Last night on "Top Chef Texas," cheftestapant Grayson Schmitz defended her choice of...

Since 2002, when the National Collection of Modern and Contemporary Arts moved from the Haus der Kunst to the Pinakothek der Moderne, the former has been in something of a state of flux. By no longer having a permanent collection, Haus der Kunst was not exactly a museum in the traditional sense. And though it has housed many exhibitions since, the variation of these — from Tutankhamen to Gilbert and George — made the institution feel lacking in direction, to say the least. If you were going to Prinzregentenstrasse 1, it’s fair to say that it was at night, to the infamous P1 night club in the museum’s basement.

So, last year Haus der Kunst began working on a makeover, hiring Base Design to completely overhaul the museum's visual identity and putting forth a new and very appropriate mantra for the institution: “Stretch Your View.” They also appointed celebrated curator Okwui Enwezor to direct the institution along its new path.

On Thursday, the one-year anniversary of his appointment, Enwezor announced the outline of how that program will look. Central to the new diection is a plan to transform the museum's lack of a permanent collection into a strategic asset — turning Haus der Kunst, in some abstract sense, into a storehouse of collective knowledge. As such, he is vastly expanding the institution's educational programs as well as orienting its resources towards scholarly and curatorial research, using these bases as the backpressure to push exhibitions forward rather than a massive collection of works themselves.

As such, Enwesor has proposed that the museum will be a “work in progress” over the next years, setting several key goals for its critical approach. Perhaps most notable of these is an explicit return to questioning Haus der Kunt’s historical positioning. After all, the museum was initially constructed as a nationalist monument to German culture by the Nazi regime on the eve of World War II, a still-taboo subject of conversation across much of the country, yet one, as Enwezor has suggested, that can not be simply swept under the rug by a shiny new Web site and branding team. To this end, Haus der Kunst will open “75/20” — referring to the 75 anniversary of the museum’s founding and 20th anniversary of its reinstatement in 1993 — an exhibition both celebrating and criticizing the institution’s history, especially focused on the troubled period from 1933-1955.

Haus der Kunst will also aim to turn its focus outward, examining the world from an artistic, cultural, and political standpoint. In certain ways, this new trajectory places Haus der Kunst in a much more cosmopolitan field, more similar to Berlin institutions than its peers in Munich — save perhaps the Pinakothek der Moderne — which can be fairly provincial in their outlook.

Denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance. Grief is a 5-step process, according to psychiatry pioneer Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’s landmark 1969 model; first you pretend it’s not happening, then you throw a fit, then you try to buy your way out of the situation and burst into tears before reaching sweet resignation.

The whole thing sounds so tedious, and so BLOUIN ARTINFO recommends drinking your way through it. Jack Spade, arbiter of stylish men’s handbags, provides you the proper tools: the brand new Good Grief glasses, pictured above. 

As Mercedes-Benz Fashion Week concluded its run at the Berlin Strasse des 17 Juni tent, fan-favorites like Michalsky, Patrick Mohr, and Vladiimr Karaleev hit the runway, with surprising newcomers like Wang Yutao also performing beyond expectations. Here's the best of the second half of the week, winnowed down to its best looks. 

To see part two of our Berlin Fashion Week Highlights, click the accompanying slide show.

To see part one, click here.

Jay Leno will soon have some stiff competition as television’s most controversial talk show host. Earlier this week, Julian Assange — the Wikileaks founder now under house arrest in England while awaiting judgement on an extradition order issued by Sweden, where he is wanted on a sexual assault charge — announced that he will helm a program on RT, the possibly propagandistic English-language Russian network that airs worldwide. On the show, which will debut in March, Assange will interview “key political players, thinkers and revolutionaries from around the world.” People, you imagine him thinking, not so different from himself. Daniel Ellsberg, who released the Pentagon Papers, or Bob Woodward, the journalist who exposed Watergate, come to mind. But what if, as it seems natural he would, Assange thought “out of the box”? Which guests would best embody his mission of making available the world’s information, no matter how discomfiting, or even dangerous? Ten suggestions follow.

