Owners of premium-grade classic cars will have an extra incentive to enter and win the famous Concorso d’Eleganza Villa d’Este on the southwestern shore of Lake Como. The winner will receive a one-of-a-kind Lange 1 Time Zone in addition to the honor of...

SEOUL—Gallery Seoul is Korea’s newest and smallest but in other ways most promising art fair. Now in its second year, the fair’s focused selection of 22 galleries from Korea, Japan, the United States, and Taiwan provides a pleasant, easy-going art buying experience. It also reflects much of what is great about the Korean contemporary art scene — a dedication to fostering young, local talent mixed with an engaged, highly informed internationalism.

1. Stream a new Fiona Apple song, “Every Single Night,” below. [Brooklyn Vegan]

2. “Bridesmaids” director Paul Feig may helm a comedy, “Wish List,” starring Reese Witherspoon as a woman who contends with the fulfillment of her childhood dreams. [HR via Vulture]

3. Hear Rufus Wainwright’s new album in its entirety. [NPR]
Related: Rufus Wainwright’s Greatest Song Finds a Video Match Featuring Helena Bonham Carter

4. Chaz Bono and “Modern Family” were honored at Glaad Media Awards on Saturday. [Arts Beat/NYT]

5. Azealia Banks says that she is working with Missy Elliott. [This Is Fake DIY]

Previously: “Moonrise Kingdom,”Jimmy Fallon, Mark Wahlberg, Record Store Day, Willie Nelson

Name: Lee Mingwei
Occupation: artist
City/Neighborhood: New York City/Financial District

What are you working on now?

Projects for the Shenzhen Sculptural Biennial, the Sydney Biennial, the Hayward Gallery, the Shiseido Gallery, and the European Capital of Culture in Guimarães, Portugal, and some other funny things.

For your piece "The Travelers," which was recently on view at New York's Museum of Chinese in America, you distributed a hundred blank journals in which visitors would write a story of leaving home before passing the journal on to someone else. Have all the journals made it back to the museum now, and how far did they travel?

Only seven journals came back to the museum. The furthest traveled to Iraq.

What place do you call home?

Our apartment in New York, my parents' home in Taipei, and my sister's home in Rome.

Are you the child pictured in "First Day of Kindergarten" on the exhibition poster?

Yes, my mom and I were on our way to kindergarten. I didn't really want to go, so she dressed me in clothes she made for this special day just so I could imagine her hugging me when I needed her at kindergarten. Come to think of it, this might have been my very first encounter with conceptual art and relational aesthetics!

What are your memories of kindergarten in Taipei? Did you already want to be an artist at that age?

I was very much enamored with my homeroom teacher, because not only did he always wear bright-colored pants, he also had a nice smell which reminded me of being in a candy store.

For "The Moving Garden," which was recently on view at the Brooklyn Museum, you placed real flowers in a 45-foot-long granite table. Visitors were invited to take a flower and give it to a stranger upon leaving the museum. How often did you have to replace the flowers?

The museum had to replenish 150 roses every morning before it opened. By around 3pm, most of the flowers would have been taken and given as gifts between strangers.

Did you hear any stories or see any pictures of the flowers being given away?

Yes, the Brooklyn Museum created a Twitter site for participants to post their encounters. One of the most beautiful images is a tiny little girl dressed in a polka-dot dress holding an itty-bitty rose.

What do the ideas of chance and randomness mean to you?

I am fascinated by these two ideas which are quite important in my practice. I often remind myself that if one of my female ancestors didn't go to the market that fateful morning, she would never have met my male ancestor, and thus I would never have existed.

What's the last show that you saw?

A drawing show by visually impaired children in a Taipei subway station of their real and imaginary pets.

Do you make a living off your art?

Hmm, yes and no. Depending on the weather.

What's the most indispensable item in your studio?

I don't have a studio.

Where are you finding ideas for your work these days?

In the bathtub while taking a hot bath and listening to medieval liturgical music.

Do you collect anything?

Dark-colored Indian saris and Japanese kimono fabrics.

