Japanese artist Misaki Kawai, best known for her childlike drawings of goofy characters, cartoon animals, and anthropomorphized objects, looked very much at home on Tuesday in a paint-splattered jumpsuit standing next to a giant, fuzzy pink dog twice her height. She had just finished grooming the creature, part of her installation “Love From Mt. Pom Pom” at New York’s Children’s Museum of the Arts (CMA), with an oversized wooden comb.

The CMA was founded in 1988 with the aim of inspiring and supporting the next generation of artists. As in, artistically precocious children. In October 0f last year, it moved into a new, 10,000-square-foot space in SoHo. Kawai’s new installation is the largest solo exhibition that CMA has ever shown, filling the institution’s central gallery with a menagerie of creatures great and small. This delightful circus ranges from the abovementioned unmissable dog to smiling banana-stools, snake-tables, and floor-to-ceiling, cardboard-and-paint figures whom curator Prescott Trudeau refers to as “yoga gymnastics dudes.” (Kawai pointed out their sweatbands.)  

Energetic and unpretentious, “Mt. Pom Pom” provides a perfect centerpiece for a museum devoted to kids, but the project is also in keeping with Kawai’s personal sensibilities. It is, in other words, a perfect fit. In a temporary studio at the Woolworth Building, Kawai worked with a team of volunteers that included local children to complete the objects in the show. “Their wobbly hands were great for me,” she said, laughing.

The artist’s rough, faux-naif style follows an aesthetic called “heta-uma,” a Japanese term that Kawai translates as “bad technique, good sense.” Pioneered by the Japanese graphic designer King Terry, heta-uma is characterized by the rough lines, deliberately awkward shapes, and twisted poses, all themes that are visible throughout the CMA installation.  

Trudeau, the small museum’s only full-time curator, explained that he chooses artists to work with based on their ability to appeal to a variety of audiences — the most important, of course, being the very young — and to create installations that can stand up to the abuse of daily activity. “The mission of the museum is to make art more accessible for children,” he noted. “Our galleries are unique because when you’re exhibiting here you have to expect that the art is going to get looked at and experienced in a different way than anywhere else.” In Kawai’s case, the art will get jumped around, sat on, and even worn, with a selection of fanciful costumes available for kids (of any age) to try on.

The Children’s Museum boasts a permanent collection of 2,000 pieces of art, mostly works on paper, all made by children, ranging throughout the 20th century. It is also an active space for art-making, with two studios, a media lab, a sound booth, a ball pit — yes, a ball pit! — and a daily schedule of storytelling sessions and art activities, led by local teaching artists. The entire museum is participatory in nature, privileging the power of creativity over art’s ability to overwhelm and awe. “It’s about the process, not the results,” pointed out the museum’s early childhood center director Tom Burnett.

Back in the main gallery, Kawai continued grooming the big dog, enthusiastically swiping at its fur alongside husband Justin Waldron. “What is it?” one visiting mother asked, a perplexed expression crossing her face. Kawai looked up at the creature and grinned. “Hmm, I wonder. What do you think it is?”

"Love From Mt. Pom Pom" runs at the New York Children's Museum of the Arts through June 10

The first large-scale exhibition dedicated to the early career of Keith Haring opens today at the Brooklyn Museum, but back in the ’80s you didn’t need to go to a museum or gallery to see the late pop artist’s work. If you bumped into Haring in those days, he might have felt inspired enough to scrawl his signature characters on your shoes or T-shirt. In 1984, budding pop star Madonna wore a custom Keith Haring hot pink jacket and skirt while performing “Dress You Up” at his birthday party at the Paradise Garage. Haring’s bold black lines, a mash-up of tribal-esque curves and zigzags mixed in with his characters, brought the singer’s outfit to life. Haring even opened the Pop Shop on Lafayette Avenue in New York to hawk his wares.  

“It’s amazing how Keith basically customized anything that walked into his line of sight, from shoes to pants, people — everything and just the way he kind of applied his art — he made it very accessible and real,” said designer Jeremy Scott in a promotional video for his Adidas collaboration with the Keith Haring Foundation, which supports AIDS and children’s charities.

