Between the inverted-discoball boutiques, towering skyscrapers, upsets, freak-outs, and absolutely stunning new structures we've witnessed, we couldn’t have asked for a more interesting year in architecture. To properly thank those who made it so great, ARTINFO passes out its first-ever Year in Architecture Superlative Awards.  

CLICK HERE TO SEE ARTINFO'S PICKS FOR THE BEST OF 2011

As 2011 comes to a close, bringing down the curtain of a year populated by such memorable exhibitions as Alexander McQueen’s “Savage Beauty” at the Met and the Willem de Kooning retrospective at MoMA, we look forward to 2012 eagerly. ARTINFO has peered into its crystal ball and picked 20 shows that are sure to blow the art world away this year. Here is a sneak peek of what's to come.

Click the slide show to see the top 20 shows of 2012. To see more shows opening in the coing year, visit ARTINFO’s events page. 

Earlier this week, Richard Florida introduced the Metro Health Index, which ranks American cities based on smoking and obesity figures gathered from the Center for Disease Control. According to Florida's metric, San Jose is the healthiest city in the...

Matthew VanBesien just nabbed a world-class position as executive director of the New York Philharmonic — a position that likely pays on the sweet end of six figures, although the Phil isn’t disclosing the figure. To hear the New York Times tell it, however, the guy just parachuted onto an IED. VanBesien, a 42-year-old former head of the Houston Symphony currently overseeing Australia’s Melbourne Symphony Orchestra, took the job after a number of others refused it (or, poetically, “rebuffed overtures”), and apparently he’s in for a world of pain:

VanBesien faces enormous challenges: persistent and large deficits, labor friction, hefty pension liabilities, the lack of an established summer home like the Boston Symphony’s at Tanglewood, and competition from orchestras visiting Carnegie Hall. Problems even extend to the orchestra’s widely scorned auditorium, Avery Fisher Hall: Philharmonic officials say the hall needs renovations, which will displace the orchestra for an extended period, according to plans in the works with Lincoln Center, which owns the building.

Not only that, but VanBesien’s coming from a land where the government throws money at its artistic institutions — Australia provides half of the Melbourne Symphony’s budget. When it comes to picking the pockets of culture-loving swells, he’s clearly out of practice. But the former French horn player faced near-biblical challenges both in Texas and Down Under: floods, concert-hall renovations, the collapse of Enron. If the NYP’s in crisis, VanBesien may well be the person to save it. New Yorkers will find out when he arrives this fall.

Keeping up with the everchanging and constantly replaced list of the world’s tallest buildings, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill just completed the Al Hamra Firdous Tower, a quarter-mile-high sculptural commercial complex rising like a giant spike above the Kuwait City skyline.

Al Hamra may be the tallest building in the country, but supertalls are a dime a dozen these days, and the record for tallest building in the world belongs to downtown Dubai's Burj Khalifa, another SOM skyscraper. Instead, what distinguishes Al Hamra is its asymmetrical exterior — it’s the only skyscraper on earth that has one. The tower's sweeping, torqued wings resemble the long robes of the Kuwaitis living in the city below. Though simple in appearance, it was no easy architectural feat: eschewing traditional steel as their building material, SOM went with concrete, the malleable properties of which better lent themselves to the unusual shape. But that meant pumping 500,000 tons of concrete vertically, as well as enough limestone to tile the entirety of New York's Central Park. 

The uppermost corner of Al Hamra's wings is suspended 150 feet away from the building, not to mention ridiculously far away from the ground. The turning façade provides stellar views and transparency to the north, east, and west, while the main structure — the monolithic, 80-story south wall — insulates the building from the harsh desert sun. 

The building is a major commercial complex, featuring offices, a health club, and a mall complete with food court and movie theaters. We’re not sure which is more impressive to behold, the building itself or the view from the top.

Harper's Bazaar U.K. makes a birthday wish list for Duchess Kate's 30th birthday...

