The immediate antecedent of Ron Howard’s upcoming racecar movie “Rush,” which depicts the rivalry of the Formula One drivers James Hunt and Niki Lauda, is “Senna.” Asif Kapadia’s 2010 documentary about the great Brazilian driver Ayrton Senna, who was killed during the 1994 San Grand Prix after winning the 1988, 1990, and 1991 Drivers Championships, upped the ante for the big-screen presentation of Formula One. It is a spiritual (if agonizing and tragic) character drama, as opposed to a slick montage of action shots.

“Rush,” however, may recall the days when racecar movies were de rigueur for macho leading men. Howard Hawks’s NASCAR picture “Red Line 7000” (1965), starring James Caan, was followed by the likes of “Grand Prix” (1966, James Garner), “Winning” (1969, Paul Newman), and “Le Mans” (1971, Steve McQueen).

The trend overlapped with Formula One’s 1960s heyday but petered out before the glamorous (and lethal years) of the 1970s and ’80s. The Austrian Lauda won the Drivers Championship in 1975, 1977, and 1984. In 1976, he had over twice as many points as his nearest challengers, Hunt and South Africa’s Jody Scheckter, when he suffered a near fatal crash at the Nürburgring German Grand Prix (which he had intended to boycott over safety issues).

Even though Lauda (driving for Ferrari) returned six weeks later for the Italian Grand Prix and finished fourth, Hunt (McLaren) trimmed his lead to three points before the Japanese Grand Prix climaxed the season. Rain forced Lauda to withdraw after two laps, and though Hunt finished third he ended the season a point ahead of his onetime roommate and won the championship.

In 1977, Lauda won three Grand Prix as did Schechter (Wolf) and Hunt. The Italian American Mario Andretti (Lotus) won four, but Lauda topped the standing as the winner of the most points. Hunt finished fifth after a troubled season in terms of his discipline and off-track antics.

The personal differences between the two drivers will feed the drama in “Rush.” Unlike previous British champions Jim Clark, Graham Hill, and Jackie Stewart, Hunt (played in the movie by Chris Hemsworth) was the Grand Prix driver as dissolute rock star – a cocaine and marijuana user and prolific womanizer, who would reportedly snort a line and have sex before races.

On the track he was known for his hair-raising bursts of speed. After his retirement, he cleaned up his act and became a commentator respected for his dry wit and contempt for selfish drivers. Among the drivers he mentored were the two-time Finnish world champion Mika Häkkinen. Hunt was 45 when he died of a heart attack at his Wimbledon home in 1993.

A less flamboyant figure than Hunt, Lauda (played by “Inglourious Basterds”’s Daniel Brühl) was a calculating and fastidious driver. “He was known for his intense behind-the-scenes work testing and refining cars to perfection,” The Guardian’s Ben Child reported yesterday. The trailer for the film (below) has Hemsworth’s Hunt blaming himself for Lauda’s crash – which may be dramatic license.

Scheduled to open in October, “Rush” was written by Peter Morgan, who must have savored writing Hunt’s part in particular. The other “icons” he has scripted lines for include Henry VIII and the Boleyn sisters; the Queen, Tony and Cherie Blair, and Gordon Brown; Idi Amin; David Frost and Richard Nixon; Lord Longford and child murderer Myra Hindley; soccer coaches Brian Clough and Don Revie; and Bill and Hillary Clinton. He also wrote the upcoming Freddie Mercury biopic.

“Rush” co-stars Olivia Wilde as the model Suzy Miller, Hunt’s first wife (and the future wife of Richard Burton); Alexandra Maria Lara as Marlene Knaus, Lauda’s first wife; Christian McKay as Baron Alexander Hesketh, owner of the Hesketh racing team, which Hunt drove for before joining McLaren in 1975; Pierfrancisco Favino as Swiss driver Clay Regazzoni; and Alistair Petrie as Stirling Moss, the pioneering British driver of the 1950s and early ’60s. It was photographed by “Slumdog Millonaire” Oscar-winner Anthony Dod Mantle.

Watch the trailer for Ron Howard’s “Rush”:

ASCHERSLEBEN, GERMANY — The colorful, detailed canvases of artist Neo Rauch are a familiar sight at fairs and within public collections around the globe. Yet over the past 20 years, Rauch has produced another body of work that is much lesser-known: a series drawings and color prints. In his early years, the prints were mostly conceived for exhibition posters and invitation cards, continuing a tradition among artists in the former East German for whom prints where a means of exchange and keeping up to date with what other artists where doing. Being a book city, well-trained printers are still abundant in Leipzig; Rauch’s studio is also conveniently located four floors above a print shop.

“The printers carry the stone up from the basement to his studio on the third floor, where he works on it,” Kerstin Wahala of EIGEN+ART, Rauch’s longtime gallery, explains. “When he’s done, they pick it up again and apply another color. Then he works on it again. It’s this slower speed of things in Leipzig that suits him so well.” Wahala perceives the artist as being less pressured when it comes to making prints or drawings compared to the large canvases, which are promised to institutions and collectors long before they have actually been painted.

A mere two-hour drive from Berlin, Neo Rauch’s hometown of Aschersleben holds the painter’s collected works on paper. Set up in 2012 by Rauch and EIGEN+ART, the Grafikstiftung Neo Rauch recently opened its second show. A trip out into the East German province of Saxony-Anhalt helps viewers also to visualize the painter’s enigmatic pictorial worlds, which are deeply rooted in the landscape he grew up in.

But what made the famous artist come back to provincial Aschersleben, let alone donate all his prints of the past and future? The idea came from of the city. Rauch’s former classmate, Christiane Wisniewski, was in charge of Aschersleben’s newly built education center and had unused space at her hands, and approached the gallery about a possible show. At first, the gallery’s reaction was hesitative, but Rauch himself was enthusiastic. He came up with the idea to show works by his master class at the Leipzig Academy in Aschersleben, which proved a success. In 2010, Rauch donated one copy of all his past and future prints to the city. That was followed by setting up a foundation in 2012 with funds from the artist, his gallerist Gerd Harry Lybke, and the city.

Wahala, the gallery‘s co-director who was also born in Aschersleben, became chairwoman of the board. She recalls that each time she and Rauch drove to their hometown, both had the feeling of “driving deeper and deeper into Neo’s paintings, rediscovering our home, our memory blossoming like flowers.” Visitors to the foundation today might encounter similar experiences when driving or taking the train out to the town, crossing countryside, marked by industry, mines and agriculture. It is a landscape which Rauch finds much to his taste, dramatic yet subdued as well. “Through the movement towards and within the city, you can see that the landscape really is like that, just as in the paintings,” Wahala observes. “When your grandmother is the only thing left to you in terms of home,” she adds, noting that Rauch’s parents died when he was just four weeks old, “then one naturally looks for other cornerstones. For Neo, that was Aschersleben.”

