On Saturday evening, an actor took the hay-strewn stage at the 159 Bleecker Street, site of the 2012 Brucennial, the regular alternative to the Whitney Biennial run by the Brooklyn artists’ collective known as the Bruce High Quality Foundation. “I wanna thank all the artists for participating in the most important group show ever in history,” he told the hundred or so audience members gathered for the event. What followed was not exactly a very important work of theater, but it was a very funny and surprisingly catchy 45-minute attack on the corporatization of the art world — specifically art education — and a barely disguised allegory of the Cooper Union’s current financial turmoil, which has the East Village college contemplating charging tuition for the first time in its 150 year history. 

In its essence, the piece was a burlesque of George Orwell's "Animal Farm." The scrappy production, with clunky props made out of foam and a modular set design composed of rectangular bales of hay, had a cast of five actors alternately playing pigs, chickens, and dogs.

As the house lights went down the only remaining light came from a giant foam pig head hung above the stage, its DIY-Tony Oursler-esque video face staring down ominously at the audience as it narrated the musical’s first two scenes in a computer-generated voice. The setting, we were told, was Bruce High Quality Foundation University (a stand-in for Cooper Union), and the action centered on the school's board of directors — represented by chickens — and its graduating class of students, represented by pigs. While the latter optimistically set off to make it in the art world, the former grappled with their tuition-free school’s faltering finances.

Amid musical numbers like "It's Not Easy Being Pink" and flurries of quick-fire animal puns, the remedy to save the once-independent school from corporate takeover — by a group of money-hungry dogs introduced to the tune of Snoop Dogg's "What’s My Name?" — was to start a brand new institution. Like the real-life BHQF, which famously has founded a free alternative university, the play's artist-pigs launched their own university, "Pigs Organized 'Round Kunst,'" or PORKU. The whole spectacle concluded with the student-professors of PORKU singing in a rousing chorus: "We only want to free your mind!"

What it (deliberately) lacked in polish, the Brucennial's "Animal Farm" compensated for with good humor and a handful of great, Christopher Guest-meets-William Powhida musical numbers, making it a slacker art-school work of political performance. You couldn't help but think that the message was a bit muddled though: The production posited founders of a new non-traditional school as its heroes, a post-show announcement reiterated the urgency of keeping the Cooper Union free. The man who had the production’s two light switches urged spectators to visit FreeCooperUnion.com and do everything in their power to keep the school from following the example of the onstage BHQFU.

When it comes to the biennale circuit, the United States doesn’t quite stand up to the rest of the world. The Whitney Biennial presents a mandatory stop for all New York art-world cognoscenti, but there’s nothing to rival the large-scale, international exhibitions of Venice, Gwangju, or Kassel. (New Orleans’ Prospect Biennial gave it a go in 2008 but seemed to lose steam with Prospect.2 in 2011.) In an unconventional move, the newly announced Dallas Biennale, organized by local art museum Dallas Contemporary and opening March 29, is trying to make a virtue of its own obvious minor-ness. It's not entirely clear if the new event is meant as a sincere play at biennial-dom, as a kind of satire of biennials, or as both at once.

"The motto of Dallas is 'Think Big,' and when you go there it's actually true, it's all about excess," organizer and Dallas Contemporary adjunct curator Florence Ostende told ARTINFO. Her approach is to "slow down the pace and the craziness, and bring each artist an individual space to work." A press release says that the new Biennial "is not an exhibition reviving the encyclopaedic format of other grand international surveys, but a critique of them," adding that it "is intended to ignite larger intellectual discussions surrounding international biennales and their growing lack of intellectual clarity and international standardization." Texas art Web site Glasstire has already dubbed it the "Un-Biennial."

