(Courtesy Calvin Klein)

The New York Post was pretty shocked by Paul McCarthy's "X-rated sex-and booze-fueled version of Disney classic hits" at the Armory. [NYP]

There is now a David Bowie mural on Houston. [Bloomberg]

"Swiss art mimics banks by luring foreign millionaires." [Bloomberg]

Pan American’s Worldport Terminal at JFK has been added to the National Trust for Historic Preservation's list of endangered places. [ArtsBeat]

Georgina Adam on the ubiquity of white cube contemporary art galleries. [The Art Newspaper]

"Modest art and modest sales" at Christie's Impressionist and Modern Art evening sale [ArtsBeat]

Haegue Yang has an awesome conversation with Abraham Cruzvillegas. It begins with Ms. Yang: "I remember your beautiful long hair when we met for the first time in L.A. in 2009. Don’t ask me why, but tonight in Dubai, this strange 'island' in the gulf region, all of a sudden I found myself thinking about whether it meant anything to you to cut your hair." [Bomb]

Asher Penn talks with the inimitable Gene Beery. [Sex Magazine]

New Josh Smith work at Standard (Oslo). [Mousse]

A profile of collector Robbie Antonio, who has commissioned David Salle, Julian Schnabel, Takashi Murakami, Marilyn Minter, Damian Hirst and others to create portraits of him as part of his "Obsession" project. [Vanity Fair]

Because summer arrives on Friday (it's going to be 80 degrees): the 10 best ice cream sundaes in New York. OddFellows and its cornbread sundae are just four blocks from The Journal Gallery, where the excellent "Mushroom Hunter" show is on view through Sunday. [CBS]

'Snack,' 1964. (Photo by Art Digital Studio/Luxembourg & Dayan)

Considering the staggering number of galleries in this city, and the recent trend for revisiting under-appreciated modern masters, it boggles the mind how many aging postwar greats still await proper exposure in New York. The latest to receive well-deserved attention is French artist Martial Raysse, who is typically grouped with the 1960s European avant-garde movement known as Nouveau Realism. Mr. Raysse’s first show in more than 40 years in New York, where he lived for part of the 1960s, is a piquant look at his early work, which handily shrugs off any single label.

Within that early work, he is most famous for paintings he made with enlarged photographs, high-pitched colors and some unusual materials—wallpaper, a yellow plastic bird and a plastic bag, in the case of a 1964 work that shows orange- and green-skinned women in bathing suits. Its title is spelled out in neon red cursive: Snack (1964).

Mr. Raysse’s sexy portraits of women and scenes of leisure in the 1960s approached popular culture and consumerism from the same type of obtuse angle as Andy Warhol. Are they mocking capitalism’s middlebrow values, or reveling in them? Probably a little of both. When he really lets it rip, expertly joining garish colors in complex compositions, Mr. Raysse offers up grotesque rococo fantasies that push beyond bad taste into pure pleasure. (Paging Jeff Koons.)

'L’Innocent (The Innocent),' 1971. (Courtesy Luxembourg & Dayan)

Though Mr. Raysse’s films—five are on view here—feel like typical early experiments in the medium (playing with filters, strobe lights and editing, or sending up the bourgeoisie), some other works harbor surprises. A 1965 piece has a cut canvas of two men pointing and staring at a brief Super 8 film of counterculture types romping about. Sexy stuff. And Mr. Raysse’s narrow bric-a-brac sculptures—totems (one leaning out of a corner is held to the wall with just a thin string) and object-filled vitrines—are forerunners of work by today’s younger artists, like Andy Coolquitt, Jim Lambie and Amy Yao.

Things get weird in the 1970s, as in his “Coco Mato” series, little wooden boxes filled with sand, miniature sculptures of mushrooms and the odd bird head or Buddha figurine. Imagine Joseph Cornell at a hippie commune in the Southwest. Having lived in the midst of a radical moment and made what is by any measure major art, Mr. Raysse was floating off on his own—a story for a future show. (Through July 13, 2013)

(Photo by Fernando Pereira Gomes)

Even as more art is being made, seen, bought and sold than at any point in human history, there is a feeling in many quarters of listlessness. Reviewing the Venice Biennale in Newsweek two weeks ago, Blake Gopnik rehearsed the already-tired idea that it showed that art is at an end, “nothing more than a series of moves in a series of games.” We’re stuck or adrift and, as New Museum curator Lauren Cornell put it last fall, “deeply obsessed with the past.”

