The Venice Biennale is nearly upon us. In addition to serving as an excuse for a mind-numbing onslaught of parties, pop-up events, and invitation-only affairs in the picturesque Italian city's many palazzi, the Biennale also still serves a function as the World Series of curating. The main show — this year helmed by Massimiliano Gioni — is easily one of the most visible statements about contemporary art on the global stage. Meanwhile, the international pavilions see countries trot out their best to compete for the Biennale's Golden Lion award.

Two years ago, the United States tapped art duo Allora & Calzadilla to create a spectacular display with indistinctly political overtones, including a giant-sized tank parked upside-down in front of the pavilion which was used as a treadmill by an Olympic athlete. As if responding to grumblings over that installation's bombast, this year the U.S. tapped Sarah Sze, an artist known for her spidery, lyrical sculptural constructions made from everyday objects. The co-curators of the affair are Holly Block, head of the Bronx Museum — which also serves as the Pavilion's sponsoring institution — and Carey Lovelace, a freelance curator and critic. While Sze's exact plans for Venice remain a closely guarded secret, we recently talked to Lovelace about the demands of organzing this high-profile project. 

Why propose Sarah Sze to represent the U.S. at the Venice Biennale in 2013?

My co-commissioner Holly Block and I had been following Sarah’s career and were very impressed with her development as an artist, in particular how she has met increasing challenges, making works that are more and more ambitious with a great deal of success. The U.S. Pavilion has a very specific kind of architecture, and there was a desire to find an artist who deals with scale in an interesting way, and Sarah does this.

You come from a critical background. Does the selection represent a critical stance on art? Is it a statement about art in the United States or art in general? Or more about the strength of just this artist’s work?

It’s more the strength of this artist’s work. When you start to get into global statements you tread in dangerous territory. In fact, in the end, it’s more about a curatorial statement than a critical one, in terms of choosing someone who could create a successful work in this kind of high-pressure, high-stimulus environment, and also respond in an innovative way to the very idiosycratic structure and Neo-Classical architecture of the Pavilion. Curatorially, that was really the reason, from my point of view, to choose Sarah.

Are there any challenges or sensitivities in proposing an event like this, since it's kind of a work of cultural diplomacy?

Definitely. You want to be sensitive to the environment; there’s a particular history of the United States in relation to its neighbors. One always has to be sensitive to that. That’s a tricky point. Personally I like art that seeks to adapt and get along with its neighbors.

In an earlier period, it was more in vogue for art to make a strong political, conceptual statement — and that was important.  But we’re in a different time now. This Pavilion is really about the strength of Sarah’s work, and also about her intellectual acuity and grasp of what art-making is.

It’s funny that you mention being sensitive to your neighbors. That was actually one of the criticisms of the Allora & Calzadilla pavilion two years ago, that it was bombastic and hogged attention. Does your pavilion at all respond to those criticisms?

Not really. We were focusing more on the challenges of the context of the Pavilion and the Giardini. Holly has worked with Allora and Caldzadilla before, and they are friends. 

Do you have any sense of what criteria the State Department uses to select you for the Biennale, or is that a black box?

They didn’t even tell us who the other people who applied were. But if I can sing my co-commissioner’s praises for a second, Holly has done a fantastic job with the Bronx Museum and she’s also done a lot of international programs. She just finished an initiative with the State Department where she set up artist residencies all over the world. She must have made a good impression because they again chose her to be part of a major project.

I know from passing comments that [officials working on the project] have a very high opinion of Sarah as well. A lot of factors go into peoples' selection.

What was the process of putting together the proposal? How did you come on board, and what’s your role as an outside curator working with an institution?

I think I may have been the initiating force, in terms of saying, at the outset, “Let’s do this.” I’ve known Holly for years; we’ve done many projects together. The two of us got together with Sarah and discussed the idea with her. In the end, we worked well as a team, putting together the proposal. We all had strengths that worked well together.

Obviously, something like this is very expensive. At the press conference in New York, Massimiliano Gioni remarked that the U.S. Pavilion has a larger budget than his entire show. What kind of fundraising is involved?

That comment did not go over very well with us, nor was it accurate. Our budget from the State Department is very modest.  We have had to do a lot of outside fundraising — just as the Biennale itself has done and is doing starting from its own relatively small starting point.  

As for our resources, Holly’s done such an amazing job with the Bronx Museum in terms of putting it on stronger footing financially. In addition, she’s developed all these amazing initiatives, including a free admission policy. For anyone, a Venice Pavilion is a deeply ambitious project. For us, we’re bringing an artist from the United States to Italy, plus her crew, materials, and equipment for a very complex site-specific work. A lot has gone into the piece.

But the Bronx Museum does assume the funding responsibility?

