When legendary sculptor John Ahearn called himself and partner in crime Rigoberto Torres “virgins” during a recent visit to their plaster-dusted South Bronx studio, he was referring to the fact that never before have they done their iconic body castings by commission. That will change at this week’s Frieze New York fair, when Ahearn will restage his 1970 Fashion Moda “South Bronx Hall of Fame” exhibition in a fair booth and perform castings of willing collectors, for the bargain price of $3,000. Three appointments will be available each day of the fair (some, including a joint casting session for curator couple Cecilia Alemani and Massimiliano Gioni, are already booked), but Ahearn also hints that there just might be room for walk-ins.

ARTINFO spoke to Ahearn and Torres about the casting process, their decision to start doing commissions, and whether they’ll use KY Jelly or a shower cap to protect their subjects’ hair.

Will anything else be in the Frieze tent show besides the “South Bronx Hall of Fame” sculptures?

We’re going to be live casting, so those pieces will be part of the installations, and they’ll be in the same room. It’s going to get very crowded. We have Natalie Bell up for Wednesday, Thursday we have Darnell Brown. That’s the extent of our relationships. There are other appointments, but it’s very hush-hush. Three others have been booked, but I don’t know if I’m at liberty to reveal their names. We have six people involved so far.

Will collectors be able to stop by the Frieze tent and book appointments for castings?

You should be asking me “could someone come in and just lay down and get cast?” and I would say, maybe. But it’s recommended that you book it in advance. The reason is that we don’t know what our schedule is. You could just wing it, like standby. You show up for standby in case there’s an opening. Someone could do that, but otherwise there may be someone already scheduled.

How long does it usually take to do one casting?

It varies. There’s how long the material is literally on the person’s face and also there’s your working time with the person, whether you want to ask the person any questions or if they want to ask you any questions. I usually say to them, I don’t want to answer any questions, I just put the straws in your nose, you sit down, you shut up. I have Robert (Rigoberto Torres) get on top of you and hold you down with his knees. The main thing is don’t let them get up. They’ll just have to deal with it. If they’ve signed up they’ve already signed off.

I would give it at least two hours. And that’s the quick haircut, in and out. And the work is not done; all you’re doing is getting the first casting part of the statue. And then it gets worked later.

Do you just put the straws in the subject’s nose and then pour the casting material right on top of them?

In your case, what we do is, we’d say “Do you like swimming?” Great! Well it’s just like swimming in that you have to breathe in a certain manner that works with your stroke, you don’t just breathe constantly while you’re swimming, you can’t. It takes a certain measure of confidence in yourself and how you’re doing. Once the breathing is good and we set you up, there’s nothing for you to do after that other than just let us have our way with you and work our hands all over you.

We will consider your hair. Your hair could go two ways. Either we have a shower cap we put on your head or we’re going to have this KY Jelly that we’ll squeeze into your hair and what that’ll do is permit the hair to release, so it doesn’t stick to your hair. I’m guessing that we’ll be doing a lot of shower caps at Frieze.

What’s the actual process like?

The main thing behind it is actually how you want to look. What are you interested in? And what are we interested in doing with you? In terms of an idea about sculpture or art. What do we want to convey about you, or about ourselves, using your portrait to stand in for something. That’s part of it. We’re not machines, it’s not a job like someone getting a gallbladder operation. Our job is not to perfectly do your cast. There’s no such thing. Of course we don’t want you to suffer or freak out, but other than that, what we really want to do is have an exciting experience that is going to lend itself to something special. Something we’ve never thought of before. Something that is a whole new experience, that would be the ideal.

How will it be different casting collectors for money versus casting locals in the Bronx as public art?

Stress. I’ve never done it. Robert [Rigoberto Torres] and I are both virgins at this time in our lives. We’ve never in our lives ever done a casting for pay. This is the first time, but it’s about time.

How did you decide that this was going to be your first time doing commissions?

[Frieze curator] Cecilia Alemani brought up this idea that we would do an homage to Fashion Moda [gallery] focusing on the “South Bronx Hall of Fame” show. She said, along with this, we would like very much if you would do a live activity there, and I thought that given that it’s an art fair, I thought it was.. I didn’t want to replicate any human interactions with people. Not bus in a bunch of people from the Bronx or something. Especially, I didn’t want to do it officially as part of the program. I thought let’s work with the people who go to the art fairs, the collectors. 

You could say, “John, why are you asking them to give you money for it, why don’t you treat them like all the other people in your life and just do it for free?” And you could do two casts, and you could give one to them and have one to keep for yourself. The problem I have is if I did that, then I’d be responsible for every damn cast we made. I give them one, then I have to worry about what to do with the other one. So what I thought was, we make a very minimal, nice kind of price for everybody, one that’s comfortable for them, and they commit to the idea that they want to get involved for nothing, or relatively nothing, then it’s their cast. After I’m done with it, then it’s theirs. It’s not mine any more. I thought, maybe this is a better way to deal with the work.

Did Cecilia Alemani suggest that you do the commercial commissions at the fair as well?

I demanded it softly to her. I said this is what I would like to do. Everyone was really skeptical, but whatever happens, it’s only going to take four days. It’s a ride we’re going on, priced to keep a smile on everybody’s face. 

Rigoberto Torres: The way I see it is that the collector would want to go through this process themselves. They’ll appreciate the pieces that they collect more.

John Ahearn: It is possible to please a collector. It requires a certain sense of humor on their part, a sense of adventure.

At the price you’ve set and the visibility the project will have at the fair, it seems like you’ll get booked solid pretty quick. 

