The Seven Art Fair in Williamsburg. (Courtesy of Seven Art Fair)

The Seven fair, which has appeared for the past two years in Miami during Art Basel Miami Beach, has always walked the line between being a traditional art fair and a curated show. Like New York's Independent fair, which bills itself as a "temporary exhibition," it offers work from multiple galleries in a format that eschews booths for a more free-wheeling hang.

In its inaugural New York edition, Seven's exhibitors—BravinLee, Hales, P.P.O.W., Postmasters, Pierogi, Ronald Feldman and Winkleman—have gone even more in the group-show direction, extending the show well beyond the typical short run of a fair. Late last month, each gallery installed work by one artist at Pierogi's gigantic Boiler space on North 14th Street in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and the show runs through May 20.

The space is stark. From afar, it sort of looks like a science fair in a gym—but if the tone is cool overall, it's surprisingly cohesive. Gil Yefman, from Ronald Feldman, is showing Blood Moon, a big knitted red globe that hangs in the middle of the room. The red, knitted drips are said to be the artist's conceptualization of male menstruation, and it's been related to the artist's transgender identity. Without that information, though, we'd only know that a much smaller version of the piece appears in the sleek wall-mounted animation Shivers, in which knitted nipples belch and squirt, and a character in a knitted, bodily tube sock suit dances and burns.

Diana Cooper's Watch Your Step, from Postmasters, is a wall installation of collage and assemblage, and resembles the results of a graphic design brainstorm: manufactured panels (like electrical outlets and caution signs) and spaces (plastic stadium seating, concrete tunnels) are clustered by palette and layered over images of fire, water, grass and sky. It functions like a game of mental pinball. Try getting your eye in there, and you're spit out by fast exits and arrows pointing in on each other.

Each work builds on the last. Following Watch Your Step is Andy Yoder's Swing (on view courtesy of Winkleman): a half tire of little fake flowers, mounted against a mirror to form the shape of a swing. It follows the self-replenishing dead end of Ms. Cooper's road signs and passageways. It's also the type of big, friendly object that defies hyper-rationalization, which goes for Ms. Yefman's Blood Moon. To its left is a black and white ink drawing by Dawn Clements (of Pierogi), a still life on crumpled paper: from the flowery mass emerges a bell jar, a crucifix, a tea kettle and century-old high heels of various sizes. The old-world decor speaks to Hew Locke's (Hales Gallery) embroidery Chariots of the Gods, which looks like an early Christian or Eastern diety made of gold rope on black fabric, with depictions of prisoners hidden in the coils. The content hints at subversion, but it's more enamored with style.

Ben Gocker's Bad Dreams (P.P.O.W.) alone makes the whole trip worthwhile. A long sand table (the kind you might remember from pre-school) is lit by clip-on flood lights and covered with remnants of childhood: the weirdest being rubbery casts of hound-dog faces, painted brown, red, yellow and pink with little human eyes. On the wall, Mr. Gocker has framed pages from a storybook version of the film E.T. The powdery alien lies wide-eyed and face-up on the bathroom floor, while Elliott in white long johns rests with his hands clasped delicately around the bony alien fingers. It's holy. The sensitivity adds potence to the items on the table.

In the back corner, Emil Lukas's Skin (BravinLee) looms like an alien ship. Mr. Lukas has covered half of the space's massive boiler with white, heat-shrink plastic. One imagines the suffocating power of the plastic if the space's huge boiler were to heat up; the press release tells us it's a transformation of the boiler's form into something unrecognizable. Like Ms. Cooper's Watch Your Step, you're spit out soon after you've solved the formal exercise—but not even that might have registered at an art fair.

This month-long exhibition is hardly a fair, save for the exhibitor-led collaboration, heightened awareness of gallery names, and lack of an overall curatorial mission (there's no curator, per se, but Joe Amrhein from Pierogi is described as a sort of "wedding planner"). The decision to call it one, though, proposes an alternative to both gallery shows and the fairs. Participating galleries still feel it's necessary to show work in fairs like the Armory and ADAA, reported P.P.O.W. founder Wendy Olsoff over the phone, but she continued: "We see [Seven] as another way of working that's less competitive and more holistic, more creative. You have more time with your artists and meet the other dealers." Artists seem happy, said Ms. Olsoff; people spend more time with the work, the space allows for bigger projects, the work looks less like product, and price tags aren't so prominent.

Plus, Seven makes for a more collaborative sales model in general. "If I brought in five of my best clients, and Pierogi did, it's advantageous for every one," she told us.

It's a model which at least a few dealers would love to get behind. Since Seven opened two years ago in Miami, where last year's sales were very good, many galleries have asked to join, and fairs have asked Seven to join them. This may not be a replacement to the larger events--the thought of hundreds of these pop-up shows makes Frieze look like a writer's retreat--but we're getting somewhere.