It’s “The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari” meets Dr. Seuss. No: It’s “Les Miserables” meets Ryan Trecartin. It’s the antic, instantly recognizable world of Mary Reid Kelley, who is just about to close her second solo show at Fredericks & Freiser in Chelsea. Reid Kelley (b. 1979) has been touted as an artist to watch by super-critic Roberta Smith and praised by super-curator Robert Storr. She graduated in 2009 with an MFA from Yale’s famous painting department, but is really best known for her videos, which pull off the neat trick of being engaging and estranging all at once.

The current show is titled “The Syphilis of Sisyphus” (Reid Kelley seems to have a thing for venereal disease — a previous video featured a musical number about the clap titled “Roll Back the Foreskin”). A back room showcases concept sketches and costumes, but the centerpiece is her 11-minute film, a burlesque of French history. Everything here is black-and-white. The characters, principally a “grisette” (that is, the archetype of a 'woman of lowly condition' from bohemia) played by Reid Kelley and four “saltimbanques” (harlequin-like tumbler-performers), are all done up in weird black-and-white makeup, with black-and-white period costumes and cartoony patches over their eyes that turn their expressions into masks. The sets are similarly stark, with lots of exaggerated theatrical painting. And, oh yes, the dialogue is all verse, rhyming doggerel chockablock with brainy wordplay. (The gallery offers the printed text in a nicely designed pamphlet, for your appreciation.)

The action begins with Reid Kelley’s grisette, Sisyphus, at the mirror, pondering aloud the fate of woman. It ends with her character being dragged off by the "Morals Police," apparently consigned to be a test subject at La Salpêtrière Hospital, where French neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot infamously submitted female patients to his studies of hysteria. In the middle section, Reid Kelley’s monologue is interrupted by the saltimbanques, who act out exaggerated vignettes about the lights of French history: Diderot, Marie Antoinette, Robspierre, Marat and Charlotte Corday, Napoleon, Marx and Engels, Baron Haussman, and a pair of mincing dandies.

Reid Kelley’s verse is not Molière, but it is pretty amusing, and a lot of the pleasure of "The Syphilis of Sisyphus" is just surfing the tide of language, particularly if you have any interest in the particular history she is riffing on. Wandering Paris's streets and pondering why more women don’t take revolutionary steps to better their condition, Sisyphus quips that “rational girls / prefer necklace to headless”; later, standing before the male spectators in Charcot’s theater of hysteria, she declares herself in favor of “a womb of one’s own.” 

The big debate about Reid Kelley's work, thus far, seems to be how seriously to take it. Is she just messing around with intellectual references, or is she using the past to say something about the present? In Frieze, Storr described her previous videos as a response to "our current multi-fronted conflict and the sexual politics of warfare." In Art in America, Brian Boucher countered that Reid Kelley's interest seemed to be primarily "historical," not contemporary. Interviewed by Emma Allen, the artist, for her part, stated, “I don’t think I am trying to make a particularly detailed analysis or a metaphor,” but added that she was "aware" of the contemporary resonances. So, it's somewhere in between then.

When it comes to “The Syphilis of Sisyphus,” you could see how the extremists and sybarites of French history might somehow reverberate in the present. But I’d say that the film is about the present in a different way, less in its specific references and more in its whole absurdist sensibility. If you unpack Reid Kelley’s rhymes, you find that their theme is women’s need to escape the position assigned to them by history and nature. The aesthetic of the film — with its cross-dressing, flamboyant artificiality, and use of alienating effects — is a formal way of amplifying this sentiment: It's not about looking for meaning in historical material, but about playing around with it.

Since we’re dealing with French intellectual history, the name "Sisyphus" is probably a nod to “The Myth of Sisyphus,” existentialist Albert Camus’s famous essay on the “absurd.” Which makes a lot of sense. Camus used the fallen Greek king’s torment in Hades of eternally rolling a rock up a hill as a metaphor for modern man, whom he believed is doomed to activity without meaning. Rather than strive for significance, however, the key for Camus was to embrace the essential meaningless of history and carry on anyway. “The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a man's heart,” he wrote. “One must imagine Sisyphus happy.” Reid Kelley's film, too, is absurd history, both in its highbrow screwiness and in its cheerful sense of the fundamental pointlessness of it all.