I have a feeling there will be some last minute bookings. We’re going to treat the collectors like they’re good friends, and they’re welcome to be there, but they’re not ready to be cast yet. First they have to come and see if the temperature is right, see what it looks like. They can come and watch us, and then if they’re ready they can come back the next day and try it. I think there will be people that definitely do not want to make an appointment three weeks in advance. But there may be someone that watches it and says, “Wait a second, I think I get this now. Hey, honey, are we going to come back here tomorrow? Of course we’re coming back here, we have tickets for the whole week! Okay, you got any time tomorrow?” And we’ll go, “Let’s see. Maybe we can squeeze you in. We’ll have to talk to our secretary.”

Tomorrow, art world denizens will start making their fitful way across the water to Randall’s Island for Frieze’s inaugural New York fair, by train, boat, car, or chartered helicopter (it's easy to get to, we're assured). The giant tent is waiting, the sculpture park is ready, and the food trucks full. In one final preview of the exotic urban locale and a look at the SO-IL-designed structure before the action starts, ARTINFO caught Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover on location and talked to him about choosing the island, the new Focus section for young galleries, and why collectors should pick their fair out of the multitude of international options.

Click on the video below for our interview with Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover:  

BERLIN — One would think that after the collective outcry over the Berlin Biennale’s extravagantly political tendencies, documenta artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev might have waited for the dust to settle before announcing that her exhibition, opening a little more than five weeks from now, would also have a political focus and highlight non-art components. Not the case.

On Thursday, the American-born curator announced that documenta 13 would take a keen focus on viewpoints critical of capitalism. Christov-Bakargiev — a veteran of MoMA P.S.1, whiere she initiated “Greater New York” — noted that the exhibition will question “the persistent belief in economic growth,” and will be “driven by a holistic a non-logo-centric vision.” Though the Kassel-based exhibition has consistently taken a fairly wide-ranging view of art, Christov-Bakargiev said that documenta 13 will also include archival and research-based projects as well as, “experiments in the field of art, politics, literature, philosophy and science.” In total, 150 artists representing 55 countries have been invited to participate.

Also new for this year, the exhibition will extend its reach beyond its traditional trio of venues: the Fridericianum, the documenta-Halle, and the Neue Galerie. New spaces are to include a cinema, a hotel, a disused railway station, a park, the “Ständehaus,” and the “Hugenottenhaus.” According to tradition, the participating artists will not be announced officially until the press conference on June 6. However, some have already arrived to begin preparations.  

Lest the kind of outcry that has greeting the Berlin Biennale be continued at documenta, Christov-Bakaragiev emphasized that her plans will also include more tradional mediums like painting, sculpture, photography, film, performance, installation, and audio. As such, her vision ultimately seems to point towards a holistic representation of current artistic practices from both inside and outside the traditional studio space.  

Three days after Amanda Brooks started her new job as fashion director at Barneys New York, she took to her blog, I Love Your Style — a spin-off of the fashion guide she published in 2009 — to express some well-deserved excitement. “It is my DREAM JOB!” she wrote on the site back in February 2011.

But just over a year later, Brooks decided to leave the position and move to England, with little public explanation.

Apart from her relative lack of retail experience, the Barneys job seemed like a logical extension of Brooks’ life in fashion. This New York Observer profile from 2003 sums up her first 29 years pretty well. Her parents met through their mutual friend Lilly Pulitzer. At Brown, Brooks roomed with Carolina Herrera’s daughter and dated Diane von Furstenberg’s son. An internship with Patrick Demarchelier led to a friendship with Vogue’s Plum Sykes, who recommended that Brooks revamp Frédéric Fekkai’s line of accessories. Next, she became a muse to Tuleh, then took over the brand as creative director, all while writing a column for the nascent Men’s Vogue and freelancing elsewhere. She then became director of fashion at William Morris Endeavor, but at the time of her hiring at Barneys held none of these positions. Some pointed to her blog as a major qualification.

After spending last year traipsing below the border to break ground on his first few projects in Mexico, Richard Meier is heading below the equator to start his first South American project: a light, modernist office building in the beach-lined metropolis and future Olympic host city Rio de Janeiro. 

Situated on prime beach-front real estate in Leblon, Rio's most affluent neighborhood, the high-end, 10-story building has been designed to optimize the climate-related advantages that come with building in paradise. Because of the low energy demands of the year-round good weather, the architects were free to plan without having to accommodate unnecessary cladding on the exterior or insulating the interior. They did include a concrete wall, which provides a rough contrast to the sleek white aluminum and glass façade.

"Brazil is the country of modern architecture," project architect Bernhard Karpf told ARTINFO. "It reminds me of the early days of Le Corbusier and early Oscar Niemeyer buildings where everything just really was what it was, without layers and cladding, no extra this or extra that. Very simple, very straightforward stuff makes it very easy and very elegant. We wanted to take advantage of that situation."

Free to create a sense of openness and airiness that cold weather usually prohibits, the firm also designed an internal courtyard to bring natural light and ventilation to all parts of the building, despite the existing structures that will flank it on three sides.  To add a little greenery,"we’re trying to find out how you build a vertical garden, which is a bit more difficult than a horizontal garden," according to Karpf. Taking a cue from Herzog & de Meuron's lush, living wall at the CaixaForum in Madrid, they "figured we could do something like that on a smaller scale."

To see renderings of the forthcoming Richard Meier project in Rio de Janeiro, click the slide show.  

There are movies that (just as there are people who) take such pleasure in themselves that you can’t help but admire them. It’s contagious — they are enchanting precisely they so openly revel in their movie-ness. “Casablanca” may be the best-known, but the supreme example is surely Jacques Rivette’s 1974 “Celine and Julie Go Boating,” starting a revival run in a new 35mm print, this Friday at Film Forum.

The most experimental of nouvelle vague directors, Rivette was here concocting a recipe for a cinematic joie de vivre so heady it might be sustained for three-plus hours. “Celine and Julie” is verdant, airy, and playful — at once a leisurely exercise in narrativity, a comic rite of spring, an extended riff, a genial incantation, and a feminist buddy film. Harpo-mop Julie (Dominique Labourier), a librarian with a scholarly interest in the occult, and mercurial Celine (Juliet Berto), a pouty stagemagicienne, cross paths and form a friendship based on playful role swapping and mutual mind-reading.

