a small town in southern Mexico, where the residents have violent disputes over how their territory is marked. 13 musicians play separate funeral marches while standing on stone mounds, whose function is to draw the territorial lines.”

Ajay Kurian

Born 1984, Baltimore. Lives in Brooklyn.

Lately, Kurian has pursued projects “concerned with reaching beyond the human,” as he puts it. One, to be exhibited this fall in India, consists of clarified butter, or ghee, silkscreened directly onto linen. The butter is then dusted with gold, as for fingerprints. The silkscreened images are either taken from the patterns inside security envelopes or are fabrications incorporating quasi-crystalline formations. Both, Kurian says, “are meant to withhold information from others. I found that I was more interested in the mechanism that hid the information than in the information itself. Thus the image becomes a screen, revealing and hiding simultaneously. This work addresses the sense of hiding or withdrawal as a general motif, almost as an aesthetic law: Nothing presents itself as such. Phenomenally, the silkscreened pattern can just barely be seen, and only in a particular light. In the right or wrong position, it disappears into a cloud of golden dust and the scent of musty butter. The series is titled ‘Prevenient,’ meaning anticipatory; it’s a word borrowed from a phrase, ‘prevenient grace,’ coined by the 18th-century theologian John Wesley.”

Katja Mater

Born 1979, Hoorn, the Netherlands. Lives in Amsterdam.

“I record the numerous ways we can look at photography and think about photographic images,” Mater says of her work. Her process is exceptional in that she investigates photography by turning it on itself, disrupting our sense of what this medium is. In her hands, photography loses any relationship to the documentary and instead approaches something closer to painting and drawing, which she takes as the basis of her practice. She interpolates drawing with photograph y— for example, using a camera to record the process of drawing, which is then masked by multiple negatives, generating countless different outcomes from one supposedly unique drawing. Mater is currently producing a book to be published early next year by Roma.

Ian Cheng

Born 1984, Los Angeles. Lives in New York.

“My work can’t disguise a love for cinema, special effects, eroticism, stupidity, optical and linguistic distortion, and a desire to promote images to the respect status of objects,” says Cheng, a man of many hats. In addition to making animated videos — This Papaya Tastes Perfect was shown as part of “A Disagreeable Object” at the Sculpture Center, in Queens, this past fall; the same piece had earlier been presented on an iPhone at West Street Gallery, also in New York — Cheng is director of operations for Badlands, the publishing outlet launched by artist Paul Chan, as well as a director, most recently of a music video featuring carnage rendered in 3-D for the band Liars. Currently he’s working on a 3-D animated film in collaboration with the artist Christian de Vietri. Cheng elaborates: “It will explore the ‘sculpting of copyright’ of CGI celebrities through a narrative that documents their transformation from iconic protagonists into a heterogeneous deformed primordial mess. It’ll utilize motion capture both as a technical process to be pushed far beyond its elegant use in Hollywood films and as a radically economical solution to producing a visually unbounded feature-length film.” Other projects include learning to make iPhone apps and coauthoring a romance/self-help novel with the artist (and his girlfriend) Rachel Rose, called Active Social Personal Work Life. Above all, Cheng says he wants “to live to be 200 years old in order to bear witness to long-term evolutionary and cultural change, and so I’m working on getting better at living.”

Angelika Loderer

Born 1984, Feldbach, Austria. Lives in Vienna and Feldbach.

“Stimulated by the idea of what contemporary sculpture is and could be about,” Loderer consistently pushes the medium’s envelope. For Stillleben als Hausfassade (Still Life as House Façade), 2012, she covered a bucket of fruit in yellow housepaint. Schüttlöche, 2012, is a series of aluminum casts of mole tunnels that, when positioned in a gallery space, resemble dancing alien organisms. Loderer has also made art out of car windshields and slabs of asphalt dangling from plain chairs, and has crafted a pair of semi-wearable shoe sculptures. “I’m interested in the nature of materials and their interactions with each other, in an ephemeral and formal way,” she says.

Guillaume Airiaud

Born 1983, Nantes, France. Lives in Berlin.