In practice, what Ostende's vision means is an event focusing on solo shows, spread across six different local venues and featuring a modest 19 international artists, including Swiss installation artist Sylvie Fleury, Mexican conceptualist Mario Garcia Torres, and Dallas artist Michael Corris. Claude Leveque, Morehshin Allahyari, and Charlotte Moth are also highlighted. Venues include Dallas Contemporary, the Nasher Sculpture Center, and the Goss-Michael Foundation (the Dallas art venue part owned by UK pop singer George Michael). Fleury’s guerrilla exhibition will take the form of window displays in the Neiman Marcus department store. Corris, echoing Ostende’s anti-biennial formulations, will contribute a piece based on a list of all the things biennales shouldn't do, originally created for the 2005 Venice Biennale.

So, will the Dallas Biennale be the latest stop for the international art traveller? The Magic Eight Ball says 'try again later.' "It might only happen once," Ostende said. "I'm not sure." 

Italian design firm Avatar Architettura is well-known for their ability to turn recycled wooden pallets into inspiring works of art, and this fun pavilion in Italy is no different. Designed as a temporary art installation for the Villa Romana at the...

The Central Park bridge is really three bridges in a Z-shape. During the Games this will be the main pedestrian route, so the gaps between the bridges have been filled with this temporary rubber surface The Olympic Park pumping station...

March 5 marked Yves Saint Laurent creative director Stefano Pilati’s last runway show for the revered French fashion house, after eight years at the helm. Pilati’s first collection in spring 2005 introduced the tulip skirt, which became a women’s wardrobe staple. His following collections earned both praise and criticism: the Tribute sandal became the must-have item of spring 2008, while New York Times critic Cathy Horyn noted: “At times he seemed to struggle with the brand’s legacy and its future.”

Yves Saint Laurent co-founder Pierre Bergé snubbed Pilati repeatedly, by not inviting him to the opening gala of the Petit Palais Yves Saint Laurent retrospective in 2010 and refusing to attend Pilati’s fashion shows, while supporting other young designers such as Hedi Slimane and Riccardo Tisci. Like the fashion house’s namesake — who created pieces inspired by Van Gogh, Picasso, and Mondrian throughout his storied career — Pilati was often influenced by the art world, from 17th-century Flemish paintings of nuns to Robert Mapplethorpe’s photographs of men in leather. Museums like Centre Pompidou and the Palais de Tokyo also served as venues for runway shows. Here, we take a look back at how art played a role in Pilati’s Yves Saint Laurent collections.

Click on the slide show to see how art played a role in Stefano Pilati's tenure at Yves Saint Laurent.

– Master Forger Paints Himself as Art-Market Supervillain: Wolfgang Beltracchi may have been sentenced to six years in prison but he is still having a laugh at the art world. The German art forger was convicted in October of counterfeiting 14 paintings including works by Fernand Léger and Max Ernst, achieving some notoriety for fooling actor Steve Martin. Now he claims that he forged works by some 50 different artists and that due to the market's insatiable demand he may have produced from 1,000 to 2,000 fake works that are still on the market. Can you be sure that the masterpiece on your wall is not a Beltracchi? [Der Spiegel] 

– Venus's Original Outfit Uncovered: Chemical analysis of the 2,000-year-old "Medici Venus" displayed at Florence's Uffizi Galleries provides proof positive that, far from being a model of decorum, the all-white marble statue was once dressed to party. In Roman times, her lips were ruby red, her hair covered with gold leaf, and earrings hung through holes in her earlobes. All traces of colour were removed during an overenthusiastic restoration in the early 19th century. [Telegraph]

– More Controversy for 9/11 Museum: Families of some of the victims of September 11 have voiced opposition to a plan for storing human remains below the planned museum at Ground Zero, saying that they believe the remains should be placed in a tomb above ground, and that putting them deep within the museum is disrespectful to the dead. This isn't the first roadblock for the 9/11 Museum: it is also currently locked in a dispute over funding. [LAT]

– Whitney Gets Buzzy: From the Strange-But-True department: As part of a worldwide urban beekeeping movement, the Whitney Museum is installing beehives on its rooftop. The Whit is not the only museum to join the craze — across the Pond, the Tate's roof honey is sold in its gift shop. Adam Weinberg, who also had beekeepers install hives on the roof of his own brownstone, has asked artist Kiki Smith to design a label for the Whitney's honey. [New Yorker]