Yes. We get an initial grant through the United States State Department. The Bronx Museum is the commissioning institution. So fundraising has gone on through auspices of the museum. [Editor's note: The Ford Foundation is the lead sponsor of the U.S. Pavilion.]

Why, then, would a museum want to do this?

One asks oneself that question every day [laughs]. Obviously, it’s a huge honor. For the Bronx Museum, it’s the largest thing it has ever taken on.

In addition, Sergio Bessa, Programs Director at the museum, has been dealing with public programming.  Together with partners in Italy, we’ve created this amazing initiative that, for one thing, brings together kids in the Bronx and kids in Venice. There’s been this real exchange of consciousness, about the Bronx in among young Venetians and vice versa. Many of the students are from an area of Venice called Mestre — it’s not exactly equivalent to the Bronx, but it is a working-class community in Venice. It’s been amazing to connect these kids with one another. They’re going to do an exhibition together, of work they’ve created through this program. Part of the involvement of the Bronx in this is that it can act as a diplomat, and that’s very important to the mandate of the museum.

Is that kind of initiative a part of the initial proposal, or built on top of it?

It was part of the proposal. We talked about public programming, including a series of workshops with the local university. The Bronx Museum has a Teen Exchange program, so this is an elaboration of that. All that was very much a part of the proposal, as was a Web component that will extend the relationship between Sarah’s work to a larger, more global audience.   

The specifics of the pavilion are secret until it debuts. Is there anything in general you can say about what’s being planned?

Each gallery in the U.S. Pavilion is going to be a separate environment. It’s a series of linked experiences which will have a connection to one another — a loose connection. It’s going to continue out into the exterior of the space… and that’s all I can say.

What’s been Sarah’s process of planning “Triple Point”?

She’s very detailed. She’s probably the most organized person I’ve ever met. So she began, as soon as we heard we were selected, to plan, sketch, and to build models. She was able to work on this for a while, thinking and evolving her ideas. It’s been moving to watch the piece develop. The level of thought that has gone into it is amazing.

Her work is sometimes very delicate. Has making a project for an event that draws such crowds changed the way she approaches the work?

No, I think it’ll be pretty consistent with the way she’s worked in the past in terms of approach.

What does the title “Triple Point” mean?

She did a piece at the Whitney called “Triple Point of Water.” [Triple point] is the temperature and pressure at when a substance like water exists in three states, in a kind of precarious but stable equilibrium — liquid, frozen, and steam.

As an interesting aside: There were also three people involved, two curators and the artist. So the theme of tripling just happened to run through the piece.

How important is the competitive aspect to the Biennale?

I don’t think you can think about that at all, because when you do, it really can only make you unhappy. I think you just have to concentrate on doing the best you can.

In that case, how will you define the project as having been a success?

If it’s a really powerful work of art, I think it’s a success. I’d rather have it be a powerful work of art whether it wins something or not than have it be so-so and win a prize. I’m a big fan of Sarah’s and it’s been amazing to watch her work. I’ve learned a lot in this process about making art and staying focused. It’s been an amazing experience — not just in terms of the final artwork, but in terms of what the process has been.

Is there anything else you’d want to add?

Another fun fact is that nearly all the principle figures involved are female, though not by design: the two curators and the artist; the able person at the Peggy Guggenheim collection who manages the pavilion; the fabricator; all the writers in the catalogue. That’s just a sign of how the world is changing, which is great.

HONG KONG – Bold, attention-grabbing works await visitors to Art Basel Hong Kong, which opened to VIPs at noon on Wednesday and opens to the general public on May 23.

Many galleries opted for statement pieces via large sculptures or installations (video works seemed perhaps rather under-represented). Yet, while many recognizable names are understandably given prominence, there are also plenty of young emerging artists that make the fair fresh and interesting.

With ABHK spread over two large halls on two different floors, collectors will need plenty of stamina and comfortable shoes to take in the breadth of works available.  

To see some of the eye-catching works at the fair, click on the slideshow.

HONG KONG — If you believe art fairs are elevating, then you are likely to find the first edition of Art Basel in Hong Kong an eye-popping experience — in a pleasing way, for the most part. Still, the sight of over 240 galleries from 35 nations in one place is bewildering, even for seasoned art fair goers. The organizers estimate that art by more than 3,000 artists is on display at the functional if barn-like Hong Kong Exhibition Centre, now through Sunday.

In its first real year at the helm, the Art Basel team has brought a new and very welcome level of professionalism to the organization of this fair. Everything works, booths are nicely laid out, and the quality and diversity of work is spot on, with Asian, European, and American galleries well integrated as equals. For the first time it is possible to imagine that this once regional fair could evolve into a major international art event — that is, if it isn’t there already. That is happy news for all.