Even now fashion is still influenced by Haring’s playful pop illustrations. Designers and labels including Patricia Field, Scott, Zara, Nicholas Kirkwood, Levi’s, and Tommy Hilfiger constantly collaborate with the Keith Haring Foundation on lines of clothing and accessories, putting the artist’s work on display using people as moving gallery walls. Some designers put a fresh spin on the artist’s work by merging it with their own aesthetic, while others simply throw a Haring drawing on a bikini or T-shirt. And musicians still follow Madonna’s lead: pop star Justin Bieber and rapper Lil Wayne have worn Haring items on stage.

Scott, who also made a Haring leather jacket for the clothing brand Schott, began putting the artist’s drawings on Adidas sneakers, leggings, and tracksuits in 2006. In the video, he said that he thought he could “breathe some new life into [Haring’s work] through my vocabulary using his textile print and doing something that could be bringing it to a new audience or bringing it back up to date.”

Last year, British shoe designer Kirkwood created a capsule collection with the foundation. He turned a Haring character into a heel for one, and covered a black Haring pattern all over another. “I saw so many shapes within Keith Haring’s artwork that I thought could translate in a really beautiful way on to a shoe,” Kirkwood told Nowness.com.

Not everyone can afford to own an original Haring, but for much less you can have a bit of Haring in your wardrobe and wear his art on the streets.

Click on the slide show to see Keith Haring fashion collaborations.

Every Friday ARTINFO video editor Tom Chen, photo editor Micah Schmidt, and performing arts editor Nick Catucci choose five of the most visually engaging music videos from the previous week. Here are descriptions and a slideshow of stills linking to the full clips, plus highlights from each in video supercut. Today ...

Orbital’s “New France” finds them partying with a very sad puppet.

Danny Brown stalks around attacking rap clichés, backed up only by himself, for “Radio Song.”

In “Knight Rider,” the rapper Exile does his best Gene Wilder in “Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory,” but instead of helming a nightmarish boat ride, he’s driving drunk.

In Vaura’s “Drachma,” sea, land, and people are ground down to oily textures.

“Juicy J Can’t” shows the titular MC’s head run through a kaleidoscope.

Previously: Björk, Big K.R.I.T., Christian Mistress, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Factory Floor

Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Fashion, and Performing Arts, March 12-16, 2012:

ART

— In a four-part series, ART+AUCTION asked an esteemed group of collectors and gallerists — including Tim Blum, Lucy Mitchell-Innes, and Marc Glimcher — for their thoughts on the current state of the art market, and where they think it's headed. Check out part one, part two, part three, and part four.

— The lavish European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) got underway in Maastricht. We previewed selections from the fair's 25th edition, while Paul Laster reported from the opening that it was off to a strong start.

— The 340-ton boulder for Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass" installation at LACMA finally touched down last weekend. ARTINFO Los Angeles correspondent Holly Myers spoke to museum director Michael Govan about why nothing comparable could be done in New York, as well as offering some reflections of her own on what the whole thing meant.

— After the Armory Week dust settled, we recalled some of the lessons we took away from the Armory Show's heated art finance panel.

— It may have grabbed headlines with an online exhibition curated by Marina Abramovic and a James Franco performance, but Shane Ferro figured out what art site Paddle8 is really up to.

DESIGN & FASHION

— Janelle Zara reviewed the new renderings for the third and final section of New York's High Line park, and then compared them to five projects for similar post-industrial parks around the world.

— Ann Binlot used economist George Taylor's historically semi-accurate Hemline Index to prognosticate about the trajectory of global financial markets based on five fashion houses' Fall 2012 collections.

— Detroit-based painter Hernan Bas explained the inspiration behind the luxury bindles he designed for Louis Vuitton.

— French automaker Peugeot unveilved its new DL 122 bicycle, which comes equipped with a laptop-sized cargo space that will prove useful for "nerds on the go."

— Online music site SoundCloud and 3-D printing site Shapeways debuted The Vibe, a collaboration that lets music lovers get their favorite songs transformed into iPhone cases.

PERFORMING ARTS

— ARTINFO film correspondent J. Hoberman reported from SXSW, where he was shoved by cops outside the "21 Jump Street" premiere, but still managed to enjoy the indie heist comedy "Gimme the Loot."

— Reviewing the new documentary "Gerhard Richter Painting" by Corinna Belz, which opened in New York this week, Graham Fuller wrote: "This is good, as far as it goes, but watching an artist paint is like, well, watching paint dry, no matter how great he or she is or how worthy of study."