What's the first artwork you ever sold, and who bought it?

"Money for Art." It was an interactive installation which consisted of 36 origami shapes made of ten-dollar bills. The participants were asked to exchange it with something they considered as having equal value and leave it on the shelf in place of the sculpture. I don't remember who acquired the project; all I know was the collector lived in Seattle.

What's your favorite place to see art?

At the Met.

Do you have a gallery/museum-going routine?

Not really.

Know any good jokes?

Sid and Al were sitting in a Chinese restaurant. "Sid," asked Al, "are there any Jews in China?"
"I don't know," Sid replied. "Why don't we ask the waiter?"
When the waiter came by, Al asked him, "Are there any Chinese Jews?"
"I don't know sir, let me ask," the waiter replied, and he went into the kitchen. He returned in a few minutes and said, "No, sir. No Chinese Jews."
"Are you sure?" Al asked.
"I will check again, sir," the waiter replied and went back to the kitchen. While he was still gone, Sid said, "I cannot believe there are no Jews in China. Our people are scattered everywhere."
When the waiter returned he said, "Sir, no Chinese Jews."
"Are you really sure?" Al asked again.
"I cannot believe there are no Chinese Jews."
"Sir, I asked everyone," the waiter replied, exasperated. "We have Orange Jews, Prune Jews, Tomato Jews, and Grape Jews, but we have no Chinese Jews."

What's the last great book you read?

"The Gift" by Lewis Hyde.

What work of art do you wish you owned?

Duchamp's "Fountain."

What would you do to get it?

Nothing.

What international art destination do you most want to visit?

Berlin.

The Tastemaker is a new series in which ARTINFO talks to artists, designers, curators, and other personalities about their must-have items and more.

Israeli Artist Nir Hod couldn’t have picked a more fashionable location for his studio than New York’s trendy Meatpacking District. By day, fashionistas frequent the neighborhood’s trendy shops like Jeffrey and Scoop. At night, the area attracts those looking to indulge in the velvet-roped scene at exclusive boites like Soho House and Top of the Standard.

Hod, 40, has shown his work around the world since age 23, when his first solo exhibit was presented at the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. His break though came in 2011 with “Genius,” a controversial series of paintings and sculptures that depicted pouty-mouthed doe-eyed children — “Geniuses” — clutching smoldering cigarettes. The show sold out, with several sculptures going for up to $45,000.

His latest exhibition, up through April 28 at Paul Kasmin Gallery, takes an even darker tone, drawing on an iconic 1943 image by Nazi photographer Franz Konrad of soldiers rounding up residents of the Warsaw Ghetto to bring them to their fate in a Nazi death camp. For Hod’s series of 10 paintings, he chose to focus not on the frightened “Boy From Warsaw,” who is the photo’s main subject, but rather the woman in the foreground — who Hod refers to as “Mother” — glancing towards the boy.

When Hod isn’t busy working on gallery shows, he designs objects like coasters made to look like cocaine on mirrors, which will be on sale this summer at Paul Kasmin Shop and other retailers. As the first subject of ARTINFO’s Tastemaker series, the stylish Hod shared the things that make him tick, from his favorite spot (the Hudson River) to his clothing item of choice (a scarf).

Click on the slide show to see all of Nir Hod’s Tastemaker picks.

Britain's most powerful art institution has announced the details of a 15 week-long festival this summer that will inaugurate the East and South Tanks of its future Tate 2 wing. Tate Modern's new spaces — which once contained oil fuelling the power station that houses the museum's iconic Turbine Hall — are to be dedicated to film, installation, performance, and pretty much everything in between. It is the first time that a museum has conceived exhibition spaces of this kind.

The South and the East Tanks will be unveiled on July 18 and showcase a string of solo presentations by the likes of choreographer Anne Teresa de Keersmaeker, experimental filmmaker Jeff Keen, and visual artists Tania Bruguera and Haegue Yang. Works by Aldo Tambellini, the artist, filmmaker, and founder of the Gate Theatre and Black Gate, will also be shown.