Mary Reid Kelley's  “The Syphilis of Sisyphus” is on view at Fredericks & Freiser, November 11, 2011-January 7, 2012. 

Superstar Japanese artist Takashi Murakami is well known for his corporate approach to art making, with a network of studio and production factories around the globe. But this Friday, the artist took to Twitter to rip apart a different kind of corporatized culture — the Cool Japan initiative, a government-mandated advertising campaign that promotes Japanese culture abroad. “Dear ad agencies and bureaucrats! Attention please. Stop inviting me to Cool Japan events, interviews or sending any kind of offers whatsoever. I have absolutely no connection to Cool Japan.” Murakami wrote (as translated by Spoon & Tamago).

Cool Japan is a branding campaign that tries to aid in Japan’s resurgence after its ‘90s economic collapse through promoting cultural exports. Journalist Douglas McGray coined the term “Gross National Cool” in 2002 to describe the country’s position as an arbiter of taste in art, fashion, style, and technology the world over. Popular culture like Hello Kitty, Pokemon, anime, and video games have given Japan a huge amount of soft power — cultural pull and influence, rather than military might. Now, the country is capitalizing on its name-brand success with the Cool Japan campaign, which has even been spun off into a TV show of the same name.

Murakami takes issue with ad agencies’s co-optation of the Cool Japan initiative and the money that comes with it. “I can’t understand why artists get involved with the gimmicks of ad agencies who are simply trying to turn a profit with Cool Japan,” the artist tweeted. “It really pisses me off to think that a few individuals are in bed with each other, licking up the money that came out of our country’s deficit. And the ad agencies who strut about pretending to be creative disgusts me.”

Murakami’s vitriol seems reserved for the ad agencies rather than the branding campaign, and is curious given how the artist’s own work has wandered perilously close to advertising in the past. Seeing that Murakami has slapped his Superflat imagery on a Louis Vuitton bag and a Kanye West album cover, it’s easy to see where ad agencies would get the idea to approach him. Murakami is one of Japan’s chief cultural representatives, and perhaps its single most internationally visible artist. While his anger toward agencies is understandable, one wonders why he wouldn’t want to participate in a nationwide branding campaign — it seems so perfectly Murakami. 

Expect to turn a lot of heads toting a JumpFromPaper bag down Madison Avenue. The brainchild of Taipei-based design duo, Chay Su and Rika Lin, this new accessories line fools the eye with a reverse spin on trompe-l’oeil: 3-D objects parading as a two-dimensional drawings. 

With exaggerated outlines and bright blocks of color, they look they’ve been pulled straight from the comic pages — like something Little Orphan Annie would oogle in a store window. Despite their flattened appearance, they're deceptively spacious, with enough room to hold all your accessories, even your laptop. Current styles mimic the basic bowling bag, satchel, hobo, and briefcase, but we’d like to see the designers tackle some more iconic models — maybe an Hermès Birkin, a Chanel 2.55, or even a Fendi Baguette in time for Christmas?  

Here’s what you missed last night: Van Halen played New York City’s tiny (capacity 250) Café Wha? to promote their new album, "A Different Kind of Truth" — their first since 1985 with David Lee Roth as singer — and upcoming arena tour. (The show was not officially announced; critics, industry folks, and Jimmy Fallon filled the room.) Reading Jon Pareles in the New York Times today, one gathers that the show was (predictably) amazing. There were “intergalactic siren noises,” “vocal yowls and guitar squiggles,” and “jungle cackles.” As a bonus, Roth left his shirt on, sparing everyone his 57-year-old chest. (“In fact, he was wearing overalls.”)

Rolling Stone took the superfan’s view, with Andy Greene noting that original bassist Michael Anthony's backing vocals were “sorely missed” (Anthony was replaced by Eddie Van Halen’s son, Wolfgang) and pointing out that “She’s the Woman,” the one track the band played from the new album, was actually recorded in 1976, and had parts repurposed for the song “Mean Street.” Still, you’re well advised to get your tickets for the arena jaunt (they go on sale January 10). “Before the start of a Van Halen tour you never know what Ed you're getting,” Greene writes. “The 2004 Van Hagar Ed was a drunken, shirtless mess. The 2007/08 reunion Ed was cleaned up and together, and that clearly is the case today.” There are no guarantees, of course, that someone’s shirt might not come off.