— Stage veteran Linda Emond talked about working with director Mike Nichols — and a cast of screen stars that includes Philip Seymour Hoffman and Andrew Garfield — on a new Broadway production of Arthur Miller's "Death of a Salesman."

— With renewed focus on silent cinema following an Oscar sweep by "The Artist," a restored version of Abel Gance’s legendary 1927 silent film "Napoleon" — all 330 minutes of it — will screen later this month at the San Francisco Silent Film Festival.

— Ann Binlot concludes that NBC's new show "Fashion Star" provides what the world of high-style reality television has been sorely lacking since the very first episode of Bravo's "Project Runway."

OTHER

— ARTINFO provided artists with a helpful resource listing the 20 best artist residencies and retreats in the United States.

VIDEO

— Video editor Tom Chen offered a glimpse at the upcoming Asia Week exhibitions in New York:

We've covered some innovative lamp designs before — knotted scarves and violent, Harry Potter-esque lightning bolts, for example. Artemide's Cosmic Leaf by Ross Lovegrove is right up there with them. The sinuously curving bit of foliage is crafted from transparent methacrylate. Textured with a raised pattern of scales, it diffuses light in a way that creates a strange pixelated illusion, as if it were digitally placed in your living room and taking too long to load.

As a recent addition to the permanent collection, the Cosmic Leaf is currently on view in the Art Institute of Chicago's "Rethinking Typologies" through July 29. 

Uruguay’s contemporary art scene, like the country itself, isn’t exactly huge. This makes the often-overlooked Latin American nation, located between Argentina and Brazil like the hinge on a giant arm, the sort of place where a couple of motivated collectors can really make an impact.

Alex and Carrie Vik have done just that. An international power couple (he’s Swedish, she’s American) with houses in New York, Greenwich, and southern France, the Viks had been visiting and buying art in Uruguay for years. And when they opened two hotels there recently, Estancia Vik and Playa Vik, the goal wasn’t simply to provide a place to stay — it was to offer a glimpse of the very satisfying life they lead there.

Judging from the hotels, that life is a gorgeous one filled with art. Both properties have earned accolades in all the right travel publications. Estancia, which opened in 2009 and sits at the end of a long, winding driveway overlooking farmland populated with cows and ostrich, is the epitome of haute ranch living. A river literally runs through it, and it has its own polo field.

Playa, designed by noted Uruguayan architect Carlos Ott, has made waves for its innovative design since opening in 2010. It’s five miles away from Estancia, worlds away aesthetically, and occupies arguably the choicest beach spot in the exclusive little resort town of Jose Ignacio, just outside hard-partying Punta del Este.

Erected into a rolling and perfectly manicured lawn and opening onto the sea, the sculptural central building at Playa Vik is a true showstopper. The way in is through a one-ton bronze door, made by Uruguayan sculptor Pablo Atchugarry in oxidized blue and with his signature accordion pleats. Above the living room, three suites overlook the cantilevered pool through the building’s inclined glass façade. The pool floor is dotted with tiny lights, and one of the great joys during the two nights I spent there last spring was watching them play beautifully against the stars before bed.

Six casas, containing two or three bedrooms each, half-encircle the main building, forming a courtyard in between that boasts an Anselm Kiefer sculpture. The interior design of these rooms and those inside the main building is uncluttered and eclectic. There are Asian-influenced quarters with rice-paper sliding doors and gigantic tubs. There’s a room with cabin bunks, derived from traditional Norwegian farmhouses. And there’s the Fuerteventura suite, the room I stayed in, decorated with ocean photographs by Montserrat Soto and kitted out with riveted-aluminum bathroom elements inspired, Alex revealed during our tour, by Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge.

Alex and Carrie like to explain that Playa began as their own house, but that their plans for it kept expanding until the only way they could justify moving forward with the project was to share it. And, one assumes, try to turn a profit — they’re entrepreneurs, after all.

More than their other projects, though, this one is an extension of their personal lives. The idea of the art hotel isn’t all that new anymore, and the Viks are right to think the concept is ready to evolve a bit. Alex told me he’d found limited inspiration in the Colombe d’Or, the mid-century artist hangout in southern France where customers sometimes paid their bills with works that still decorate the walls today, and Madrid’s much newer Puerta America hotel, where he once stayed in a suite designed by Zaha Hadid. “We’d seen different hotels that had done art, but I don’t think we were wowed by them,” he says.