But there are signs of life. Artists are finding interesting ways forward, and in a number of recent books, philosophers and critics are too. The results are all over the map, but there is a feeling that new ideas are beginning to simmer.

(Courtesy Scribner)

This shift can best be seen in relation to the recent popular success of Rachel Kushner’s rich and pleasurable if uneven sophomore novel, The Flamethrowers (Scribner, 383 pp., $26.99). It’s set in late 1970s Soho—when it was still possible (barely) to see art as a succession of heroic avant-garde movements.

“I thought art came from a brooding solitude,” Ms. Kushner’s artist narrator, Reno, says. “I felt it had to involve risk, some genuine risk.” After college in Nevada, she moves to downtown Manhattan—“so alive with people my age, and so thoroughly abandoned by others, that the energy of the young seeped out of the ground.”

The book’s nostalgia is central to its appeal. There are boozy loft parties and wild experiments (artistic, sexual), the things that, more recently, Berlin has specialized in. But to Ms. Kushner’s credit, she stops short of romanticizing the era. Reno’s world is already changing into ours. It’s becoming professionalized, and movements are giving way to pluralism. She makes Land Art using a motorcycle and dates an Italian version of Donald Judd. A Mary Boone type rides a crest of talent, hype and money. The world that Dave Hickey once said was run by “4,000 heavily medicated, mysteriously employed human beings” is ending. In a moment of doubt, Reno admits she’s “shopping for experience.” She’s a hipster.

But setting the past aside, part of the present malaise can be attributed to the collapse of any agreed-upon qualitative criteria for judging art. This isn’t exactly a new story. Since Warhol, art has been moving in too many directions at once too quickly for criticism to keep up. How do you compare two burritos on a windowsill, slapdash paintings of blog post screenshots and an artist living on minimum wage with illegal immigrants (to take examples from recent shows in New York)? If you wanted to be dramatic about it, you might say that the belief that art can change the world—that there is “risk” involved, as Reno says—is in serious doubt.

(Courtesy Hayward Market Books)

Ben Davis argues in his ambitious debut book of wide-ranging essays, 9.5 Theses on Art and Class (Haymarket Books, 224 pp., $16), that one way artists and critics could start to tackle these issues is by “[d]isentangling what is aesthetically affecting from what is politically effective.”

A self-proclaimed Marxist, Mr. Davis sees the “contemporary artist [as] the representative of middle-class creative labor par excellence.” She is a laborer in charge of her own production and is thus unable to affect capitalist production like a proletarian. He quotes Carl Andre: “From whom would artists be withholding their art if they did go on strike? Alas, from no one but themselves.”

By acknowledging that artists are, by the nature of their labor, middle class, Mr. Davis says you can “see the natural limits of what you can promise for [art] as a critic or expect of it as an artist.” An artwork is simply not going to bring on the revolution, despite decades of polemics from left-leaning critics. Lower your expectations.

“[P]reserving a mythical ideal of middle-class creative autonomy in the face of a wider culture that has superseded it is the main thing that contemporary art now does, its main contemporary mission,” Mr. Davis argues. That seems like a fairly impoverished goal, but thankfully he also sees the artist as “a hospitable conductor for all kinds of alternative energies,” and wants her to join with progressive forces.

Today’s most financially successful artists, of course, are on the verge of transcending their middle-class positions, running factories with dozens of assistants. ("[E]xploiting their workers, they are in turn exploited by speculators, who themselves make nothing but money," as Katy Siegel put it succinctly last year.) Does this make their art bad? In Mr. Davis’s estimation, it would seem, yes. He imagines a future in which the values exemplified by today’s precious, high-priced art look alien, overcome by more egalitarian values.

But what do we actually want art to do? As Mr. Hickey loves to point out, it feels good to celebrate art’s supposedly ennobling qualities, even if the evidence for them is fairly slim. And sure, it can march with the progressives, but it can also operate in all sorts of other ways that are not necessarily less worthwhile.

(Courtesy Yale University Press)

Arthur Danto approaches such issues via an even more fundamental question. What Art Is (Yale, 174 pp., $24) is a summary of his 50 years of thinking on that topic, which all began with an intense encounter at a New York gallery in 1963 with Warhol’s plywood Brillo Box sculptures, “a kind of philosophical Rosetta Stone” for the Hegelian philosopher, he says.

