In “Ted,” “Family Guy” creator Seth MacFarlane’s sort-of romcom spoof, Mark Wahlberg plays a mid-thirties dummy with an everyday gorgeous lady (Mila Kunis) as a possible mate — and a childhood teddy bear (voiced by MacFarlane), come to life, representing all his adolescent baggage. We’re fans of all three of the above-mentioned showbiz folks, not to mention the New England accents on display here, but we have to ask: What if Wahlberg’s character were a woman? What’s the “Bridesmaids” equivalent of “Ted”?

Ted the bear, like Wilfred, acts as a sort of id for his human, taking bong hits, humping supermarket scanners, and running into bed at the first sound of thunder. Man-boy things. There are limitations to this mirroring, of course, and any “female”-equivalent movie would have to have them, too. We don’t really remember “Bride of Chucky,” but we can imagine that as a sort of model for reducing women down to their menacing young-adult ways. Or, at least, in the universe where men must be boys, and lovable mess-makers themselves.

TOKYO, Japan — Art Fair Tokyo closed yesterday, reporting record visitor numbers and solid sales for its local participants. After the upheavals of last year, when the fair was postponed in the wake of Japan’s devastating earthquake and tsunami, its director Takahiro Kaneshima worked hard to put together the most extensive list of exhibitors to date for this year’s edition, and to strengthen the curatorial credibility of the event.

Compared to other international events of this type, Art Fair Tokyo is less sharply focused, presenting an eclectic mix of antiques, arts and crafts, nihonga (traditional Japanese paintings), and modern art, alongside contemporary offerings. This clearly made it a hit among visitors, who jammed the aisles over its four day run, but it tended to mitigate against artistic fireworks. There was little that pushed the envelope and even contemporary art powerhouse galleries like SCAI THE BATHHOUSE were restrained in what they put on show.

Business was briskest among Japanese galleries showing contemporary painting at its most unchallenging. Galerie nichido sold out an entire booth of works by Hiroki Yamamoto, whose oeuvre centers on young women in winsome poses rendered in an unthreatening palette of pastels. Other work finding favor included pieces in a similar vein by Tsuyoshi Katagiri (at Gallery Ginza Artone), bravura tempura and oil on canvas works in the style of Italian Renaissance masters by Masato Yoshioka at Saitama Gallery, and exquisite pencil on paper studies by Izumi Akiyama at Kobayashi Gallery. Although the tastes informing such acquisitions might be judged conservative, the prices collectors were willing to pay were not, with works by Yamamoto, Katagiri, Yoshioka, and Akiyama ranging from hundreds of thousands to millions of Yen.

Overall business was slow for the handful of international exhibitors. Korea’s PKM Gallery hadn't secured any sales by the end of the fair, despite showing work by Lee Bul, who's currently having a solo show at Tokyo’s Mori Art Museum. Doing best among the foreign galleries was Taipei’s TKG+, which featured video works referencing classical landscapes by Chi-Tsung Wu, and a project in honor of the victims of last year’s tsunami by Charwei Tsai. Tsai’s work was one of the hits of the fair as it required audience participation to be completed. It featured hundreds of shells gathered from the tsunami-ravaged beaches of northern Honshu on which Tsai invited fairgoers to inscribe words from the seminal Buddhist text, the Heart Sutra. The gallery was hoping to sell a number of sets of these shells, especially as part of the proceeds from their sale would be donated to the children of tsunami victims.

The dominance of local galleries at the fair made one wonder whether it should even aspire to being an international event. Fair director Kaneshima, when quizzed on this point, however, was adamant that it should. “International participation is very important to make Japan’s art market more transparent and more global,” he said, “[and to] stimulate Japanese galleries, too. It is necessary for the further improvement of the fair’s quality.” Certainly Art Fair Tokyo had done what it could to attract international participants, offering a range of incentives to offset the costs of exhibiting.

Despite disappointing results for the non-Japanese galleries this year, Kaneshima says there is an emerging group of younger collectors in the country who do have an “international perspective.” No doubt it will be the possibility of reaching them that will bring international exhibitors back to the fair next year.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from the Tokyo Art Fair.