At Playa in particular, you get the feeling you’re in a collector’s dream house. “We buy because we love something, because it inspires us, not because we’re thinking about what our guests are going to like,” Carrie says. They have Uruguayan art in their other houses, too, and not all the pieces in the hotels were bought with the hotel mind.

Perhaps this fluid approach doesn’t always pay off: a mural in the Caras suite, populated with many faces of model Devon Aoki and one of Alex, seems to be more about patron-pleasing than enriching a room you’d want to sleep in. Much more often, however, the results are wonderful, the compromises invisible or even a value-add. Even if, for example, Carlos Musso now sometimes works in a hotel-friendly style – “Vikismo,” he calls it — the pieces that result are hardly anodyne. What’s more, some of the less hospitable art has found serious favor among guests. Take the Trujillo suite at Estancia Vik, which the owners are the first to admit isn’t everyone’s cup of tea. Several years ago, a young Boston couple was so taken with the artist’s intimate nudes that they bought them all, set him up with a three-month studio stint in the States, and arranged a gallery show for him in New York. (Similarly, at least one artwork in fashion designer Jason Wu’s New York office is a direct result of his stay at Estancia.)

The hotels are made for art, Alex emphasizes, and not vice versa. “In our own houses, we had the house and put the art in it. Here, the difference is the art is part of the construction.” Without necessarily planning to, the Viks have become, if not the most influential collectors in Uruguay, at least the ones with the most tangible impact on the country’s contemporary-art practitioners. “Many of them, you see their prices have gone up significantly since our project,” Carrie points out. “It’s fun to see them being more confident and inspired, their careers moving to another level.”

What’s more, their pet project may end up as a model for others. “We’ve had visitors come down to stay, and we find out that they’re decorators or developers who’ve come to scout out what we’ve been doing,” Alex says. He and his wife seem as though they’ve got nothing to hide, and with a new art-themed program this winter are opening up their world like never before: the six-day itinerary includes an asado, or traditional barbecue, artist-led tours of both hotels, and a day trip to Atchugarry’s museum and rambling sculpture garden.

Next up is Chile, where the Viks have a winery and hotel in the works. They’re taking a more active role in the architecture this time, and learning the ins and outs of a completely different art scene. “Uruguay is more figurative, more textural — it’s more about the pure fine arts. Chile, I think, is closer to what international contemporary art is: more conceptual, which can slide over into decorative and crafty,” Alex says.

The Chile project is terra nova, the Viks point out. After all, they never really wintered or collected there. In Uruguay, Carrie noted, “we had a five or ten-year head start.”

Click on the slide show to see images of Estancia Vik and Playa Vik.

– Dances With Bison Sculptor: Twenty years ago, "Dances With Wolves" star Kevin Costner commissioned artist Peggy Detmers to create a monumental artwork for a resort he was planning outside Deadwood, South Dakota, a dramatic image featuring 17 bronze sculptures of Native-Americans chasing a herd of bison over a cliff. Today, the resort still hasn't broken ground, the project has brought Detmers's career to a standstill, and the pair are facing off in South Dakota's Supreme Court. It may just be Costner's biggest flop since "Waterworld." [WSJ] 

– Berggruen's Grand Plan: The art collector son of legendary art dealer Heinz Berggruen — called the "homeless billionaire" because he prefers living out of hotels to homes — has been working closely with LACMA to assemble an extensive and impressive list of major acquisitions, ultimately intended to be donated to the museum. The list consists of work by 12 artists, including Ed Ruscha, John Baldessari, Paul McCarthy, Mike Kelley, Charles Ray, Joseph Beuys, and Gerhard Richter. (As reporter Jori Finkel notes, all are male, all are white, and five are represented by Gagosian.) [LAT]

– Catskill Plans Citywide OWS Art Project: The Catskill Mountains will be playing host to a series of exhibitions of commissioned art by Occupy Wall Street activists and local artists. Part of a city-wide initiative in the town of Catskill called "Wall Street to Main Street," the three-month-long political art event is an effort to attract tourists and spur artist-activated economic development. [Almanac]  