What blew Mr. Danto’s mind about the Brillo Boxes was that in them, art and life seemed to be indistinguishable. At that moment, half a century ago, he floated the notion that we are still grappling with—that art was over. In a sense, he was right. Warhol was repeating and expanding a project started 50 years prior, when Marcel Duchamp presented a snow shovel, a urinal and other banal objects as artworks, emphasizing that he was not selecting them for any visual property. Duchamp “managed to condemn pretty much the entire history of aesthetics, from Plato to the present,” Mr. Danto argues.

Mr. Danto is on the hunt for the ontological core of art, and he homes in on the idea that artworks are “embodied meanings” that viewers interpret. A lot of art was about aesthetics—which is to say, “visual delectation,” to borrow Duchamp’s term—from at least the late 18th century through the mid-1960s or so. But Duchamp, Warhol and then Conceptualism attempted to make art that was pure idea. Their lesson: meaning extends far beyond beauty.

The initial shock of Duchamp and Warhol’s rupturing of aesthetics has long worn off—still, it reverberates. It’s become commonplace to refer to our own era, in art and otherwise, as postmodern, though no one can really agree on what that means. Mr. Davis goes with the “semi-post-post-modern condition,” in which grand narratives, from economics to culture, have been discredited, though no credible alternative has arisen. He blames lazy, out-of-touch academics.

(Courtesy Verso)

Among Mr. Davis’s targets is the philosopher Jacques Rancière, who in his latest book, Aisthesis: Scenes from the Aesthetic Regime of Art (Verso, 304 pp., $29.95), attempts to dramatize what’s at stake in the aesthetic. He offers up 14 episodes, from 1764 to 1941, in which there were shifts in what was presented and understood as art, and how these demarcated, and even facilitated, larger changes. He maintains that “social revolution is the daughter of aesthetic revolution.” Mr. Rancière is short on specifics about how this all works (the translation by Zakir Paul veers between thrilling and indecipherable), but he does succeed in exploding the idea of modernism as a single, tidy movement—shifts in perception happen when codes of art are blurred and erased, not when they follow logically, as the critic Clement Greenberg had it.

One of the more interesting paths out of the po-mo morass is offered by philosopher Peter Osborne in Anywhere or Not at All: Philosophy of Contemporary Art (Verso, 288 pp., $29.95). He sets his sights on the term contemporary art and decides that its key feature is not so much that it is postmodern as that it’s post-conceptual, marked by the coming and going of Conceptual art in the 1960s and ’70s. It’s a shift similar to Mr. Danto’s, but Mr. Osborne (who also goes after Mr. Rancière for his focus on the aesthetic) emphasizes specific criteria for evaluating the contemporariness of contemporary art. Since “art is a privileged cultural carrier of contemporaneity,” he reasons, “it has become incumbent upon any art with a claim on the present to situate itself, reflexively, within this expanded field.”

(Courtesy Verso)

The clarity of his thesis is not helped by huge doses of Heidegger, but in effect Mr. Osborne argues that truly trenchant contemporary art is marked by very specific (and nebulous) characteristics that reflect its contemporaneity, like the crossing of mediums, the malleability of historical and geographic borders, “an infinity” of possible materials and other attributes. And, importantly, they have conceptual elements while not being wholly subsumed to pure idea. (Historical role models, for him, are Gordon Matta-Clark’s wild architectural projects, which live on in their documentation, and Robert Smithson’s radical land works, which change over time.)

As Mr. Danto notes, philosophers—and, I would add, art critics—always face the danger of mistaking changes in style for real distinctive philosophical attributes of art’s character. But it feels like Mr. Osborne’s onto something. By the high standards that he sets, the firm majority of what is labeled contemporary art today would fail to measure up. Which sounds about right. And at the same time, he is perhaps not so far from Mr. Davis and even Mr. Rancière when he argues that “contemporary art models experimental practices of negation that puncture horizons of expectation.” Put simply, art, the most endlessly mutable of all disciplines, can make suggestions, enacting experiences not possible in other realms.

The modern era, whatever it was, lasted two centuries. It will take some time to sort out the present one. All the while, as Mr. Danto writes, some aspect of art remains steady, a notion Reno sums up in The Flamethrowers. Making art, she says, “was really about the problem of the soul, of losing it. It was a technique for inhabiting the world. For not dissolving into it.”