There’s a measure of preciosity but the actresses are resourceful, unafraid, and often very funny. (New York Times reviewer Nora Sayre characterized Berto as “a defiant, ruthless clown.”) Whimsy is grounded by the vulgar schoolyard pranks and submerged eroticism of the pair’s telepathic rapport. “Celine and Julie” is scripted but it has the free-associative feel of a fantasy created by two imaginative kids over the course of a long summer vacation. (Truly, Rivette learned the lessons of his open-ended, quasi-improvised 14-hour epic “Out 1”; “Celine and Julie” is his rules of the game in more ways than one.)

The movie’s first act is a long, playful hide-and-seek pursuit across Paris; in the second act, Celine and Julie become accomplices, investigating the sinister doings in a seemingly haunted house. They relive their discoveries as shared memories, triggered by some magical sweets (part Proust, part “Alice in Wonderland,” part mescaline). The situation becomes more explicitly cinematic when they discover that the house is offering a continuous loop showing of the same domestic mystery.

Alternately horrified and hysterical with laughter, Celine and Julie watch a pair of mannered mam’zelles (Bulle Ogier and Marie-France Pisier) slink around in murderous competition for the affections of a fatuously morose widower (the film’s producer Barbet Schroeder). Thus, the movie turns into an essay on spectatorship that, in its delirious third act, has the duo intervene in the melodrama they have been critiquing. Their high spirited, improvisatory style alternates with the over-determined, claustrophobic atmosphere in manner that suggests Jean Renoir and Fritz Lang battling for control of the universe. What’s magical about “Celine and Julie” is the way it conjures up so many earlier movies (Feuillade’s serials, “Duck Soup,” “Last Year at Marienbad,” “Band of Outsiders,” Vera Chytilova’s “Daisies,” to name a few) while seeming completely sui generis.

At the same time, “Celine and Julie” seems to have cast its spell on such disparate subsequent films as “Irma Vep,” “Mulholland Drive,” “In the City of Sylvia,” and especially Madonna’s most respectable vehicle, “Desperately Seeking Susan.” It seems to have always been with us but, like any cult film, “Celine and Julie” required time to find its audience. Hailed by its devoted early champion Jonathan Rosenbaum in both Sight and Sound and Film Comment, “Celine and Julie” had its US premiere at the 1974 New York Film Festival (along with Rivette’s even longer “Out One/Spectre”), then waited over three years for a commercial release.

In early ’78, New Yorker Films opened the movie at the Cinema Studio where, if memory serves, it lasted less than a week. Some 10 months after that, before vanishing into the realm of Rivette retrospectives and one-day revivals it got a brief run downtown at the Public Theatre. Senior critic Andrew Sarris had two more commercial openings by nouvelle vague directors (Claude Chabrol’s “Violette” and Eric Rohmer’s “Perceval”) that week and so “Celine and Julie” was reviewed for the Voice by its neophyte third-stringer, moi: “The quintessential French movie of the past 15 years … an original and entertaining metaphor for film-watching and, perhaps, film history.” Decades later, that history is unthinkable without Rivette’s glorious intervention.

Indeed, having newly revisited “Celine and Julie,” I could not help but superimpose its premise over the weekend’s two other outstanding releases — the superlative comic-book (or pure cinema) son-et-lumiere spectacle that is “The Avengers,” and the lovingly restored re-release of Shirley Clarke’s landmark 1961 adaptation of Jack Gelber’s dope opera, “The Connection.” While it’s superhero business as usual to watch the eponymous Avengers vie with Loki for control of their scenario, it would be truly fabulous to watch Celine and Julie insert themselves into and take control of “The Connection”’s Pirandellian ritual.

Read more J. Hoberman in Movie Journal

Having just visited the inaugural iteration of Frieze New York, one thing is abundantly clear — this fair isn’t going to last here, at least not in its present location, organization, and form.

Randall’s Island is too troublesome to get to, and once you are all the way there the amenities are so rudimentary — wonky wood plank floors with mesh grills that catch high heels, misprinted signs, and demountable bathrooms — and the quality of the art on view so average that it is hardly worth the effort.

I'm not saying there isn’t good art here, but there is no doubt that the quality of the exhibitors is markedly lower than the Frieze art fair in London. Many big American galleries have opted out of participating. Meanwhile it is too expensive for a lot of European galleries to come back to New York after participating in the Armory Show in March. With all this in mind, I don’t see how this fair can succeed. New York is too competitive.

I also think the much ballyhooed location was a mistake. Beyond the difficulty of getting there, the place — how do I say this nicely — smells. A strange odor of rotting meat or something of the sort pervaded the aisles towards the back of the tent venue. It could have been the river, because Randall's Island is an out-of-the-way, semi-deserted location where the Harlem River and Long Island Sound meet to form the tidal, East River estuary. 

Then there is the storied tent venue itself. It is certainly an interesting and ambitious architectural structure, but it does not create an environment in which you feel that you want to look at or buy art — at least not one that New Yorkers will warm to, with the permanent art fair of Chelsea on their doorstep and the well-heeled galleries in midtown offering easy access to collectors. Looking at art in a tent here feels a little like eating food from a bucket.

It seems to me that a decision to locate the inaugural Frieze New York on Randall’s Island only really makes sense as a bold publicity stunt — to build the Frieze art fair brand in the U.S. media. It is clearly not in the interests of the dealers, the collectors, or the visitors. It is a location that serves the interests of the fair at the expense of everyone else.