It goes without saying that dozens of booths offer outstanding presentations, albeit with a strong regional bias — more than 50 percent of the galleries here are from Asia and the Asia Pacific region. Picking favorites is subjective, but having walked the two floors it is pretty clear that several booths demand consistent, repeated attention for reasons that are not entirely arbitrary, including the scale and quality of works on view and their overall elegance of presentation.

To see our picks for the Top 10 Booths of Art Basel in Hong Kong, click on the slideshow.

HONG KONG — The doors to the VIP viewing of Art Basel in Hong Kong opened May 22 after an early rainstorm that was followed by persistent drizzle. Amid the gloomy weather, the four-day fair started on a cautious note, with sales during the first few hours led by big-name international artists.

“Quarteto,” an oil-on-canvas by Colombian artist Fernando Botero, sold for $1.3 million at Galerie Gmurzynska from Switzerland. The painting of four musicians executed in the artist’s trademark chubby style was sold to a Malaysian collector, according to gallery director Mathias Rastorfer, who brought along 18 paintings and sculptures by Botero for the fair.

Japanese A-listers also led the charge in terms of sales. “Flame of Life — Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu)” by Yayoi Kusuma, a large painting comprising hundreds of wriggly red tadpole shapes, went home with an Asian collector for US$2 million at the collaborative booth by Japanese gallery Ota Fine Arts and London-based gallery Victoria Miro. 

Over at Galerie Perrotin, Japanese A-lister Takashi Murakami’s sculptures were also a hit. “Pom & Me,” depicting a cartoon version of the artist and his dog Pom, came in four versions: two color versions, as well as gold and silver versions. Each version cost $135,000 and comes in an edition of five. At the time of press, 15 statues were sold, gallery owner Emmanuel Perrotin told ARTINFO

Lin Gallery also had a fair showing. Four abstract paintings by prominent Beijing-based multidisciplinary artist Liu Wei sold for between HK$400,000 to HK$500,000 ($51,500 to $64,000), all within the first hour. They were bought by collectors who were already familiar with the Taiwan-based gallery, said director David Lin.

But one had to look hard for the red stickers. If sales seemed off to a muted start, most gallerists seem to agree that this is typical of an Asian fair. “In Basel or Miami, the most important time is in the first two hours,” says Rastorfer of Galerie Gmurzynska. “You never get this feeling in Hong Kong. Sales take place throughout the fair.”

The stakes are higher this year, since the Hong Kong fair is at a turning point. Formerly known as Art HK, the event was bought out by the Art Basel franchise, which already runs high-profile art fairs in Basel and Miami, making the 2013 edition the first Asian fair to bear the Art Basel name.

Jasdeep Sandhu, owner of Gajah Gallery from Singapore, remarked that “this year's fair is a full-on exercise in branding.”

“Look at the huge signage. It says: ‘Boom! Big brother Basel is here!’,” he says. “The fair wants to raise local standards. It wants to do a Basel art fair as good as Basel Basel or Basel Miami. I think they are doing a good job, because the Hong Kong fair is more representative of what’s happening around the world. You have a decent number of Asian galleries, for a start."

Ahead of the fair opening, fair director Marc Spiegler said he expected about 7,000 people on the first day for the VIP preview and vernissage. He added that he was expecting more young collectors from Europe and the United States this year, who are still building their collections, while acknowledging that older European collectors who already have substantial collections appeared less interested in making the trip to Hong Kong. 

Art Basel Hong Kong opens to the public May 23 and runs till May 26 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

To see works from Art Basel Hong Kong's VIP preview, click on the slideshow.

– Ai Weiwei Music Video Dramatizes Detention: In the new music video for his rock song "Dumbass" (which you can see as our video of the day, below), Ai Weiwei reenacts moments from his 81-day detention at the hands of the Chinese authorities in 2011, portraying scenes of interrogation and torture. It also shows him distracting his guards with the aid of two underwear-clad models. "Music is a kind of self-therapy and at the same time helps the public to see. Even conditions like these can still turn into a positive effort," Ai said. "So many people think they can improve the situation or collaborate. I think that's very wishful thinking in this political structure. It makes people not very conscious of what's happening." [Guardian]

– Sotheby's Sets New Record for Harry Potter: A first edition of "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone" signed and annotated by author J.K. Rowling has set a new auction record for the author, selling for £150,000 at the English PEN benefit auction at Sotheby's in London. "The sale room fell silent as two determined bidders vied for the prized edition," a Sotheby's spokesperson said. "Bidding leapt in increments of up to £25,000 and the hammer finally fell, to a round of applause, on a £150,000 telephone bid." [BBC]