Installation view. (Courtesy the Whitney)

This exhibition, in the Whitney’s lobby gallery, is a thriller—two young artists have stepped up to a larger platform and are clearing new, still-shadowy pathways for art. Coming not long after the Whitney’s 2012 biennial and a Trisha Baga show in this same space, it gives the impression of a museum in touch with art’s zeitgeist.

The Whitney is, in part, the subject of Brussels-based Jana Euler’s piece, a two-panel oil on canvas, roughly 6 by 10 feet. The museum's Marcel Breuer-designed building is on the left; on the right is a portrait of Whitney Houston in her prime, her face as large as the building. Ms. Euler paints this insouciant pun with the cartoonish élan of Martin Kippenberger or Francis Picabia, layering multiple images atop one another like so many transparencies. Musical notes glide across her Whitneys and abstract sculptures float within them, as do two nude bodies in contorted poses. Pop pleasures, New Age leisure and modern art commingle and are winkingly equated.

More bodies await courtesy of New Yorker Stewart Uoo, who has cast eight of them—their upper halves, anyhow—out of polyurethane resin. These are the four stars of Sex and the City, though you may not recognize them at first. He has used the same Patricia Field mannequin for each one and marked them with grimy pastels. The women, affixed to metal poles like war trophies, are burned, battered, ruptured, spilling their innards (computer cables and headphones). They are covered with flies, maggot cocoons and dust. Only their tangles of hair and accessories hint at their identities—a charred Gucci scarf, a menagerie of hippie textiles, a haute black veil, a sporty, no-nonsense backpack.

These sculptures are horrifying, hilarious and unflinching. Inspired by the reverie of violent video games and anime and equipped with razor-wire spinal columns, they seem to embody the tortured identities cybernetics just might have in store for us.

The gallery has been given a second floor of plywood covered with bright white denim (the same color as the walls). It feels precarious in there; sculptures rock as you walk. As curator Jay Sanders notes in an  essay that accompanies the show, the space feels perfectly queued up for digital reproduction, which is how so much contemporary art circulates today. The joke, of course, is that, first of all, online you can get none of the gorgeous, sickeningly obsessive details of Mr. Uoo’s sculptures or Ms. Euler’s painting and, secondly, for the past month and a half, people have been treading through the space, sullying that denim so that it is now a pale gray in the most heavily trafficked areas. And it is only getting dirtier.

(Through Aug. 11, 2013)

Still from 'Community Action Center' by Burns and Steiner. (Courtesy the artists)

Dirty Looks, which hosts monthly screenings of queer film and video around New York, just released details of its On Location festival, which will bring film presentations to a different venue each day of July. It looks like it will really be something.

Among the events on tap are Merce Cunningham's Variations V on the High Line, A.K. Burns and A.L. Steiner's Community Action Center (created with Fire Island Artist Residency) at the Cherry Grove Community House on Fire Island, N.Y., and Ken Jacobs's Star Spangled to Death at Spectacle in Williamsburg.

The list of artists and filmmakers whose work is being presented is pretty great. It also includes Narcissister, Gregg Bordowitz, Harry Dodge, Barbara Rubin, Pedro Almódovar, Rashaad Newsome and Andy Warhol, whose 1964 film Taylor Mead's Ass will be shown in MoMA's sculpture garden.

The curatorial committee for this year's festival is as follows: Sam Ashby, Claire Barliant, Brian Droitcour, Scott Ewalt, Alex Fialho, R. E. H. Gordon, David Everitt Howe, Clara Lopez, Tiffany Malakooti, Karl McCool, Konstantinos Menelaou and Bradford Nordeen.

The full lineup is available over on the On Location website.

Can't wait!

Cameron and Obama. (Courtesy the White House)

Taking a break from the G8 summit in Northern Ireland today, President Obama and British Prime Minister David Cameron painted a G8-themed work on paper with schoolchildren. The Telegraph, which has a video of them at work, reports that the photo op "quickly turned into a painting contest between the pair." From the paper: "Whilst it is Cameron who finishes his work first and receives cheers from staff and pupils for keeping within the lines, Obama refuses to admit defeat saying, 'I'm not as good as these guys, but I'm better than David.'"