Spike Lee: He recently accused the film industry of knowing “nothing about black people,” then blew off Chris Rock when the comedian needled him about it. Blew off Chris Rock! Clearly he can go up against Assange on any topic.

Lars Von Trier: This filmmaker isn’t so much a polarizing figure as a confusing one. Maybe Assange can reach into his big bag of information and help ground Von Trier in some fact-based conversation.

Sasha Grey: She’s an actress and former porn star who defends the adult industry but considers her work performance art. Surely she and Assange can compare notes on what constitutes a thinker or revolutionary.

Joe Biden: The leading political gaffe-maker would undoubtedly let a meme-spawning something slip, helping give the show a little traction online.

Barney Frank: Obviously he speaks his mind. But he’s also hilarious, which is key when your host is, whatever else you want to say about him, as humorless as Assange.

Charlyne Yi: This actress-comedian is her own straight man, seeming to surprise and amuse herself with her own (admittedly stage-y) honesty and openess. She thrives on awkwardness, which Assange should amply furnish.

Sacha Baron Cohen: As Ali G, and like Assange, Cohen has vexed a number of world figures. The interview would have to be in two parts: Assange talking shop with Cohen, and Ali G sparring with Assange.

Nickelback: With many fewer defenders than Assange, this rock band, unfairly scapegoated for their blandness and commercial success, have made defensiveness their art.

Cam’ron: He has famously gone on record saying he wouldn’t turn in a serial killer even if the person were his neighbor: “I’m not gonna call and be, like … the serial killer’s in 4E.” (Although he would “probably move.”)

Sarah Palin: Actually, we’re not sure we want to see these two flirt.

Christie's took a different approach than usual for its Old Masters sale on Wednesday, breaking out works by French artists into their own "Art of France" sale immediately following the venerable sale and following that up with a wine pairing — an additional auction of French vintages, that is. The morning sale brought in $34.3 million, the afternoon auction added another $10 million to the total, and the wine topped things off with another $1.2 million. The buy-in rates are telling, however: while a respectable 42 of 59 lots sold at the first Old master sale (71 percent by lot and 70 percent by value), only slightly over half of the "Art of France" sale found buyers, with 57 percent sold by lot and only 52 percent sold by value. The wine portion, in which 96 percent of lots sold, showed that buyers aren't willing to pay the top prices they once were for the best Bordeaux. The sell-through rate by value was 91 percent.

The painting expected to bring the highest price of the day, a tondo of the Virgin Mary and baby Jesus by the 15th-century Dutch painter Hans Memling, failed to sell (est. $6-8 million). As a result, the top lot was Giovanni Battista Tiepolo's "The Arrival of Henry III at the Villa Contarini," which set a record for the artist at auction when it sold for $5.9 million (est. $4-6 million). The painting depicts the arrival of the newly crowned king of France to the Italian country estate in 1574, ascending the steps of the villa as the Contarini family and other village onlookers greet him. The work, commissioned in 1744, was originally just a sketch for a larger fresco that Tiepolo did on the wall of Federico Contarini's villa. However, when the 19th-century owners of the villa, Edouard André and Nélie Jacquemart, tried to move the fresco from Italy to their townhouse in Paris, it was badly damaged. Now the oil sketch stands as the more complete work.