"The collective spaces that [Tambellini] established in New York City in the 1960s really established a template — as did the London Film-Makers Co-op — for the way we hope the tanks will develop: as a multidisciplinary, experimental space that really champions the notion that artists can transcend boundaries," said curator of film Stuart Comer. In the East Tank, a new commission by Sung Hwan Kim will be presented for the duration of the festival.

The raw concrete "Transformer Galleries" will also be opened for the first time and host two new artworks acquired for the collection: the sound and light installation "Light Music" (1975) by linchpin of the London Film-Makers' Co-op Lis Rhodes, as well as the group performance "Crystal Quilt," first realized in 1987 by feminist artist Suzanne Lacy in collaboration with Miriam Schapiro.

"[For many years,] we had to work somehow between the gaps of the official programs," said curator of contemporary art and performance Catherine Wood. "So it's very exciting to have a location where we can plant the seeds of experiment and watch them grow over time."

Education and learning will be key components of the program. From August 16 to 27, part of the festival will be dedicated to — and designed by — young people. "Undercurrent" will be articulated, curator of young people's programs Mark Miller explained, around "the construction of sub-cultures," "what culture is, how it's transferred, and how it's moved from one place to the other." Tracey Moberly will design an evolving "social, participatory space" using networking sites; London-based research group Dubmorphology will create a new sound and video installation responding to Tate's environment; and Rinse 106.8FM will add some countercultural groove to the mix.

The rehabilitation of the Oil Tanks marks the end of Tate 2's first phase. Designed by architects Herzog & de Meuron, a new building rising out of the tanks is currently under construction. It is scheduled for completion by December 2016, "but my guess is that it will be sooner than that," said Nicholas Serota. £160 million ($257 million), 75 percent of the funding required, has been raised so far. It remains to be seen whether Tate's current large number of gifts will dwindle if the Treasury's controversial plans to cap tax relief on donations are approved.

Although the Oil Tanks are marketed as the first permanent galleries for film, performance, and live art, they will close on October 28, and it might be a while until they fully serve their function. "We will continue on through 2013 and 2014 according to our ability to get into these tanks," said Serota. "We don't know yet precisely when the builders are going to let us in, but periodically the tanks will undoubtedly be in use. It's a festival that lasts 15 weeks, we'll see what happens thereafter."

The Tanks at Tate Modern, July 18 - October 28, 2012.

This article originally appeared on ARTINFO UK.

NEW YORK — When designer Lisa Perry walked into her eponymous Madison Avenue boutique last Thursday evening, the white sequined shift dress she wore appeared stark and devoid of color, until she whirled around to show off the digital print of Jeff Koons’s 1988 porcelain sculpture “Pink Panther” emblazoned on its back. Koons’s wife, Justine Koons, walked around to greet guests sporting what appeared to be a simple, chic white moto jacket over a black dress. But a view from behind revealed the artist’s 1986 stainless steel sculpture “Rabbit.”

The playful frocks were two of many being celebrated that night at a cocktail party and intimate dinner hosted by the artist and W magazine editor Stefano Tonchi. The event marked the debut of Perry’s latest art-inspired collection, which features Koons’s work. (Perry has also created lines covered with Andy Warhol and Roy Lichtenstein images.)

“He gave us full access to his entire body of work,” Perry said of Koons in a statement about the collection. “It was more inspiration than I could have ever dreamed of!”

Some of the other pieces were a bit more obvious. A strapless white confection with a frilly textured skirt displayed the cherry-topped dollop of whipped cream in a spoon from Koons’s poppy 1999 collage print “Loopy,” while the another, an A-line skirted short-sleeved dress, was covered entirely in the kooky 2007 “Monkey Train (Birds)” screenprint. Those not daring enough to wear a garment bearing a prominently-placed Koons could choose from several accessories: two bangles, one blanketed with “Loopy” and the other, the “Monkey Train (Birds)” print; or a clear plastic bag like the one depicting the Koons green “Diamond” sculpture that sits on Perry’s penthouse terrace.