The most-talked-about stories on ARTINFO, January 2-6, 2011:

– The New Year kicked off with the Republican primaries. Looking at the antics of some of the candidates and would-be candidates, we asked, “Is Politics the New Performance Art?” We also outlined the views of the top Republican contenders on art, concluding that Jon Huntsman would be the best candidate for the arts. He has no chance.

– Downtown environmental artist Colette accused Lady Gaga of biting her style for her arty Barney’s window display. 

– New ARTINFO performing arts editor Nick Catucci surveyed reactions to Van Halen's exclusive New York gig previewing their new album and tour.

– Shane Ferro explained the rise of a new investment category: SWAG (Silver, Wine, Art, and Gold)

– Noah Charney reviewed the new book by Leonardo scholar Martin Kemp on how cultural icons become, you know, iconic.

– Judd Tully surveyed the career of AbEx painter Helen Frankenthalen, who recently passed away, asking how its legacy would endure.

– Ben Davis asked what the YouTube-sponsored “Life in a Day” project tells us about how the video sharing site has affected our ability to appreciate art.

– At the Louvre, controversy erupted over the recent cleaning of Leonardo da Vinci's "The Virgin and Child With Saint Anne," with some conservation experts resigning in protest that it is now too clean.

– The Village Voice sacked revered film writer J. Hoberman. Our own film correspondent Graham Fuller asked why.

– Kyle Chayka talked to the Russian anarchist Voina collective about why its members considered their latest incendiary act a work of art. (And when we say "incendiary," we do mean incendiary!)

– Japanese art megastar Takashi Murakami declared war on the "Cool Japan" campaign.

– Kanye West announced his ambitions to found the grandious new design super-collective, codename: DONDA. Janelle Zara offered some suggestions for projects DONDA might take up.

– Shane Ferro connected the dots between the upcoming auction of artifacts from the Titanic and the controversial cadaver exhibition, “Bodies.”

– Ben Davis reviewed rising star Mary Reid Kelley’s rhyming art-film version of French history at Fredericks & Freiser gallery.

As you're surely aware, Kanye West went on a Twitter rampage last week, defending his place in the fashion world. But he should put his money where his Tweets are, remember the critiques of his spring/summer 2012 collection, and spend a little less time defending himself and more time actually working on his line. Here are some thoughts to help him get started.

DO
Listen to the experts, especially when they’re people like Pulitzer Prize-winning fashion critic Robin Givhan and the New York Times’s Cathy Horyn. They’re not your enemies. They know what they’re talking about. If you follow their advice rather than defending your poor choices, they won't be the only ones to take note.

Use season-appropriate fabrics. In your runway debut, you used leather and fur — to be worn in spring and summer.

Make sure the pieces fit the models. In your first show, your garments looked like they were falling off the models. You said it was on purpose. Everybody else thought you needed a tailor.

Take lessons from Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen, Victoria Beckham, and other celebrities who have had successful turns as designers. They don’t make spectacles of themselves. They concentrate on making quality pieces that are stylish, fit well, and sell.

Stop trying so hard.

DON’T
Think you can slap together a collection in a few weeks, like you did last time. Formulate a clear plan and allow enough time to improve and execute it.

Make garments that scream for a wardrobe malfunction. Those super-deep plunging necklines were vulgar. Skin can be sexy, but nipple slips are not.

Think you can make your debut during Paris fashion week in a prime-time slot. Opt for a more commercial fashion week, like New York, and don’t try to compete with the biggies. Your name may be known, but your skills just aren’t up to par.

Go around telling top fashion editors you don’t appreciate their criticism, like you reportedly told Elle creative director Joe Zee, who didn’t even attend your show.