– Tate Modern Denies Entry to Damien Hirst Detractor: Yesterday, art world maverick Julian Spalding — whose latest book is titled "Con Art – Why You Ought To Sell Your Damien Hirsts While You Can"— wasn't allowed into the Tate Modern, where he was planning to give TV interviews inside the musuem's Hirst retrospective. "The Tate's job is to encourage debate about art," he said. "The fact that I'm not allowed to talk about the work in front of [it] is extraordinary." [Independent]

– Was Caravaggio Murdered by the Church?: The hard-living Renaissance master, long thought to have died of lead poisoning or malaria, may have been whacked by the Knights of Malta in a church-sponsored assassination scheme to avenge a knight the painter had seriously injured in a fight. In his forthcoming book "Caravaggio, Between Art and Science," Italian historian Vincenzo Pacelli says that documents from the comically sinister Vatican Secret Archives suggest the artist was murdered by the knights with the approval of the papacy. [Telegraph]

– Zahi Hawass Faces New Charges: Egypt's embattled former antiquities minister — known as the country's "Indiana Jones" — is in hot water for allegedly wasting public money, violating Egyptian antiquities laws, and facilitating the theft of antiquities while in office. Many of the charges stem from Hawass's decision to display 143 objects from the Egyptian Museum in Washington, D.C. in 2003, violating a law that prohibits renting Egypt's heritage. [Ahram Online]

– Versailles's First Lady: After crowd-pleasing (and controversial) exhibitions by male art stars Jeff Koons, Xavier Veilhan, and Takashi Murakami, the contemporary art program at France's Versailles palace will welcome its first female artist this summer. The Paris-born, Lisbon-based sculptor Joana Vasconcelos will take over the mirrored and gilded galleries from June 19 to September 30. [Le Figaro]

– Banksy Market Bounces Back: Last week, works by the elusive street artist outpaced early estimates in auctions at Christie's and Bonhams, selling for up to half a million dollars. Bonhams's Alan Montgomery believes the four-year depression in the market for the urban prankster may have come to an end: Banksy is "back with a vengeance," he said. [Telegraph]

– Nazi-Looted Greek Antiquities Returned: The Pfahlbaumuseum in Germany recently contacted the Greek government after discovering a number of archeological objects in its collection originated from an illegal excavation in Thessaly during WWII. The works are now on their way back to Greece. [Greek Reporter]

– Musée Toulouse-Lautrec Reopens: Located in the medieval fortress of the Palais de la Berbie in Albi, France, the world's largest public institution devoted to the work of Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec has opened its doors today after a 10-year restoration. [ArtDaily]

– Mummy Mask Remains in Missouri: A District Court judge has ruled against the U.S. government in its quest to return the "Mummy Mask of the Lady Ka-nefer-nefer" (1295-1186 BC) from the collection of the St. Louis Art Museum (SLAM) to the Egyptian government. Judge Henry Autry sided with SLAM, whose director Brent Benjamin maintained that the museum researched the mask's provenance before acquiring it and found no reason to believe that it had been illegally imported to the U.S. [Culturegrrl, Cultural Heritage Lawyer]

– Record-Breaking Price for Victor Hugo Drawing: "Souvenir de Belgique," a 1857 brown ink and watercolour by Victor Hugo, sold at the French auction house Artcurial for €447,500 ($597,345), the highest ever price paid for one of the writer's works on paper. [Connaissance des Arts]

– Tracey Emin Protégé Designs Airplanes: Pascal Anderson has unveiled the first of a set of special Olympics-inspired British Airways plane designs. Overseen by Anderson's mentor, YBA Tracey Emin, the arty airplane is painted to look like a golden dove and will be in service for one year. [Guardian]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

Watch the opening of Damien Hirst's first retrospective at Tate Modern in London:

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Morley Safer's Tetchy "60 Minutes" Report on the Contemporary Art Market, Assessed

Indonesian-Chinese collector Budi Tek (aka Yu Deyao) went on a spending spree at Sotheby’s Hong Kong’s last night, snapping up historic works by

Zhang Xiaogang and Fang Lijun and helping the house to a healthy $27 million total for the evening, their second best result ever for a mixed owner sale of Contemporary Asian Art in the Harbor City.