– Museum Plans Jim Henson Gallery: The Museum of the Moving Image in Queens will create a permanent installation devoted to the work of the late film puppeteer Jim Henson, featuring his sketches, storyboard drawings, props, costumes, and puppets including Kermit the Frog, Elmo, and Miss Piggy — the latter of whom was helped New York City mayor Michael Bloomberg announce the new exhibition. "It will be one of the most comprehensive tributes to his work, anywhere," Bloomberg said. "No city can be more fitting than New York to host this incredible tribute to Jim Henson’s legacy." [DNAinfo]

– Porn Star's Calligraphy Causes Controversy: Despite reportedly fetching a whopping $95,000 at a Beijing auction house, a work of calligraphy art featuring eight Chinese characters by the Japanese porn star Sola Aoi is not going over well with China's calligraphy purists. "This matter is a commercial activity," Tang Jihui, the deputy head of the Shanghai Youth Calligraphers Association, said. "Her calligraphy has nothing to do with art and the people buying and selling it don’t care about whether or not what she writes is art." [AFP]

– Photography Rights for Dummies: Six photographers are suing John Wiley & Sons, the group that publishes the popular "… For Dummies" book series, for copyright infringement and repeated use of third-party photographs in excess of their licenses, citing some 10 previous lawsuits brought by photographers against the company. "Evidence submitted to the courts in these cases demonstrates that Wiley has engaged in a systematic pattern of fraud and copyright infringement," the complaint explains. "Evidence from these lawsuits demonstrates that, even after gaining actual knowledge of license violations and unlicensed uses of photos in particular publications, Wiley executive made the knowing and intentional decision to continue to sell inventory of publications that Wiley determined included unauthorized copies of third-party content." [Courthouse News]

– Sharon Hayes Wins Alpert Prize: Artist and Cooper Union art professor Sharon Hayes has received the 2013 Alpert Award in the Arts for visual art, which is given by the California Institute of the Arts and the Herb Alpert Foundation, and comes with an unrestricted $75,000 prize and a weeklong residency at CalArts. "I was shocked, pleasantly shocked," Hayes said. "It's such a strong field of applicants. The award tends to focus on mid-career artists of some stature. So you are always up against really great, provocative, dynamic artists." [Cooper Union]

– Museum Embraces Bad Taste: The Museum für Kunst ind Gewerbe in Hamburg has just opened "Evil Things: An Encyclopedia of Bad Taste," an exhibition devoted to aesthetically offensive objects, including a bedazzled cell phone, a novelty beer stein, and a USB key in the shape of a finger. The show is more than a century in the making, taking its inspiration from art historian Gustav E. Pazaurek's 1912 pamphlet "Good and Bad Taste in the Arts and Crafts." [Independent]

– New President for Asia Society: As of June 10 Josette Sheeran, current vice chairwoman of the World Economic Forum, will take over from Vishakha N. Desai as the president and CEO of Asia Society. During her time at the World Economic Forum Sheeran has helped raise over $4 billion to fight hunger and malnutrition in Africa. Before that she was the executive director of the United Nations World Food Program. [NYT]

– "Levitated Mass" Ready For Its Closeup: As part of the Los Angeles Film Festival, the new documentary "Levitated Mass: The Story of Michael Heizer's Monolithic Sculpture" will premiere at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art's Bing Theater on June 20. The film, which chronicles the creation of the Land artist's suspended boulder installation at LACMA last year, was created by Lynette Howell and Jamie Patricoff. [LATimes]

– RIP Cecilia Steinfeldt, "First Lady of Texas Art": Cecilia Steinfeldt, a curator at the Witte Museum for six decades, art historian, and White House art adviser to Laura Bush when her husband was elected president, died on Friday at the age of 97. "Even though there were earlier curators who worked on Texas art, she was the one who did that first book on the Onderdonks, the most well-known family of Texas artists," said former Witte Museum colleague Michaele Haynes. "She really did make Texas art known." [San Antonio Express-News]

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For breaking news throughout the day, check our blog IN THE AIR.

HONG KONG — On VIP opening day of Art Basel in Hong Kong, May 22, initial reactions seem to be generally positive, with much higher expectations than those at last year's Hong Kong International Art Fair (Art HK). BLOUIN ARTINFO took some time to walk around during the VIP viewing to collect first impressions from exhibitors and collectors, before the fair opens to the public on May 23. Here is what we heard:

— Japanese art collector Kosuke Mori: “I think the fair has tried to adjust its taste to Asia, with works that have color, that are more fun.” 

— Lorenz Helbling, owner of ShanghArt: “I think there is a better mix and integration of Asian and Western work. No one is shouting in their corner, ‘We're Western! We're Chinese!’”

— Pearl Lam, founder ofPearl Lam Galleries: “I have high expectations for the show because I paid a lot more for the booth so I expect much better sales figures.”

— Johnson Chang, founder of Hanart: “I feel there is an upgrade in the way galleries display their works. I think they make an effort to create an exhibition, rather than just a display of goods.” 