Perry is the latest in a string of designers to show affection for Koons’s work. Stella McCartney printed Koons graphics on a few pieces in her spring/summer 2006 collection, even collaborating with Koons on a “Rabbit” pendant. Basso & Brooke also referenced Koons’s wildly whimsical pieces through digital printing in its spring/summer 2010 line. The feeling is mutual: Koons has had a long-running flirtation with fashion, most recently shooting an editorial for the September 2011 issue of Harper’s Bazaar and writing the foreword for Patrick Demarchelier’s stunning coffee table book “Dior Couture.”

Perry’s collection, which is available at her boutique and on her Web site, doesn’t come cheap. Accessories start at $295, while T-shirts, dresses, and jackets retail from $150 to $4,500. But shoppers shouldn’t feel guilty about a hefty purchase: a portion of the price tag will go to the organization Koons founded after his son became a victim of parental kidnapping, the Koons Family Institute, an initiative of the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children.

Click on the slide show to see Lisa Perry’s Jeff Koons-inspired collection.

Related: Which Eccentric Train-Loving Art Patron Will Bring Jeff Koons’s $25-Million Locomotive to the High Line?

Pictured above is the Pebble, the watch that seems to do it all. Designed to sync to your iPhone or Android via BlueTooth, it downloads apps, displays incoming messages, monitors your golf swing, and even tells time. It also demolishes records: The Kickstarter-funded device, part watch, part remote control, part pedometer, has surpassed all the crowd-sourced fundraising site's previous milestones. It reached its goal of $100,000 within its first two hours, and then just kept going.

The Pebble's creators inPulse have raised about $6.1 million since their fundraising campaign began on April 11, an average of $20,000 an hour. They're still going strong, with 25 days to go. The exceptional enthusiasm for this device is due in no small part to the awesome perks that come with being a donor. For $99 or more, inPulse offered donors their very own Pebble, a $150 value. (That option quickly sold out.) Ten very zealous backers pledged $10,000 or more to receive the Mega Distributor Pack, a super package of 100 Pebbles in any color. With this extra money, Pebble's creators have been able to develop an upgraded, water-proof version — for our part, we'd like to see one with a color touchscreen. 

This outpouring of crowd-funding testifies to our obsession with dressing up and accessorizing our treasured gadgets. Three out of four of Kickstarter’s highest funded objects have been accessories designed primarily for Apple products. The fourth-highest funded project is the TikTok+LunaTik Multi-Touch Watch Kit, an iPod Nano dock that fits on the wrist, transforming a soon-to-be-obsolete device into a watch — itself an even more antiquated gadget (as we've previously discussed). It held the title of most-funded for more than a year, raising nearly $1 million beyond its $15,000 goal before being surprassed by the Elevation Dock. In February that docking device became the first Kickstarter project to surpass the $1 million mark by promising to solve the harrowing ordeal of plugging in and unplugging your mobile device, and went on to raise a total of about $1.5 million. After only six hours at the top, it was surpassed by an adventure video game. While that last example doesn’t support our hypothesis about the fundraising power of Apple fanatics, it does suggest that Kickstarter is mostly funded by total geeks. 

While upstate New York's Garden Road School hopes to get its community Giving Garden funded in time for summer school, tech junkies continue to divert their dollars towards high-tech baubles. Our Apple products have become as precious to us as our babies, or at the very least as much as our pets. Buying a cradle for your iPhone is really akin to buying your Chihuaha a designer doghouse, isn't it? 

Frieze New York will force plenty of art world notables onto Randall's Island ferries next week, but one visitor may be more notable than the rest. As the boat leaves the dock, you might look to your left and see divisive pop star Lana Del Rey.

Mulberry, the nostalgia-steeped British luxury brand sponsoring the Cecilia Alemani-curated Projects section of the first Frieze New York, will be bringing the much-debated crooner to perform during a dinner in honor of the fair on May 4, WWD reported today. No word on where the bash will be held, but the invites will certainly be hard to come by.