Pictorial elements and titles such as “Kalimuna” (2010) directly relate to Aschersleben and the narrations of Rauch’s grandmother, who had worked in a local munitions factory during WWII (the title is a hybrid of the name of the factory, the Muna Depot, and “kali,” a reference for potash, mined for the weapons) . The seemingly dislocated architecture of Rauch’s work is in fact quite real to visitors to the Grafikstiftung, when moving through  Aschersleben and the surrounding Harz mountain range. Rauch’s deliberate and persistent proximity to the place where he was born and raised has been eyed suspiciously by critics and other, mostly German, artists. For Rauch, however, it’s simply a precondition of his work. And in contrast to his recent paintings, the reduction to three or four colors and much less detail in his printed works characterize an artist who is very much at ease with that medium – one that is just as deeply rooted in the city of Leipzig as Rauch’s motifs are in the modest but mysterious mountains of the Harz. Behind which the artist recalls, “The inaccessible kingdom of West Germany was to be found.”

Neo Rauch, “The Graphic Work: Part 2” is on view at the Grafikstiftung in Aschersleben, Germany through March 2, 2014.

When will Facebook's running battle with art end?

Art fans will be familiar with the steady drip of stories about the social media giant taking works offline for obscenity. It's become such a common story that we decided to investigate the questions raised. What's behind this continuous stream of problems? How has the company evolved in relation to complaints from the art community? And what is Facebook — which otherwise seems to be bent on gathering as much data about its users as possible — doing to better identify artists and art institutions, to avoid such embarrassing incidents?

The Process

To get at the root of the problem, it helps to know how Facebook goes about identifying and removing obscene content in the first place. When an image depicting “sexually explicit” content gets reported by a Facebook user, it heads to the “abusive content” department, one of four teams that work around the world and around the clock to monitor time-sensitive material (the process is detailed by a chart on the website NakedSecurity.) The team then measures the photo against Facebook’s community standards, which define what type of content is prohibited, including content containing violence and threats, self harm, bullying and harassment, and “graphic content,” which among other things includes nudity and pornography. 

If the image is found to have violated a standard, the team will issue a warning. A second offense causes the account to be disabled. There is no algorithm or auto-delete that searches for offensive content, save for a software called PhotoDNA, which polices the platform for child pornography.

We reached out to Facebook for a clarification on what is acceptable and what is not, given the recent scuffles over artworks. In an email, Frederic Wolens, a representative of Facebook’s Policy Communications, explained: “Photographs that depict nudity, regardless of context, are against our Terms. This is because with over 1 billion people using Facebook we have to put in place a set of universal guidelines that respect the views of a wide range of people.”

But should hardcore pornography, a documentary on breast cancer, and Francesca Woodman's probing self-portraits all be classified as “nude” and therefore offensive? Facebook's sheer size and influence on today's social life brings new urgency to the age-old question, “what is art?”  

Wolens went on to clarify, saying, “This policy concerns photos and digital images (since we allow Courbet's L'Origine du Monde, for example).” This example itself points to the fact that Facebook's guidelines have evolved in reaction to complaints about art: Courbet's iconic image was once famously banned by the platform, touching off protests; now, the company thinks it is specifically worth defending, while photographic work remains beyond defense. Yet the fact that there still isn't an “art exception” for photographic material upsets organizations that have spent years promiting this medium.

The History

Facebook’s community standards offer the following, hopeful sentence: “We aspire to respect people’s right to share content of personal importance, whether those are photos of a sculpture like Michelangelo's David or family photos of a child breastfeeding.” Again, this sentence clearly indicates that the platform is evolving, however reluctantly — its prohibition on breastfeeding imagery was a significant early controversy for the site. Meanwhile, the question of artistic uses of nudity has proved a constant problem.

In February 2011, a Copenhagen-based artist, Frode Steinicke, posted an image of Gustave Courbet's “The Origin of the World” (1866) to Facebook, an act which led to his account being disabled. The story soon made waves. Steinicke’s story was picked up by the AFP, which set off writer Luc Wouters of the French website Rue89 to campaign against this act, calling on advocates to stand by Steinicke by making the image in question their Facebook photo in order to “disseminate 'The Origin of the World' widely so that [Facebook CEO] Mark Zuckerberg comes across this masterpiece of world heritage of humanity, and can admire its unfailing and unrelenting beauty as much as I do.” His account was disabled 24 hours later. Facebook was ridiculed around the world. 

Similarly, artistic nudes were systematically taken down from the New York Academy of Art’s Facebook page in the beginning of 2011. Frustration with the censorship boiled over on the school’s blog, which kept a post titled “How is FACEBOOK controlling ART?,” cataloguing artworks that were removed from its page. After Steven Assael’s drawing “Simone” was taken down, the New York Times took notice, which in turn led to apology issued by the company: “In this case, we congratulate the artist on his lifelike portrayal that, frankly, fooled our reviewers. Each member of our investigations team reviews thousands of pieces of reported content every day and, of course, we occasionally make a mistake. We’re sorry for the confusion here and we encourage the artist to repost his work,” Simon Axten, a Facebook spokesman, told the New York Times.

This response hinted at the underlying distinction being made between photos and painted or drawn artworks. Yet more recently, the removal of the Pompidou Center’s image of Gerhard Richter’s photorealistic “Ema” again called into question the company's ability to make a clear distinction. After the famed French museum’s digital projects manager, Gonzague Gauthier, took his frustration with the issue to Twitter, Facebook again issued an apology, stating that the censor had once again confused the famous painting with a photo. 

The most recent large arts organization to make a fuss was London’s Saatchi Gallery — and this time the battle was squarely over photography's status as art. Just last month, the photograph “Voluptas Mors” by Philippe Halsman, depicting Salvador Dali beside a surrealistic specter of a floating skull made from nude female bodies, was taken down by Facebook. Via email, gallery director Rebecca Wilson told ARTINFO that this was not the first time Facebook removed one of their images, and that Facebook threatened to close the Gallery's account if it “continued to post offensive images.”

“I would love to know who polices Facebook and why it isn't possible educate its staff so that they can tell the difference between offensive pornography and the work of some of the greatest artists in the world,” Wilson wrote. “I guess we should be thankful Facebook don't run the world's great museums otherwise there'd be a lot of empty walls!”

Facebook's Stealthy Evolution

How difficult it would be for the Facebook teams would be to simply look at the identity of the organization posting the image to determine whether it was “art,” rather than simply adopting a blanket 'if it's nude it's lewd' approach? When we proposed the idea, company spokesman Wolens replied simply, “We don't have any comment on future policy changes.”

Such a cagey reaction baffles members of the art community — particularly those who spend their time making the case for photo-based work to the public. “Facebook strengthens the conservatism of public about ‘what is art?’" the Pompidu's Gauthier wrote to ARTINFO. "It’s a classical question in art history, specially linked with body and sexuality... a painting equals art, but a picture doesn’t?” The social media site's ad hoc solution to the problem of obscenity in art seems to have only produced another, different problem.