“There is a certain kind of loneliness to Airiaud’s entire body of work which touches me profoundly,” says artist Kirstine Roepstorff. “I have a copy of his handmade book Thoughts After the Research for the Project ‘Love Me Tender,’ ” she continues. “It’s very beautiful and poetic. He has a very precise, distinct way of working, using metaphors and storytelling elegantly.”

Airiaud’s work process is rooted in his use of materials and includes experimentation with techniques and presentation methods, and it touches upon subjects as abstract as fiction, death, love, and play. “Patient handcrafting brings me to another level of excitement and inspiration,” says the artist, who, apart from making books, works in sculpture, collage, painting, and drawing. He recently collaborated with fashion designer Martin Niklas Wieser on a collection of garments. Airiaud produced some of the pieces in metal. “A major part of it is to create an environment to represent the vision of the project, which we are just starting to develop,” he explains. “It may involve various disciplines: installation, performance, video, photography, and so forth.” The collection will be out next spring.

Meleko Mokgosi

Born 1981, Francistown, Botswana. Lives in New York and works in New York, Los Angeles, and Gaborone, Botswana.

Mokgosi’s large-scale, project-based installations, such as Pax Afrikaner, 2008–11, and Pax Kaffraria, 2010–12, take the form of history paintings on panel. They serve, in the artist’s words, as “a conceptual, theoretical, and personal working-through of a particular dilemma: the physical and epistemological violence toward black foreigners in southern Africa.”

 Using cinematic tropes as well as psychoanalytic and postcolonial theory, his practice interrogates the specificity of regionalism in order to address questions of nationhood, colonial and anticolonial sentiments, and the perception of historicized events. “I am especially interested in how Lacanian psychoanalytic theory and semiotics can be used to comprehend national identification and occurrences such as the 2008 xenophobic attacks in South Africa,” he says. “Pax Kaffraria is a project divided into eight chapters. The installation is constructed to mimic a filmstrip: It strategically uses cinematic scale, privileges peripheral vision as opposed to frontal, and utilizes tropes of cinematic shots—pans and medium-long shots—as well as inter-titles to conceptually frame each chapter. This project investigates nationalism by taking Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe as case studies. Pax Kaffraria is a conflation of two terms. The word pax, taken from the original phrase ‘we Romans have purchased the Pax Romana with our blood,’ highlights the essence of institutionalized, enforced ‘peace’ at the height of the Roman Empire. Pax Romana, contrary to conventional belief, is not about peace; it is about nationalism, the bond between blood and soil. Kaffraria is a term that was first used by the British in the 18th century to establish British Kaffraria, a subordinate administrative entity that was primarily inhabited by the Xhosa people. More precisely, kaffraria is a British adaptation of the word kaffir, which is used as the equivalent of nigger. Pax Kaffraria, then, is a forcefully made appellation that is chiefly historical.”

Kyla Hansen

Born 1983, Panaca, Nevada. Lives in Claremont, California.

“I tend to alter and add to found objects — rural desert debris, backyard junk, furniture remnants — Frankensteining them together with glitter, whimsy, and blatant artifice,” Hansen says. Her materials evoke the provincial places she explores in her work. “I still love looking at the way certain things are put together in small, rural towns, the aesthetics of some backwards, makeshift way of getting something done,” Hansen explains. “The objects I make all seem to have a frivolity about them. They look like they could be broken down, packed away, and wheeled to the next town — kind of like a traveling circus.”

“Hansen’s work reminds me of happening upon a desert sunset at the same time you catch yourself laughing at what was just whispered in your ear.”  —Sarah Cain

Fiona Mackay

Born 1984, Aberdeen, Scotland. Lives in Glasgow and Brussels.

Mackay’s vibrant wax and batik dye paintings are inherently contrary, oscillating between controlled design and the fluid spontaneity her medium commands. “My work has always been concerned with opposites, whether in regard to medium, imagery, or application, in an attempt to confess a personal narrative, versus a public system of signs always in potential flux,” she says. With her batiks Mackay creates further tension by placing a traditional craft within the context of fine art. “The result is a combination of opposites between male and female,” Mackay explains of the process, “on the one hand connecting to the glory days of abstract painting, a predominantly male territory, while on the other hand situated within the world of textiles and folk art, connected to craft and its usual association to the feminine.”