— Rachel Lehmann, co-founder of Lehmann Maupin Gallery:“There is a more international crowd of collectors and more international galleries. I saw works by Shahzia Sikander at Pilar Corrias Gallery that were very interesting.”

— Martin Clist, director of Rossi & Rossi: "We haven't noticed any new collectors, and honestly haven't observed a great difference between this year and the last. This year's fair is better organized, but it doesn't feel as 'family.' We are still relating and connecting with the same Art HK people, but this year, with Basel on board, there seems to be a more rigid Swiss shell." 

— Cesar Villalon Jr, owner of The Drawing Room: “It feels the same [as] the years before, there are just a lot of bigwigs from Art Basel walking around.”

— Indonesian art collector Deddy Kusuma: “I see a lot of Western art here. I've already told Marc (Speigler) we should promote Asian art because we are in Asia. Western art has other platforms around the world, but it should be up to places like Hong Kong and Singapore to promote Asian art.”  

— Wei-ling Lim from Wei-ling Gallery: “There are more U.S. and European collectors who seem to be attracted to Hong Kong for first time by the quality that the Basel name represents.”

HONG KONG — Sales continued to be strong into the third day of Art Basel in Hong Kong, with many galleries doing brisk business after the lukewarm opening amid stormy weather.

Works by top Chinese and Japanese artists led the way. At Pace Gallery, which has branches in New York, London, and Beijing, all four of prominent Chinese artist and auction darling Zhang Xiaogang’s painted bronze sculptures of children’s heads, priced from $100,000 to $350,000, were sold. 

Japanese artist Yoshitomo Nara also did well at the booth, selling out the handful of pencil drawings of cutesy cartoon figures on view, as well as a large acrylic-on-wood panel “Balance Girl” for about $350,000.

At the joint booth by Japanese gallery Ota Fine Arts and London-based Victoria Miro, 15 works by superstar dot artist Yayoi Kusuma were sold on the first day of the fair, half to Asian collectors and half to Europeans and Americans. The works are priced at six-figure sums each, said Victoria Miro’s director Glenn Scott Wright, who declined to be drawn into details but added that he has sold another three paintings since opening night. The highlight sale was a $2-million triptych painting titled “Flame of Life — Dedicated to Tu-Fu (Du-Fu)” — depicting a writhing mass of red tadpole shapes.

The cash register was also ringing at top Beijing gallery LongMarch Space, which attracted a strong following of Mainland collectors who snapped up works by their compatriots. All three of Zhan Wang’s abstract nickel-coated resin works, priced at 600,000RMB ($98,000) each were sold, together with his stainless steel sculpture titled “Artificial Rock No.146,” at $280,000.

Most visitors will have seen the installation “Play 201301” by Shanghai-based MadeIn Company, a hanging cathedral made from leather fetish gear that stands at the entrance of the fair. Long March sold the work for 2 million RMB ($326,0000) to the White Rabbit collection in Australia, a prominent collection of Chinese contemporary art.

Chinese “thread” artist Lin Tianmiao was the star of New York- and Paris-based Galerie Lelong’s booth, and her large-scale installation “More or Less the Same,” comprising parts of the human skeleton and industrial objects wrapped in silk thread, went for $300,000. At the same booth, Spanish artist Jaume Plensa’s “Sitting Tattoo VIII” — a polyester resin sculpture of a crouching man with glowing light in the middle — sold for €260,000 ($336,000).

Meanwhile, over at top New York gallery Paul Kasmin, a set of three sheep statues titled “Famille De Moutons” by French duo Les Lalanne trotted home with a Hong Kong collector for $650,000.

Art Basel in Hong Kong continues till May 26 at the Hong Kong Convention and Exhibition Centre.

HONG KONG – There are no immaculate white walls at the Asia Contemporary Art Show, nor are the big-ticket art pieces like Andy Warhol’s contemporary silkscreens or Damien Hirst’s provocative installations present. Exhibition booths are substituted with hotel suites at the JW Marriott, where paintings and photographs hang. Some rest on beds and by the windowsills, or are propped up by wine glasses. Many even lean against bathroom mirrors near mini bars.

Each hotel room conjures an intimate viewing experience at the show and there is something special about looking at artworks with Hong Kong’s skyline as a backdrop. It is also in this somewhat quirky setting that you might find hidden art gems and surprises, often with wallet-friendly price tags at around HK$20,000 (around $2,500)

“I think being the leading satellite fair at this time of year is a great opportunity for both galleries and visitors,” said Mark Saunderson, director of Asia Contemporary Art Show. “They get to experience the glitz of Art Basel and also visit the more engaging, intimate, and fun atmosphere of Asia Contemporary Art Show.”