Other Social Networks

Facebook may be the most prominent social network, but it isn’t alone. Other social networks recognize the issues raised by obscenity (a notoriously problematic concept) and have developed their own policies to deal with it. Pinterest and Tumblr, for instance, have prohibitions on nudity and, most notably, “thinspiration” or pro-anorexia content (the latter of which made headlines in early 2012). Like Facebook, these platforms make it clear that nudity of any kind is prohibited.

However, Tumblr, a platform with a large arts community, has its own hybrid policy: It only polices content on so-called “featured tagged pages,” as in, pages that come up when you search for things tagged #art, #fashion, etc. (a fact attributed to the anti-nudity policies of Apple and Android); nudity, however, may appear in content that merely goes into one's personal feed (the posts that come up in your own feed of those you follow). As for Pinterest, along with content promoting self harm, it states that no pins involving “[s]exually explicit content or photographs containing exposed breasts, genitalia and/or buttocks” can be pinned. However, Mashable reports that even though they have publicly denounced “thinspo” content, the site has done little to stop it, and it appears the nudity policy is also fairly loose. Perhaps the issue of obscene art has simply not come up yet.

The most significant example, however, may be YouTube. The video site has similar policies against clips containing nudity, and also will only review a video once it’s flagged. Even then, if reviewers deem the video to be not pornographic, they may place an age restriction on the content. Yet it's approach appears to be markedly more sophisticated: In a recent article, Gizmodo explains that actual humans in an office determine whether the “artistic context of a video outweighs the sexual context,” on a case-by-case basis. In addition, in YouTube’s community standards, it states that “[t]here are exceptions for some educational, documentary, scientific, and artistic content, but only if that is the sole purpose of the video and it is not gratuitously graphic. For example, a documentary on breast cancer would be appropriate, but posting clips out of context from the documentary might not be.”

The Solution?

Organizations like the Saatchi Gallery, the New York Academy of Art, and the Pompidu Center are hardly obscure. YouTube has over 1 billion unique visitors each month, about the same amount as Facebook, and it has found a way to take artistic merit into account. This is even more surprising considering YouTube’s teams watch entire videos — obviously more time consuming than the single issues that have created problems for Facebook.

A policy that would at least be a partial answer seems clear: When a user creates a Facebook page, they are required to classify it — why can’t Facebook recognize images posted by an arts organization as art? Based on Facebook’s gradual clearance of photos containing breastfeeding and paintings depicting nudity, we predict some evolution in this direction. Yet given how notoriously inscrutable its policy changes are, you'll likely have to keep your eye open to see what does — and what doesn't — get censored to guess at the new policies as they happen.

– MoMA Will Demolish Folk Art Museum: The Museum of Modern Art will raze the Tod Williams and Billie Tsien-designed building it bought from the American Folk Art Museum in 2011 to replace it with an extension that will connect the existing MoMA galleries to a forthcoming Jean Nouvel-designed skyscraper, whose bottom floors will house still more exhibition spaces for the Modern. "We feel really disappointed," Tsien said. "There are of course the personal feelings — your buildings are like your children, and this is a particular, for us, beloved small child. But there is also the feeling that it’s a kind of loss for architecture, because it’s a special building, a kind of small building that’s crafted, that’s particular and thoughtful at a time when so many buildings are about bigness." Construction on the 86-story Nouvel tower and the expansion to replace the AFAM building will begin next year. [NYT]

– MOCA Board Replenished: After the widely publicized departures of all its artist board members, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art (MOCA) has recruited three new trustees: longtime Eli Broad buddy and convicted felon Bruce Karatz, investor Stanley Gold, and lawyer Orna Amir Wolens, who is also a major collector. New MOCA board members pay a $250,000 induction fee, and are committed to contributing at least $75,000 every year. [LATimes]

– Gagosian Gives Show to Pratt Students Who Lost Work in Fire: Mega-dealer Larry Gagosian has arranged for an exhibition of works by the 44 Pratt Institute seniors whose work burned in a blaze at the Brooklyn art school in February. The show will be curated by Brooklyn Museum curator Eugenie Tsai and will take place next month in the Seagram Building. "The students wanted a show in Manhattan, and this is like a dream come true," said Pratt president Thomas F. Schutte. The show, titled "Flameproof," runs May 9-14. [NYT]

– White House Requests Smithsonian Boost: The Obama administration's request for the Smithsonian Institute's 2014 budget includes a $59 million increase to help advance one of the president's education programs and to speed construction of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, which is due to open in 2015. The Smithsonian's budget has been fixed at $810 million since last year, though this year it suffered a $41 million cut as a result of the March 1 sequester. The budget request includes an extra $3 million boost to provide the Smithsonian's 4,400 federal employees a 1 percent cost-of-living pay increase, something it hasn't been able to do for the past three years. [Washington Post]

– Venice's Sideshows Revealed: Details of the 48 auxiliary events and exhibitions that will surround the official programming at this year's Venice Biennale have been revealed, including the Lawrence Weiner text piece "THE GRACE OF A GESTURE" (2010) to be installed on Venice's vaporetti boats, Ai Weiwei's installation of steel bars from a quake-ravaged school at Zuecca Project Space, and an exhibition by the roving outsider artist institution the Museum of Everything. Among the projects is a plethora of presentations by Asian non-profit organizations, like Korea's National Museum of Contemporary Art, the M+ Museum for Visual Culture, and the Museum of Contemporary Art Chengdu. [AiA]

– Pompidou Needs New Director: Do you or anyone you know have the necessary skills to run one of the largest museums of modern and contemporary art in the world? If so, the Centre Pompidou is about to post a job listing on its website for a new director, as its chief of 13 years Alfred Pacquement prepares to retire on his 65th birthday, December 27, 2013. Early contenders for the job include two insiders — Pompidou adjunct directors Catherine Grenier and Didier Ottinger— as well as Documenta 13 curator Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev. [AFP]

– Art Restorers Hijack Airport Scanners: According to research presented at the 2013 edition of the National Meeting and Exposition of the American Chemical Society, scientists have harnessed the technology used in those invasive and unpleasant full-body airport scanners as a tool for conservation that can allow art historians to scan frescoes for works hidden beneath their surfaces. A group of researchers applied the teraherz scanning technology to a 19th-century fresco at the Louvre, "Three Men Armed With Lances," and discovered a much older Roman fresco hidden beneath it. "We could not believe our eyes as the image materialized on the screen," said one of the researchers, J. Bianca Jackson. "Underneath the top painting of the folds of a man’s tunic, we saw an eye, a nose and then a mouth appear. We were seeing what likely was part of an ancient Roman fresco, thousands of years old." [Co.Exist]