– Art Saves Stroke Sufferers, Study Says: Arts appreciation may be key to a successful stroke recovery. According to a new study of 192 stroke survivors, those interested in the arts were found to be happier, less depressed, and have a generally better quality of health and life. [Hindustan Times]

– California Takes Arts Funding Into Overdrive: The California Arts Council will tap the golden state's two greatest resources — cars and celebrities — to boost its abysmal arts funding by promoting a series of special arts license plates to donors who make charitable contributions to the state's arts grants. Celebrities backing the new "Create a State" campaign including Robert Redford, Annette Bening, actor-collector Steve Martin, architect Frank Gehry, and Ed Ruscha. The project's aim is to boost arts license plates sales from 60,000 to over 1 million annually; the Arts Council gets $35 for each new plate sold. (Previously painter Wayne Thiebaud did a plate for the program — though its palm tree imagery was deemed too "SoCal" for those further north.) [LAT]

– Ten Egyptian Looters Die During Illegal Excavation: The looters were buried when the walls of the well they had dug under a house in Arab al-Masnara, just north of Luxor, collapsed. Mansouk Boraik, head of the antiquities department at Luxor, told AFP that the Egyptian authorities had to "work on several levels to stop these dreams of easy money, people digging looking for a mirage." [Journal des Arts]

– Boston's Levitated Classical Sculpture: A 2nd century sculpture of the goddess Juno will roll up to Boston's Museum of Fine Arts on Tuesday in a rig reminiscent of that used to transport Michael Heizer's "Levitated Mass." Delivered lying down on a flatbed truck with its fragile head temporarily removed for the journey, the antiquity will be lifted into the MFA by crane through a skylight, then rolled through a gallery doorway that was expanded by a foot and a half just to accommodate the sculpture's delivery. [WSJ]

– Ennery Museum Reopens in Paris: The museum, linked to the Musée National des Arts Asiatiques Guimet, was created to host a collection of Chinese and Japanese art bequeathed to the French state by Clémence d'Ennery in 1894. Closed since 1996, it will officially reopen its doors on April 5, more than a century after its first inauguration in 1908. [Connaissance des Arts]

– Damien Hirst's Market Heist: On the eve of the Tate's highly-anticipated Damien Hirst retrospective, author Hari Kunzru once again considers the artist's relationship to the market. "This isn't just art that exists in the market, or is 'about' the market," he writes. "This is art that is the market — a series of gestures that are made wholly or primarily to capture and embody financial value, and only secondarily have any other function or virtue." (Meanwhile, Art Market Monitor disagrees.) [Guardian] 

– Warhol Museum Gets a New Curator: Australia native Nicholas Chambers, formerly the curator of contemporary international art at the Queensland Art Gallery, will assume his new role in April. [Pittsburgh Post-Gazette] 

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Watch the trailer for "The Virgins, Part 4" at Maurizio Cattelan and Massimiliano Gioni's Family Business gallery:

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MAASTRICHT, The Netherlands — A crowd of well-heeled art consultants and collectors quickly poured into the lush, tulip-filled aisles of TEFAF, the European Fine Art Fair in Maastricht, on its second of 11 days. Queen Beatrix of the Netherlands had already made a preview visit to mark the Silver Jubilee of the exclusive fair during its considerable vetting period, while royalty of another kind — American fashion designer Calvin Klein — had made the rounds and a pricey purchase of a colorful painting of a drag queen from Andy Warhol’s shocking, mid-’70s Ladies and Gentlemen series for $2.5 million at New York’s Van de Weghe Fine Art, on opening day.

TEFAF’s strict vetting process, which is overseen by committees of exhibiting and non-exhibiting experts in the various categories on view — ranging from Tribal art, historical manuscripts, classical antiquities, and Old Master works to vintage design furniture, photography from all periods, and Modern and Contemporary art. “People can buy here with great confidence,” said London’s Johnny van Haeften, a founding member of the fair, “because they know that every single item — whether it be a humble spoon, a chair, a piece of jewelry, or painting — whatever it is, it has been vetted by a team of experts, which is important.”

“A lot of business is done at TEFAF,” added Van Haeften, having already sold a gorgeous, million-dollar Jacob van Walscapelle flower painting from the 17th-century, as well as numerous other masterworks. “Curators and collectors can see 70-to-80 percent of the available supply of Old Masters in one building. They don’t have to travel to Paris and then onto Quebec and Munich. All of the major galleries are here; and they’re all next door to each other. It’s a microcosm of the art world.”