Isabel Lewis

Born 1981, Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Lives in Berlin.

Trained as a dancer, Lewis says that her work “strives to find a new mode of performative expression that is not clearly derivative of performance art, nor of theater, nor of dance, while perhaps touching aspects of all these modes of performance.” In her various activities, which run the gamut from dance to curating to visual art, she frequently collaborates with artists, writers, other dancers, and even family members (she makes work with her three siblings under the name Lewis Forever). Her projects experiment with combinations of dance, film screenings, readings, and other such activities. She sees dance “as a way of conversing with social, aesthetic, and political value systems,” exploring our relationship with objects, spaces, technology, and each other.

This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters and will appear on ARTINFO in two parts. 

In 2012, ARTINFO pursued stories that explored the manifold ways fashion interacts with visual art, media, and contemporary society. From the Karlie Kloss Photoshop debate to Yayoi Kusama’s latest collaboration to the use of underage models in advertising campaigns, we’ve rounded up our favorite fashion stories of the year.

To see our illustrated guide to ARTINFO’s top fashion stories of 2012, click on the slideshow. 

As in past years, Modern Painters presents a list of emerging artists whose work we — and the artist-nominators we’ve collaborated with — find especially promising. Part 1 of our "24 Artists to Watch" appeared yesterday and can be read here. Read Part 2 below. 

Nicolas Party

Born 1980, Lausanne, Switzerland. Lives in Glasgow.

“I’m a painter — a painfully slow painter,” says Party, who admits to finishing only five or six pieces a year. “Such slowness allows time and space to pursue other activities. Thus I’m making sculptures and installations, drawings and prints, performances and curatorial projects. But I’m a painter,” he reiterates. “All other productions are made in the shadow cast by the canvas. I’m not producing generic images; I make specific paintings. This is fundamental to any understanding of my practice.” One of Party’s painting-adjacent activities took place in November at Salon 94, in New York, where he hosted Dinner for 24 Dogs, a “performance dinner” that included hand-painted furniture and plates. He’s also preparing for a solo exhibition in the spring at the Modern Institute, in Glasgow. “It will be a presentation of 15 paintings that I have been working on for the past two years,” he says. “All the walls of the gallery will be painted with different decorative patterns to create a non-neutral environment.”

Cornelia Baltes

Born 1978, Mönchengladbach, Germany. Lives in London and Cologne.

In Baltes’s works, daily life becomes a subject of constant wonder. She has a light touch and a keen eye for everything that is surprising and sometimes ridiculous in our world. Her photographs document mundane things like lit windows at nighttime (Dark Knight, 2012) or a plastic chain hanging from a stack of logs that looks like a smile. Her paintings use the medium in unexpected ways: Some protrude from the frame (Teaparty for Michael, 2011), others use murals as part of a painting installation. In There You Are!, 2010, a large hand painted on a wall points to a painting that hangs there. Simplicity and not overworking—these, she says, are the things “I need to nurture most: keep it light and tight. Also, giving up on a misplaced investment in ‘painting’ has freed me to do as I feel.” Beyond the fact that the works are witty and subtle, they also show a real interest in composition, color, and texture, which makes them quite beautiful.

Toby Christian

Born 1983, Lincolnshire, U.K. Lives in London.

Christian addresses the nature of objects, the burden of art history, and exhibition conventions that have become familiar to the point of invisibility. His early works include empty plinths painted in various shades of white to look dramatically lit, and non-monumental items — like snowballs — carved in marble. In his 2012 “Life Room” series, the artist traces the positions of models posing on a slab of foam as if for a life drawing session. The resulting lines mingle with accidental stains and marks to map an absent body whose memory saturates the support like an afterimage.

Over the last couple of years, Christian has started using words as a medium, “writing from the point of view of making sculpture,” he says. His texts draw on the legacy of semantic poetry and the works of Stefan Themerson, Alain Robbe-Grillet, and Francis Ponge. Although concerned with the world’s physical makeup, the texts flirt with the hermetic, obscuring the objects they supposedly describe. Christian often jots notes on chalkboards as he goes along, later erasing them to create serendipitous abstractions he describes as “post-event images.” Process and product collide.