– Qatar Buys Blue Period Picasso From Britain: The latest blockbuster art purchase by Qatar is Pablo Picasso's 1901 painting "Child With a Dove," which the country has reportedly acquired for £50 million through a private sale brokered by Christie's. Despite an export ban placed on the painting by the government of the U.K., where it has been since 1924 and is currently on view at London's Courtauld Institute of Art, no British museum has come up with a campaign to keep the work in the country. [TAN]

– Christie's Preps Major Pollock Drip Painting for Spring Sale: Christie's has pegged a $25-$35 million estimate on Jackson Pollock's "Number 19" (1948), a drip painting rendered in splashy streaks of black, white, and silver, and speckled with a few drops of vivid red, to hit the block in its contemporary art evening sale May 15. "If Pollock’s drip paintings are among the best-known paintings of the 20th century, the sale of Number 19 this spring in New York is an exceptional and unique opportunity for collectors and institutions to acquire this iconic masterpiece," said Christie's chairman Brett Gorvy. "Innumerable layers of delicate dripped paint reveal the captivating circular movement of Pollock’s hand. Number 19 is one of those paintings you get lost in." [Artdaily]

– Obama Budget Boosts NEA: Under the federal budget for 2014 proposed by President Barack Obama, the National Endowment for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) would each receive a modest increase of $200,000 to their $154.5-million endowment's budgets — though the $7 million hit that each took as a result of sequestration would not be remedied. "With this funding," an NEH statement said, "we believe that NEH can make a credible investment in a range of humanities activities that will yield both immediate and long-term returns to the nation." [Chronicle of Higher Education]

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For breaking art news throughout the day, check our In The Air blog.

“For these guys, and for some of us who are veterans, the war never ends,” said Mike Fay, of the subjects he draws. A former Chief Warrant Officer in the Marine Corps, Fay served as the sole, official Marine Corps artist on active duty in Iraq tasked with documenting the war through his drawings. Now, he spends his time organizing the Joe Bonham Project, a loosely connected group of artists who make portraits of wounded soldiers. Over 50 of these works — some created just weeks after soldiers have returned from Iraq or Afghanistan — are featured in a show opening today in Charlotte, North Carolina.

After returning from his final tour in Afghanistan in 2006, Fay and current official Marine Corps artist Kris Battles began visiting and drawing wounded veterans at Washington D.C.’s Walter Reed Army Medical Center. Fay quickly realized that “we had this new generation of guys with really catastrophic wounds.” He decided to organize more formally, naming it after Joe Bonham, the fictional WWI soldier who lost all of his limbs and facial features in Dalton Trumbo’s 1938 anti-war novel, “Johnny Got his Gun.”

The group includes around 20 artists with various political views who work in diverse media including illustration, digital, and conceptual art. Battles and Fay have both been on the front lines, and a few Joe Bonham members, like Victor Juhasz and Steve Mumford, have been to Iraq and Afghanistan as embedded combat artists. Similar to journalists and photographers, embedded artists must travel with the backing of a media outlet to document the war  through their practice. But along with the handful of seasoned vets and combat artists in the group, the majority of Joe Bonham artists are civilians who have never been in a war zone. 

Regardless of its military roots, the Joe Bonham project is witness art, not political propaganda. “We do it to tell the stories. We don’t take a political stance. We’re not heralding the war. We’re not denouncing the war. We’re simply painting a visual picture of those fighting their own wars when they come home,” explained Robert Bates, the Marine Corps veteran and combat artist organizing the group’s upcoming exhibition. Bates sees the project as an extension of war art made in the field. “It’s the aftereffects of combat, and what they’re combating today at home. We’re still embedding with a subject, and prying into their personal life and trying to tell their story,” he said.

The artists don’t sell any of the works they create as part of the Joe Bonham Project, and in many ways, the project is as much about relationships and healing as it is about the finished portraits. Fay emphasized the ways in which the artists build rapport with the subjects, asking about what happened to them, holding their hands, making eye contact, and trying to make sure the world doesn’t forget them. “We want to show that there are wounds that aren’t visible. Everything from the wounds you can definitely see — guys that are basically torsos — to people who have wounds that are just as profound, but aren’t as easy to see, like post-traumatic stress disorder and traumatic brain injuries.”

In addition to documenting for history, or posterity, Battles spoke about the way in which the project helps people — both veterans and civilians — heal. “Human creativity can be a great unifier. We don’t have a political agenda, but I think we can bridge a gap between communities that may not agree on things politically.”

What comes across most powerfully through the works in the Joe Bonham Project is just what Battles describes: the way art can break down the walls that prevent people from seeing the humanity in each other. As participating artist Jeffrey Fisher wrote in the Joe Bonham catalogue, “I no longer focused on the ravages of war, but instead am now focused on the individual serviceman, his dedication, and his forward-looking attitude, and that is what I try to record. Not the physical, although there is no getting around that, but rather, the ethereal essence, not of the Marine or soldier but of the man who happens to be a Marine or soldier.”

The exhibition, a collaboration between the University of North Carolina-Charlotte and the Central Piedmont Community College, is the second Joe Bonham show to take place in Charlotte. There have also been shows in Virginia and Michigan and in 2011, the works were exhibited at Storefront Bushwick, in an exhibition organized by New Criterion editor, James Panero. Both Fay and Bates will receive awards from the Marine Corps on April 20, in recognition of their work with the Joe Bonham project. 

According to Fay, the project will continue for as long as there are GI’s in the hospital. Maybe that won’t be forever. 

To see images, click on the slideshow.

On April 19, 1965, New York City mayor Robert Wagner enacted the city’s Landmarks Preservation Law, and the New York City Landmarks Preservation Commission was formed, tasked with safeguarding the city’s rich architectural history by identifying and protecting historically significant buildings. The law came about a year and a half after McKim, Mead & White’s Beaux-Arts Pennsylvania Station fell to the wrecking ball, a cultural blunder few can imagine transpiring today — in no small part due to the law penned in response to this urban tragedy.

Though the city has come a long way, there is no overestimating the importance of the 1965 legislation in a society entranced by economic growth and often willing to sacrifice its own heritage to pay the price. With the Landmarks Preservation Law approaching its 50th anniversary, now is an important time to do precisely what the law has taught us to do: pause and reflect. A newly formed civic group known as the NYC Landmarks50 has emerged with this task in mind, and on Sunday, April 14, they are set to begin their two-year countdown to the 50-year mark with an exhibition at the Queens Museum of Art that — in nifty preservationist style — utilizes one of the city’s oft-overlooked treasures: the museum's famous 1964 Robert Moses-designed Panorama.

Built by Robert Moses for the 1964 World’s Fair, the Panorama is a 9,335-square-foot architectural model of every building in the five boroughs constructed before 1992, viewed by visitors from above. Inhabiting this sprawling sculpture are 895,000 individual models, and for the NYC Landmarks50 exhibition “Marking Spaces: New York City's Landmark Historic Districts,” the city’s 109 historic districts will be highlighted with yellow flags, creating a stunning three-dimensional graphic that emphasizes the architectural eclecticism the Landmarks Preservation Law has striven to protect for almost five decades.