A portrait by Frans Hals greatly outperformed its $700,000-1 million estimate, possibly because its longtime home was over the fireplace in Elizabeth Taylor's Bel Air mansion and was the only Old Master in the film star's estate. After a long bidding war, the hammer finally came down at $2.1 million. The painting had previously been attributed to a follower of Hals, but in 2011 was upgraded by scholars and conservators to an autograph work by the Dutch master himself.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington added a Thomas de Keyser painting to its collection at the auction, courtesy of the Lee and Juliet Folger Fund. The museum's bidder only came away with the lot after pushing the price up three times above the $300,000-500,000 estimate. "Portrait of a Gentleman, Bust-Length, in a Brown Doublet and Ruff," an octagonal work on copper by one of Rembrandt's best-known rivals in Amsterdam, hammered down just below $1.5 million. Though the exact date of the painting is unknown, the stiff, intricate collar on the sitter suggests it is from sometime between 1615-1635. The work's most recent owner was Gerard d'Aquin, who made a name for himself as the art buyer for William Randolph Hearst.

Later, at the "Art of France" sale, the highest-estimated lot — Jean Honoré Fragonard 's "The Good Mother" (est. $5-7 million) — was bought in. The highest total came from another lot by Fragonard, a pair of large paintings entitled "Le Jour (Day)" and "La Nuit (Night)" (probably late 18th century). The two decorative canvases show a group of putti frolicking in the clouds during the day and laying down to sleep at night. After 50 years in a private collection without being shown to the public, the paintings were scooped up by an American collector for $3.7 million, just topping the auction house's $2-3 million estimate. The Fragonard diptych was the only lot in the French auction to top the $1 million mark. However, a trompe-l'oeil painting by Louis-Léopard Boilly of a cat peeking out of the back of an old, tattered canvas fooled Christie's appraisers ­­— it was only estimated to sell for $150,000-250,000, but brought in $842,500.

The day's finale was a classy affair of mostly wine professionals sipping on Krug and munching on caviar as they lifted their paddles for the modestly priced lots at the special wines of France auction. The top-estimated Bordeaux mostly went to Asian buyers who were bidding online. A lot consisting of a dozen bottles of 1982 Château Pétrus — one of the best vintages of Bordeaux in the last 30 years — sold for $58,000 (est. $42,000-65,000). Three different lots tied for the second-highest priced, all selling for $46,000 — a dozen bottles of 2000 Pétrus, a dozen bottles of 1982 Château Lafite-Rothschild (no longer the favored child among Bordeaux, it seems), and an assortment of 12 bottles of Burgundy from the Domaine de la Romanée-Conti region.

The three-year legal battle between Richard Prince and Patrick Cariou isn't over yet. Cariou's lawyers voiced their opposition to Prince's appeal of the historic 2011 copyright decision in a brief filed yesterday in the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. The takeaway? It's not easy to mix copyright law and art history.

The dispute centers on Prince's "Canal Zone" series, which a Manhattan district court ruled did not sufficiently transform Cariou's photos of Jamaican Rastafarians to qualify as fair use. In Prince's appeal, his lawyers argued that the artist's standoffish original testimony was "consonant with the core post-modern belief that an artist’s intent is irrelevant because an artwork’s meaning is manifold." (Prince originally testified that he had “never been interested" in Cariou's photographs, and used them as raw material.) 

Now, it's Cariou's lawyers' turn to cry foul. "Fittingly perhaps, in a case involving appropriation art, appellants’ brief is 'post-modern,' questioning basic concepts such as: what is a fact, and what is properly before an appellate court on an appeal?" they write. The defendants are trying to make a "revisionist" argument, they argue, by adding views of critics, museum curators, and collectors like Lisa Phillips, Nancy Spector, Douglas Eklund, and Adam Lindemann, which were not presented in the original case. (Lindemann, it should be noted, bought a painting from the "Canal Zone" series.) A sample statement that Cariou's lawyers want the court to ignore involves Spector asserting that Price needs original works in order to "critique, dismantle, [and] transform those works."  

The brief is also filled with gossipy tidbits about the manner in which Prince's dealer, Gagosian, promoted the show. (Because the gallery reprinted and sold the copyrighted material, it was held liable as well). Larry Gagosian testified that guests at the gallery dinner held for the opening included Gisele Bundchen, Elle Macpherson, and Kate Moss because they "look good at a dinner table." (We can't quite figure out what legal insight this offers, but maybe Cariou's lawyers just wanted to make Larry Gagosian look like kind of a jerk.) According to court papers, the gallery sold eight paintings for a cash total of $10.48 million, 60 percent of which went to Prince.