– Warhol Went to Church?: Music PR maven Susan Blond, who threw a baby out the window in Andy Warhol's movie "Bed" and became friends with the Pop artist during is heyday in New York, says in an interview that he "went to Church every Sunday." [AM New York]

– Legendary Czech Villa Reopens: The long-neglected Tugendhat villa has reopened to the public after a $9.2 million restoration project. The UNESCO world heritage site, which was built by the last director of the Bauhaus school of design, was occupied by the Gestapo during WWII and then ravaged by Soviet troops. [Bloomberg]

– Calling All Angels: A Dutch couple placed a cell phone in the hands of a recently-unveiled statue of an angel outside a cathedral in the Netherlands. Now, the sculpture, by Dutch artist Ton Mooy, receives about 30 calls a day from people in need, all answered by an anonymous woman. Unsurprisingly, the calls became much more frequent around the holidays. [NYT]   

– Melvan for Sale: Attention '80s rock fans: the Melvins' first tour van, which features a hand-drawn mural by Kurt Cobain, is now for sale on eBay. The bid is currently up to $4.9 million, with 18 people still bidding. [Audio Ink]

– Restoring Stereotypes: A plan to recreate a mural in San Antonio that was removed in the 1960s after Mexican-American activists protested its racist imagery is now generating protests of its own. Not surprisingly, the mural's imagery — which included a Mexican figure sleeping with a sombrero over his face and another standing with a burro — is still considered offensive by many. [Yahoo] 

– High Line Air Fetches High Prices: The value of the air rights adjacent to New York City's High Line park have reached stratospheric levels. A square foot of air alongside the elevated park is now worth $500, or $125 more than the dirt beneath it — typically, Manhattan air rights cost half the price of the land under them. [NYPost]

– Ansel Adams Trove Goes to the Getty: The California institution has received a 25-photograph "Museum Set" by Ansel Adams from Carol Vernon and Robert Turbin. Adams allowed collectors to select 25 images from a collection of 2,500 negatives, dubbing the small grouping a "Museum Set." [Art Market Monitor]

– Museum Investments Pay Off: The Association of Leading Visitor Attractions has announced that, in the UK, museums that have been recently refurbished are also the most popular. At 141 percent, Edinburgh's National Museum of Scotland has seen the country's largest increase in visitors after a £47 million ($74.38 million) redevelopment. Still, the sturdy British Museum remains the most popular gallery for the fifth consecutive year with 5,848,534 visitors. [Press Release]

– ForYourArt Gets a Project Space: ForYourArt, a Web site which markets itself as a definitive guide to the Los Angeles art world, has secured a storefront on Wilshire Boulevard across from LACMA that will function as a gallery and conference space. [Press Release]

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Beauty often goes hand-in-hand with impermanence. New York-based Chinese artist Cui Fei takes this to an extreme with her current project for the Museum of Arts and Design’s exhibition “Swept Away: Dust, Ashes, and Dirt in Contemporary Art and Design.” For the show, which explores the artistic possibilities of the titular materials, Cui has created "Tracing the Origins VIII," a series of sand paintings using a technique familiar from Tibetan colored sand mandalas. The artist uses black sand to draw out a series of abstracted shapes that reference graceful calligraphy and the splintering, organic forms of tree branches in equal measure. Cui uses Chinese characters "as a way to explore the relationship between human beings and nature," she explains.

In this video, ARTINFO takes a look behind the scenes of the exhibition, following along as Cui installs her work on the museum floor and talking to the artist and MAD chief curator David McFadden about ephemerality, meaning, and language. Get a glimpse of this thoughtful work before it gets literally swept away: 

"Swept Away" runs at New York's Museum of Art and Design through August 12, 2012

Say what you will about Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld, the young art dealer son of former French Vogue editor Carine Roitfeld. Though he has been criticized as a dilettante riding on a famous name, one thing is certain: the 27-year-old knows how to generate some serious buzz. Hot off the heels of a successful exhibition of Ivorian painter Ouattara Watts during Fashion Week, Roitfeld’s latest show is garnering attention as much for its chosen venue as for the art.