However, despite the importance of some of the works on offer, the sale was an overall muted affair, with little of the passionate competition that animated the evening sale last spring when the Ullens Collection of Chinese Contemporary art went under the hammer.  Estimates this spring were conservative and though a number were exceeded — including for the two top lots by Zhang and Fang — the overall total was inside the house’s pre-sale estimate.

Tek’s acquisitions are destined for a planned private museum in Shanghai, which is slated to open in 2013. His ambition for this museum to be a showcase of Chinese contemporary art history was first signalled in October 2010 when he bought Xiaogang’s early masterpiece "Chapter of a New Century — Birth of the People’s Republic of China II" (1992 ) at Sotheby’s Hong Kong. 

Last night’s purchases would  appear to confirm the seriousness of his intentions. The headline acquisition was Zhang’s “Bloodline – Big Family: Big Family No.2” (1993), which he secured for $6.69 million, against a high estimate of $4.5 million. The work had been held in the same private collection since 1996 and is one of the earliest examples of the Bloodline series, which is of central importance not just in Zhang’s oeuvre but in the history of Chinese contemporary art. Tek also acquired a strong early work by Lijun, “1993 No. 4” — which was created for the 1993 Venice Biennale —  for $3.67 million against a high estimate of $3.2 million, as well as early works by Wang Guangyi and Song Ling.

The success of this sale as a whole, with 75 percent sold by lot and 89 percent by value, confirms the trend of the season, the strength of which is assuaging fears that the slowdown in the Chinese art market appreciable in fall 2011 might accelerate this year. The opening days have already seen pair of sold out wine auctions and solid results in the Chinese 20th Century Art and Southeast Asian Modern and Contemporary sales.

Attention now turns to the market’s “sweet spot,” Chinese traditional modern painting today and to Chinese porcelain and works of art tomorrow. The latter is expected to be especially competitive as its headline lot is an extremely rare Song Dynasty (960-1279) brush washer, fired in the Dynasty’s fabled Ru kilns. Consigned from a private collection in Japan, there are reportedly only another four like it in private hands. Market watchers will be focussed not just on the price, which could far exceed its fairly conservative estimate of between $7.7 and $10.3 million, but on determining who picks up the prize. If it goes to mainland China it would signal a change in a market that has hitherto eschewed the subtlety of the Song for the flashier charms of the Qing Dynasty (1644-1911).

Click on the slide show to see works from yesterday's Contemporary Asian Art sale at Sotheby's Hong Kong.

This story first appeared on ARTINFO Hong Kong.

The annual guessing game about which movies will appear in the Cannes film festival Competition section received an unwelcome jolt yesterday, A false list, purporting to be the real thing, was “leaked” by the Blog du Festival de Cannes.

As post-April Fools Day jokes go, it was très méchant, serving no one’s interests.

Thierry Frémaux, the festival's director, denounced the list of 24 films as “lies.” It included new films directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, David Cronenberg, Jacques Audiard, Terrence Malick, and 103-year-old Manoel de Oliveira. It also hinted that the five surviving members of the Monty Python team would reassemble on the Croisette for the unveiling of “A Liar’s Autobiography – The True Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman.”

"The selection is in my head," Frémaux told Deadline’s Nancy Tartaglione. "It's disgusting to play with such a thing. There is a code of conduct for Cannes and it must be respected. Those who don't respect the code will never come back to Cannes."

The blog announced that the roster was temporarily leaked on the festival website.

"No list was leaked from our website," reported Gérald Duchaussoy of the Cannes press office. "No technical error or mistake was made on our side."

The competing films will be officially announced at the Cannes press conference on April 19.

Cronenberg’s “Cosmopolis” seems a good bet and Anderson’s “Moonrise Kingdom” will definitely be screened. Cannes organizers announced on March 9 that Anderson’s comedy-drama, which is about the search for a boy and a girl who have run away from a New England town in the 1960s, had been chosen to open the world’s biggest film bash on May 16.

That means likely Cannes appearances by the film’s stellar cast, including Bruce Willis, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, and Jason Schwartzman, not to mention the young leads, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward.