It's not the first collaboration between the high-end handbag purveyor and the polarizing songstress. At February’s London Fashion Week, Mulberry lured Lana Del Rey across the Pond to act as a sort of mascot for their Autumn/Winter 2012 line. The singer sat front row next to “Downton Abbey” cast members and Hollywood starlets, and performed an acoustic set at the Saville Club dinner. She was even honored with the release of her own handbag, The Del Rey. That's no small honor: Mulberry's Alexa bag, named for beloved waif Alexa Chung, caused something of a sensation upon its release.

For Lana, the timing of that particular appearance couldn't have been better. After a meteoric rise to fame, an atrocious performance on Saturday Night Live left her out of favor with some of her countrymen, and a spot next to Michelle Williams by the runway was just the damage control she needed.

There's no word whether Ms. Del Rey will grace the actual fair with her presence. (And, really, would anyone notice either way?) But for those making the trip to and from the remote location, just know that there's a certain ferry-appropriate bag that can tote all of your belongings. Ignore the off-key warbling, and you're set.

Since retiring from fashion design in 2005 after Prada acquired his self-named minimalist luxury label, Helmut Lang ventured into a career as an artist, presenting his first solo show at Kestnergesellschaft, in Hanover, Germany, in 2008. Last summer, Lang destroyed and repurposed 6,000 pieces of his clothing archive to create a series of columnar sculptures for an East Hamptons exhibition at the Fireplace Project. His latest offering, “Helmut Lang: Sculptures,” will open on May 5 in New York City at 24 Washington Square North. The show is timed to coincide with Frieze Week. 

Co-curated by Mark Fletcher and Neville Wakefield, the exhibition will feature more than 20 new sculptures by Lang. The artist continues with themes of destruction and renewal, this time leaving his clothing collections in tact and opting for found objects made of materials like rubber, foam, tar, sheepskin, and plaster.

Lang utilized white or black monochromatic color schemes – covering the pieces in tar or paint, or leaving them untouched in their original shade – and stacked the objects into vertical totem-like structures whose “softened edges record both the process of erosion and their progression from industrial object to gallery artifact,” states the press release. Not around New York during Frieze? The exhibition will run through June 15.

“Helmut Lang: Sculptures” will be on display at 24 Washington Square North from May 5 through June 15.

It may seem ungenerous, unnecessary, or even unfair to propose that “A Buddy Story,” a little indie flick starring a likely pre-“Mad Men” Elisabeth Moss, works better as a parody of little indie flicks than an actual example of such entertainment — after all, little and indie is what it is. But play the trailer and decide for yourself: Would you rather watch this movie in what is almost certainly vain hope of some pleasant (or even unpleasant) surprises, or watch it as a potentially seamless, tickling embodiment of the wistful-winsome modestness of intelligence-depletingly derivative independent cinema? Note the following markers, so blandly familiar as to be invisible:

1. The cutely punning title — “Buddy” being the leading boy in this “buddy” movie.

2. Buddy is a mildly disheveled, acoustic guitar-strumming “solo” indie musician — the implied creator of the movie’s (wistful-winsome) score, and in the grand design, the embodied musical equivalent of this movie.

3. Susan (Moss) — whose mania for ice cream results in Buddy having to inform her that she has in fact gotten ice cream on the tip of her nose — is Annie Hall processed through a thousand student-film scripts and three decades into some kind of weird-girl gruel.

4. Buddy and Susan travel on his tour inside of the sort of charming old vehicle of the type one inherits from their white parents or sees in a Wes Anderson movie (although it is not a Volvo or compact BMW).

5. There is the scene in which one person strips off their clothes in an impromptu fashion so that they may dive into a body of water they have just happened across, as a challenge-slash-invitation to their companion to join them in doing so. (The foregone twist here is that Susan cannot swim; Buddy must meet the challenge in order to save her from drowning.)

6. Matisyahu cameo.

7. The disquieting, complicating fact that Susan is a victim of domestic abuse — a plot point mentioned in the movie’s description — is entirely scrubbed from the trailer, and presumably conveniently disposed of in the movie.