Indulge in obscenity-laced outbursts about people treating your fashion designer dreams as a joke, especially not at your after-party, as you did last season. Show some class.

Rodarte designers Kate and Laura Mulleavy recently announced that they are taking their ethereal aesthetics to the stage, outfitting the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s production of Mozart’s “Don Giovanni,” opening in May. This is the first such project for the sisters, who created the ballet costumes for Darren Aronofsky’s “Black Swan,” but they’re the latest in a line of fashion designers who have tried their hands making opera costumes. Former Tatler fashion editor Helena Matheopoulos chronicled the trend in her book “Fashion Designers at the Opera,” writing about Chanel designer Karl Lagerfeld, who brought the feminine ruffles of the French fashion house to “Les Contes d’Hoffmann”; Gianni Versace, who lent the dancers in “Capriccio” his whimsical flair; and Miuccia Prada, who added the Prada touch to “Attila.” Although the resulting looks are distinctly different, the designers all took a distinctly operatic approach to their assignments.

It will be a few months before we get to see Rodarte’s “Don Giovanni” costumes, but “Fashion Designers at the Opera” is a great look in the meantime.

Click through to the photo gallery to see the operatic costumes by Karl Lagerfeld, Prada, Versace, and more.

She and William were the guests of honor at the U.K. launch. The event at Odeon in Leicester Square was being held in the name of charity, specifically the Foundation of Prince William and Prince Harry...

Fashion house Burberry has now become one of the world's most popular luxury brands, after registering more than 10 million Facebook fans. The makers of fragrances, clothing and fashion accessories achieved the landmark figure last week...

Christie's ended 2011 with a Hollywood-style bang after its $157 million Elizabeth Taylor estate sale, which included the most valuable sale of jewelry in auction history. However, last year was not without its hiccups for the auction house as it struggled with weakening demand for wine in Hong Kong, increasing competition in Asia, and a flop of an Impressionist and modern auction in New York. After the Liz Taylor dust settled, ARTINFO caught up with one of the figures behind the sale — Christie's international jewelry specialist and the president of Christie's Hong Kong François Curiel — to discuss the importance of provenance, the advantages of low estimates, and how the end of 2011 will affect 2012 and beyond.

Let's begin with the Liz Taylor sale. You wrote in your email to ARTINFO that the sale demonstrated the significance of provenance in jewelry, where the history of the object has often been of less importance than in visual art sales. Do you think that means provenance will be more important for jewelry sales going forward, or was this auction be an outlier?

It has always existed. One can always sell jewels with a royal provenance — or if you remember when we sold the jewelry that belonged to Ellen Barkin three or four years ago, it commanded a premium over the intrinsic value of the jewels. But, in the case of Elizabeth Taylor, it was really exemplified. The premium was larger than for many other collections. If you look at the very old catalogues from Christie’s when I started working in the 1970s, whenever a piece of jewelry came from a private client, we used to put a note in the catalogue that it came from "property of a lady" or "property of a lady of title." That sent a message to potential buyers that it came from a distinguished provenance. So it [the importance of provenance] has it has always existed, but not to the level that we have seen at the Elizabeth Talyor sale.

Does it allow you to market jewelry more easily if you can lean on the provenance?

Yes. Whenever we have jewels somewhere in an exhibition, there is always a lot of interest. Jewels attract passionate people. But had the collection of Elizabeth Taylor not belonged to Elizabeth Taylor, we certainly wouldn't have sold 25,000 tickets at $30 a piece for people to come to the exhibition, and we certainly would not have had 39,000 people around the world look at the exhibition. Her name drew the crowd.

There is a rumor that BVLGARI bought many of its own vintage jewelry back at the auction. Is it common for jewelry companies to collect their own pieces?

I can't comment about BVLGARI because they did not make any press releases or announcements, but I remember doing some auctions several years ago, and Van Cleef and Arpels used to — in a very proud manner — buy their invisible-set jewelry, which is a very rare technique that Van Cleef and Arpels had created in the '60s. Cartier always buys some of their vintage pieces when they come up for auction. Some very rare pieces end up in the Cartier Museum.