James Capper

Born 1987, London. Lives in London.

“I build machines that use industrial hydraulics to move,” says Capper of his unique pieces. These machines are part sculptural object, part utilitarian device. “I’m interested in the problem-solving aspect of industrial engineering, which requires a combination of creative and practical thought. There is a strong element of inventing, adapting, and changing existing techniques and processes to resolve a problem — how to make a ship that walks, for instance — and working closely with materials. Ultimately, I hope that this combines to create a distinct new language in the realm of mechanical sculpture.” Capper divides his artistic inventions into categories — ones that are destined for land and those meant for the sea. His newest pieces double as working tools, “hydraulically operated and made to drill, slice, or hew into precast plaster blocks.”

Sarah Dornner

Born 1979, Quartz Hill, California. Lives in New York.

“I like to think about space in relation to the psychological dynamics of domestic spaces, including the embedded power dynamics,” says Dornner of her artistic practice, which includes sculpture, drawing, video, and photography. “The scale and types of objects relate to the body in space and show some possibility of frustrated, impossible, absurd, or magical interaction.” For a solo show that opened at Bureau gallery, in New York, in June, Dornner created a seven-minute video animation, Primavesi House, named for a Josef Hoffmann–designed villa that was destroyed by fire in 1922. In a nod to Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s feminist text The Yellow Wallpaper, the video depicts a wallpaper pattern come to life, with chevrons — a common motif in Dornner’s sculptures — rotating and pulsating to dance music. “The video is an exploration of the possibility of psychology affecting a domestic space,” Dornner explains. “Through the works, I try to confound the dominant frameworks of spatial knowledge and suggest alternatives.”

Marine Perault

Born 1985, Paris. Lives in Paris.

Perault’s videos and installations chart what she describes as a “sentimental geography.” In Pond Scum, 2011–present, her latest and most ambitious project to date, the artist focuses on a tiny patch of swamp: her grandfather’s former artificial pond. In 1976 he bought a piece of land 12½ miles from the town of Poitiers and, with the dedica-tion of outsider architect Facteur Cheval, started digging to create a miniature lake. Water never really stayed put, and the pond was more of a slough. It also became a meeting point for Perault’s family reunions, a natural landmark of her childhood.

With this transdisciplinary project, the artist reactivates the now-abandoned locale, ensnaring it in a mesh of references, from 18th-century fêtes galantes to rave culture. Pond Scum’s first act — Perault calls it the “party’s antechamber” — involves a large sculptural model of the pond, complete with lights, sound, and fireworks. It functions as a prelude to the party itself. The second act took place at the pond itself on May 12 and 13, 2012. Perault invited artist friends for a night of performance, improvised along the way, prompted by such elements as dark smoke, a heron costume, and, serendipitously, the unsettling banging of guns shooting clay pigeons in the distance.

The party’s only traces are the works produced by the invited artists in response, pieces that will be shown in an exhibition — the final act, or “post-party” — to be held next spring. The pond of Perault’s grandfather is thus triply mediated, three times reinvented: as a fantasy of itself experienced by the artist’s guests, as a series of fleeting memories transmitted through the resulting pieces, and as the fictional construct the works collectively conjure up in the viewer’s mind.

Sirra Sigrun Sigurdardottir

Born 1977, Reykjavik, Iceland. Lives in Reykjavik.

Sigurdardottir’s large-scale sculptural installations seek to tread the line between art and entertainment while investigating the color spectrum and principles of movement and space. “Certain personal symbols,” she says of her work, “bear reference to art history, the status of the artist, statistical information, scientific theories, and topographical contexts. These evoke a response similar to a child’s sense of captivation by a magician’s illusions — a mixture of wonder, a touch of uncertainty, and a feeling of instability.” Although a founder of the Kling & Bang gallery in Reykjavik and the KlinK and BanK collective, Sigurdardottir has more recently focused on her own work, which involves “research into the forces and powers underlying the current economic situation in the world — my vantage point being Iceland, but in the larger context.” Her pieces, she explains, bring together “perceptions from economics, politics, geology, and environmental issues, looking at patterns and forces under the surface, the undercurrents that shape the flow, shifts, and changes in our society at large, linked to the voice and means of the artist. This would include studying the fabrication of history or falsification of truth and the study of the workings of the systems we are all taking part in. I am especially intrigued by the illusion of the status quo or permanence.”