The blog also repeated the speculation that “Cosmopolis”’s Robert Pattinson and “On the Road”’s Kristen Stewart will also show up. If they do, they’ll probably want to run away, too, once the paparazzi strikes.

Below: the trailer for "Moonrise Kingdom"

The small, alternative art fair SEVEN will join the growing crop of satellite fairs running during Frieze New York this May. The mini-fair, which features Hales Gallery, Ronald Feldman Fine Arts, Postmasters Gallery, PPOW, Winkleman Gallery, BravinLee Programs, and Pierogi, launched in Miami in 2010 to both strong reviews and strong sales. It will debut at the Pierogi-owned Boiler space in Williamsburg on April 28, shortly before Frieze begins, and run through mid-May.

Each gallery will present one artist, and, just as at SEVEN in Miami, there will be no booths. "It's a cooperation sans competition model. We all work on it together and we sell each other's work," Magda Sawon of Postmasters told ARTINFO in a telephone interview. "We want to hover this in between a fair and a show." Though the Boiler space is smaller than the former ice factory used for SEVEN Miami, it still has the same high ceilings and industrial feel, she said. 

The idea for the New York fair came in light of the success of "Armory Brooklyn Night," an evening on which galleries in Greenpoint and Williamsburg, including Pierogi, stayed open late to welcome crowds in town for the March art fairs. "It was enormously successful, and we felt this sense of the Brooklyn art community," Sawon said. The full roster of artists in the fair has not yet been finalized, but will be released later this week. 

SEVEN's cooperative format makes it a much less expensive alternative than traditional fairs: Dealers do all their own transportation and installations, and in exchange, Sawon said, they feel the freedom to mount whatever kind of presentation they desire. "The cost of particpating in fairs determines what people bring to those events, and that's not always reflective of the work being produced at the moment," she said. "This won't be a bank breaker for us, but it will be bloody impressive."

Of course, the fact that these participating galleries — six of which already have storefronts in New York — feel the need to launch a fair is yet another indication of the increasing importance of such events in the marketplace. "It is kind of a Muhammad and the mountain principle," Sawon said. "Fairs are incredibly profitable, and generate revenue for galleries to survive. But we wanted to do it on our terms, without the humongous cost that always comes with them."

1. Listen to a sample of the Lana Del Rey and A$ap Rocky collaboration. [Vulture]

2. David Lynch has made a frightening video for his song “Crazy Clown Time.” [YouTube]

Related: "I’m Happier and Happier": A Tortuous Q&A With David Lynch on the Inspiration for His New Paintings

3. Kevin Smith might bring “Clerks III” to Broadway. [EW]

4. Neil Patrick Harris will once again host the Tony Awards. [Playbill]

5. The Dirty Projectors will release a new album this summer, and you can hear one of the songs now. [Tiny Mix Tapes]

Previously: Nicki Minaj, Ashton Kutcher, “True Blood,” Aaron Sorkin, and Kendrick Lamar

LONDON — Damien Hirst has been so overwhelmingly omnipresent for the last two decades that you might be forgiven for thinking you've already seen it all: the shark, the medicine cabinets, the spot/spin/butterfly paintings, and the cattle floating in formaldehyde. And all these works are indeed there in Tate Modern's just-opened survey in London, including even the diamond-encrusted skull "For the Love of God" (2007), a work that is as notorious as it is iconic, which is presented in its own little viewing room like a relic in a shrine.

One of the show's most striking conclusions is that the origin of virtually all the types of work that made Hirst a global brand can be traced back to his student and early graduate years, circa 1986-1992. Most of what followed have been endless declensions of the same handful of ideas, increasing in production value as the artist's market prices went through the roof, but staying basically the same in their underlying essence.

Still, curator Ann Gallagher promised that there would be a few surprises, and indeed there are. "Damien Hirst" is also a chance to see a few works by the world's most famous artist that are rarely shown or discussed: the artist's eccentric first spot painting; his contribution to the legendary "Freeze" exhibition that catapulted him to stardom; and a selection of his dark video works.

To get a peek of a selection of some of the less-well-known works in the show, along with ARTINFO UK's explanations of their background, click on the slide show. 

A version of this article originally appeared on ARTINFO UK.