The exhibition will showcase works by French painter Nicolas Pol at a space most artists could only dream of showing: a private home owned by one of the world’s great art collectors on New York’s Upper East Side. The 45-foot-wide, 22,000-square-foot building also happens to be the former home of one of the city’s most notorious galleries, Salander-O'Reilly. Roitfeld convinced the new owner, real estate mogul Aby Rosen, to turn over two of the brownstone's five floors to Pol, who will install a never-before-seen series devoted to a fictional theme park he's calling Neverlodge. 

"The whole curatorial process is different from anything we've done before — we're dealing with 12 or 13 rooms," Roitfeld told ARTINFO. The home, which is not Rosen's own residence but is owned by his real estate company, has now been taken over by a vibrant, graffiti-inspired series that looks a bit like what might happen if Gorky met Basquiat at a sinister Six Flags. Most of the paintings in the show are already sold or on hold at prices ranging from $40,000 to $60,000.

The exhibition is also significant because it is Roitfeld’s second consecutive show produced without his partner in crime, Andy Valmorbida, the young Australian dealer with whom Roitfeld mounted pop-up exhibitions by Richard Hambleton and threw glamorous art parties around the world. (All of Pol's previous New York shows, however, were produced by Roitfeld alone.) Valmorbida is now pursuing his own private dealership, Valmorbida & Co., based in Europe. "Like everything in life, people decide to make changes," Roitfeld said of the duo's decision to pursue independent projects, noting that they remain friends.

The world of Neverlodge is part brothel, part ticketed amusement park. "It's about vices, a sin-oriented place, but it’s also about luxury," Pol said of the colorful paintings. And indeed, what better location for such an exhibition than a disgraced gallery-turned-private mansion for sale? Though Pol says he's been pondering the series of paintings and sculptures for a long time, "when I saw the place, I thought that it made sense."    

"Neverlodge" opens on March 6 at 22 E 71st Street in New York.  

In 2007, the Czech artist Roman Tyc used stencils to replace the green and red pedestrians on 50 streetlights at major intersections with funny or disturbing images: a peeing man, a figure hanging from a rope, a sensuous playmate, a crucifixion victim, even a man defecating. But a Czech court didn’t find it amusing. Tyc was charged with vandalism and was recently ordered to pay 80,000 korunas ($4,260) in damages as well as 60,000 korunas ($3,200) in fines, according to Courrier International.

The artist (whose real name is David Hons) agreed to pay the damages, but refused to pay the fines. Now he finds himself behind bars. Tyc calls his project “Semaphores,” and since he’s been in prison his fans have picked up where he left off. All over the Czech Republic, people have been decapitating streetlight pedestrians by placing black stickers over their heads. In this way they’re showing their support of an artist who many Czechs consider to be a harmless free spirit.

In a way, jail time represents the culmination of Tyc’s project, which involves “showing that the state is a dumb, repressive machine,” according to Hospodarske Noviny. Tyc belongs to Ztohoven, a subversive collective that seeks to short-circuit official communication networks in order to dismantle their power. Most famously, Ztohoven — whose name translates either as “one hundred shits” or “getting out of this” — hacked into the Czech public television station CT2 and showed images of a fake nuclear explosion.

In another show of support for Tyc, citizens baked cakes and brought them to Prague’s Pankrak prison when he was taken there in late February. After his wife decided to bake a cake for the artist, local businessperson Petr Vidensky used Facebook to invite others to do the same. “It’s really disturbing that the Czech president decides to pardon real criminals and that an artist has to spend time in prison,” Vidensky told France 24. “How can someone who has won awards in Austria for his work be tried and jailed for that same work in his own country?” Due to security regulations, Tyc was not allowed to take the cakes into the prison. But a petition demanding his pardon has collected 6,000 signatures so far. 