Today, after months of anticipation, the very first Frieze New York art fair opened its doors and ARTINFO was on hand to get a look at the British export's inaugural outing. From the sprawling tent with its roomy booths to the outdoor sculpture park, the newcomer is giving its more established competitor, the Armory Show, a serious run for its money. Here are some of the highlights from the first Frieze New York.

NEW YORK — Wandering around the airy, massive tent that is home to the inaugural Frieze Art Fair, critic Jerry Saltz mused, “New Yorkers usually don’t cross water for culture, unless it’s an ocean.” But cross water they did, and in droves — though the tent was so large that it was at times difficult to determine exactly how many people were there.

Judging by the number of familiar faces and substantial sales, if not by the elbow room, Thursday’s VIP opening day on Randall’s Island was quite well attended. Artists Tracey Emin, Maurizio Cattelan, and Chuck Close were all spotted, along with a healthy crowd of art advisors, curators, and museum directors like Glenn Lowry, Thelma Golden, and Jeremy Strick.

“The fact that it’s limited to people who bother to get out here and people who can afford to get out here means it’s a more discerning audience,” said Joost Bosland, director of Capetown’s Stevenson Gallery. While the Miami art fairs may play host to P. Diddy and Catherine Zeta-Jones, there were few celebrities to spot here (other than Mark Ruffalo, engaged in a strange BBQ stunt at Gavin Brown Enterprise, to call attention to the dangers of fracking). The audience was professional, and though Thursday’s VIP opening had the jovial feel of something fresh and new, it was clear that serious business was being done.

At Cheim & Read’s booth, partner and sales director Adam Sheffer was practically giddy. “It feels like 2007 all over again!” he exclaimed. The booth sold several Jenny Holzer pieces — an LED sign for $175,000, a bench for $100,000, as well as a work via JPEG — as well as a Chantal Joffe painting for $65,000, a Louise Fishman work for $125,000, and a Bill Jensen for $25,000. Reportedly on reserve was the 2,000-pound Lynda Benglis sculpture oozing out of the corner of the booth, which required the gallery to reinforce the floors underneath in advance of the opening. 

Within the first eight minutes of the fair, Lisson Gallery sold a sculpture by Haroon Mirza, the young British sound and installation artist who won the Silver Lion at last year’s Venice Biennale, for $40,000, and proceeded to sell a bronze mirrored disk by Anish Kapoor for £500,000 ($809,100). London’s Victoria Miro sold several recent works “in the low to mid-six figures” by Yayoi Kusama, who has seen a rush of fresh interest on the heels of her Tate retrospective. “People are incredibly happy to be here,” said dealer James Cohan, who sold a number of pieces by Berlin-based Simon Evans for $30,000 to $75,000 by early afternoon. “They all say, ‘I guess this is going to become the fair in New York.’”

The swift sales continued over at Metro Pictures, where Robert Longo’s large, black-and-white close-up drawing of a waving American flag sold for $425,000 and a Cindy Sherman film still sold for $950,000. Casey Kaplan and Andrea Rosen reported selling out, or very nearly selling out, everything they had on the walls. Kaplan presented a solo show of Garth Weiser’s large, bright abstractions ($35,000-45,000 each). Rosen mounted a solo room of brand new vibrant paintings and wall collages by Elliott Hundley, all sold for $85,000, and an accompanying room of quieter work by Wolfgang Tillmans and Aaron Barrow, among others. “I tend to bring work under $100,000 to Frieze,” Rosen said. “People who come here like to feel a sense of discovery, but also buy work they know is still reasonably established.”

Not every booth was built with brisk sales in mind, however. Stevenson devoted the majority of its space to a massive installation by South African rising star Nicholas Hlobo: the rubber tube snaked around the entire booth, festooned with colorful ribbons. (The gallery had yet to sell the piece by the end of the first day, though it had sold several of Hlobo’s smaller wall pieces.) Standard Gallery, from Oslo, devoted half its floor space to a towering installation of cardboard boxes by Matias Faldbakken, priced at £30,000 ($39,500).

“This is the kind of fair where people don’t always go for the obvious,” said Sprueth Magers’s Andreas Gegner. The gallery sold one of Jenny Holzer’s new paintings for $175,000 and a bright red Rosemarie Trockel wool sculpture that looked like a large, anthropomorphized rug for £75,000 ($121,410). The gallery also sold several pieces for £18,000 ($29,138) by the German artist Aster Klien, whose collages incorporating vintage movie stills, text, and paper look like the lovechild of John Baldessari and Barbara Kruger. (Though, to be fair, Klein began working in this now-familiar format a bit earlier than some of her peers, in 1979.) 

Tang Contemporary Art, from Beijing, devoted its entire booth to an installation by Chinese artist He An entitled “I am Curious Yellow I am Curious Blue.” The artist stole various lighted signs from around the city in order to form the name of his favorite Japanese porn star. He then took the signs and dropped them from the roof of a building. The broken bits of porn-themed signage are still available for $50,000.

Somewhat creepy sculptures of or referencing the female form was a mini-trend at the fair: Athens-based Breeder Gallery was displaying Jennifer Rubell’s “Nutcracker,” a nude mannequin whose legs served as a fully-functioning nutcracker. Over at Galerie Perrotin’s booth, a hyperrealist sculpture of a young woman leaning up against the wall by French artist Daniel Firman could have easily been mistaken for an exhausted gallerina. (It turned out to be a plaster work entitled “Lea” — the latest in the artist’s “Attitudes” series, priced at $35,000.)

With Armory Show director Noah Horowitz and Armory Show co-founder Paul Morris spotted trolling the halls, there was much chatter about what this event might mean for the New York fair landscape. “It’s a much better range of galleries, and lots of them didn’t come to the Armory this year,” said dealer Sean Kelly. “But we did seven-figure sales at the Armory and we’re doing well here. So far, there is room for both fairs.”