Perhaps the most interesting question highlighted in the filing is this: should the art establishment's critical reading of an artist's work sway a judge's ruling? According to Dan Brooks, a partner at Schnader Harrison Segal & Lewis and counsel for Cariou, the answer is no. "Fair use is an affirmative defense, so it's something that the defendant has to prove. It's true that some of the cases evaluate whether the comment or satire is objectively perceivable," Brooks told BLOUIN ARTINFO. "But courts only do that after the defendant first says he subjectively intended to create a parody or satire."

So, does it matter if outside observers perceive a work as parody or commentary if the artist never frames it as such? The Andy Warhol Foundation challenges Brooks's assertion in an amicus brief filed in support of Prince, claiming that "transformative meaning must be assessed first and foremost by observation of the work itself." This argument is likely to be fleshed out by Prince's own lawyers in their response. The legal battle is in no way over: after Prince's lawyers file their brief, Cariou's lawyers will have the opportunity to reply.

Douglas Eklund's contention that Prince was "being intentionally inarticulate" in his deposition is another statement that Cariou's lawyers are trying to throw out of the appeal. Brooks, for his part, noted that Prince seemed "very articulate" in earlier interviews about the "Canal Zone" series, and wrote a catalogue essay for Gagosian's exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings. "It's very well written," according to Brooks. "He's perfectly capable of expressing himself in words as well as in paint. Who else would know better than Richard Prince?" In the coming months, perhaps we'll find out. 

The Hôtel de la Marine was built by Louis XV on Paris’s Place de la Concorde in the 18th century and later became the headquarters of the French navy. Now that France’s naval offices plan to move to the still-under-construction “French Pentagon” in 2014, the building needs a new purpose. President Nicolas Sarkozy has decided that the historic structure will succeed its military career with a cultural one: the Louvre is turning the Hôtel de la Marine into a rotating exhibition space.

The new plan comes as a relief for those who opposed the for-profit privatization of such an important cultural landmark. There was a public outcry in late 2010 when news leaked that the government was considering turning the structure over to technology and real estate entrepreneur Alexandre Allard. Allard had proposed creating a cultural center called "La Royale," but critics denounced this as a "money-making circus.” Historians and members of the military signed a petition against the plan, reported Agence France-Presse. In response to the new Louvre arrangement, Allard has said that Sarkozy's decision shows that France is "rotten with conservatism,” according to Le Figaro.

Sarkozy appointed former French president Valéry Giscard d'Estaing to lead a committee tasked with deciding the fate of the Hôtel de la Marine. Giscard d'Estaing — who was skeptical of Allard's grandiose plans — gave Sarkozy his report back in September, but the French president announced only earlier this week that he had accepted its conclusions. "The heritage zones of the Hôtel de la Marine will be open to the public under the management of the Louvre, which will present pieces of great historical and artistic value," Sarkozy announced during a speech on cultural issues in Marseilles on Tuesday. "The main courtyards will be turned into pedestrian streets, [and] the ground floor sites [will be] devoted to the practice of French art and civilization."

Private tenants and government offices including the Cour des Comptes (the governmental auditing office) will occupy office space left in the building. The added income from rental fees will go toward supporting museum programming. The Louvre and the Caisse des Dépôts (a French financial body that holds civil servants' pension funds and retirement accounts) will work together to establish a new entity that will develop more specific curatorial plans for the Hôtel de la Marine. The project is estimated to cost €50-80 million ($66-105 million).