In 2010, a bus driver named Smetana served 100 days in prison for having slashed campaign posters. “People like Tyc and Smetana are not criminals and don’t deserve prison time,” Vidensky said. “We live in a democracy. I’ve been to countries where people are oppressed. I feel like all this could have happened in Belarus, but that it never should have happened here.”

Click on the slide show to see more images of Roman Tyc’s streetlights.

"The Art Show hangs in the Armory on Park, while the Armory is parked in a hangar on the river," quipped Mayor Bloomberg this morning at the Park Avenue Armory just before praising both shows for their contribution to New York's vast cultural industry.  

Art fair week in New York kicked off with those words as dealers put the last nails in the walls and finished installing their booths for tomorrow's opening of the Art Dealers Association of America's "Art Show" and Thursday's public unveiling of the Armory Show, as well as the various satellite fairs and shows throughout the city over the next week. The event was all-hands-on-deck — Mayor Bloomberg was joined by the executive director and the president of ADAA, Linda Blumberg and Lucy Mitchell-Innes, respectively, as well as New York City's commissioner of cultural affairs Kate Levin, the director of the Armory Show Paul Morris, and artist Sarah Sze, whose work is exhibited at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery's booth at the ADAA fair and who will represent the United States at the 2013 Venice Biennale.

After finishing his prepared remarks (which included a second use of his quip about the two fairs and giddy praise for his speechwriter), Bloomberg stood for a few moments discussing his art purchases with dealer Richard Feigen, including a couple of paintings he had picked up for a steal at auction (ARTINFO is terribly disappointed to report being just out of earshot of hearing which works those were). Among other things, the mayor mentioned that one of his first art purchases was a $5,000 painting he bought (with a little loaned help) back when his salary was only $9,000 a year. On his way out, we found ourselves standing next to the mayor, and asked if he considered himself a collector (rumors of his affinity for Italian Old Masters, Andy Warhol, and Jasper Johns abound).

"I try to," he responded.

To see a preview of the ADAA Art Show, click on the slide show. 

The ’60s marked a cultural coup for the disenchanted children of the prim and proper ’50s. Dresses became shorter and tighter. Miniskirts revealed more skin. Young people turned to counterculture as a form of rebellion, beginning the decade with the bowl haircuts and hip suits of the mod scene and ending it with the long hair and bell bottoms of the hippies. The Museum at FIT pays homage to the era with an exhibition titled “Youthquake! The 1960s Fashion Revolution.”

Diana Vreeland, who was editor-in-chief of Vogue at the time, coined the term Youthquake in 1963 to describe the new youthful cultural phenomenon that combined music, fashion, and political discontent, and was shaking things up in the United States and Europe. The show, which runs through April 7, opens with a 1965 quote from the magazine: “Under 24 and 90 million strong in the U.S. alone. More dreams. More doers. Here. Now. Youthquake.” Bob Dylan’s face greets viewers through a 1968 Harry Gordon paper shift dress covered by his photo.

The exhibition leads visitors through the Carnaby Street boutique boom in London and the iconic New York shop Paraphernalia, where Betsey Johnson got her start making dresses for Edie Sedgwick, who was the store’s house model. Tear sheets from Life and Vogue show models like Lauren Hutton and Pattie Boyd in pieces by Johnson and iconic mod designer Mary Quant. “Youthquake!” also explores how high fashion designers like Yves Saint Laurent and mass-market labels such as Trimfit Hoisery ­– represented by a bright blue pair of tights that, according to the package, are “inspired by Twiggy” – interpreted the style of the times. In total, more than 30 garments, accessories, videos, and other memorabilia bring the ’60s back to life. The show might have benefited from some appropriate music – perhaps a bit of Jimi Hendrix, the Beatles, or the Who – but a wall display of album covers paid necessary tribute to a handful of pop and rock icons of the era. 

Click on the slide show to see more images from “Youthquake! The 1960s Fashion Revolution.”