“I think NADA, the ADAA, and Independent will be fine,” said art advisor Lisa Schiff. “The Armory, I’m not sure. Maybe just the modern section will stick around. Next year will be an interesting one, that’s for sure.” 

Indiana may be an ideal state for a sports enthusiast — the Indy 500 takes place in Indianapolis annually, and the Pacers and Colts call the city home. But what most people don’t know is that a handful of influential fashion designers spent their early years in the Hoosier State. The Indianapolis Museum of Art pays tribute to them with an exhibition titled “An American Legacy: Norell, Blass, Halston & Sprouse,” running from May 4 to January 27, 2013.

More than 50 garments spanning a half a century make up the show, consisting of pieces by Norman Norell, Bill Blass, Halston, and Stephen Sprouse. The items include a Blass gown created for first lady Nancy Reagan, as well as a Norell day dress worn by actress Betty Furness during the 1960 presidential convention. Andy Warhol also has a presence in the exhibition, through a 1972 Halston floor-length dress covered with Warhol’s “Flowers,” and a Warhol-inspired camouflage dress designed by Sprouse and worn by Blondie front woman Debbie Harry.

“Norell, Blass, Halston, and Sprouse influenced not only American fashion, but international style,” said Niloo Paydar, curator of fashion and textile arts at the IMA, in a press release. “The pieces in ‘An American Legacy’ were selected to represent the unique style of each designer, highlighting their individual artistic approaches and philosophies of decorating the human body.”

All four of the designers ended up leaving the Midwest for the country’s fashion capital, New York, living out the prime of their careers in the Big Apple. But we imagine that there must be something stylish in the Indiana water for the state to have spawned four great American fashion icons.

Click on the slide show to see highlights from “An American Legacy: Norell, Blass, Halston & Sprouse,” on display at the Indianapolis Museum of Art through January 27, 2013.

NEW YORK — It's here. After months of hype, Frieze New York at last opened to VIPs this afternoon on Randall's Island. What can you expect if you make the trek?

Well, it's a really good art fair, and most people I talked to seemed already to be giving it the advantage over its New York competitors. The giant Frieze Tent looks smart; the sweeping venue is filled with natural light (even in the relative gloom of a gray afternoon) and pleasant to navigate, despite its immensity; and the roster of exhibitors feels well-chosen. The crowd is lively and Manhattan's millionaires seem to be in a buying mood. The space even feels relatively laid back for such a high-stakes affair. Heck, even the bathrooms look great.

Scads of outstanding, ultra-contemporary art is on view, of course. Gagosian, making its first appearance at a NYC fair, has filled its booth with Rudolf Stingel paintings. Michael Werner has a large Thomas Houseago sculpture, "Head (Black Hill I)" (2010), a striking work that looked something like a decrepit effigy of Darth Vader's helmet. Galerie Thaddaeus Ropac has one of Gilbert & George's "London Pictures," which of late have been circling the globe — and happen to also be on view in Alfonso Artiaco and White Cube's booths — out front. It's a tasting menu of the best and most bankable.

There are the inevitable instances of blank art-fair irony. "It's Going Very Badly / It's a Terrible Disaster," reads a David Shrigley sign, in his characteristic scrawl, outside Anton Kern, a statement that might well crystalize the commercial anxieties of the financial high-wire act that is the art-fair economy for many of these dealers. "Too Big to Fail" reads a wall-filling black-and-white canvas by Barbara Kruger at Spruth Magers, referencing the concentration of financial power that underpins the jet-setting art collector class. "This Dream Has an Advantage Over Many Others" — my favorite snippet of text at the fair — blazes in yellow neon at Almine Rech, a bit of lonesome existential musing that might also lament entrenched privilege.   

As usual, the program of the "Frame" section of young exhibitors offers the frisson of discovery, and gives you someone to root for. Los Angeles's Night Gallery was showing a grotto-like, site-specific installation by Samara Golden, inspired partly by Randall's Island's history, partly by her own personal experience. Titled "Bad Brains," the booth was made over to resemble a trashed living room, with fragmented mirrors, TV monitors, a pile of pagan masks, and an LED strip reeling off a set of questions that are supposed to diagnose mental illness: "Do you ever talk to plants?" "Do you draw pictures of people getting violently injured?" And so on. It was a successfully ghoulish interlude in the fair, and sold in the first hours for $15,000.

So: Frieze is well designed and pleasantly appointed. The Frieze organizers are pros, and have done what they do, which is give art commerce a high-brow but also accessible and relatively unpretentious feeling. Curators Tom Eccles and Cecilia Alemani have carried off their tasks of curating the fair's pop-up sculpture park and various special attractions — like the booth where the sublimely intense John Ahearn was hard at work creating casts of willing fairgoers — in such a way as to give the whole thing the appropriate air of class and grace.

It's all so well organized that the one detail that stands out really stands out, and that is the ongoing labor dispute with the Carpenter's Union, which continues to fester. Visitors can expect to be greeted at the shuttle buses at 125th street by a big banner reading "Shame on Frieze Art Fair: Purveyors of Poverty, Hurting New York City" (now there's a bit of text art for you!) As the woman who sat there, holding up one end of the banner, told me, referring to the exhibitors and artists looking to do business, "It's not their fault, they're just trying to sell stuff — it's the organizers. They did this." In a context that reduces political sentiment to kabuki theater, that feels like bedrock reality. There has to be a better way.

To see some of the works mentioned in this article, click on the slide show.

Pulse was definitely “pulsing” yesterday morning, from the scantily-clad performers in Pulse Projects upstairs to the early morning crowds surfing the gallery booths on the ground floor. The fair, which historically has run at Chelsea’s Metropolitan Pavilion during Armory Week, was an early ally with Frieze, switching over its dates to run alongside the British import. “It was great for us logistically to have more time between Miami and New York,” Pulse’s director Cornell DeWitt told ARTINFO. “I think galleries were nervous that everyone would get the message and come, but they all felt it was the best thing to do.”  