“The Panorama has always been intended as a vehicle to educate and celebrate the built environment that is New York City,” said executive director of the Queens Museum of Art Tom Finkelpearl in a public statement. “What better way to commemorate 50 years of the Landmarks Preservation Law than to gaze upon the five boroughs and think of what our evolving city would be today were it not for those with the foresight to preserve our City’s past while also looking to its future.” Finkelpearl appropriately emphasizes the powerful visual effects of Moses’s Panorama, which — apart from celebrating the city’s infrastructure, the project’s primary ambition — conveys the density and cultural heterogeneity of New York.

“Marking Spaces” kicks off two years of events programmed by NYC Landmarks50 to raise awareness of the conservationist and landmarking efforts in New York. “There is hardly a neighborhood, or a New Yorker, not touched by New York City’s preservation movement, which so reflects the great diversity of our city," said committee chair Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel. “We are committed to developing future preservationists who will take responsibility for protecting our history, and the continuity of the New York Cityscape.”

“Marking Spaces: New York City’s Landmark Historic Districts” will open with a reception on Sunday, April 14, 2013 from 3 - 6 pm at the Queens Museum of Art in New York.

It’s April, which means it’s kick-off time for music festival season. First up, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, a must-attend event for live music fans (despite the fact that it takes place in the middle of the desert), opening Friday. Like any good festival, Coachella offers a wide range of acts to choose from, covering the spectrum from house to Top 40 rock – there is literally something for everyone. With that in mind, ARTINFO has put together a festival guide – arranged by handy listener profiles – to help lucky music lovers who find themselves in Indio, California, over the next two weekends (note: if you can’t make it this weekend, next weekend’s schedule offers the exact same lineup).

For the Listener Who Wants a Gentle Introduction to the Electronic Music World

Electronic music is as big as it’s ever been in America and Coachella has always been on top of its rise, spotlighting artists who shy away from analog instruments. This year’s festival features plenty of musicians with a foot in that world but who won’t be a shock to the system for the uninitiated. Those looking to hear what all the fuss is about should check out the scene mainstay Paul Oakenfeld, along with more recent acts like Jamie xx and TNGHT. Our top pick, though, is U.K. bass duo Disclosure, who perform on Sunday. The Lawrence brothers (Guy and Howard) have spent the last couple of years creating propulsive music that appeals to the more technically concerned electronica fans but is also a good fit for anyone looking to dance.

Disclosure, Gobi, Sunday, 11:10 p.m.

For the Listener Who Stopped Listening to New Music Years Ago

While the Internet has made it easier than ever to find new music, it’s also made it a daunting task. With seemingly thousands of bands coming out of nowhere daily, who has time to keep up? Sometimes it seems easier to stick with what you know and love. Coachella’s always been good at featuring bands that made their mark last century, and this year is no different with Sparks, New Order, and Blur all playing high-profile sets both weekends. But if there’s one show you must check out, it’s Friday night’s performance from the recently reunited Stone Roses. As with anything involving the Manchester quartet, there’s no reason to believe a feud won’t derail their reunion (it already has, actually), so catch the Brit rock legends while you still can.

The Stone Roses, Coachella Stage, Friday, 11:40 p.m.

For the Listener Who Cares More About a Thrilling Flow Than a Killer Guitar Riff

Coachella has a decidedly indie rock vibe, but the festival has never held back in spotlighting the best from the hip-hop world. After all, this is the festival that featured the Tupac hologram last year. This year is no different with sets from the Wu-Tang Clan, 2 Chainz, and Pusha T. All of them are worth checking out, but at the top of our list is Detroit MC and hip-hop’s current most talented weirdo Danny Brown. The unbelievably fast rapper (and recent Uniqlo model) performs Saturday afternoon.

Danny Brown, Outdoor Theater, Saturday, 3:00 p.m.

For the Listener Who Wants to Stay on Top of Things

Artists who play Coachella end up on the bill because they’ve proven themselves as acts worth paying attention to. And while the festival may not be the place to find up-and-coming bands, it’s a great spot to see young artists who have been recognized but aren’t yet household names. There are plenty of those acts bloating the middle area of each day, including Smith Westerns, Tame Impala, and Beach House. British singer Jessie Ware, who might be poppier than most buzz bands, is nonetheless someone you’ll definitely want to see, especially since the U.S. release of her debut album, “Devotion,” might make her a star.

Jessie Ware, Mojave, Sunday, 3:45 p.m.

For the Listener Who Wants to Make Sure to See the Best Artist Each Day

Clearly the 2013 Coachella line-up has plenty of outstanding acts, but if you ask us, there are some that rise above the rest. On Friday night, check out Odd Future’s most talented member, and hip-hop’s most promising young voice, Earl Sweatshirt. Saturday, the day most rife with potential scheduling conflicts, Sigur Rós’s set will be worth committing to. And on Sunday, you can still catch Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, without getting stuck in traffic.

Earl Sweatshirt, Gobi, Friday, 12:05 a.m.

Sigur Rós, Outdoor Theater, Saturday, 11:50 p.m.

Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds, Coachella Stage, 8:40 p.m.

DALLAS — How much can a three-day art fair contribute to an art scene that aspires to flourish year-round? It’s a question Dallas is asking itself on opening day of the fifth-annual Dallas Art Fair, which runs April 12-14. The event has grown from a 37-exhibitor, largely local affair to a buzzing hub for 90 international galleries like New York’s Marlborough Gallery and Milan’s Massimo de Carlo, a good half of which are new to the event this year.

Dallas, it’s abundantly clear, is a city that wants to be known as an art capital. And maybe — just maybe — it’s got a shot at becoming one. Collectors flew in from New York, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Detroit to browse the fair’s VIP preview on April 11. (Of course, it’s no Basel — many of those visitors already had existing ties to the area through relatives and friends.)

The number of local collectors has also grown dramatically since the fair’s inception. “In the 10 years since I left, it’s totally changed,” said Dallas-born Esther Kim Varet, founder of the Los Angeles gallery Various Small Fires, a first-time exhibitor. “There were always a couple names of collectors you would see — now there are so many more. It feels like it’s a part of the culture.” 

A testament to its growing ambition, this year’s fair even has its own satellite: Caja Dallas, a spinoff of the indie event SEVEN. (Unlike most auxiliary events, however, Caja Dallas was formally invited and co-produced by the fair’s organizers.) It’s one of over a dozen exhibitions, panel discussions, and other art events timed to coincide with the Dallas Art Fair.