Ash Ferlito

Born 1979, Monterey, California. Lives in Brooklyn.

As Ferlito says, her canvases “allude to certain painterly traditions” — color field painting comes immediately to mind — “but refuse their pull and recomplicate the territory with interests far beyond painting.” She counts among those interests “physical science and kinetic learning,” as well as anything that might keep her efforts “as fresh as possible.” Ferlito’s most recent pictures — spare, abstract compositions, often with streams or fields of color breaking through monochromatic planes — seem to be mashups of hard-edge abstraction and Expressionist glee. With them, Ferlito says, she is “thinking about light, flash, and reverb.”

“Ferlito is making beautiful paintings that address formal issues from a nicely skeptical position.”  —Dike Blair

John C. Gonzalez

Born 1980, Providence, Rhode Island. Lives in Providence and works in Boston.

Unexpected collaborations are important to Gonzalez, whether they happen to be with scientists or Chinese factory workers. For Small Conversations, which Gonzalez thinks of as an extended performance piece, he establishes one-on-one relationships with Bostonians of different professions. “These strangers are individuals that I seek out, or who seek me out,” he says. “They’ve included a scientist, a politician, a writer, several curators, and artists. What we produce together often has an unpredictable nature, allowing for a mix of personalities and ideologies to develop a finished artwork.” For Self-Portrait Project, 2011, Gonzalez charged 51 professional painters at the Yayuan Art Company in Dafen, China, with contributing images of themselves, which were then exhibited together. “Another project, ‘Installation Box,’ is an ongoing series of sculptures that begin as systematically packaged boxes of material, which are sold and later constructed in a collector’s home, with my input,” Gonzalez says. “And in early 2013 I’ll be exhibiting a new series that will behave as interactive financial instruments, entitling their owners to rights and privileges for future work that I will create.”

Tameka Norris

Born Agana, Guam. Lives in New Orleans.

In the video installation Licker, 2010, Norris, in a bikini and fur coat, raps, “I’m that black Cindy Sherman and that little Kara Walker.” In photographs, videos, and performances, she explores how identity is constructed by media and pop culture, with a particular interest in “the body as a social, physical, and spiritual structure.” While this is usually done through the lens of gender or race, Norris readily deconstructs her identity as an artist as well, specifically in a 2012 video series that tracks her progression through the Yale School of Art. (It’s a savvy update on Alex Bag’s classic Untitled Fall ’95.) Norris was long-listed as a rising talent in our 2011 “Artists to Watch” issue, and her prolific practice has earned her a spot in this year’s edition. Her work can currently be seen in “Radical Presence: Black Performance in Contemporary Art” at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston. She’s also gearing up for inclusion in the Prospect 3 biennial in New Orleans and planning for an upcoming solo exhibition scheduled for 2014 in Biloxi, Mississippi, at the Ohr-O’Keefe Museum of Art, which Norris will transform into her living, studio, and exhibition space for six months. “My hope,” she explains, “is that this live-in residency will demystify the idea of the artist to an audience that is rarely exposed to art, let alone the maker of the art.”

Ian Tweedy

Born 1982, Hahn, Germany. Lives in Brooklyn.

After beginning his artistic life as a graffiti tagger, Tweedy turned to painting on found canvases, photos, maps, book covers, and other items that can suggest a story. He recently moved to a larger studio and has been taking advantage of its size by experimenting with newer platforms, as well as “amplifying my research a bit, or rather updating it,” he says. “Recently the subject matter is becoming more theatrical, both in light and in concept, probably from painting on the backs of other painters’ forgotten or discarded canvases, exposing the raw canvas and bare wood frame that acts as a shadowy stage of sorts. But I’m still expanding on this concept — for example, with the idea that the background or support I paint on functions as an actual place or a temporary location that can harbor characters and their contexts.” His paintings, he says, will accept no labels, “neither Pop nor ironic nor abstract. But the colors are bold and dry. Utopia and dystopia, immigration, confrontation, and, most of all, adaptation are a few of the threads connecting my work at the moment.” Currently Tweedy is finishing a site-specific video for Museion, in Bolzano, Italy, and working on Crisis, a forthcoming artist’s book produced with Rome’s Cura magazine.