The change of date didn’t seem to deter collectors. VIPs sipped mimosas as early as 9 a.m., inured to the profusion of the oft-extreme artwork on view, which included slaughterhouse-sourced animal blood paintings and roboticized dogs. By mid-afternoon, red dots began to pop up alongside artworks. Peter Brock’s solo booth from the “Impulse” section of the fair reported sales by the end of the day.

Clocking in at 60 exhibitors, this year’s edition of Pulse is four galleries smaller than last year, though DeWitt says the slimming was merely a consequence of certain galleries wanting more space. This year, Pulse’s roster included work by certified (if eclectic) mix of big names like Ed Ruscha, Kiki Smith, Mickalene Thomas, Andres Serrano, David LaChappelle, and William Eggleston. That said, a lot of the most striking and strange works were by lessers-knowns. See ARTINFO’s picks from Pulse below, complete with price tags (or click here to see our picks in illustrated slide show form).

1) Fred Wilson at Rena Bransten Gallery, San Francisco

Two works by the seminal institutional critique artist Fred Wilson adorn the entrance to Pulse, signaling that this will be a classy affair. “Sneaky Leaky” (2009), an austere installation of raindrops made out of opaque black glass, harks back to Wilson’s 2003 Venice Biennale installation. A smaller work from this series, featuring a single tear, is available in the gallery’s booth, a bargain for $38,000. In “Reign” (2011), iridescent black beads are suspended from a globe, conjuring complex issues of race and geo-politics.  

Price Tag: $38,000 – $65,000

2) Jordan Eagles at Causey Contemporary, Brooklyn, NY

Not the creepiest work seen at Pulse (for that, see Tinkebell's taxidermied horse, below), but it takes the silver medal while remaining far more aesthetically appealing and inventive in the process. Eagles’s slaughterhouse-sourced animal blood and cast UV resin paintings and sculptures glowed with almost inorganically intense hues from Causey Contemporary’s solo booth. If Showtime’s Dexter Morgan were a collector, he may gravitate to this booth.

Price Tag: $2,000 – $25,000

3) Sam Messenger at Davidson Contemporary, New York

Sam Messenger debuted at Pulse’s younger upstairs annex, “Impulse,” in 2007. Since then, prices have almost tripled for the artist’s meticulous networks of grids and webs on weathered paper. His intricate lattice-like netting (rendered in white ink) unfold according to the Fibonacci sequence.   

Price Tag: $4,000 – $25,000

4) David Kramer at Freight + Volume, New York

Kramer’s kitschy studio drawings brightened up the booth for this eclectic New York gallery. Only one of his large-scale paintings, illuminated by a single yellow fluorescent-light, made it to the fair, but it was strikingly different from the smaller studies for sale, which incorporate a sloshy rainbow of messy ink and slogans, touting tongue-and-cheek jokes about the American dream. His haphazardly sketchy style is in line with a trend towards gallery shows that feature work torn straight from the sketchbook, but Kramer’s pieces show a unique sensitivity to humorous plays on words and pictures.

Price Tag: Large-scale painting “70s Porn” 2012 $15,000; “Simple Life” 2012 $3,500; “More Is More” 2011 $3,500; “Facebook Drawing” 2011 $3,300

5) Paul Paddock at Frosh & Portmann, New York

The New York-based artist stood out with technically refined, subtly disturbing, and playful watercolors. These included “Grand Standing” (2012), a complex image picturing ghostly skeletons in the bark of birch trees amidst an owl-headed man lifted by children. “Horse” (2012) features a flying thestral and a young girl in a red dress wielding a machete.

Price Tag: Small size $2,200, medium size $3,800, large $7,500

6) Alan Rath at Hosfelt Gallery, New York

“Creature II” (2012) will both wag his tail hello to you and cost you a pretty penny. Tech-savvy Rath picked up training in robotics at MIT and has combined his interest in digital video and image-making into a series of robotic sculptures that respond to human interaction. Very cool.

Price Tag: “Creature II” 2012 $45,000; “Handful” 2010 $70,000

7) Anne Lindberg at Carrie Secrist Gallery, Chicago, IL

The artist splits her time between Kansas City and New York, creating vibrant experiential drawings and installations. The one installed at the gallery’s booth was site-specific and completed over the course of 12 hours. It's hard to explain, but the relatively new series began with graphite drawings produced with the aid of "an architect’s parallel bar" and, due to the inspiration from a peach the artist ate over lunch one day, slowly became infused with bright yellows, oranges, and greens. Brace yourself, this booth will distort your visual field, so keep  your eyes locked on something stable.

Price Tag: Installation “Call and Response” 2012 $25,000; simple graphite $3,500; color graphite $8,500; thread drawings $15,000

8) Tinkebell and Terry Rogers at Torch Gallery, The Netherlands

If there were an award for most awesomely flashy booth at Pulse, the Netherlands’s Torch Gallery would take the cake. Cat-slaughtering provocatrice Tinkebell (nee Katinka Simonse) has never been one for subtlety, but she really ups the ante with her equine tour de force, a life-size taxidermy entitled “Cupcake, My Little Pony.” As a comment on how we cutsily anthropomorphize animals for own narcissistic ends, Tinkebell has transformed the noble beast into a kitschy Disnified monstrosity, complete with roller skates and twinkling cartoon eyes. Meanwhile, Terry Rogers’s monumental rendition of a porntastic orgy scene holds court on the back wall, a meditation on the alienation and emptiness of partying and casual sex.

Price Tag: Tinkebelle “Cupcake, My Little Pony” $23,000; Rogers “The Calculus of Existence” 2012 $150,000

9) Loren Munk at Daniel Weinberg Gallery, Los Angeles, CA

If fair-teague is setting in after the Frieze Week blitz, be sure to check out Loren Munk’s “Graphic Representation of the Dialectical Aesthetics of Modernism 1900-2000” at Daniel Weinberg’s booth. Munk’s obsessive diagrammatic maps of art historical movements and trends might be the shot in the arm to get you excited about art again.