The animators, set designers, and graphic artists Stephen and Timothy Quay — known to fans as the Brothers Quay — have made their mark with dark, brooding animated films that are regularly placed on the top ten lists of favorites by savvy filmmakers, critics, and animators. Now, the Museum of Modern Art has announced that this August it will host a retrospective of work by the duo, curated by Ron Magliozzi, who also co-organized the institution’s door-busting tribute to pop-Goth filmmaker Tim Burton, a filmmaker whose sensibility the Brothers Quay somewhat share.

The show, which is called "Quay Brothers: On Deciphering the Pharmacist's Prescription for Lip-Reading Puppets," continues a partnership with the Brothers by MoMA. Last year, the institution was also the venue for the debut of the Brothers’ “Through the Weeping Glass: On the Consolations of Life Everlasting.” While they are a cinophile’s favorite, the Brothers’ show promises the American viewing public a particularly European sensibility: Though born in eastern Pennsylvania, the two have lived and worked in London since graduating from the Royal College of Art in the early 1970s, and their main influences go even further east, to Franz Kafka, the Franco-Russian puppeteer Wladyslaw Starewicz, the Czech animator Jan Švankmajer, and the surreal, cryptic work by Polish animators Walerian Borowczyk and Jan Lenica. 

The MoMA show will presumably tell the story of how the Brothers Quays’ distinctive filmic sensibility evolved from their roots in avant-garde graphic design and art. The original version of Anthony Burgess's novel "The Clockwork Testament Or Enderby's End" featured their drawings at the beginning of each chapter, and they also had an early job doing the cover art for "Stockhausen: Conversations with the Composer," a book on the avant-garde German composer Karlheinz Stockhausen.

However, they are best-loved for their cult status achieved by their more than 30 short films and two feature-length films ("Institute Benjamenta," "The Piano Tuner Of Earthquakes"), as well as set designs and projections for arty performances of Tchaikovsky, Ionesco, Prokofiev, and Molière, and music videos for the likes of Peter Gabriel. In addition to screening these classics, expect to include drawings, calligraphy, and small sculptures by the Brothers Quay that have never been exhibited in public before. 

Iris van Herpen’s innovative design methods have earned the 27-year-old numerous accolades in the past five years. The Dutch designer fuses technology and fashion to create intricate sculptural garments through 3-D printing. Björk wore one of Van Herpen’s creations for her “Biophilia” album cover, Time named her 3-D-printed dress one of the best inventions of 2011, and she is a guest member of the prestigious Chambre Syndicale de la Haute Couture. The first large-scale exhibition of Van Herpen’s work is on display through September 23 at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.

The couturier initially starts her process by making a sketch in Photoshop before working with an architect to create a 3-D model, which is then printed onto polymers like Plexiglas or latex. The exhibition shows Van Herpen’s work from 2008 to present, beginning with the 2008 Refinery Smoke collection, in which she used thin wire gauze to replicate the look of smoke floating in air, all the way up to Micro, her latest collection made with a 3-D printer, laser cutting, and electroplating bath techniques, which produce metallic coating.

Van Herpen studied at the ArtEZ Hogeschool voor Kunsten (ArtEZ Institute of the Arts) in Arnhem, pursuing an internship with Alexander McQueen before founding her own label in 2007.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from “Iris van Herpen,” on display through September 23 at the Groninger Museum in the Netherlands.

A glimpse of some of the dazzling jewels set to go on display at the Tower of London have been unveiled today. Around 2.5 million visitors flock to the historic landmark every year to see the bejeweled accessories and it is expected that the Diamond Jubilee...

Following the introduction of the seamless, virtually topless MKZ concept in Detroit earlier this year, Lincoln presented the finished draft of the luxury car at a highly anticipated unveiling reception last night at Manhattan’s Frank Gehry-designed IAC building.

The MKZ bears no resemblance to a conventional, boxy sedan, and features a more fluid, approachable design. “From the dynamic, modern centerline and the sweeping roofline, the car is a vehicle that could be sketched in just a few strokes,” Lincoln design director Max Wolf announced last night. The reintpretation of the classic split-wing grill was inspired by an eagle in flight. His goals were to create a silhouette that would be inviting to the younger buyer, with just an element of restraint. A dedicated focus on luxury was apparent in the attention to small experiential details throughout — active noise control, heated front seats, and drive control — as well as ornamental flourishes and bold sculptural elements on the interior, all meant to be both comfortable and functional.