“I think fairs can become nodes — magnetic points that things gather around,” Nasher Sculpture Center director Jeremy Strick told ARTINFO as he browsed the aisles, adding that he thought this year’s fair was “significantly better” than last year. “First, a number of institutions have constructed their exhibition schedules around the fair, and now a number of artists have organized exhibitions and projects.”

There are early signs that this coordination may help promote commerce. Though most marquee, expensive pieces — like a celestial painting by Roberto Matta from 1972 at the booth of Cernuda Arte priced at $800,000 — remained available at the end of the preview, work by emerging artists with established exhibition histories in the city sold briskly.

Within 30 minutes of the VIP opening, New York’s David Lewis Gallery sold a multipanel painting by Charles Mayton for $12,000 that was recently on view at the Power Station, a kunsthalle founded by local collector Alden Pinnell. Similarly swiftly, Jonathan Viner Gallery of London sold a $30,000 painting adorned with jewel-tone plasticine by Dan Rees, who is currently the subject of a solo exhibition at the nearby Goss Michael Foundation.

Dealers attribute this “hive mind” buying pattern to the social nature of collecting in Dallas and the small number of key art advisors active in the city. “People here know what their friends are buying — they bring people by to say, ‘Oh, I have this artist,’” noted the Green Gallery’s Jake Palmert. The Milwaukee gallery sold a bamboo and rope sculpture by Kasper Muller and Tobias Madison, who currently has a water-filled installation on view at the Power Station, for $8,000.

The fact that Dallas is located far away from self-serious art hubs like Los Angeles and New York also means that collectors here take more risks, dealers said. “The collections are personality driven and whimsical, much more so than in New York,” noted CANADA’s Phil Grauer. “The collectors are all advised, but sometimes they’ll go rogue, maybe to prove to their neighbors that they’re that much more relaxed.”

Indeed, some collectors were clearly taking chances. San Francisco’s Jessica Silverman Gallery sold four works by Amikam Toren, an Israeli-born, London-based artist in his 60s who had never before shown in America. His canvases — made from the pulp of ground-up thrift store paintings — sold on opening night for $13,000 each.

By the end of the weekend, dealers may conclude whether or not the region’s appetite for art is keeping pace with the fair’s ambitious expansion. Most are optimistic. “More than any small center,” Grauer said, “I can’t think of anywhere else that could pull this off.”

To see images from the Dallas Art Fair 2013, click on the slideshow.

“Buyer and Cellar,” the new off-Broadway hit starring Michael Urie and written by Jonathan Tolins, begins with a caveat. A big caveat. “This is a work of fiction,” says the protagonist, a struggling actor named Alex More. “The premise is preposterous. What I’m going to tell you could not possibly have happened with a person as famous, talented, and litigious as Barbra Streisand.” What is real and undisputable is that in 2010 Streisand shared with the world her extravagantly appointed Malibu compound in a coffee-table book, “My Passion for Design.” What caught the eye of Tolins, right there on page 190, is the fact that the legendary performer had transformed her vast basement into a shopping mall in order to display her sizable collection of art, costumes, furniture, antiques, and assorted tchotkes.  It is a veritable “main street” a la Delaware’s Winterthur or Anaheim’s Disney. 

What germinated in Tolins’s imagination was a fantasia: what if the superstar hired a sales person to man the shops? Enter the “preposterous premise.” If the mood struck her, Streisand could then haggle over the price of her own stuff, like some rug merchant in a Middle-Eastern bazaar. Bizarre, no?  Yes. But also lots of fun due to Tolins’s absurd cleverness and a charming performance by Urie, best known for his role in the TV series “Ugly Betty.”  The New York Times’s David Rooney praised the show, which is currently at the Rattlestick Playwrights Theater in Greenwich Village, as a wonderful solo vehicle for Urie. He wrote, “Juggling both sides of every conversation, including Alex’s tete-a-tetes with la Streisand, he brings a supremely light touch and a droll detachment to situations of ‘Twilight Zone’ oddness, but also welcome suggestions of tenderness.” ARTINFO spoke with Urie about the privileges and pitfalls of being Barbra Streisand, someone that talented, that rich, that famous, and that adored and hated. 

Wasn’t taking on an icon like Streisand a fairly loaded prospect?

When I first read the script, I thought, “Wow, this is risky.” Who knows how people will take it or how Barbra would take it when she found out about it?” But I also knew our intention was pure. It certainly wasn’t an attempt to make fun or skewer her. We wanted people to laugh, at her expense, but at the same time enjoy her. If you don’t leave the theater loving her more than when you went in, I failed.

What were your perceptions of her before this and how has this experience changed them?

I always knew her as a wonderful talent and a super-successful renaissance woman. And I knew something about her design sense. I happened to catch the show about her book on “Oprah.” But something I didn’t expect was that I now find her very relatable.  That’s not something you get from just reading interviews. But when you become immersed in her, the interviews, the movies, the onstage banter, you can find the real her. It’s out there.

And that is?

Someone who cares deeply about the work. Who loves the process of it.

Apart from that, if you could meet her, what would you want to know?

Why don’t you do more? Why don’t you make more movies? I think I know the answer maybe because I’m doing this play. She says herself that she’s lazy. But the fact that she’s such a perfectionist provides the answer.

Do you think it’s also a heightened anxiety over failure?

Maybe. Could be. But that is in a way a self-fulfilling prophecy. The more you do, the more success and failure that you have. If she did more, it wouldn’t matter as much. And you learn so much more from your failures than your successes. But because she works so little, when she does do a movie, especially if she directs, all eyes are on her. 

Creating her own version of Marie Antoinette’s Le Petit Trianon is a little nutty. In what way do you think of this play as a cautionary tale?

I think all of us who get on a stage or get in front of a camera crave attention in some way. Some people are completely obsessed with it but she’s not like that. She does crave attention in her own way, but she spends a lot of time alone. She’s almost reclusive. It’s her way of preserving herself, preserving her privacy. I do think, in my tiny way, when “Ugly Betty” first hit and it was the biggest show on TV for a hot second, we were instantly famous. We were at these big parties, the Emmys and the Golden Globes, with people screaming our name, wanting autographs, and taking our picture. And I would go home at the end of the night to my studio apartment in a city I didn’t know and it was an intensely lonely feeling unlike anything I’d ever had before. You’re alone as you can possibly be. And that’s just a minute example of what she goes through on a much more intense level.

In the play, Tolins touches on her need to control her world.

He does a little bit. She says herself [in the play] there’s all this excitement and it’s fun but everybody wants something and expects something and you expect more and more until you go crazy and you think you can’t stop without the whole thing crashing down. It isn’t necessarily from something that she said, but it’s interesting and true. There are certainly stars out there who keep making the same mistakes and you wonder who’s close to them telling them it’s OK to do this? Who’s telling Lindsay Lohan it’s okay for her to keep doing this? Or, more likely, telling her that it’s not okay?

Why do you suppose she was such a gay icon and there may now be a new generation of gay men who could care less?