Emre Huner

Born 1977, Istanbul. Lives in Berlin and Istanbul.

The extensive list of subjects that interest Turkish artist Emre Huner includes such ideas as travel in space-time, the rise and fall of civilizations, and the cyclical nature of time. His storytelling installations often bring together original reference material, drawings, sculptures, and found objects. Huner, says his compatriot Ali Kazma, “is doing a very relevant body of work on the aftermath of the modern and what happens when utopias turn sour.” For instance, Fordlândia, 2010, considers the now abandoned eponymous industrial town on the Amazon River in Brazil, founded in the 1920s by Henry Ford, who intended to grow rubber there for the tires on Ford cars. And in the installation A Little Larger Than the Entire Universe, 2012, recently exhibited in Manifesta 9, Huner interposes fossils and rocks with remnants of modernity, alluding to a moment in the future when contemporary society will be a distant history too. Huner will have a solo show at Rodeo Gallery, in Istanbul, in March, 2013. 

This article was published in the December 2012 issue of Modern Painters and appears on ARTINFO in two parts. 

Every year, buildings come and go, transforming our surroundings bit by bit, for better or for worse. This year was no exception. We witnessed historic Chinese hutongs razed, the tallest building in Europe constructed and eclipsed, and pop-up pavilions assembled and disassembled around the world. And while the ever-shifting shape of our world plays an important role in structuring the way we live, it is also the human activities and events surrounding our architecture that informs how we interact with our environment — and each other. The narratives that architecture generates adjust the way we understand what is built, what is destroyed, and even what is left unbuilt. Here are ten of the most essential stories in architecture this year.

1. Wang Shu wins 2012 Pritzker Prize

At the comparatively young age of 48, Chinese architect Wang Shu took home the top international prize in architecture this year. The award not only honored the architect who designed the Ningbo Museum and swept a number of accolades in his own country but also served to acknowledge “the role that China will play in the development of architectural ideals,” as the official announcement put it. The prize spotlighted Wang’s attention to site-specificity and regard for traditional materials and techniques, qualities that have elicited a rare dialogue with the past that questions the feverish pace of development in China today.

2. Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center is saved from demolition

The Brutalism success story of the year centers on Paul Rudolph’s avant-garde government center in Goshen, New York, where a dramatic 11-10 vote in early May favored the preservation of the 1971 building, designed when Rudolph served as the dean of the Yale School of Architecture. Its reprieve from the wrecking ball was no small effort: Upon being flagrantly dismissed as a concrete eyesore, Rudolph’s government center had long been vacated, the subsequent lack of maintenance exacerbating problems brought on by perpetually leaky roofs. When local officials proposed razing the shifting concrete volumes of Rudolph’s building, preservationists and journalists rallied to its defense, eliciting a wave of media coverage extoling the virtues of Brutalism.

3. Anish Kapoor and Cecil Balmond’s ArcelorMittal Orbit confuses and angers at the 2012 London Olympics

Despite gallant efforts to build the most sustainable Olympic Park to date with lithe constructions, pop-up stadiums, and detachable viewing stands, the 2012 London Olympics still left a rather bewildering architectural legacy in the form of a 377-foot-tall observation tower sculpted out of asymmetrically contorting red steel. Dreamt up by London mayor Boris Johnson, financed by steel tycoon Lakshmi Mittal, and conceived by sculptor Anish Kapoor and structural engineer Cecil Balmond, the ArcelorMittal Orbit was lambasted by critics for its glib disregard for context as well as the political baggage that came with its eponymous sponsor, ArcelorMittal Steel.

4. The Venice Architecture Biennale incites a series of publicized diatribes against contemporary architecture

The thirteenth Venice Biennale of Architecture barely opened its doors to the public before receiving an acid rainstorm of criticism from Austrian architect Wolf Prix. Likening the event to “an expensive danse macabre” on its debut day, Prix triggered a histrionic war of press statements with biennale curator David Chipperfield, who attempted to defend the integrity of his “Common Ground” theme by accusing Prix of turning the entire profession into a “soap opera.” Though melodramatic in their approaches, both architects raised relevant points about the impotence of contemporary architectural culture — points that critic Philip Nobel was unafraid to gripe about from a different angle.