Back for its second edition, the Asia Contemporary Art Show is one of the top satellite events of Art Basel in Hong Kong this year and has grown in size and expanded to a three-day event, hosting over 70 galleries from 16 countries including France, Spain, Korea, the U.S., Australia and, of course, Hong Kong. It runs from May 24 to 26 and spreads over four hotel floors.

The fair aims to promote works by young, emerging, and mid-career artists with affordable art pieces. The Gallery Eumundi from Australia, for example, has brought along a series of paintings on music and dance by Madeleine Ekeblad. The artist and her works, which are inspired by free musical rhythm and fluid choreographs (priced from HK$15,800 to HK$38,500 — $2,000 to $5,000), are new to the Hong Kong audience.

“I think it’s quite edgy and funky [to exhibit in a hotel room]” said Karen Beardsley of the Gallery Eumundi, who is exhibiting in Hong Kong for the first time. “It’s a bit of a gamble I suppose because it’s our first time here, but we’re very excited and hopefully there is a good mix of people here.”

Indeed, at the VIP preview on May 23, guests filled the hotel floors and crowded out the 74 participating galleries.

Of the 2,000 art pieces being showcased here, a majority of them are paintings, while some notable artworks are also available. At the VIP view, the crowd-pleasers included works by Japanese artist Takashi Murakami at suite 2803, Ai Weiwei at 2704, Pipp Todd Warmoth at suite 3023, and Sanzi at 2807.

The show is also playing host to the Hong Kong Art Prize, for which an emerging local artist is awarded for his or her submitted work. This year, 26-year-old Jims Lam Chi Hang won HK$80,000 ($10,000) for his painting “Beacon, Sheung Wan Hours - 01.05,” which is now showcased alongside a selection of shortlisted works at the Wheellock Gallery in Queensway, Admiralty until June 2.

“Asia Contemporary Art Show,” May 24 to May 26 at the JW Marriott Hotel. Tickets are available here at HK$240.

HONG KONG — A woman in a scarlet dress walks along the waterfront in Hong Kong while being whipped with belts by men dressed in black. We are at “Paper Rain,” a parade organized by musician Arto Lindsay in collaboration with various artists for the launch of Art Basel in Hong Kong on May 23. 

The parade route followed the waterfront path from Central pier to the government headquarters at Tamar Park. The woman would was voluntarily undergoing corporal punishment during the performance is Hong Kong artist Angela Su, known for her high pain threshold — she previously underwent a procedure for an elaborate ink-less tattoo on her back for her series “The Hartford Girl and Other Stories” (a portrait of her marked back is on display at Hong Kong Eye).

During the parade, Su marched along with the procession while being subjected to humiliating and punishing acts. At one point the artist held out her arm for her “lover” to put out his cigarette on it. Su hardly flinched from the pain. All this took place while contemporary dancers tumbled in the background and a rickshaw puller danced along to the beat of music blasting from boomboxes. The effect was a surreal and rather melancholy parade, dwarfed by the grand setting of Hong Kong’s waterfront and the monumental government headquarters buildings, a sensitive location for a parade as many political protests take place around here.

“This is the dead skin of a protest,” Lindsay told BLOUIN ARTINFO. “What we’re doing is like a political demonstration without content. It is a husk, like when the insect sheds its skin.”

The musician held his first parade at Carnival in Brazil in 2004, a collaboration with artist Matthew Barney that became the first of a series of artist parades that Lindsay has since organized around the world. Living and working in Brazil for many years, Lindsay is informed by the procession of trio elétricos that roll through the streets of Bahia every Carnival. Like the floats of Brazil, the artists of Hong Kong’s “Paper Rain” created performances that connect allegorically.

Nadim Abbas fabricated foam barricades for his section. Modeled after actual barricades from the streets of Hong Kong, the jokey, oversized blocks were strapped to the backs of participants who enacted choreography, their color scheme (red and white) echoing with Su’s tragic scarlet-clad protagonist in an uncanny contrast of subjugation and subversion. João Vasco Paiva conducted a loudspeaker orchestra, improvising a noise soundtrack from the squawkish feedback of the loudspeaker and his own muffled mumblings. Nearby, an old woman with purple hair moved a pushcart carrying posters for artist Korakrit Arunanodcha. 

Most iconic of all are the red and green rickshaws chosen to transport Shane Aspegren’s “Roaming Boom Boxes Sound Tracks.” The choice of this tired symbolism was borne mostly out of necessity, according to Lindsay. Motorized vehicles are not allowed along the route of the parade, so the next best thing was to hire out the rickshaws. He is also exploring the commercialized imagery of Hong Kong as a perfect meeting of history and modernity. “I like this painful postcard image of Hong Kong, and not making it this cool thing,” says Lindsay.

To see images of “Paper Rain,” click on the slideshow.