"The idea isn't to make it a department of the Louvre," Louvre president Henri Loyrette said, "but to have collections from several institutions pass through, including the Mobilier National (the institution that furnishes French government buildings since the time of the monarchy), the Manufacture de Sèvres (the renowned porcelain factory), and the Decorative Arts Museum." The possibility of French chef Alain Ducasse opening a restaurant in the building is also under discussion.

The Hôtel de la Marine is expected to open to the public in 2015. Art and political space have been colliding quite a bit in France over the past few weeks with Italian artist Francesco Vezzoli’s short-lived “24 h Museum” project. The pop-up institution took over Paris’s Museum of Public Works on January 24 in a glitzy celebrity-studded extravaganza. The Louvre-directed Hôtel de la Marine space will likely be a tamer affair.

The L.A. landscape would look much different without four Chinese-Americans — Eugene Choy, Gilbert Leong, Helen Liu Fong and Gin Wong — whose work has shaped some of the city's architectural landmarks. Dan Kaufman Eugene Choy designed the Cathay Bank in...

At Sotheby's $62.1 million sale of Old Masters on Thursday, it was smooth sailing for the highest-estimated works of classic art as a magnificent mid-18th-century Venetian canal scene by Canaletto, "A View of the Churches of the Redentore and San Giacomo, with a Moored Man-of-War, Gondolas, and Barges," sold for $5.7 million (est. $5-7 million), the best price of the day. But while the loftiest end of the market elicited a frenzy of bidding, with all of the top 10 fetching more than $2 million, the international cadre of buyers were more discerning about the remainder of the inventory, and 40 percent of the works were bought in.

Lucas Cranach the Elder's oil-on-panel "Lucretia" (1509-10) brought in the auction's second-highest total, selling for $5.1 million, smack in the middle range of its $4-6 million estimate. Long dismissed from the artist's oeuvre but attributed to him since the early 20th-century, the portrait shows the suicide of the legendarily modest consul's wife following her rape by the king's son — which, according to Roman lore, brought about the fall of the Roman monarchy and the rise of the republic — was a favorite subject of the artist, and he is thought to have painted it at least 35 times. This particular example is a three-quarter-length portrait of the tragic figure, who stares sadly into the eyes of the viewer as she is stabbing herself in the heart.

Fra Bartolommeo's small panel of the "Saint Jerome in the Wilderness," which shows the solitary saint praying in woods, set a record for the artist when it hammered down at $5 million, three times the $1.5 million low estimate. Another record was set when European collector bought Simone Martini's gold-ground "The Virgin Annunciate" for $4.1 million (est $3-4 million). The small panel originally made up the right side of a small devotional diptych done by the artist of the angel Gabriel announcing to the Virgin Mary that she would have a child, but the second painting has since been lost.

In an unexpected twist, Sotheby's Old Master drawings sale on Wednesday brought in $5.6 million — the highest amount since 1998 for the category — despite a buy-in rate of nearly 50 percent. The total was given a boost by the sale of  "Portrait of a Young Man," attributed to Piero del Pollaiuolo, which was picked up by the J. Paul Getty Museum for $1.4 million (est. $300,000-400,000). 

At the Aldrich Contemporary Art Museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut, Chinese artist Xu Bing is showing some highly addictive work. His installation, called “Tobacco Project,” uses the eponymous poisonous leaf as its muse and medium, turning the material into maps, books, and printed poems that confront the omnipresent ills of a nicotine-dependent culture.

At the exhibition’s opening this coming Sunday, January 29, Xu will light a 42-foot-long cigarette for his piece “Traveling Down the River.” The sculpture will slowly burn on top of a replica of a famous Chinese scroll painting by Song dynasty artist Zhang Zeduan, commenting on the relentless spread of smoking across China: studies have shown that the country has the largest number of smoking-related deaths in the world, yet two thirds of Chinese people think smoking does little or no harm to their health.  

In this Q&A, BLOUIN ARTINFO asked Xu Bing what made him choose tobacco as a medium, and what cigarettes mean to him. He also explained his own personal history with tobacco.