Opening: Ken Price, "Slow and Steady Wins the Race, Works on Paper 1962-2010," at the Drawing Center
Just before Los Angeles-born sculptor Ken Price died last February, he approved two traveling exhibitions of his work, both of which are arriving in New York on Tuesday. Though he is best known for his three-dimensional pieces (which will be the bulk of the retrospective opening at the Met), Price drew prolifically. The Drawing Center is showing 50-odd-years' worth of works on paper that will no doubt provide nuance to our understanding of the sculptures on view uptown. —Zoë Lescaze
The Drawing Center, 35 Wooster Street, New York, 6-9 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 19

Opening: "Equus" at Tabla Rasa Gallery
Animals are proving muses for group shows all over town. Or two of them are anyway. Cat allergies? Try the horse show. —Z.L.
Tabla Rasa Gallery, 224 48th Street, Brooklyn, 6-8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 20

Opening: Dan Graham, Heidi Schlatter, Jaques Tati, Servane Mary "No Place Like You (continued)" at Shoot The Lobster at Martos Gallery
Look at those artists! Are you really not going to go to this? This is an extension of Peter Scott's exhibition at Martos, held at their back room project space Shoot the Lobster. —Dan Duray
Martos Gallery, 540 West 29th Street, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Adrien Missika, Alex Israel, Nina Beier, Sam Falls, Tobias Madison, Verena Dengler, Willem de Rooij "Noa Noa" at Metro Pictures
Great, great artists. Plus it looks there's a cool show upstairs by Claire Fontaine, check it out! —D.D.
Metro Pictures, 519 West 24 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Paul McCarthy, "Rebel Dabble Babble" at Hauser & Wirth 
Just months after he installed a magnificent array of sculptures throughout the city, Mr. McCarthy is back in town with two ambitious video/performance/installation works. The gallery will stage "Rebel Dabble Babble," a collaboration by Mr. McCarthy and his son Damon that explores the rumored relations between Rebel Without a Cause director Nicholas Ray and his young cast. "WS," Mr. McCarthy's most elaborate take on Snow White yet, opens at the Park Avenue Armory the day before. —Z.L.
Hauser & Wirth, 511 West 18th Street, New York,  6-8 p.m.

Opening: "Ambient," at Tanya Bonakdar
The Kitchen’s Tim Griffin curates a group show at Tanya Bonakdar gallery featuring work by Olafur Eliasson, Sherrie Levine, Tristan Perich and others. A live performance of Walter Marchetti’s Natura Morta by Alex Waterman will take place at 4:30 p.m. on opening day.—Michael H. Miller
Tanya Bonakdar, 521 West 21 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: "Mixed Message Media" curated by Neville Wakefield at Gladstone Gallery
Neville Wakefield curates this group show featuring work by 15 artists including Darren Bader, Claudia Comte, Dominic Nurre, Alex Perweiler and others.—M.H.M.
Gladstone Gallery, 515 West 24th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Screenings: Dirty Looks Presents David Wojnarowicz and Carl George at Participant Inc
In conjunction with the 25th anniversary of Visual AIDS and Participant's current Gordon Kurtti retrospective, the Dirty Looks film series shows two classics of the East Village scene, David Wojnarowicz's Beautiful People (1988) and Carl George's In 6 Feet, Dancers That I Know and Love (1991). A panel with Cynthia Carr, Rayya Elias and Jack Waters, moderated by Esther Kaplan, will follow. —Andrew Russeth
Participant Inc, 253 East Houston, New York, 7 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 20

Artist Talk: James Turrell with Michael Govan at the Guggenheim
This is sold out, obviously, because it's going to be great, but you never know. —D.D. (Photo courtesy Wikipedia, "taken by Florian Holzherr. Taken from Art Knowledge News, which is willing to share its media with Wikipedia and has done so in the past.")
1071 Fifth avenue, at 89 street, $12, $8 members, 2 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 22

Openings: "Haim Steinbach: Once Again the World Is Flat." and "Helen Marten: No Borders in a Wok That Can't Be Crossed" at CCS Bard
It's a big day upstate! The Hessel Museum will show early paintings from the 1970s by master of objects Haim Steinbach, along with "reconfigured historical installations and major new works," and will offer up the first U.S. museum exhibition of the young, enterprising British artist Helen Marten, which is organized by Kunsthalle Zürich's Beatrix Ruf. —A.R.
CCS Bard, Hessel Museum of Art, at Bard College, Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, 1–4 p.m., free buses from New York City, details via 845-758-7598 or ccs@bard.edu

SUNDAY, JUNE 23

Opening: "Permutation 03.4: Re-Mix" at P!
The reliably venturesome P! space ends its six-month series of shows and events about copying with an exhibition that "revives recent histories through spatial fiction and wild expropriation," according to its press release. The artists on tap: Semir Alschausky, Thomas Brinkmann (who will perform at 8 p.m.), Katarina Burin, Fake Industries Architectural Agonism and Oliver Laric. Note the peculiar opening time, which is part of an intriguing daily schedule conceived by FIAA. —A.R.
P!, 334 Broome Street, New York, 7:02–10 p.m.