– Art Basel in Hong Kong opened its inaugural edition, registering strong sales on VIP day and after sustaining that momentum once the fair opened to the public. We picked our 10 favorite booths at the new fair, and offered some photos of VIPs.

– Meanwhile Tim Cheung checked into Asia Contemporary Art Show, a satellite fair inside the JW Marriott hotel.

– Benjamin Genocchio argued that the current boom of new art fairs will have to come to an end, if only for the well-being of exhausted dealers.

– Julia Halperin spoke to Inge Reist about the Center for the History of Collecting at the Frick Collection, which collects oral histories of patronage and provenance.

– Modern Painters got an early peek at 10 national pavilions at this year’s Venice Biennale, while Ben Davis chatted with Carey Lovelace, the co-curator of Sarah Sze’s exhibition in the U.S. Pavilion.

– Rozalia Jovanovic checked out the portraits of Playmate of the Year Raquel Pomplun that Playboy commissioned from contemporary artists Alex Israel, Malerie Marder, and Aaron Young.

– Benjamin Sutton spoke to High Museum of Art curator Michael Rooks about the institution’s acquisition of major works by Sarah Sze and Julie Mehretu.

– Alanna Martinez asked author Rachel Kushner about the sources of inspiration for her new novel “The Flame Throwers,” which is set in the 1970s art scene in Soho.

– Janelle Zara picked the three smartest designs at the 2013 International Contemporary Furniture Fair in New York.

– Word got out about Doug Aitken's plans to take a massive art-filled train across the U.S. this summer.

– “Curiosity” opened at Margate’s Turner Contemporary, with fittingly curious objects like a historic stuffed walrus, diagrams by da Vinci, pictures of popes and cardinals staring at the stars, and more.

This week's VIDEOS:

This has been Hong Kong's week in the art-fair sun, as Art Basel in Hong Kong opened, bringing with it lots of excitement, a bevy of special events, and, of course, a lot of amazing art. Here, we round up photos of the big fair's many highlights, including an artist-designed parade and pictures of who made the scene at the VIP opening earlier this week. 

To see the art, events, and faces of Art Basel in Hong Kong, click on the slideshow.

BUENOS AIRES — Following exhibitions from the likes of Ernesto Neto and Los Carpinteros, Faena Art Center— brainchild of Alan Faena, who made his name with the Via Vai clothing brand — turns to the Russian collective AES+F for a video trilogy about airports, shopping, violence, death, and handsome centaurs, among other things. The show, titled "The Liminal Space Trilogy" and curated by Sonia Becce, opened with major fanfare on Tuesday night. 

To see images from the opening, click on the slideshow.

People should be angry about what has happened at Cooper Union.

Trouble has been looming at the historically tuition-free New York institution for years. Faced with ongoing deficits, administration figures have floated trial balloons about charging admission, always insisting ritualistically that they were exploring all other options. Last year, a student occupation anticipated the current turbulence. Still, the board of trustees' declaration last month that for the first time in more than a century, the prestigious art, architecture, and engineering school would begin charging tuition enraged and saddened students, alumni, and just about everyone else who cares about education.

In the weeks since, there have been protests, symbolic actions, and scathing exposés. Just yesterday, a transcript of a Cooper board meeting was released (and promptly turned into a student play), revealing a body dangerously insulated from the values of the community it was charged with leading, dismissive of student protest as “performance art,” hostile to the unionized faculty, and capable of using the threat of closing the school entirely to make staff fall in line. Last week, video game guru and MIT professor Kevin Slavin — who once had a team of forensic accountants look at Cooper’s 990 forms, only to have them declare that, in his words, “they haven’t seen anything this fucked up from anyone who wasn't being deliberately obstructive” — won an election for alumni trustee as a write-in candidate on a transparency platform.

The nine full-time art faculty — Dore Ashton, Robert Bordo, Christine Osinski, Mike Essl, Dennis Adams, Walid Raad, Sharon Hayes, Day Gleeson, and Margaret Morton — have very publicly signed a letter of “No Confidence” in the administration. Finally, and most visibly, a fresh occupation of the President’s Office continues to this moment, albeit in a somewhat vitiated form, down to 14 occupiers from 50-plus at its height, now that classes are over.

Occupations are important but symbolic affairs. After initially sending in armed guards, the administration is likely waiting for the ruckus to die down and peter out. A lot depends on how the issue of tuition gets translated to a broader public — and I realize not everyone sees this as the burning issue of the day. Cooper Union is, after all, a very small school, with just 12,000 alumni and 1,000 or so students a year. It has evolved a long ways from its origins as a college meant to train working-class New Yorkers, and is widely known these days as an elite institution.