Prices at jewelry auctions — and not just auctions tagged with celebrity names — seem to have increased tremendously in the last few years. Is there a sense that gems, like art, are becoming more popular as an alternative investment or is there something else going on?

It's part of a general movement where, at the moment, works of art and jewelry attract a lot of customers. It's no longer the best-kept secret. Financial markets are not very attractive at the moment. If you give money to your bank they give you one percent a year, if that. The fact that the art market, over the past five to ten years, performed extremely well — not only in jewelry, but in Impressionist and modern art as well as post-war and contemporary — also gives new buyers courage to enter the market. I think it is mostly the lack of confidence in the monetary system, which pushes people to works of art and jewelry.

There are quite interesting statistics [about the jewelry market]. The Elizabeth Taylor Diamond was purchased by Richard Burton for her for $300,000. That, corrected for inflation, comes to $1.95 million. We sold it for $8.8 million. There are many examples like that, and we see the publicity that the auction houses now give to their reserves. I think it gives a lot of confidence to new collectors to enter a market that ten years ago was probably the best-kept secret, or reserved for a small group of aficionados.

In January the droit de suite royalty law goes in effect in London for artists deceased up to 70 years, and last week was a bill proposed in the U.S. to impose a tax of 7 percent on the resale of contemporary artworks. Do you see this benefitting Hong Kong's auction market? If taxes go up enough, will Western collectors start consigning in Hong Kong?

Not at the moment. I have seen this several times in my life. When there was a droit de suite in France and many other European countries, as well as in England for dead artists, some people thought that the market would move to Switzerland where there was no droit de suite — but it didn't. The big markets for Impressionist and modern pictures and for contemporary pictures are London and New York, and I can't imagine that contemporary pictures will be sold in Hong Kong soon because of droit de suite. I think at the moment, the markets will stay where they are. Look at the case right now — London has droit de suite and New York does not, and the London market has not disappeared. It's just another tax — it makes things more expensive and not everyone is happy about it — but I don't think that the market is going to shift to Asia, at least not in the immediate future.

While prices are still high, 2011 wasn't quite as spectacular as 2010 in the Chinese auction market. China's overall economic growth is slowing a bit. The demand for fine wine has leveled off a bit. How does this affect Christie's in Asia?

At the moment it doesn't affect it as much. We just released our figures for 2011. We're 25 percent up over 2010. Our sales in the fall were very strong. So far, it hasn't affected the art market in Asia. So far, we have seen the same phenomenon in Asia that we have seen in Europe: buyers going for works of art and jewelry. Our biggest jewelry auction of the group this year was in Hong Kong for $80 million — New York was $60 million and Geneva was $50 million. There used to be three big centers for jewel auctions: Geneva, New York, and Hong Kong. Now, Hong Kong is way ahead of Geneva and New York because of the presence of Chinese buyers. There are three or four Chinese artists in the list of top ten living artists at the moment. This is just this year. So, on the contrary, I think the Asian market is getting stronger and stronger, and is not affected by the slowdown of the economy.

Do you see that continuing into the next year?

When you sent me your email today you didn't tell me to take out my crystal ball, so I left it in the office... but, we are cautiously optimistic. At the moment, there are no signs that the market will slow down, but we are all extremely careful putting together our sales for next year. We certainly want what we have seen at the end of the year — for quality items there are always buyers. Perhaps next year we should have smaller sales with quality items, and also very attractive estimates.

The Elizabeth Taylor sale worked so well not just because  it had quality items, but also the becasue if the fact that the estimates were very conservative. The $8.8 million ring was estimated at $2-3 million. Everyone knew it was going to bring more, so I asked, "Why did you put such low estimates?" They were there because of the estate — it's a complicated story. But in the end, the conservative estimates very often make for the success of a sale. Had we estimated the Peregrina pearl at $8-12 million, I am not sure that it would have sold for $11.8 million. But if we estimate it at $4-5 million or $3-5 million, maybe it will get to a very high price.