8. “You helped ME,” Susan tells Buddy, who incorrectly believes that he acts purely out of self-interest.

“A Buddy Movie” opens on May 15.

Mid-century modernism did wonders for New York's Park Avenue back in its heyday. Case in point: Mies van der Rohe's Seagram Building and the neighboring Lever House by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill. The two buildings were pioneers of high-end office design, leaving a trail of boxy facsimiles along Manhattan's ritzy boulevard. Few designs have really broken the mold since then, but now, half a century later, a not-so-little developer called L&L Holding Co. has come along, hoping to shake up the city skyline.

The site of 425 Park Avenue now awaits its fate as a star-studded line-up of prospective architects compete for the chance to helm the $750 million project. L&L Holding Co. has tapped Jean Nouvel, Herzog & de Meuron, Foster & Partners, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas, Richard Meier, Renzo Piano and others with high hopes to create a "bespoke skyscraper that will both complement Park Avenue's existing architectural treasures and make its own indelible mark in the world's most timeless office corridor," as described by Columbia director of the center for urban real estate Vishaan Chakrabarti, according to the Wall Street Journal.

The current building is already occupied by a pristine office tower, and L&L have bold plans to knock down the bulk of it to construct a bigger, badder "crown jewel." Moreover, the plan to leave part of the existing building in place is to dodge finicky city zoning codes, which would have forced L&L to build a smaller tower had the existing building been completely razed.

It is clear that L&L have placed incredible faith in the appeal of the site as well as the appeal of name brand design, enough to expect that tenants will happily shell out $100 or more per square foot. The plans exhibit architecture at its most aggressive, aiming to find a form that will turn dollar signs into even more dollar signs, or in more relevant terms, architecture of the 1%. Judging by the shortlist of architects, the aesthetic of Park Avenue's new skyscraper will make a similarly forceful statement, breaking through the uniformity of an avenue fossilized in the 1960's. Picture it now: a contorting sculpture churned out by Zaha Hadid Architects, resting atop a Duane Reade. 

As an artist, Lucio Fontana made his mark, literally. The best-known of his "Concetto Spaziale" works — intensely monochrome paintings marked with slashes that look like surgical cuts — are ubiquitous in art and design fairs around the world. The Italian artist, who was born in Argentina in 1899 and died in 1968, is recognized by connoisseurs for his minimalist line. While such a categorization suits the contemporary market, it is a very reductive way of characterizing of his work.

Hence the important contribution of Galerie Karsten Greve's current show in Paris, which places Fontana in a much more classical and complex context. Long associated with the Arte Povera movement, his work also has abstract, Impressionist, and especially Expressionist aspects.

For "Sculptures: Io Sono Uni Scultore e Non un Ceramista" ("I Am a Sculptor and Not a Ceramicist"), the gallery has brought together 37 rarely seen yet revered works dating from 1936 to 1960. Several influences are evident in these works, including the Abstraction-Creation group in Paris, which Fontana joined in 1935, and the Manufacture National in Sèvres, France. Between 1947 and 1952, Fontana led the Spatialist movement, writing manifestos seeking to unite time and space as both conceptual and formal elements. Throughout such intellectual exercises he continued to create figurative sculptures, which, while they seem less iconic or introspective than his better known slashed canvases, remain very personal.

The show begins with its most intimate and evocative piece, "Le Sirene" (1950), a landscape of sea and sun. As if broken into several separate components, the work seems very rough for its theme, but its imperfect and impulsive lines convey movements that evoke waves and rays of sunlight. It immediately introduces Fontana's characteristic style as a sculptor, with his preference for sharp ridges. Each piece exists as a completed movement while mainting an unpolished edge. This technique endows the most stunning sculptures — including the great "Il Guerriero" (1949) — with incredible power.

Fontana's sculptures seem to be the antithesis of his monochrome paintings, as if he took a break from his minimalist philosophy to contemplate religion, history, the raw emotion of life, and the strength of humanity. The influence of Hellenistic and Roman art, as well as the Calvary paintings of Hieronymus Bosch, can be seen in Fontana's almost-abstract "Battaglia" sculptures from 1947-48. At times, these scenes of battles and turmoil possess the grace of dancing figures, but at others they are animated with destructive virility.

Click on the slide show to see images from the Lucio Fontana show at Karsten Greve.

A version of this story appeared on ARTINFO France.

Jennifer Love Hewitt wasn’t awful as Audrey Hepburn in ABC’s 2000 biopic, and there’s no reason why Lindsay Lohan should be awful as Elizabeth Taylor in Lifetime’s “Liz & Dick.” It was announced yesterday that Lohan, who posed as Taylor on the June 2006 cover of Interview magazine, has been cast in the upcoming television movie about the late star’s tempestuous relationship with Richard Burton, to whom she was married twice.

After five years of misery, involving drug and alcohol addiction, DUI arrests, jail terms, house arrest, rehab, and community service, Lohan, 25, has been handed an opportunity that could potentially put her career back on track, although Rosie O’Donnell, for one, doesn’t think so. "The last thing she did good, she was 16," O’Donnell said on the Today show this morning. “I don't think she's right for the role and I don't think she's capable at this point of doing what's needed." 

Despite her wild image, Lohan’s on-screen persona is essentially sweet and ingenuous, as she demonstrated during her “comeback” hosting “Saturday Night Live” on March 3. Whether she can capture Taylor’s fieriness and she-wolf intensity without parodying it, which is surely what the film will require, it’s frequently forgotten that Lohan is gifted. Her performances in “Freaky Friday,” “Mean Girls,” “A Prairie Home Companion,” “Bobby,” and “Georgia Rule” were not those of a commonplace actress. If she can stay on course as Taylor and regain Hollywood’s trust, who knows what she can achieve?

“Liz & Dick,” scheduled for a June Start, is being produced by Larry A. Thompson (“Lucy & Desi: Before the Laughter”) and scripted by Chris Monger, director of “The Englishman Who Went Up a Hill But Came Down a Mountain” and writer of “Temple Grandin.” Monger is Welsh, which won’t hurt his conception of Burton.

Finding an actor to play the hellraising, unfulfilled star, who first met Taylor at a party and fell in love with her on the set of “Cleopatra” (1963), will be harder. Tom Hardy could be right, especially as his gravelly voice is vaguely reminiscent of Burton’s, but after the success of “Inception,” a Lifetime movie with LiLo may not tempt him. Is James Franco busy?

Alongside the Chinese introduction of its new ILX and RDX, Honda rolled out two concept... After what seems like an interminably long rev-up, Travis... Maserati says the Beijing motor show will be the fourth and ... Day 1 is over, and I had a great time...

1. Watch the trailer for “Mansome,” Morgan Spurlock’s documentary about male grooming — which features Zach Galifianakas, Paul Rudd, Will Arnett, and Jason Bateman — below. [Splitsider]

2. Tony Danza has two high-profile roles in the works. [Vulture]

3. Charlie Kaufman will adapt “Chaos Walking,” a sci-fi  book series for young adults. [Deadline]

4. Chuck Klosterman reviews Creed and Nickelback in concert together. [Grantland]

5. Watch Wayne Brady freestyle. [MissInfo]

Previously: Fiona Apple, Reese Witherspoon, Rufus Wainwright, Glaad Awards, and Azealia Banks

Preserving modernist architecture has been an uphill battle, to say the least. The threat of demolition now hangs over Paul Rudolph's Orange County Government Center, and the grim fate of Peter and Alison Smithson's Robin Hood Gardens complex has already been sealed. Even the messianic Rem Koolhaas found little resonance in his plea to save the 1969 Preston Bus Station from the impending death stare of developers. It comes as a surprise then that we find the beginnings of a preservation success story in war-torn Baghdad. For years, the Baghdad Gymnasium, commissioned to Le Corbusier in 1957 and completed posthumously in 1982, stood as an aging mega-structural relic of the Iraqi oil boom. Now, Iraq is reaching out to France to help restore the little known modernist landmark to its former glory.

Designed at the height of the architect's fame, the Baghdad Gymnasium had but a brief halcyon period. No later than 1958, political agitations spurred an uprising against the Iraqi monarchy, and the assassination of the king forced the project to come to a premature halt, leaving the architect "extremely disappointed," Washington-based architectural historian Mina Marefat told AFP. Le Corbusier, more formally known as Charles-Edouard Jeanneret, passed away in 1965, leaving the project in its early stages in the form of approximately 500 signed drawings.

Ironically, with yet another nationalist revolution came renewed life for the Gymnasium. Construction for the project began under the rule of Saddam Hussein and with the guidance of one of Le Corbusier's associates, Georges-Marc Presente. Completed in 1982, the Gymnasium became an illustrious new home to the country's athletes, hosting a number of international competitions under its swooping roof and filling its brightly colored seats with sports fans. But its glory days were cut short yet again in the early 2000s, as American soldiers began to occupy the stadium, and sectarian violence left any notion of recreational sport as an afterthought.

The neglected Gymnasium was rediscovered in 2005 by Caecilia Pieri, a researcher for the French Institute for the Near East who had been working on her thesis on modern architecture in Baghdad. She was surprised to hear that the Le Corbusier Foundation in France had never visited the Gymnasium, working only with scant and inconclusive information about this later work. After paying a visit to the site and attesting to the building's proper completion, the Foundation began drumming up conservation efforts, gaining the support of Baghdad University, the French embassy, and even the UNESCO.

Like Frank Lloyd Wright, Le Corbusier is one of the few modernist architects who can inspire such an urgent and imperative call for preservation. But what is most striking about this effort is the site and context from which it stems. For most of the world, Baghdad, and all of Iraq, projects a fragmented image of an ancient culture thrashed by modern warfare. Little attention, if any, is paid to the more recent strides of a nation steeped in violence. Perhaps the newfound appreciation for a long lost modernist building will, in turn, raise new awareness of a nation’s long lost modern heritage.

Those not familiar with the 72-year-old designer Azzedine Alaïa may remember a mention in the 1995 cult classic “Clueless.” “You don’t understand,” squealed the film’s protagonist, Cher, played by Alicia Silverstone, as she was forced to the ground and held at gunpoint in a red dress by the designer. “This is an Alaïa.”

The couturier’s designs are back in the public eye, this time in the Netherlands at the Groninger Museum, which is hosting a portion of the designer’s oeuvre through May 27 in an exhibition titled “Azzedine Alaïa in the 21st Century.”

The show traces the last decade of work from the Tunisian-born designer, who was originally trained as a sculptor and is known in the fashion world for being a rebel, thanks to his open criticism of Karl Lagerfeld and Anna Wintour, and his disregard of the industry’s schedule, adhering to the notion that his designs are ready when he says so. Last year, he held his first couture show in eight years. He also miraculously manages to keep the designs from his ready-to-wear shows from becoming ubiquitous by maintaining a strict no photography policy. (Now there’s a strategy for keeping fast fashion retailers like Forever 21 and H&M at bay!)

All of the garments featured in the exhibition are carefully fitted, impeccably constructed, and oozing with sex appeal — the designer’s signature marks. A sharp tailcoat accented with crocodile from summer/fall 2003 is included, as well as a ruffled salmon pink ensemble from winter 2008, and a decadent black gown adorned with a paillette and ruffle waist and suggestive cut-out back, from his winter 2011 couture collection.

“Azzedine Alaïa in the 21st Century” follows a 1998 retrospective of the designer’s work at the Groninger that went on to the Guggenheim’s now-closed SoHo location in 2000 and the Brant Foundation in 2002. Since we don’t know if or when Alaïa will show his next collection, this exhibition may be our only way to indulge in his exquisite mastery in the foreseeable future.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from “Azzedine Alaïa in the 21st Century,” on view at the Groninger Museum through May 27.