In the play, she says, “My God, there are so many of you. I know it’s supposed to be like 10 percent of the population. But in my life, it feels more like 70.” John Epperson [the drag artist Lypsinka] is a friend who I asked to come and watch the play and let me know if I was on the right track. He did a talkback for us and this question came up. I’m paraphrasing his theory but he said, women like Barbra and Judy Garland and Madonna or Natalie Wood, they’re freakish in their talent, their vulnerability, and beauty. For John, growing up in the south and feeling like a freak, he felt that he could relate to these women. That’s a big part of it.

So as gay men become less “freakish,” they are less in need of these icons?

Perhaps. That’s probably very true. We still have them. Lady Gaga or even Beyonce. But the times are changing and there’s a sense among young people that you don’t have to glom onto them. Alex in the play doesn’t have a Judy or Barbra thing. He’s savvy about that. He says, “I appreciate that this stuff is part of my gay birthright.” But some people don’t. Some people push back against it.

Why do you suppose Streisand incites as much animosity as devotion?

I guess it’s jealousy. Anything that’s overly touted, overly praised, overly beloved will get resistance from naysayers. That’s what Barry, my boyfriend in the play, represents. Cynical dissatisfaction and this sort of attitude that I’m not going to waste my time, I would rather tear them down than jump on a bandwagon. A certain backlash sets in.

Do you think that people are turned off by her need to do everything on a project? Even her design book credited her with principal photography.

Maybe. As Barry says about “The Mirror Has Two Faces,” her movie, “She didn’t write the screenplay, she only stars, produces, directs, and take credit for the love theme. But it’s all her so don’t even blink.”  

Did you find her to be an object of pity or sympathy? After all, she says in the play that she married James Brolin in part because she could never figure out what to do on Sunday and he could. Seems like a poor reason to get married.  

She has more money than anybody in the world, she could buy and sell any of us but it is a lonely place to be. She trusts very few people. Perfectionism can be admirable but it can also hurt others and breed criticism among your collaborators. But I actually admire that in her. I think she’s a true artist who never settles. Even putting out this book about her insanely expensive house. I heard that she’d been working on directing a film. And when that fell through, she started on this.  She “directed” a house instead.

And the producers haven’t heard from her lawyers?

As far as I know they have not. I think we’re legally square. And I think enough people have said it’s a loving portrayal. It’s affectionate. 

— We ran down the pre-fame jobs and careers of 30 art stars, from Ed Ruscha's years spent as a layout artist working at Artforum under the pseudonym Eddie Russia, to Carolee Schneeman's time as a walk-on actor in pornographic films.

— Julia Halperin reported from the Dallas Art Fair, which appears to be growing by leaps and bounds.

— On the occasion of the Iron Lady's passing, Rozalia Jovanovic looked back at the controversy surrounding Hans Haacke's portrait of Margaret Thatcher at the Tate in 1984.

— Kelly Chan explored the origins of the Seagram Building, whose revolutionary design can partly be credited to a 27-year-old liquor empire heiress.

— Terri Ciccone investigated the many occasions on which Facebook has censored images of artworks, and the arcane obscenity policies that have led the social network to not recognize photography as art.

— The Queens Museum of Art announced that it will restore and repurpose Robert Moses's famous New York City panorama.

— Kris Wilton checked in on the market for works by Claes Oldenburg on the eve of his retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, highlights from which we later perused.

— Collector and cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder donated some 78 Cubist artworks to the Metropolitan Museum, a trove of works reportedly worth $1 billion. We highlighted some of the most amazing pieces.

— Shane Ferro offered five useful tips for reading news about the art market.

— Alanna Martinez surveyed experts on creating top-notch visual artists' websites and came away with some essential guidelines to follow (and a few that can be broken).

— Janelle Zara speculated that the prevalence of wit and humor in the offerings at Milan's Salone del Mobile was a response to Italy's economic hardships.

THIS WEEK'S VIDEOS:

Ronnie Wood of the Rolling Stones exhibits a collection of his work at a gallery in London.

Most associate Wood with the veteran British rock group - along with Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Charlie Watts. However, art has been also been a constant in his life and before his musical career kicked off, Wood attended art school in London.

His latest exhibition comprises a series of sketches and canvases of the world-famous Rolling Stones including individual portraits and group pieces.

Wood says he has many influences ranging from Rembrandt to Carvaggio.

"Well from my early childhood influences of Rembrandt and Caravaggio, I love to carry that through - Picasso and all the expressionists and impressionists and all the styles I've soaked in over the years. It's a bit like the music, you know, you get influenced by the blues and soul and classical and you mix it all up and it comes out your way," he said.

For Wood, music and art are not only a relaxing form of expression but also spiritual.

"I'll get the musical mode when I'm on tour and I might do a few sketches but it's mainly concentrating on the music. Then when the tour is over I can relax and I find myself getting the brush out and it's very spiritual - you know, music and art is very relaxing to me," he said.

The Rolling Stones will play the Glastonbury Music Festival for the first time, organizers announced in March, joining Arctic Monkeys and folk band Mumford & Sons as headliners at the three-day June event.

The appearance by the veteran British rock group followed weeks of rumours that the Stones, who in 2012 celebrated 50 years in the music business with a handful of concerts, finally would play at Glastonbury, one of Europe's biggest music festivals.

"Glastonbury is going to be something pretty special, I'm sure, whatever the weather. Even the helicopter's got wellington boots on it!," said Wood.

Following their appearance at Glastonbury, the Stones are then scheduled to return to Hyde Park in July for a concert that will be their first performance there since 1969.

It was at that 1969 performance that Wood says he knew he wanted to, and would be a member of the Rolling Stones.

"Yeah, very big year and quite important for the Stones to go back there. I remember meeting them on the perimeter of the park in '69 when they played there and they said 'hey! we'll see you soon' and I said, yeah, sooner than you think!," he said.

"I always thought I was going to be there. I always knew it... in the back of my mind - you know it's ambition - that's what you gotta have kids! It was at Hyde Park back in '69 when I had this thought: I'm gonna be in that band. And it will be a nice full circle for me to play it with them," he continued.

Tickets for the July 2013 Hyde Park concert sold out within minutes of going on sale. A second date has been added since.

Once again, ARTINFO has sent its intrepid staff into the streets of New York City, charged with reviewing the art they saw in a single (sometimes run-on) sentence. (To see our One-Line Reviews as an illustrated slideshow, click here.)