5. A Frank Lloyd Wright home in Phoenix incites preservation battle

A Phoenix home marked for demolition became the site of a protracted preservation debate this summer when it was identified as a 1952 Frank Lloyd Wright —and a truly inventive one at that, “[u]nlike 80 percent of the houses Wright designed after World War II,” according to one historian. After the first wrecking ball was parried, an anonymous buyer stepped up to purchase the property in early November, offering to both preserve the house and pay the developers the demanded listing price. Days later, the munificent buyer backed out, and an already prolix saga dragged on. Bristled by the media attention, the development-minded owners of the David and Gladys Wright House informed New York Times reporters that they refused to swallow losses and “carry the cross for Frank Lloyd Wright," but luckily, they won't have to: After half a year, a buyer has finally closed the deal to purchase the house, restore it, and use it for educational purposes.

6. The Barclays Center opens in Brooklyn

Even before breaking ground, the SHoP Architects-designed (and Jay-Z-endorsed) stadium for the Brooklyn Nets ruffled more than a few feathers when developers muscled their way onto the downtown Brooklyn site and inspired a muckraking full-length documentary. When construction was completed this year, many considered its otherworldly, weathered-steel facade an abomination. The stadium presented a particular challenge for architecture critics, who struggled to ignore the welter of tendentious comments and evaluate the building as isolated entity, dramatic urban intervention, and controversial political gesture, all at once.

7. The potential demolition of Bertrand Goldberg's Prentice Women's Hospital rouses debate

If there’s one thing a gaggle of Pritzker Prize winners can agree on, it’s that the 1975 Prentice Women’s Hospital should be landmarked and preserved. Designed by Bertrand Goldberg, the clover-shaped steel-and-concrete mass is a pioneering work of Brutalism, the first design to derive its form from a computer-generated model. To its current proprietors at Northwestern University, however, the building is more a hindrance to growth than a relic of innovation. When the university began deliberating the fate of the building, a slew of Pritzker-wielding architects petitioned Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel for Prentice’s landmark designation, while others drafted proposals for its adaptive reuse. In the end, the mayor sided with demolition, but preservation efforts have continued undeterred.

8. Louis Kahn's FDR Four Freedoms Park opens

Almost 40 years after its conception, Louis Kahn’s Franklin D. Roosevelt Four Freedoms Park was completed posthumously this October, introducing a majestic new public space to New York City (on the southern tip of redeveloping Roosevelt Island) and receiving almost universal praise from critics. The plaudit for the memorial testifies to the timelessness of Kahn’s modernism and the determination of those who preserved his vision for decades and helped realize a monument faithful to its original design.

9. Lebbeus Woods dies at age 72

Visionary architect Lebbeus Woods passed away in late October at the age of 72. His untimely death prompted many in the field to pen poignant eulogies extoling Woods’s integrity and ingenuity as an architect. It also illuminated the importance of his work— largely composed of vivid dystopian illustrations — and the value of the two-dimensional drawing in contemporary architectural practice. A major exhibition of Woods’s work is being planned at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art for this coming February.

10. Oscar Niemeyer dies at age 104

After a succession of minor hospitalizations, legendary Brazilian architect Oscar Niemeyer died just ten days before turning 105. His passing marked the end of a prolific career and, in a sense, finally closed a chapter in modernist architectural historiographies, one marked by soaring optimism and political zeal. Niemeyer’s death brought new attention to the architect’s curvaceous concrete structures — particularly his designs for the civic buildings of Brasilia — and renewed discussion on the aspirations, successes, and failures of late-20th-century modernism.

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Kirbie is excited for New Year’s eve and already ready with her look. She started with a fun one-shoulder dress from Alice + Olivia before moving into her makeup look. For makeup, she used brown shadow to create a subtle smokey eye and threw on some mascara...

It's the end of the year and some kind of round-up is due. Fortunately, it's been a cracking year for beauty products...