Siegelaub outside 44 East 52nd Street, a temporary space where he housed the exhibition 'January 5–31, 1969.' (Photo by Robert Barry/MoMA)

Seth Siegelaub, the venturesome dealer and curator of conceptual art in New York in the 1960s and 1970s who helped lead efforts for artists' rights and devoted his life to studying textiles, died on Saturday in Basel, Switzerland, according to a friend, confirming a report by Metropolis M. He was 71.

After closing a gallery he ran on 56th Street in Manhattan from 1964 to 1966, where he showed contemporary art and Oriental rugs, Mr. Siegelaub, still in his 20s, presented the work of artists who would become some of the core members of what would be termed conceptual art, like Douglas Huebler, Joseph Kosuth and Lawrence Weiner. He showed them in experimental curatorial formats that often eschewed gallery shows in favor of publications. In a busy period between 1968 and 1971, he organized 21 projects, according to MoMA, which holds a collection of his papers that it presented in an exhibition earlier this year. When Mr. Siegelaub donated his art-related archive to MoMA in 2011, the museum also acquired a number of works from his art collection, which included a number of important early conceptual works.

What is arguably Mr. Siegelaub's most famous exhibition took the form of a publication, Xerox Book (1968). For that show, seven artists—Carl Andre, Robert Barry, Huebler, Mr. Kosuth, Sol LeWitt, Robert Morris and Mr. Weiner—each contributed a 25-page work. Its title was a bit misleading: though inspired by photocopying, it was made using the more traditional offset printing because of the high cost of Xeroxing at the time.

In interviews, Mr. Siegelaub often emphasized the collaborative nature of the radical advances being made in art in the late 1960s, in which he played a leading part. "This was a very collective art," he said on a panel at MoMA in 2007, adding, "It's not like I had these great ideas that I came up with like magic, or whatever, all by myself."

Though many of the artists he worked with have gone on to be among the most critically and financially successful artists of the postwar period, Mr. Siegelaub said he had generally not been successful selling their art on a large scale at the time he first showed them. "I was in the research and development department...and I was never in the marketing or sales department," he said during that panel.

"Well, you tried," Mr. Weiner cut in, good-naturedly.

"I tried, that's for sure," he said, "but I never saw myself as that, and I never even thought people should make money, or could make money…I never thought that was the purpose of it."

Seth Siegelaub was born in 1941 in the Bronx, the first of four children, served in New York State Air National Guard from 1959 to 1960, and briefly attended Hunter College in New York, before leaving to work as a plumber and part-time gallery assistant at SculptureCenter. He credited artists, particularly Mr. Andre and Mr. Weiner, art dealer Richard Bellamy, who ran the Green Gallery, and art historian and curator Eugene C. Goossen, with helping develop his interest in the latest in contemporary art.

For another seminal show, "March 1969," Mr. Siegelaub asked 31 artists to produce a work for one day of the month, publishing the text responses of those who replied—many took the form of ephemeral works—in a book. Mr. Barry said he would release two cubic feet of helium into the air. Mr. Weiner piece read: "An object tossed from one country to another." Claes Oldenburg's: "Things Colored Red." For still another show, "July, August, September 1969," 11 artists created works throughout the world, and the complete exhibition was presented only as a publication. (Primary Information has a nice selection of digital scans of these books on its website.)

In the late 1960s, Mr. Siegelaub was involved with the Art Workers' Coalition, a group that lobbied for artists' rights and opposed the Vietnam War. In 1971 he published The Artist's Reserved Rights Transfer and Sale Agreement, a contract he designed with lawyer Robert Projanksy that would pay artists a royalty fee when works were resold (assuming that a dealer and an artist both signed it). In an interview with Frieze earlier this year, the curator recalled that he began the project after hearing Mr. Barry complain about a collector reselling some of his works for a huge profit. His motivation, he said, was "to help level the playing field."

Mr. Siegelaub left New York and the art world in 1972, moving to Paris to focus on leftist media studies and help build a library on the topic. "I was provoked into doing it by people saying that there was no theory about how the left or progressive movements use the media, despite the fact that there clearly was a history," he told Frieze. In the 1980s, he devoted himself to assembling a library on the history of textiles. He moved to Amsterdam in 1990.