And the most exciting amenity? The MKZ features one of the world’s largest retractable glass roofs, which opens at any speed — quite a thrill for late-night, 80-mile-per-hour joyrides, although we recommend you leave that to the professional drivers.

When Google Art Project launched in February of 2011, it was a massive step forward for the presence of art online. Using the same technology as Google Street View, the project offered what amounted to virtual tours of 17 major museums in nine countries, including such important institutions as New York's Museum of Modern Art and London's Tate Britain. As of today, that number has expanded to a staggering 134 museums in 40 countries. Though not every museum has a full-fledged tour option, each is represented by a selection of objects from their collections in high resolution. 

The expansion seems to respond to criticism that the initial group of museums featured in the Google endeavor was too Eurocentric and lacked coverage of the West Coast to boot. For the project’s second round, the company sought to “balance regional museums with those that are more nationally or globally recognized,” Google’s Diana Skaar told the Los Angeles Times, and institutions that now offer full virtual tours via Google Art Project include the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Mexico’s Museo Nacional de Antropologia, and the J. Paul Getty Museum. Also, be sure to take a Google-enabled stroll around the White House. 

Rather than capturing all of the data on site itself, Google receives the high-resolution images from the museums and posts them on the Web site, a compendium that is quickly becoming something like the Google Books Library Project (which has scanned over 20 million books from academic libraries), only for art history. Among the diverse group of browsable objects now a part of the initiative are a collection of 70 drawings on rock from the Australian Rock Art Collection, a luminous 14th-century Qur’an manuscript from the Museum of Fine Arts Houston, and a powerful abstraction by Imre Bak at the Hungarian National Gallery. All are worth spending some quality time online with.

One highlight is worth calling out: For the Getty, Google brought in its own equipment to shoot a seven-billion-pixel interactive digital replica of Rembrandt’s “The Abduction of Europa” (1632), the same ultra-close-up that the project has made possible for iconic works like Van Gogh’s “The Starry Night” (1989) at MoMA. 

The pioneering sculptor and printmaker Elizabeth Catlett died yesterday just two weeks shy of her 97th birthday, the Web site Black Art in America reported. She died at her home in Cuernavaca, 40 miles south of Mexico City, where she had lived since using a Rosenwald Fund Fellowship to travel to Mexico in 1946.

Her smoothed, stylized sculptures — which she made primarily in wood, bronze, and black marble — portrayed archetypal subjects like a mother holding her child. Her more hard-edged prints feature some of the same classical subjects while also incorporating portraits of gaunt yet noble agricultural laborers, as in the striking 1952 lithograph "Sharecropper."

Catlett was born in Washington, D.C., in 1915 to parents who were both teachers — though her father died before she was born. She earned her Bachelor of Science in art at Howard University — she was originally offered a full scholarship to Carnegie Tech, now Carnegie Carnegie Mellon University, though she was denied enrollment when the institution discovered she was black — and later received an MFA from the University of Iowa, where "American Gothic" painter Grant Wood was her mentor. Two years ago Catlett told The Root that Grant managed to convince the university to give her and a male student its first ever masters' in sculpture. After graduating she followed in her parents' footsteps and became a teacher, first at Dillard University in New Orleans, and then, during the second World War, at the George Washington Carver School on 125th Street in Harlem. She remained an avid student, taking ceramics courses at the Art Institute of Chicago and learning lithography at New York's Art Students League.

She and her first husband, the artist Charles White, traveled to Mexico City on the Rosenwald Fellowship in 1946, where she joined the highly political Taller de Gráfica Popular (The People's Graphic Arts Workshop), an institution which was frequented by Frida Kahlo, Diego Rivera, and other members of the Mexican avant-garde. There she studiet with the sculptors Jose L. Ruiz and Francisco Zúñiga and met her second husband, the Mexican painter Francisco Mora (who died in 1973). Catlett became a Mexican citizen soon after the U.S. Embassy asked her to provide the names of Communists she knew in 1955. In 1958 she joined the faculty of the School of Fine Arts of Mexico's National Autonomous University, becoming its first woman professor. She continued to teach there until she retired in 1975. She is included in the National Museum of Art in Mexico City.