Linda Ganjian, "Overview" at Auxiliary Projects, 2 St. Nicholas Avenue, #25, Brooklyn, through May 5

Like an OCD-afflicted city planner bent on making streets and buildings conform to the rigid patterning and symmetry of mathematical formula, traditional Middle Eastern tiles, or American quilts, Linda Ganjian has transformed the features glimpsed on her daily elevated train commute into a series of small drawings and a large sculpture in which air ducts, barbed wire, billboards, bollards, and banal bits of blight are organized into ornate sequences and shapes that render these ubiquitous urban objects abstract and strange. — Benjamin Sutton

Peter Hutchinson, “The Logic of Mountains, 1963 - 2013: A 50-Year Survey of Constructions, Collages, Books, and Film” at Freight + Volume, 530 West 24th Street, through April 13

The delicate, diaristic, and fragmented poetry with which Peter Hutchinson adorns his photographic collages and assemblage pieces is more honest and intelligible than any artist statement could be; it reads like a 50-year running commentary written by the artist himself, and offers a second entry into the subtle, abstracted beauty of the parts of human nature on which his works muse. — Alanna Martinez

Will Kurtz, “Another Shit Show” at Mike Weiss Gallery, 520 West 24th Street, through April 27

While I’m largely unsure what lasting artistic legacy this show might have, I will say that Will Kurtz’s ability to craft convincing dog poop — not to mention numerous breeds of dog and even a human — out of paper maché is second-to-none, and therefore it’s worth stopping in. — Shane Ferro

Hiraki Sawa, "Figment," at James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26th Street, through April 27

The narrative of this show's centerpiece, a two-chanel video installation featuring an unnamed amnesiac protagonist quietly observing the objects in an apartment while they come to life — turntable records that unwind like thread and zip in and out of invisible crevices to form repetitive patterns, clockwork mechanisms of lamps and timepieces that eventually meld with their human counterpart — provokes a sense of anxiety that's calmed by a rigorous sense of visual order and a palindromic audio composition, so that the video's viewer (like its subject) loses track of time. — Lori Fredrickson

B. Wurtz, “Recent Works” at Metro Pictures, 519 West 24th Street, through April 27

Had Calder gone to the voodoo fetish markets of Togo, the result might have been something akin to B. Wurtz’s tiny, delicate sculptures made from wood, wire, brass, ribbon, buttons, and string, whose charm enthrall and conjure whimsy that is surprising for such pedestrian things. — Rozalia Jovanovic

Director Brad Anderson’s horror-thriller “Eliza Graves,” which Millennium Films will put before the cameras on June 24 according to Deadline, is inspired by Edgar Allan Poe’s 1845 short story “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether.” Joe Gangemi wrote the script; Mel Gibson is one of the producers.

Updated to around 1900, it will star Jim Sturgess as a graduate of Harvard Medical School who joins the staff of a remote psychiatric hospital and falls in love with a patient, to be played by Kate Beckinsale. He gradually discovers that the “doctors” are the inmates and the “inmates” are the doctors. 

Michael Caine and Ben Kingsley have also been cast in the film. If Kingsley’s role is that of one of the hospital’s doctors, as is rumored, it will prompt comparisons with his head psychiatrist in Martin Scorsese’s “Shutter Island” (2010).

Poe’s story originated the Freudian (and Borgesian) idea of lunatics taking over an asylum and fed “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” (1920). Robert Wiene’s German Expressionist masterpiece was predated by the Edison comedy “Lunatics in Power” (1909) and Maurice Tourneur’s horrific two-reeler of a 1903 Grand Guignol play based on Poe’s story that was released as “The Lunatics” in the US. Philippe de Broca’s 1966 counterculture comedy-drama “King of Hearts,” about mental patients who take over a French town booby-trapped by retreating German soldiers near the end of World War I, suggests that the instigators of war are the true madmen.

In the Tourneur film, eye-gouging and throat-slitting are the cures for madness used by the insane doctors, Tarr and Fether. In Poe’s tale – a hilarious, pro-reformist satire of psychiatric hospital conditions rather than a flesh-creeper – a traveler in the South of France visits an asylum (as if it were a tourist spot) in “a dank and gloomy wood” because he’s heard that its system of soothing patients and allowing them to run free has proved efficacious.

Once admitted by the dignified gentleman superintendent, Monsieur Maillard, he falls immediately for a beautiful woman singing an aria at the piano – presumably the origin of Beckinsale’s character in “Eliza Graves” – and is told by Maillard that she’s not an inmate but one of his relatives. Both, in fact, are patients.

At an elaborate but cacophonous dinner, the narrator gradually realizes that his resplendently attired fellow guests are all mad men and women who have tarred and feathered the staff and locked them up. Individual guests mock the behaviors of patients who are, in fact, themselves: one imagines himself a teapot, others think they are a donkey, a Cordova cheese, a frog, a pumpkin, a champagne bottle, a spinning top, a cockerel, and a pinch of snuff. The story augurs not only “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” but “Monty Python’s Flying Circus.”

(The beautiful woman, who thinks clothes indecent, attempts to take hers off and wear them inside herself – a detail that will pique the interest of Beckinsale’s male fans.)

At the end, the narrator, having taken a beating and continued his European tour, reports that the soothing system has since been restored by the real doctors, who had escaped confinement by leaving through a sewer. He also mentions that the mad superintendent was the original superintendent. Poe had written “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” after his crisis year of 1844, and, as Jeffrey Meyers has written, it explores “the thin borderline between the lunatic and sane,” suggesting “that crazy people may have superior insight” and condemning “the tendency to call insane those people whose ideas and behavior differ from the norm.”

Another Poe biographer, Kenneth Silverman, writes that Poe’s awareness of his own fragile hold on sanity is indicated by his name, “Allan,” nearly resurfacing in the names of Maillard and those of fellow keeper-inmates Laplace, Boullard, and Gaillard. If “Eliza Graves” proves insightful enough to take a cue from Poe’s wordplay, its eponymous mad beauty ought to be the ghost of a woman prematurely buried alive.

NEW YORK — A spirit of satire was in the air at last night’s Public Art Fund gala at 82 Mercer in Soho. Entering, guests were put through the comical ordeal of a fake airport security checkpoint, courtesy Ryan McNamara (small bottles of vodka magically appeared in shoes that were passed through the scanner). In the main hall, mingling crowds were invited to play an Olaf Breuning-engineered carnival game, or browse a panda-themed garage sale, courtesy of Rob Pruitt.

The charity auction and dinner brought out plenty of heavy hitters from the New York art community, from the city's culture czar Kate Levin and Guggenheim boss Richard Armstrong, to more offbeat luminaries like J. Crew creative director Jenna Lyons and satirist Mo Rocca. Among the artists, Nate Lowman, Adam Pendleton, and Xaviera Simmons were spotted, among many others.

It's been a banner year for Public Art Fund, with its Tatsu Nishi-conceived “Discovering Columbus” installation in Columbus Circle drawing blockbuster crowds. And success, it seems, breeds success: This year's benefit broke records for both attendance and amount of money raised. The silent auction brought in more than $250,000; all in all, $750,000 was raised to support the organization’s exhibitions and adventurous public programs.

To see pictures from the Public Art Fund gala 2013, click on the slideshow.