Could you please describe your exhibition at the Aldrich museum for us?

Except for taking “tobacco” as their organizing theme, the works in “Tobacco Project” share no stylistic considerations or connections. Some of the works are as small and as refined as jewelry; some are huge and overtake the entire exhibition space. The semantic meaning of the project is produced in the counterpoint and questioning that takes place between the various works. In this sense, the project's vague uncertainty, the ambiguity of the materials, is transformed into a kind of clear and vigorous language, which in turn becomes the artistic language of the project.

"Tobacco Project" began with an interest in the aroma of tobacco and the way it is made. The result is something enormous and growing, located between history and sociology, or, one could say, an activity employing artistic means to explore sociological issues.

Why did you choose cigarettes as the dominant medium for the show?

In 1999 I visited Duke University to give a lecture. When I entered Durham I was immediately aware of the scent of tobacco in the air. Friends explained to me that the Duke family was built on a tobacco fortune, and thus Durham had come to be called “Tobacco City.” Moreover, because the Duke University School of Medicine excelled in treating cancer, Durham has also come to be known as the “City of Medicine.” A multifaceted connection exists there between tobacco and cultural history.

I have a habit of visiting local factories wherever I go. The “intelligent” machines that I find are often far more akin to art than actual contemporary work. When I visited a cigarette factory, I was drawn to the refinement of the materials. I decided to limit myself to these materials to create a series of works related to tobacco.

Since the initial show at Duke, I went on to expand the show to the Shanghai Gallery of Art in 2004 — there is a deep historical connection between Shanghai and Durham as a result of the tobacco trade that flourished at the beginning of the 20th century — and then to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond in 2011, where collectors Carolyn Hsu-Balcer  — whose family has a long-standing connection to tobacco — and her husband, René Balcer, encouraged me to pursue the history of tobacco in Richmond. The Aldrich contemporary art museum in Ridgefield will be the project’s only venue in the New York area.

Your work often deals with appropriation, adopting symbols and warping or destabilizing their meanings. How have you confronted the innate symbolism of cigarettes?

I am interested in an examination of inherently human issues and weaknesses through an exploration of the entangled relationship that exists between man and tobacco. Historically speaking, our human connection to tobacco is at times distant and at times close.

In some eras, tobacco was seen as something good: men and women young and old all took part in the use of tobacco. It could be said that today we have reached the summit of man's rejection of tobacco. The design of a single pack of cigarettes engages in the contradictory behavior of simultaneously promoting its sale and its rejection. Everyone knows that tobacco is harmful, but we are inseparable, caught in an entanglement that resembles the relationship between lovers: getting too close is no good, but neither is being too distant. Taken together, human weakness and the meaning of tobacco form this kind of awkward relationship.

When I treat tobacco as a material and come into close contact with it, I realize that it should not be the object of further subjective judgment. It has already taken on the burden of too much social significance. I don't want my work to function as little more than a contribution to the body of tobacco-related propaganda. There is no reason for me to spend my energy saying something that everyone already knows. By viewing tobacco as something neutral, by returning to its innate qualities, I am simply engaging the material in a discussion, in an exchange. If the material is approached with a sense of moral or ethical judgment, then its true aspect will never be visible.

The exhibition also includes a time-based work: the 42-foot-long cigarette, which you are about to light. Is this a piece of performance art?

It is an installation work. It does require the actions of lighting and extinguishing the cigarette, but not in any ceremonious way.

The work on view at the Aldrich shows an obsession with cigarettes and tobacco culture. Do you smoke?

I don't. In fact, when I was “sent down” to the countryside in 1972 during the Cultural Revolution, I was a little overzealous, competing with the other “educated youth” in two categories. One: we competed over who wouldn't smoke. Before we sent off, we had all pledged not to smoke in the village. Among the more than 100 male educated youth in the commune, I was the only one who didn't take a single puff for the entire two years of our stay. I said I wasn't going to smoke, so I didn't smoke. There wasn't much to it. Two: we competed over who could stay there the longest between visits home. I would wait for a national or city level exhibition before I returned to Beijing, so I was frequently the only educated youth left at our post. There is a kind of satisfaction I get from this kind of self-restraint.