ARTINFO had a conversation with the director of China Guardian a few months ago and he mentioned that he is studying Christie's and Sotheby's to try to bring his business model, specifically authentication methods and client services, up to your level. Mainland China seems pretty separate as an auction market for the moment, but do you see the big Chinese auction houses competing in Hong Kong at some point in the future?

Absolutely. Poly has opened an office in New York. They definitely want to connect to Chinese American sellers. So far we haven't seen them much in Hong Kong in terms of planning presale exhibitions, but they come to Hong Kong to buy works of art. It's a new force on which we will have to count. Before the market was just the two major auction houses, but now there are two very strong competitors with Poly and Guardian. It's amazing what you say that they are studying us, because I think they are doing pretty well, and their model is right. They don't do things too differently from us. What do they do differently?

What he said was that their authentication methods are not up to the same standards as yours.

It's certain that Christie's and our competitors have a group of experts who have been here for a long time. When an expert in Hong Kong sees a Chinese work of art, it is also vetted by six or seven other specialists at Christie's — in New York, in Paris, in Amsterdam — and they have regular conference calls where they look at each other's property and they discuss it among themselves. It is nice because you can play ping pong with a colleague rather than being isolated. I suppose if you work for a small auction house you can't talk to too many people. That is one of our strengths. Every department works as a team and works with specialists around the world. That network is difficult to replicate because we have been around since 1766. The system has been around for a while. If you take the five major departments, Impressionist and modern, post-war and contemporary, jewelry, Asian art, and Old Masters, there are between 25 and 30 specialists in each of the departments. They don't always all meet all the time, but there are always six or seven of them looking at every work of art that is sold at Christie's, with different points of view from different countries.

Does Christie's have any other expansion plans in Asia?

When I joined Christie's Hong Kong in January 2010, we were 80 colleagues in Beijing, Hong Kong, and Shanghai. Now, about two years later, we are 140. Nearly two years later, we have added specialists, we have added client-services colleagues, we have added support staff for all the departments. We are also having more exhibitions in Shanghai and Beijing of the works that are being sold not only in Hong Kong, but all around the globe. We have had Chinese concierges head up customer service in London and New York so that the Chinese would find someone who speaks their language when they go there. We have done a lot of work to have our Web site in Chinese. My job when I went there was not to China-ize Christie's, but to make it easier for clients there to work with us. 

VIP, the online-only commercial art fair founded by James Cohan gallery in 2011, has announced an injection of $1 million in funding from investors with powerful art and financial pedigrees. The investment comes with an expansion of the company’s brand into three new art fairs, VIP Photo, Paper, and Vernissage, to take place later this year following the flagship VIP 2.0 fair, scheduled for February 3rd through the 8th.

The three new online fairs allow VIP to “showcase a wider range of works at a wider variety of price points” and “help the VIP brand solidify its position as the leader in online art sales,” VIP CEO Lisa Kennedy said in a statement. The first two are pretty self-explanatory: VIP Paper, which will be online between April 20th to 22nd, will focus on works on paper, while VIP Photo, July 13th to 15th, will be a showcase for photography galleries. By far the most intriguing proposition of the bunch is VIP Vernissage, a smaller fair meant to preview the Fall gallery season, which will run from September 7th to 9th. 

The new investment, a seeming vote of confident in the whole VIP endeavor, was made by a pair of art collectors: Brazilian Selmo Nissenbaum, partner in Personale Investimentos, and Australian Philip Keir, media and arts specialist and founder of NextMedia. The added capital comes at a key time for the fledgling digital endeavor. Last October, VIP hired Kennedy, an Internet retail specialist, as its first CEO, and has just replaced founding director Noah Horowitz (who left to manage the Armory Show) with art advisor and former Artnet sales director Liz Parks.

With a new team and a fresh infusion of funding, VIP might be able to transcend the technological glitches that frustrated dealers during their first outing. In an email to ARTINFO, co-founder Jane Cohan noted that one impetus for seeking out external investment was to “allow us to re-architect our site and build out our tech team.” VIP has also “enhanced the visitors’s ability to navigate the fair,” adding the options of using a filtered search or taking curated tours of the work on view, guided by prominent art-world personalities.