She continued to make art, however, and enjoyed major solo shows at the Chrysler Museum of Art in Norfolk, Virginia in 2010, and at Florida's Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in February of 2011. In the spring of 2010, her 10-foot-tall sculpture of singer Mahalia Jackson was installed near a 1975 sculpture she created of jazz great Louis Armstrong in New Orleans's Treme neighborhood. She is survived by her three children, including her son David Mora, who was her assistant for nearly a half-century. Her granddaughter Naima Mora won the fourth season of the reality television show "America's Next Top Model." Catlett received a lifetime achievement award from Trenton's National Sculpture Center in 2003.

It’s a myth that all wines get better with time. Most are designed to be consumed young, and those supposedly built for the long haul can often disappoint. If there’s beauty in age where wine is concerned, I’d submit that you’re more likely to find it in

New questions (and very few answers) are emerging from a dispute between journalist Matthew Blackman and South Africa's Department of Arts and Culture (DAC) regarding the country's participation in the 2011 Venice Biennale. The Times of South Africa reports that Blackman has filed a court challenge demanding information about how the country curated and financed its presentation at the prestigious international exhibition last year. In a strange twist, the pavilion became mired in controversy after the offical commissioner "Lethole Mokoena" was revealed to actually be Johannesburg-based Monna Mokoena, a dealer who happened to represent two of the artists selected to show in Italy. Now Blackman wants answers about how this situation, which tanished the African nation's first Venice outing since 1995, came to pass.

Blackman has covered the scandal for the Art Newspaper, and filed the new affadavit to articulate concerns within the South African art community that Mokoena influenced the selection process to favor his artists, a charge the gallerist denied by pointing out that the artists were selected by the curator he appointed, Thembinkosi Goniwe, who acted independently. (For his part, Goniwe declined to comment on the issue to the Times of South Africa as long as the issue is being discussed in court.) Other concerns center on why the position of commissioner wasn't publicly advertised. (The Times of South Africa reports that the DAC has previously claimed that it "did not have time to follow prescribed tender processes in the appoint of the commissioner.")

The revelation of the conflict of interest came to light last year after one of South Africa's four Biennale artists, Zwelethu Mthethwa, dropped out of the exhibition, citing the "lack of transparency" of the selection process, and saying that he felt as though he'd been treated like a "pawn in this pro­ject." The revelation of the conflict of interest came to light last year after one of South Africa's four Biennale artists, When Mokoena's real identity was first revealed to be the commissioner last September, his public relations representatives ChilliBush Communications added that international art stars Nicholas Hlobo, Marlene Dumas, and Robin Rhode were initially approached to participate, but all three declined, before Mthethwa, Siemon Allen, Lyndi Sales, and Mary Sibande were tapped — the latter two of whom are represented by Mokoena's Gallery Momo.

In the court documents Blackman also questions whether public funds were used to finance South Africa's costly Venice exhibition without full disclosure. Last year the DAC, in response to a parliamentary inquiry, revealed that its Biennale exhibition of works by Allen, Sales, and Sibande cost R14.1 million ($1.8 million). Yet according to Blackman's reporting, in emails dating from as late as December 2010, the DAC's chief director of international relations wrote that the country's return to the Venice exhibition seemed unlikely as the department's 2011 budget "was under severe strain."

Blackman's inquiry to discover how exactly South Africa's participation in the Biennale was organized and paid for has received little support from the Visual Arts Network of South Africa, an agency that the country's National Arts Council funds and whose stated goals are "to promote transparency, accountability and sound financial and organisational management within the arts and culture sector." For its part, the DAC has refused to answer Blackman's questions since the controversial curatorial and appointment process were revealed last fall.

A seminal figure in American postmodern architecture, Michael Graves has designed hundreds of major buildings worldwide, but a new exhibition at the Anne Reid ’72 Art Gallery of the Princeton Day School focuses on his other postmodern masterpiece: the tea kettle.