The neighboring Richard Green of London had another magical, floral still life by Rachel Ruysch, a rare woman Dutch master. The 44-by-36 inch oil on canvas is arguably one of the largest paintings of its type. Painted in 1700, it’s priced at £2.75 million. Nearby, Munich’s Bernheimer-Colnaghi featured a magnificent Peter Paul Rubens crucifixion painting from the 17th century of a dying Christ on the cross that is believed to have been painted by the artist’s own hand. Coming on the market with a strong provenance, the €3.5 million canvas has been in a private Spanish collection since 1976.

Highlighting Old Master and Modern paintings and sculptures, Dickinson of London and New York is offering Vincent van Gogh’s the Potato Diggers for $3.75 million. The haunting 1883 oil on paper that’s mounted on canvas shows peasant workers depicted with powerful, abstract brushstrokes. Another modernist masterpiece, Henry Moore’s Reclining Figure: Curved is reportedly the most expensive item for sale at the fair at around $35 million. Prominently featured at the entrance to the booth of Landau Fine Art from Montreal, the unique and sensuous black marble sculpture from 1977 was acquired by an American collector directly from Moore’s studio.

An exceptional piece that could undoubtedly rival the cost of the Moore work is Pablo Picasso’s 1917 painting Portrait of Olga Khokhlova. According to Martin Summers of Geneva’s Galerie Krugier & Cie, the artist’s classical period and somewhat moody portrayal of his first wife was brought to the fair for other reasons. “Many people bring paintings here to show what they have in stock,” Summers said. “This time we wanted to create a thematic exhibition of arms, hands, and elbows. The affinity between the Ingres painting, the Jawlensky canvas, and portrait of Olga was irresistible. When people walk into our booth they think they’re walking into a small museum. Not many people are going to want to buy that painting [which is owned by Pablo and Olga’s granddaughter Marina] because it would have to be expensive.”

Krugier, however, has plenty of other Picasso works to sell, as did many other exhibitors. Van de Weghe has a charming, small canvas of a Musketeer’s head from 1967 for $2.85 million and Dickinson has a larger painting of a musketeer, also from 1967, for €5.5 million. Meanwhile, drawing another affinity with the priceless portrait of Olga, Landau had an enchanting, 1964 depiction of the artist’s last wife, Jacqueline, in monochromatic, brown tones.

Another artist with high visibility at the fair was Andy Warhol, with portraits popping up at multiple booths; but the biggest Warhol display making a buzz was the cache of early-drawings on view at Daniel Blau. Blau sold 20 of the 25 intriguing line drawings, priced between €20,000 and €60,000, on the first day and had to transport another batch of the simply framed works from his Munich gallery overnight to have available inventory for the rest of the week.

Fresh off strong 2011 auction sales of works by Gerhard Richter, a number of galleries in the TEFAF’s Modern section brought paintings by what’s shaping up to be Contemporary art’s leading artist. Seoul’s Kukje Gallery had two of Richter’s abstract paintings: one from 2004 at 50-by-34 inches for $4 million and a smaller one from 1999 for $700,000. Van de Weghe had a prize, large-scale abstraction for $5.5 million and Anthony Meier Fine Art from San Francisco had a great group of Richter’s painted photos from 2000 of the Arno River in Venice from €50,000 each and a pair of painted phonograph records from the 1990s for €115,000 a piece. It was Meier, however, who struck Richter gold first, with the sale of one of his coveted realistic landscape paintings for €4.3 million.

Antwerp’s eclectic gallerist Axel Vervoodt reported 15 sales in the first two days, including an impressive, action painting by Japanese artist Kazuo Shiraga of the influential Gutai group for €950,000. TEFAF chairman and Asian art dealer Ben Jannsens reported 40 sales between €3,000 and $500,000. “Last year I made 20 new clients that I didn’t have before,” said Janssens. “That’s significant.”

Finally, on the contemporary end — which oddly has to exist under the Modern section of TEFAF — New York and London’s Haunch of Venison quickly placed a new painting on paper by Iraqi artist Ahmed Alsoudani with a collector, who has promised to donate it to a museum, for $65,000, while Leo Villareal, an American artist who has been sparkling in galleries and museums around the world for the past 20 years, made a big impact on everyone coming and going.