Which is natural: In a culture as ruthlessly market-driven as ours, founder Peter Cooper’s dictum that education should be as “free as air and water” is not exactly going to go mainstream. But what I think is important to highlight is how the issues at stake here form an almost perfect crystal of the forces buffeting art and education in the woebegotten 21st century. Felix Salmon has done yeoman’s work detailing the ways in which Cooper Union's managers bear much of the blame for the current sorry state of affairs. Go read his series of angry, thorough blog posts on the mess for a sense of what’s at stake. I can’t add to them, only draw out what I think should make them resonate well beyond Astor Place:

1) Those who follow the art world will know that its heroes over the boom years have been hedge-fund millionaires. In the disaster of Cooper Union’s finances, the hedge-fund complex stands squarely on the side of the villains: The school finds itself in dire straights in part because its masters, faced with deficits, sunk its endowment heavily into such investments, believing in their healing wizardry. Instead, the funds underperformed the market, while still extracting huge fees. So, in a kind of serpent-eating-its-own-tail representation of finance at its most socially corrosive, you have a perfect symbol of a system that funds the consumption of art by undercutting the basis for its actual production.

2) Some of Cooper Union’s problems stem from the need to pay down the giant $175-million loan it took out to build its flashy Thom Mayne-designed engineering building in 2006. In constructing the facility, Cooper was simply joining in on the craze for flashy new buildings that overtook cultural institutions throughout the United States in the last decade. By now, it has been established that this starchitect boom was not based on need, but rather something more troubling: the competition to attract wealthy donors, whose egos could only be flattered by being attached to something new and shiny. The grim result has been that U.S. museums are disastrously overbuilt, saddled with increased expenses based on only tenuous real rewards.

The Cooper Union affair represents the awful logical climax of this trend: The school got the expensive new building and its associated costs, justified by the need to attract a major donor. But in a literally monumental act of institutional incompetence, its bosses built it before bothering to get any sponsor to put a name on it — and that sponsor never showed up. Perhaps the “Cooper Union Effect” will replace the “Bilbao Effect” in the annals of urban planning

3) Anyone following the austerity debate will recognize, in mutated form, the pattern of narrow-minded or even destructive ideology masquerading as hard-nosed realism. Cooper Union has one real income-generating asset, its claim on the land below the Chrysler Building. (Indeed, in 2018, the terms of that deal are set to change in a way that will improve the school’s finances). The fact that New York City, in effect, subsidizes an elite private school has been historically controversial. By jettisoning the one thing that gives the school a special, progressive claim on the public’s imagination — free tuition and merit-based admission — the board has made a decision that sounds like pragmatism, but could easily help cut its last leg out from under it. Here’s Salmon:

Cooper Union says that the current occupation of the president’s office “has created a poisonous and dangerous atmosphere that can potentially destroy the school forever”. No one in the administration is going to come out and say explicitly what that means, so let me translate it into English for you: they’re saying that the more noise Cooper’s students make in protest at the tuition decision, the more likely it is that New York City is going to decide that it wants its property-tax revenues back, and that Cooper Union, without free tuition, is not a worthy enough cause to justify an effective $18 million per year public subsidy.

4) Cooper is a private institution — which makes it all the more striking that the pattern here resembles one which we’ve lately become familiar with in the greater economy: A crisis stoked by short-sighted gambling, which will be solved by shifting the burden onto the public, in this case onto the families of the next generation of students.

Student debt has become a burning public issue of late — not least among art students, as Coco Fusco and Anton Vidokle have both recently argued. Cooper’s protesters, and their supporters, are well aware that their situation is exceptional and somewhat privileged, but you can hardly accuse student occupiers who risk losing their own degrees to prevent fees for the class of 2014 of being selfish.

I don’t know if Cooper Union’s most hallowed tradition can be saved. The school’s boardmembers have said that its alumni need to step up and give more for the school to flourish — after having pursued the one strategy guarenteed to alienate those potential donors. “The great schools in the U.S. are all too often just places that make rich families richer. Cooper Union was the exception,” artist and alum Zak Smith told Molly Crabapple in the first days of the recent occupation. “Not anymore. If it wasn’t for Cooper, people like me wouldn’t get to be artists.”

The attack on education in our era of austerity is a nationwide — rather, worldwide — phenomena. Without changing the larger picture, the same forces that are affecting institutions of higher learning everywhere are going to continue to press Cooper. Turning the tide of policy towards respecting the value of education as a public good is the only real sustainable solution for everyone. Conversely, accepting the inevitabilty of the situation at Cooper without anger only helps further set the limits of what is “realistic” to expect from the system — which right now isn't working very well, saddling young people with ever-greater levels of debt in return for pursuing their dreams. 

One way or another, Cooper Union will end up being a symbol — either of an ideal to be reached for, or of the terrible present-day wisdom that says that ideals only matter for those who can pay.