In the January 2012 issue of Art+Auction, VIP CEO Kennedy explained that the company’s Web hosting can now “respond in real time to any incremental need for server capacity,” and that they have added third-party chat support to help facilitate connection between visitors and dealers. The lack of such a feature was a clear failure of VIP 2011.

In February, the flagship fair will return with participants ranging from blue-chip stalwarts like Gagosian to emerging spaces like the Lower East Side’s Rachel Uffner gallery. An added section of “Editions and Multiples” will feature work on sale from museums and alternative art spaces like Beijing’s Ullens Center for Contemporary Art and Internet non-profit Rhizome.

VIP Art Fair is doing more visible work than any other company or gallery to create an online platform for art sales, but that platform remains in the draft stages — which makes it all the more striking that it is already expanding the franchise. Still, the potential is staggering. “The space for the contemporary art world online is only just beginning to take shape,” Cohan wrote to ARTINFO. “The impetus to further develop the event, its capacity, and its reach is ongoing.”

It’s easy to gush over Carrie Brownstein. She co-founded Sleater-Kinney, one of the most beloved indie-rock acts of the late-'90s and early aughts, before forming Wild Flag, one of the most beloved indie-rock acts of last year. She’s a sex symbol for men as well as women, and reading interviews with her, there’s no question that she is intelligent, thoughtful, and down to earth. And there have been many interviews recently. They’re keyed to this past Friday’s return of “Portlandia,” the sketch show she created with Fred Armisen, who seems genuinely smart and nice, too, and claims his own cadre of fans, earned from his years on “Saturday Night Live.” Gushing over Brownstein — and her platonic but interestingly close relationship with Armisen, who she met after he invited her to an “SNL” afterparty, and who, according to the New Yorker, she now exchanges text messages with every night before bedtime — only makes sense, whether you’re a journalist or fan.

But. (You were waiting for the “but.”) There’s a problem with “Portlandia,” in which the duo gently caricature Portland, Oregon (where Brownstein lives), and by extension, the youngish, mostly white, creatively inclined, fashion-conscious, politically engaged, overly-broadly defined category of humans known as hipsters.  Or, put more exactly, there’s something wrong with the idea — and it is this idea that underpins both the critical approval greeting the show’s second season, and the general drive to cover it — that by lampooning their hipster lives and hipster audience, Brownstein and Armisen have somehow transcended hipsterdom and created something “strange and beautiful,” “an extended joke about what Freud called the narcissism of small differences.” (Well, maybe the latter is true — sure, the show may explore “the need to distinguish oneself by minute shadings and to insist, with outsized militancy, on the importance of those shadings” — but do we really need to invoke Freud here?)

There is nothing strange or beautiful about spoofing feminist bookstore clerks or locavores, although of course it may be funny. And just because you know lots of feminist bookstore clerks and locavores doesn’t make it daring, either. In fact, “Portlandia” parrots the very same jokes you’ll hear those feminist bookstore clerks and locavores making themselves. Which is why the sketches are actually sometimes chuckle-worthy, but hardly ever memorable — watching them is a little like overhearing a table full of friends joshing one another. The show turns a mirror on a mirror.

If you truly seek the “giddy lunacy” that the New Yorker ascribes to “Portlandia,” may we instead suggest reruns of the genuinely absurd “It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia.” The folly and pratfalls indulged by that show’s band of lovable idiots will keep surprising you. Brownstein and Armisen, meanwhile, will merely nourish your arch self-awareness.

“Portlandia” certainly isn’t the only show made to validate — rather than elevate, pervert, or otherwise render more interesting — its audience’s core values and sense of humor. Many sitcoms do. So too does “The League,” a sketch-inspired FX sitcom that centers around a group of 30-something fantasy football-playing pals, and probably draws more “Portlandia” fans than you’d assume. Watching “The League” is like overhearing a table full of dudes busting each other’s balls. (The group is often shown gathered at a bar.) The jokes, like those in “Portlandia,” ultimately just fold back on themselves. But you’ll actually find that they’re funnier  — assuming you can handle the sports references.