Commissioned to create a special light sculpture for the entrance (and exit) of the fair, Villareal programmed 20,000 white LEDs on a mirror-finished stainless steel structure to construct a pulsating piece that had deep-pocketed visitors in awe. Much more than just decoration, Villareal’s Cylinder II can be taken home via his New York gallery, Gering and Lopez, for a mere $950,000. Luxury doesn’t get any better than this dynamic bit of contemporary bling.

Click on the slide show to see images from TEFAF.

After a few months of “will he or won’t he” speculation, James Murdoch informed Sotheby’s that he won’t be seeking re-election to the board of the auction house. The son of embattled media mogul Rupert Murdoch has served on the house’s board for two years. He will step down in order to focus on his responsibilities as deputy chief officer of the scandal-ridden News Corp, according to a regulatory filing. The decision comes after several major organizations publicly called for Murdoch to leave his post due to his association in News Corp’s explosive phone-hacking scandal.

“James Murdoch has been a valued member of Sotheby’s board and during his tenure Sotheby’s has benefited greatly from his broad-based marketing and brand management experience, his guidance regarding the company’s strategic initiatives in Asia, and his insight into digital media, among other things,” the auction house stated in the filing. “Sotheby’s will seek to find opportunities to continue to engage with Mr. Murdoch in the areas of his expertise.” Murdoch will officially leave his post after the annual shareholders meeting on May 8.

This isn’t the first high-profile position Murdoch has stepped away from in recent months. In January, he resigned from the board of drug-maker GlaxoSmithKline and last month, he stepped down from his post as executive chairman of News Corp’s U.K. publishing arm, News International. He currently remains on the board of British Sky Broadcasting Group, though a forthcoming report from British Parliament detailing Murdoch’s involvement with the scandal may threaten his position there as well, according to Businessweek.

Calls for Murdoch to step down from Sotheby’s board began in September, when union president George Miranda, who has overseen the house’s ongoing contract negotiations with its locked-out art handlers, noted that Murdoch’s position showed that “risk management is clearly not a priority for Sotheby’s executives or board of directors.” In January, CtW Investment Group, an advisor to union-sponsored pension funds with more than $200 billion in assets, told Bloomberg that the phone-hacking scandal rattling News Corp made Murdoch “ill-suited for service” on the board of Sotheby’s.

SHARJAH, United Arab Emirates — On Monday evening in Sharjah, the three-day-long intellectual incubator known as the March Meeting culminated with the announcement of the Sharjah Art Foundation’s 2012 Production Program grant recipients. Three artists — Sean Gullette, Mario Rizzi, and Lindsay Seers — will split the $200,000 award. They were selected from a pool of artists who applied through an open call process, judged by PS1 curator Peter Eleey, artist Isak Berbic, and Sharjah Art Foundation President Hoor Al Qasimi. While the Production Program is open to artists working within any media, including sculpture and performance, the winners of the 2012 honor share an affinity for film. 

Gullette — born in the U.S. and currently based in Tangiers — is known as a prolific screenwriter (he co-wrote and starred in Darren Aronofsky’s "Pi," among many other credits.) He was commissioned to produce work for the 2010 Sharjah Biennial; the result was the 30-minute short "Traitors." Gullette will use his share of the Production Program grant to adapt the short into a feature-length form.

The Italian-born, Berlin-based Rizzi also works in film. The Production Program funding will allow him to complete a project entitled "Bayt," which he describes in press materials as an HD-video work “concentrating on small events and memories in the life of those forgotten or ignored people who are playing a valuable role in imagining a new Arab civil society in Tunisia, Egypt, Bahrain and Syria.”

Seers, an artist born and working in England, won for her proposal to complete "Monocular 2," a film-based installation. “Monocular 2 will be housed in a structure that sculpturally refers to the ships that traded in the Indian Ocean at the end of the 1800’s,” she writes in press materials. “The work is based on a number of geographical co-ordinates and particular individuals in England, Zanzibar, Australia, and the Gulf.”