Xu Bing's "Tobacco Project" opens at the Aldrich museum in Ridgefield, Connecticut on Sunday, January 29, and runs through June 10. 

The Pavilion of Art and Design New York, the French design fair that launched a successful stateside edition last November, will not return to the Park Avenue Armory this year. In its place is a new, somewhat more focused fine art and design fair called the Salon of Art and Design, which will specialize in contemporary and 20th-century design. The fair will feature 53 dealers, many of whom participated in PAD, including New York’s Jason Jacques and Friedman Benda and Paris’s Galerie Vallois. 

“We’ll have the highest quality of art and design there is, and it will be primarily 20th-century, with just a few dealers who specialize in earlier work,” said veteran fair organizer Sanford Smith, who co-produced PAD NY with Patrick Perrin, founder of the French edition. For his new venture, Smith will team up with the Syndicat National des Antiquaires, a Paris-based association of 400 antiques, art, and design dealers that organizes the respected Biennale des Antiquaires. The partners hopes to recruit new names, like Tel Aviv’s Le Minotaure Gallery, alongside established galleries from PAD NY's roster.

The shift in leadership comes after Smith, who has a five-year contract with the Armory for the second week in November, clashed with PAD’s Perrin. Though Smith said sales were strong at the debut fair, he and Perrin disagreed over how to use resources. Booths at the reconceived design fair will cost dealers ten to 15 percent less than those at PAD, according to Smith, who promises the event will maintain “the same level of creature comforts and more.”

The breakup may be news to PAD. The Pavilion of Art & Design’s Web site currently advertises PAD NY’s return to the Armory from November 7-12, 2012. (Smith says the Salon of Art and Design will run from November 8-12.) A representative from PAD did not return a request for comment inquiring about the status or location of the fair.  

The design fair shuffle isn’t the only shakeup happening at the Armory. Two other fairs that were canceled in recent years due to the recession will return. The Works on Paper fair, which took place at the Armory for 21 years before being postponed in 2009, will return to Park Avenue in February 2013. It will run alongside a revived version of the design fair Modernism, which began in 1985 as New York’s first design show but went on hiatus last year. (PAD ran in its usual November time slot.) “I’ll split the Armory down the middle,” said Smith of his plans for the two-part fair, which will run from February 21-24, 2013.

Asked whether he felt New Yorkers had an appetite for more art fairs, Smith said, "I've always thought from the very beginning, in order to be successful you need a target market show. You don't need 20,000 people to attend, you need 3,000 to 5,000 serious people. These are target shows." 

It’s only getting easier and cheaper to make a music video these days — and all the more important, as artists compete to be heard, largely without the benefit of big pushes from major labels. For those reasons, the music video has undergone something of a mini-renaissance. Every week ARTINFO video editor Tom Chen, photo editor Micah Schmidt, and performing arts editor Nick Catucci will choose five of the most visually engaging music clips from the previous few days, presenting highlights from each in a video supercut, and a slideshow of stills that link back to the full videos.

This week:

Wilco bogey with Popeye and friends in “Dawned on Me.”

Matthew Dear take you inside a lava lamp with “In the Middle (I Met You There).”

Nicki Minaj pushes “hot” and “pink” into new territories in “Stupid Hoe.”

Kate Bush puts on a little show in “Eider Fields at Lake Tahoe.”

Mastadon take the expressway through your skull with “Dry Bone Valley.”

Previously: Music Videos from Shelly in Athens, the Kills, Adrian Younge Presents Venice Dawn, Nat Baldwin, and Black Pus
Ten Museum-Worthy Music Videos, From Bright Eyes to R.E.M.