In the very cleverly titled show “Michael Graves: Letting Off Steam,” the gallery charts his less publicized career as a prolific product designer, a timely retrospective as his 15-year run dreaming up "democratized design" for Target comes to an end this year. The exhibition begins with the sterling and ivory Coffee and Tea Piazza, a commission by Italian fine silver factory Alessi that brought Graves into product design in 1981. The highly successful set (coveted by Nancy Reagan, who was, unfortunately, never able to bring it into the White House) announced Graves as a major force in the industry. Having lived for several years in Rome, he applied the same classical forms, along with a signature palette of Etruscan rusty red and cerulean blue, to the thousands of products he created.

"Michael’s language is so consistent whether you’re looking at buildings of his in Europe or tea sets," gallery director Jody Erdman told ARTINFO. "The Coffee and Tea Piazza has got the same columns, triangle feet, and ball on the top as his architecture. It’s a language that’s completely recognizable and sophisticated." That consistent design language, also embodied in that omnipresent, little red rooster that sits on the spout — an iconic bit of quirk inspired by his Midwestern upbringing that, over the years, evolved into whimsical, abstract forms — endured throughout his affordable designs for Target in 1999, and the mouse-eared kettles he created to match the buildings he designed for Disney.

In addition to models and prototypes tracing the development of these products — borrowed from the Alessi Museum in Italy and Graves’ personal collection — the exhibition also opens the pages of his personal sketchbooks and showcases napkin scribbles of spouts, whistles, and handles. The exhibition runs in tandem with the Princeton Day School’s architectural and industrial design programs, where the kiddies will actually be learning how to design their own tea kettles. If Target is looking for the next Michael Graves, that would be a good place to start its search. 

"Michael Graves: Letting Off Steam" runs at the Anne Reid '72 Gallery through April 25. There will be an opening reception on Monday, April 9 the, hosted by the architect himself. To see the exhibition's vast assortment of postmodern tea kettles, click the slide show. 

We do not exactly live in a golden age of the movie poster. Today’s movie ads invariably involve a clichéd catchphrase, a photoshopped pastiche of the protagonist wearing an unironic “blue steel” expression, and a titillating dollop of cheap sex and/or violence. But take heart, film-fans: A global network of rogue graphic artists is working to inject design, humour, and style back into this forgotten medium. Founded by British designer Simon Hawes in March 2011, “Alternative Movie Posters” is a Web site dedicated to showcasing artists’ unorthodox, usually loving, and quite often aesthetically adventurous interpretations of their favorite films. 

“The idea for AMP [Alternative Movie Posters] came about purely by chance,” Hawes told ARTINFO. “One day, I thought I’d have a go at creating my own versions of some of my favourite movie posters… Whether it held up as a viable contender to the original didn’t really concern me.” Realizing that there was a vast but disjointed community of artists doing similar homages all over the world, Hawes decided to unite their work under a single url.

Stylistically, many of the posters featured on the site veer towards reductive minimalism, distilling a movie’s narrative into a single iconic image. These low-key, stylish posters capitalize on deadpan wit and graphic elan. See, for example, Jamie Bolton’s “Jurassic Park” poster. There’s no T. Rex in sight, only a rippling water glass — a reference to Spielberg’s famous ominous shot of impending doom. Equally clever is Matt Owen’s take on “Dawn of the Dead,” which foreshadows rampant zombie infestation in suburban America with a floor plan of a shopping mall.

“We hear from lots of people who are annoyed that a great movie had a poster that didn’t work hard enough or was just a composition of the main characters,” Hawes says. “With Alternative Movie Posters, people can express the movie in a more creative way, because they’re not selling the film, they’re creating they’re interpretation of it. I think the future lies in these more stylised posters.”

Might the alternative movie poster be the thinking man’s answer, not only to unimaginative commercial posters, but also to the creepy/sad DIY fan art thriving on the Internet? From Brian St. Denis's disturbing portrait of Josh Brolin's head in orange and yellow for an imagined "No Country For Old Men" poster  to Chay Lazaro’s fittingly quirky take on "The Royal Tenenbaums," see a selection of our favorite Alternative Movie Posters.