The announcement of these Production Program recipients caps off the March Meeting, which featured dynamic presentations and conversations among international art world professionals — including Hans Ulrich Obrist, Eungie Joo, Yasmina Reggad, Negar Azimi (of Bidoun magazine), Williams Wells (the Cairo-based founder and director of Townhouse Gallery), Alanna Heiss, Yazid Anani, Sultan Sooud Al Qassemi, Sheikha Hoor Al-Qasimi, Peter Eleey, and dozens of other creative and institutional players.  

1. Yunjin Kim, who played Sun Kwon on “Lost,” will star in ABC’s remake of the saucy British series “Mistresses.” [HR]

2. The hooded woman who appeared with two chained zombies at the end of the “Walking Dead” season finale last night is named Michonne, and she is played by Danai Gurira. [ArtsBeat/NYT]

3. The Smithsonian American Art Museum has opened an exhibit on video games. [Gawker]
Related: Unpacking Pac-Man: The Curator of the Smithsonian's Video Game Show on the Medium's Origins and Future

4. TNT’s cop drama “Southland” might be too good to last. [NYT]

5. Rufus Wainwright finds Lady Gaga “predictable and boring … a bit disingenuous.” Gaga, meanwhile, says she is ignoring the media. [Idolator]

Previously: “The Walking Dead,” Massive Attack, Sean Parker, Gerard Depardieu, M.I.A.

Born in 1943, Elaine Reichek studied under Modernist icon Ad Reinhardt at Brooklyn College as an undergraduate. She isn’t exactly the kind of artist that comes immediately to mind for inclusion in the Whitney Biennial, a survey of the new and now. But her enigmatic works presented in the 2012 exhibition — embroidered panels reminiscent of sewing samplers that rework imagery from the Western canon, adding quotes from literature and philosophy as captions — form one of the otherwise-dull show's marquee moments.

Viewers have another chance to see Reichek’s work in a solo exhibition called “Ariadne’s Thread” currently at Nicole Klagsbrun gallery in Chelsea, where an unassuming display of a dozen works spaced widely around the walls is on view. The pieces are on a grander scale than those at the Whitney, though their deadpan delivery (an effect of the inarticulate, unsubtle colors of the thread and abundance of white space) undermines their own monumentality, much as Reichek undercuts the iconic nature of the myths she appropriates in  works.

In the eponymous myth, Ariadne saves Theseus, the founder-king of Athens, from the entrapment of the Cretian Minotaur and his Labyrinth by giving him a length of string. After fleeing Crete with the hero, she is later abandoned by Theseus and becomes the wife of Dionysus, the god of wine. The Ariadne myth has been read as portraying woman as victim, which is no doubt a part of why Reichek has chosen it as fodder. The artist participated in the feminist collective art gallery A.I.R. alongside Nancy Spero and others, and had earlier attended Yale (before the school was officially co-ed) with the likes of “big,” rambunctious artists like Chuck Close and Richard Serra who, she recalled in a Smithsonian oral history, were uncomfortable with the presence of a woman in the studio. 

Though there’s a connection between Ariadne’s mythical thread and Reichek’s chosen medium of embroidery, the effect of incorporating the craft isn’t about “being a woman artist,” as she explained in a New Yorker profile. Rather, it’s about something more subtle, an investigation of the very contemporary phenomena of pixelization and translation, the ability of the digital image to be replicated endlessly into vacuity. Reichek's process of appropriation drains the stories of Ariadne and Theseus and the Minotaur of all their vitality and stature, leaving only the skeleton narrative suggestions for us to wander.

In “Would You Believe It, Ariadne” (2009) at Klagsbrun, the artist dryly hand-embroiders a replica of Victorian artist George Frederic Watts’s “Minotaur” (1885), removing the original’s moralistic tone (it was meant as an allegory about child prostitution) and picturing the Minotaur gazing longingly out to sea, as if wanting to escape his own labyrinth. Reichek captions it with a quote from Borges: “'Would you believe it, Ariadne!' said Theseus. 'The Minotaur scarcely defended himself.'” In this mixed-up version, Theseus is the predator, and the Minotaur is Ariadne, abandoned and hoping for rescue. The success of Reichek's work is to unmoor these stories in our minds, loosening their tropes and making everything slippery, moving stable meaning just out of reach. 

Elaine Reichek's "Ariadne's Thread" is on view at Nicole Klagsbrun, 534 West 24th Street, through March 24