In a 2000 interview with Hans Ulrich Obrist (whose ongoing Do It project owes a debt to Mr. Siegelaub's book exhibitions), Mr. Siegelaub explained, in part, why he stopped curating contemporary art. "If one is involved with the art world and you are not an artist but an organizer...it basically means finding young artists who you work with successfully, and then either continuing your successful project with them, or trying to do it again with another group of young artists based on your experiences and especially the contacts you made the first time," he said. "Having done that once, for me, it didn't seem interesting to do it again—either then in 1972, and certainly not today."

Despite venturing beyond art in his 30s, art types remained interested in him, and he periodically appeared on panels or assisted art historians with various research projects. "From time to time I'm called back into the art world to do a service, another tour of duty or something like this, but basically I've had very little to do with the art world, and, well, that's that," he said at the MoMA panel, commenting that the art world had changed tremendously since he was involved with it—"the size, the amount of galleries, the amount of artists, the psychology of artists making art, the kind of models, sort of from the fashion world and things like this that have been imposed on the creation activity, how the territory of art making for individual artists has been very, very constrained."

He was also vocal in interviews and writings about his frustration with the way art history is often written. "The determination of quality—who remains, who is forgotten—is very much, well, about power, in a way," he said. "And I must say I'm quite cynical about that."

Talking in Artforum last year, on the occasion of a show of his textiles collection at London's Raven Row gallery, Mr. Siegelaub explained his interest in the subject: "I was intrigued by this specific relationship between beauty and commerce, but I was also struck by the fact that, unlike artmaking, the production of textiles is a social activity—it is always a collective endeavor."

Though he had mulled trying to help develop an encyclopedic collection of textiles, he said that he quickly realized that would be impossible. "I’ve been under the illusion that somehow it would be possible to have a complete collection of books on the history of textiles, whereas a comprehensive archive of the objects themselves is definitely impossible," he said in that same interview. "I am very far from accomplishing my goal, and perhaps I never will. It’s something that can be done, however. Most likely by someone who’s crazy and rich enough to really do it."

He is survived by his longtime partner, Marja Bloem, and three children from previous relationships. (Raven Row has a comprehensive chronology of his career.)

In his Frieze interview from earlier this year, art writer Vivian Sky Rehberg asked, "Do you believe in art, Seth?" He replied:

I believe that art can increase our awareness of the world around us. When I was young and active in the art world, I thought the most interesting art was that which asked questions, which was on the very edge of what might even be considered art. For me, that was the definition of art; it wasn’t about having a painting hanging on the wall in your house.

(Image via MoMA's website for its 2013 exhibition "'This Is the Way Your Leverage Lies': The Seth Siegelaub Papers as Institutional Critique")

Knafel. (Courtesy the Frick Collection)

The Frick Collection announced today that Sidney R. Knafel, the managing partner of New York's SRK Management Company, an investment firm, has joined its board. Mr. Knafel is a collector of French faience, and previously sat on the Frick’s Decorative Arts Visiting Committee. He has also served on a number of philanthropic boards.

"We have come to know him as a major supporter of the institution and are thrilled to have him take this next step by becoming a trustee," the Frick's director, Ian Wardropper, said in a statement. "His commitment to cultural and educational institutions is impressive, having given generously of his time and resources to a range of nonprofit organizations over the course of many years.”

It's been a pretty great week for the Frick. On Monday, Mr. Wardropper joined France's Order of Arts & Letters as a chevalier.

Pettibon's logo for Black Flag.

UbuWeb founder and MoMA poet laureate Kenneth Goldsmith discusses his life, career. [Dazed Digital]

Apple used to have a sporty clothing line. [Good]

Holland Cotter on Zilia Sánchez at Artists Space: "one of the year’s high points, a revelation and a refreshment." [NYT]

Danh Vo in the Arsenale at the Venice Biennale. [CAD]

Is there a market for political art about global conflict? [The Art Newspaper]

Benjamin Netanyahu opens new Holocaust exhibit at Auschwitz. [Bloomberg]

Brian Belott and Michael Mahalchick at Ober Gallery. [ABAB]

Linda Yablonsky in Zurich. [Artforum]

"Pretty much every single Black Flag flyer designed by Raymond Pettibon. [Noisey]