Price Tag: $16,000

10) Will Kurtz at Mike Weiss Gallery, New York

If you see Will Kurtz on the street, run the other way! He might create an unflinching effigy of you from cardboard and paper mache. The Brooklyn-based artist and urban voyeur regularly combs the outer boroughs for his subjects, and his life-size portrait of three Brighton Beach oldtimers (and their little dog, too) is equal parts picturesque and terrifying.

Price Tag: $28,000

— Met Gets History Lesson from 13-Year-Old: During a recent visit to the Metropolitan Museum 13-year-old Benjamin Lerman Coady noticed a glaring omission: parts of Africa and Spain were missing from a map of the 6th century Byzantine Empire. Despite the incredulity of both his mother and front desk attendants, he filled out a comment card — and low and behold, five months later (!), Met curator Helen Evans wrote him back: "You are of course correct about the boundaries of the Byzantine Empire. You are the first person to recognize the mistake and we thank you for bringing it to our attention.” Though he seems a shoe-in for a career in art history, the lad's ambitions lie eslewhere: “I want to move to Greenwich and open a modern exotic car shop." [NYDailyNews]

— Russian Art Market Recoils From Putin: With Vladimir Putin's return to the Kremlin for a third term, many of Russia's biggest art collectors are fleeing the country, dealing a potentially fatal blow to a domestic art market that relies on the conspicuous consumption of the super-rich. With wealthy but austere bureaucrats holding much of the country's capital, local galleries are having to adapt; already international fair circuit regulars Gelman Gallery and XL Gallery are converting from commercial to non-profit models and looking for state support — which in turn is affecting the often-critical tone of the art they exhibit. [Reuters]

— Behind Every Record Auction is a Cool-Headed Auctioneer: On Wednesday night Sotheby's auctioneer Tobias Meyer appeared impervious to the hoopla as he brokered the sale of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" for a record $119.9 million. How does he do it? "When the atmosphere gets very tense, so to speak, I strangely have the reverse mechanism that I become very calm," Meyer says. "Somebody once said that's a little bit like a Formula One driver, because they're in that space and they're very happy about it and they need to make these split-second decisions." [WSJ]

— Koch Funds Dinosaur Hall Renovation: Yesterday, on his 72nd birthday, billionaire businessman, arts patron, and Tea Party backer David Koch donated $35 million to the American Natural History Museum for its hall of dinosaurs. His gift will cover all but $10 million of the gallery's renovation, which is scheduled to begin in 2014 and continue through 2019. The gift was the largest ever received by the AMNH, and the fifth-largest in Smithsonian Institute history. It's far from the largest donation Koch has made, though; in 2008 he donated $100 million towards the renovation of Lincoln Center. [WaPo]

— The Saint-Exupery Code: Lost pages from Antoine de Saint-Exupery's beloved "The Little Prince" are set to go on sale at Paris auction house Artcurial on May 16, the world's only pages besides the original copy in New York's Morgan Library — and they may unlock a secret political meaning to the classic children's text. In the lost passage, we meet a mysterious character, an "ambassador of the human spirit" searching for a lost six-letter word. One expert believes that the secret missing word is "guerre," or "war," and that the heretofore unknown persona represents a radical pacifist message embedded in "The Little Prince." [AP]

— Prolific British Forger Gets Two Years: William Mumford, 63, has been sentenced to two years in prison for forging about 1,000 paintings, some of which his co-conspirators sold through eBay and British auction houses for up to £30,000 ($38,500). Scotland Yard got wise to is scheme in 2009, when a major British auction house noticed the sudden abundance of available works by M.F. Husain — one of Mumford's favorite artists to forge, along with Kyffin Williams and John Tunnard. [AP]

— "Che" Painting Draws Fury in Nevada: Few images are more shopworn, but Ernesto "Che" Guevara's face — the mug that launched a thousand T-shirts — still has the power to draw ire. Reno-Tahoe International Airport has found itself unexpectedly at the center of a minor public art uproar over a painting in an employee art exhibition depicting Cuban revolutionary and the word "Revolution." An airport spokesman, however, insists the "Che" will remain on view though May 9. [CBS]

— Fraud Charges Fly in Calgary: The Art Gallery of Calgary has launched a civil suit against its recently departed president Valerie Cooper, demanding that she return nearly $500,000 (that's Canadian dollars, which these days make it worse, US$505,000). The institution alleges that Cooper falsified a wide variety of expenses, including purchases of works of art that went into her personal collection. [Calgary Herald]

— Wildlife Smuggling Bust Turns up Stolen Paintings: Last year a federal investigation resulted in one of Alaska's biggest wildlife trafficking busts of the last decade, and among the guns, snowmobiles, cash, ivory from about 100 walruses, and other animal parts seized from suspects Jesse Leboeuf and Loretta Sternbach were five paintings, one valued at nearly $50,000. The smuggler couple pleaded guilty in July, and now federal prosecutors are hoping to return the paintings to their rightful owner, a collector in Connecticut according to a 2010 affidavit. "There's been things like jewelry from overseas made from parts of endangered animals," said U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service spokesman Bruce Woods, "but as far as pieces of fine art, that's never happened, as far as I can remember." [Reuters]

— An Art Story Made in eBay: Fuse's David Shapiro happened upon a listing for the painting "Jesus Broke Out the Lambchop Puppet and Hired an Angel to Try and Cheer Up a Clinically Depressed Paul McCartney," a figurative painting that depicts exactly what the title says it does. The work is on offer for a staggeringly ambitious $177,000, and has been listed for two-and-a-half years. Shapiro followed up his find by interviewing Colorado-based artist Kata Billups, who explains that the asking price was determined, in part, by "the biblical significance of the number seven." Billups also definitely needs to check eBay more often: "There was a [legally binding offer through eBay] for $100,000 and for some reason I hadn’t checked my computer for a while and it expired." [Fuse]