NEW YORK — Claire Distenfeld sat under a Marilyn Minter in the “shoe garden” of her Upper East Side boutique, Fivestory. She spoke about how a love for art — but distaste for art-world politics — led her to quit her job at a gallery and create the store, a little jewel box of a shop filled with a tightly edited selection of quirky high fashion and arty accessories.

“I found that with the store, all I kept going back to was what in a piece of art made me feel good, made me feel balanced,” said Distenfeld, who studied fine art at NYU and Sotheby’s. “Because I was opening a store that isn’t any extreme — it’s kind of taking two extremes and making this beautiful marriage in the middle: uptown, downtown; decadent, comfortable; masculine, feminine — my only resource to find that was in art.”

And so she drew on her knowledge of curating, filling the space with narratives, little “moments,” she calls them — the way two shoes sit next to each other, or the way a necklace is paired with a dress.   

“It should be a fantasy world. You should see a dress, a pair of shoes, and a necklace and be like, ‘I’m going to go out, I’m going to dance, I’m going to meet someone.’ You should start thinking of what this dress could do for you, and then what you could do it for it,” the 26-year-old told ARTINFO. “That’s the same thing with art. You look at art and you think about the story behind it: What is she doing? Where is she going? Where did she come from?”

The shop, which opened this past spring, occupies a chic townhouse on East 69th Street, just off of Madison Avenue. Proenza Schouler’s flagship is just around the corner. The shop is divided into little rooms, each designed in glossy black and white by fashion’s favorite interior designer of the moment, Ryan Korban. Children’s clothing is downstairs, fine designers are at the top of a grand staircase, and just beyond, a glittering room of accessories, like those paperback-inspired minaudières by Olympia Le Tan. In a little less than a year, Fivestory has become a favorite for high-end shoppers seeking the unexpected.

There are plates emblazed with Basquiat drawings and plastic jewels by Ek Thongprasert, dresses collaged with scraps of discontinued fabric by Russian designer Vika Gazinskaya, and archive pieces from a forgotten French house called Leonard. And then there’s Distenfeld’s favorite at the moment — a pair of $7,600 embroidered runway pants by Balmain. Her friends may have balked at the price tag, but their craftsmanship and scarcity (“There’s only about eight or nine of them in the world”) convinced Distenfeld that she was making the right decision.

“When everyone said, ‘You’re an idiot, no one’s going to buy them,’ I was like, ‘Nobody buys these pants, I put them in a Plexiglas box, I put ’em on my wall,’” Distenfeld said. “To me it’s art. And it’s a pretty good price… it’s a piece.”

In her efforts to acquire such unique items, she follows a process similar to her work finding new artists. She constantly talks to people she trusts, but the real progress is made “knee-deep in the Internet,” as one boutique’s selection leads her to discover new, young designers, and in turn, new stockists with rosters of their own. “It’s kind of like a conversation with yourself and next thing you know you’re 20 clicks from where you started, you don’t know how you got there, but you’re always taking notes, and you’re always learning.” 

With learning comes change, and Distenfeld admits that her style is constantly evolving, and the store will keep changing right along with it. During our interview she wore a Peter Pilotto dress — the designer is a favorite at the store — in red, her current power color. (“I could be wearing a red garbage bag, but I’d feel good,” she said.)

She’s been wearing more color lately, and encourages others to do so too. In fact, her New Year’s resolution is to find a more consistent look within her color obsession. She’s pared it down to a few favorite hues (red, green, and navy), and now she’s looking to streamline the shapes. But come New Year’s Eve, anything goes.

“You have to be comfortable. If you’re going out on New Year’s and you’re wearing a strapless dress where a nip slip or something might happen, you have to be comfortable. Wear really good shoes. And dress, just different,” said Distenfeld. “I think there are moments in your life, your birthday, New Year’s… just don’t wear black.”

Matthew Drutt, Executive Director of the Blouin Cultural Advisory Group, takes us on a tour of several painting shows in New York's Chelsea neighborhood, including David Humphrey at Fredericks & Freiser, Barnaby Furnas at Marianne Boesky Gallery, and Carroll Dunham at Barbara Gladstone Gallery.

Watch the video below: