Our most-talked-about stories in Art, Design & Style, and Performing Arts, February 27 - March 2, 2012:
ART
— Kyle Chayka selected the most worthwhile works in the 2012 Whitney Biennial, which opened this week, dubbing Wu Tsang's contribution the "Punchiest Work" and crediting LaToya Ruby Frazier with the "Best Critique of Commercial Culture." We offered video interviews with both artists, along with Michael Robinson and Georgia Sagri.
— Locked-out Sotheby's art handlers and members of the Occupy Wall Street movement planned protests for the evening of the Biennial's opening because of the auction house's sponsorship.
— The genial art collective known as Bruce High Quality Foundation returned with its 2012 Brucennial, which had some attention-grabbing artworks.
— The artist behind the massive "bat signal" for Occupy Wall Street is set to return this weekend with a new, tricked-out art-mobile for the 99 percent.
— Armory Week is just a few days away. Check out our comprehensive guide to next week's fairs.
DESIGN & FASHION
— In an extensive feature, Janelle Zara surveyed the many revolutionary applications for new 3-D printing technologies, from rad bespoke sunglasses to prosthetic limbs and face transplants.
— A new exhibition at Los Angeles’s MOCA Pacific Design Center tracks the career of fashion designer Rudi Gernreich, whose bright colors and geometric patterns helped define the look of 1960s America.
— Architect James Ramsey explained his ideas for the "Low Line," a subterrainian park planned for the the Lower East Side.
— Chinese architect Wang Shu, a relative youngster at 48, was awarded this year's Pritzker Prize, architecture's top honor.
— A Mies van der Rohe villa in the Czech Republic that was used as a Nazi outpost and a Red Army stable is about to reopen following a $9 million renovation.
PERFORMING ARTS
— Meryl Streep may have won her third Academy Award last weekend for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, but ARTINFO's new film correspondent J. Hoberman maintains that the wrong Margaret won the Oscar.
— And speaking of the Academy Awards, "The Artist" may have swept the top categories, but "Hugo" took home the technical prizes in a ceremony that Graham Fuller says was "low on schmaltz and bombast compared with previous years."
— Hal Hartley — a hero of indy American cinema — returned to New York this week for the premiere of his latest, "Meanwhile," at the IFC Center. In our Q&A with the auteur he tells us, "'Meanwhile' grew from looking out into the world."
— Nick Catucci is fairly certain that the new hybrid CGI-live action clip for the Gorillaz-Andre 3000-James Murphy song "DoYaThing" is and will remain the best music video of 2012.
— The latest — and, we hope, last — bit of '90s cultural detritus to be nostalgically drudged up for exploitation appears to be much-loathed subgenre rap rock, whose comeback-poised practitioners include Korn and Limp Bizkit.