VIDEO OF THE DAY

ARTINFO's Tom Chen checks out some of the highlights of the inaugural Frieze New York on Randall's Island this week:

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SALE: Post-War and Contemporary Evening Sales

LOCATION: New York

DATE: May 8-10

ABOUT: Up first in this marathon week of contemporary evening sales is Christie's, which features a solid group of works by blue-chip artists. At the top of the estimates is Mark Rothko's "Orange, Red, Yellow," an example of the artist's signature large-scale paintings featuring brilliant blocks of collor. The 1961 canvas is estimated to sell for $35-45 million and comes from the estate of David Pincus, the well-known Philadelphia-based collector who died late in 2011. Other marquee works going on the block at Christie's from Pincus's collection include works by post-war masters Willem de Kooning, Barnett Newman, Jackson Pollock, and Clyfford Still, as well as work by more contemporary heavyweights Anslem Kiefer, Jeff Wall, and Nan Goldin. The Christie's sale also features a rare "fire-color" painting by Yves Klein, executed in 1962, the year of the artist's untimely death. "FC 1" is a giant rust-colored work featuring the outline of two female models in Yves Klein's signature blue. The estimate is $30-40 million.

The action will move to Sotheby's on Wednesday, where there are three works with estimates above $30 million: Andy Warhol's iconic 1963 silkscreen "Double Elvis," which was originally exhibited in Los Angeles's Ferus Gallery (est. $30-50 million); Francis Bacon's "Figure Writing Reflected in a Mirror," which was the headline work at Bacon's renowned exhibition at Galerie Claude Bernard in 1977 (est. $30-40 million); and Roy Lichtenstein's 1964 cartoon-like depiction of a woman's face, "Sleeping Girl," which was also originally exhibited at the Ferus Gallery (est. $30-40 million). Just last November, another Lichtenstein work using his signature cartoon Pop Art style sold for a record $43.2 million at Christie's. The 59-lot sale features several works by recent art market golden boy Gerhard Richter, a few de Koonings (no doubt capitalizing on his recent MoMA retrospective, which closed in January), and a bright and energetic abstraction by Joan Mitchell from her late period (1989), which could bring $3.5-4.5 million.  

On Thursday, both Bonhams and Phillips de Pury will hold sales, at slightly lower price points than the marquee works above. Willem de Kooning's work is also on the block at Bonhams, which has just recently begun to hold contemporary art sales and focuses on the market below $1 million (and mostly below $100,000). De Kooning's untitled oil and charcoal work in firey orange hues is estimated to fetch $300,000-500,000. An aluminium and copper wire sculpture by Ghananian sculptor El Anatsui carries the highest estimate of the sale, with a possible value of $700,000-900,000. At Phillips on Thursday evening, one of the standout lots is a colorful and symbolic 1981 untitled painting by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is estimated to bring $8-12 million. A blue and orange Warhol "Mao," (1973) has a $9-12 million estimate.  

Auction List: 

Location: Christie's
Date: May 8, 7pm

Location: Sotheby's
Date: May 9, 7pm

Location: Phillips de Pury
Date: May 10,

Location: Bonhams
Date: May 10, 5pm

OTHER INTERNATIONAL SALES:

Sale: Natural History
Location: I.M Chait Beverly Hills
Date: May 6, 11am

Sale: Asian Art
Location: Nagel Stuttgart
Date: May 9-11

Sale: 19th and 20th Century American and European Art
Location: Rago Arts, Lambertville, NJ
Date: May 12, 10am

Sale: African, Oceanic, and Pre-Columbian Art
Location: Bonhams New York
Date: May 12, 1pm

NEW YORK — Last night saw the opening reception of the Verge Art Fair, which, in its third year of operation, has moved from Brooklyn to Bleecker Street in Manhattan. The fair is situated in the same building occupied just weeks ago by the 2012 Brucennial, an alternative exhibition planned to coincide with the Whitney Biennial on Madison Avenue. Verge director Michael Workman seemed okay with the potential "uptown" / "downtown" interplay that would take place between Frieze — the fair that people actually come from out-of-town for — and his own scrappy shop. Still, a conversation between two visitors couldn't help but catch my attention: "Do you ever notice that the only difference between an 'independent' or 'alternative' fair and the 'major' institutions," one asked his friend, "is that the 'independent' guys are always broke?"

For better or for worse, the man had a point. Formally, the smoothly mapped-off plains of color in acrylic paintings by Japanese artist Tsutomu Nunokawa could be confused pretty easily with oil paintings I saw by American artist Andrew Masullo at the Whitney this past March. The fort made of quilts and cushions made by Chicago's Good Stuff House (artists Kayce Bayer and Chris Lin) seemed like a riff on the late Mike Kelley, highlighted in an underwhelming homage in the Whitney. I'm just as sure that Esmerelda Kosmatopoulos's giant inflated canvas glove, titled "Palm Authority," could fit in pretty much anywhere, no matter how glitzy or drab. The point is this: This work looks like contemporary art, as good as bad as any other contemporary art, but not meaningfully alternative enough, perhaps, to feel really underground — which is what a fair like this needs to spotlight to best serve its purpose.

In a way, what's most admirable about Verge is  that hype and self-promotion have been kept to a minimum. When I showed my business card and requested a press pass at the front desk, the person I spoke with sweetly suggested that I buy a ticket anyway. Nowhere in this fair did I feel insincerely pressured to look at and talk about mediocre art. Nothing really caught my eye here, but the overall lack of pretense during a week of big art fairs in New York is also rather refreshing.