This year's projects make it sound like something of a giant collector daycare. Special projects include a sonic tone by Jennie C. Jones, which is said to raise dopamine levels, a "psychic playroom," in which collectors participate in live-action drawing and sculpting, by Inner Course, and a game room, which will include videogames by Bennett Foddy, curated by Babycastles.

Plus, the Pulse prize—$2,500 cash—will be awarded to an emerging artist in the IMPULSE section of the fair.

The first edition of our Frieze preview is available here.

Banners fly outside Cooper Union's Great Hall. The protest later moved to Union Square. (Photo by Whitney Kimball)

A day after Cooper Union announced that it will begin charging graduate students tuition in September, 2013, a crowd of a few hundred students gathered today outside the school's iconic East Village home, the Great Hall, as part of a walkout. It was the school's second walkout since November. The protest had been preplanned in solidarity with today's nationwide student protests against student debt, which has just reached a staggering trillion dollars, but carried new significance after yesterday's announcement from the school's president, Jamshed Bharucha.

Students carried signs that read, "Keep capitalism out of my classroom" and "Onward to 2 Trillion," while chanting slogans like "Education is a human right" and "Free as air and water." Around noon, a crowd pulled long, pink streamers down from the building's second- and third-story windows over the circle of protestors. Others looked on from couches and benches, smoked cigarettes around refreshment tables, sliced oranges and munched on carrots, hummus and chips.

According to a crowd of undergrads, the community was particularly upset by the administration's decision to publicize the news only minutes after the announcement was made in an all-school email. "The 'hybrid model' they're proposing, where some students pay to offset the rest," said undergrad Casey A. Gollan, "would destroy the school's one-of-a-kind dynamic."

This is just the latest in a long series of tuition protests worldwide-- some of which even resulted in police clashes last fall. Repeatedly, students at the protest raised the point that college tuition has increased 600 percent since 1980. Cooper Union's freshmen are annually awarded a four-year scholarship, and tuition is valued at $37,500 a year for each of the school's 1,000 undergraduates. Nearby NYU continues to raise tuition (now around $40,000), and continues to expand; the university recently opened a campus in Abu Dhabi.

Independently, alumni and friends have crowd-sourced $314,304 through freecooperunion.com, where donors pledge to pay a sum should the school agree to accept it with the condition that the school remains free. A group of alumni and friends ("Friends of Cooper Union") has been working independently on its own plan, which will be discussed tomorrow night in a community summit and panel, starting at 5:30 p.m. at the Great Hall.

As students marched across the street, carrying the banners in a long chain into the recently-built academic building, undergraduate Audrey Snyder was posting a Facebook update from a bench in the square. On the subject of in-class discussions about tuition, she told us that students don't feel it's their job or place to come up with financial alternatives for the school. Alternative models of education, however, may be on the table. "I'm in line with Bruce High Quality Foundation's idea that maybe accreditation isn't so important," she said. "If the school's going down already, why not throw that out the window?" (The Bruce High Quality Foundation University is not based on an accredited model, and it does not grant degrees or certificates.)

When we asked a small group of protestors how many would not be able to attend college, had they not been accepted to Cooper Union, many hands shot up. "I am a Fulbright scholar, but yes," offered one German graduate student. "You have adjunct faculty [in the states] who are getting paid next to nothing, and it makes you wonder where the money from the government is going."

"I've known a lot of students who were brilliant, and were nowhere near to having any other option," said a graphic design professor Alexander Tochilovsky. "Those students tend to be particularly hardworking, because they know what an opportunity this is. To see this happen to an institution which has [managed to remain tuition-free] for 150 years, through the Great Depression and two World Wars—now, in 2012, is a very damning statement about education."

With all of this in store and scores of exhibitors, it will be impossible to see everything in one trip. For those who are planning their tour in advance, we'll be posting slide show previews of exhibitor booths throughout the week. Click above to see the first one. We'll be reporting from the fair all next week.

Mr. Safer examining a birthday cake at the Jewish Museum's 100th birthday celebration in 2004. (Courtesy Stephen Chernin/Getty Images)

On Sunday evening, the television journalist Morley Safer aired a follow-up to his 1993 attack on the art world on 60 Minutes. He visited the Art Basel Miami Beach fair—“an upscale flea market, a shopping mall fair,” he termed it, accurately—and walked around making glib remarks about art and the wealthy.

Though it’s hard to define Mr. Safer’s criteria for good art, he seems to like a bit of old-fashioned hard work: he swoons for Kara Walker, scorns Christopher Wool. Though many chalked up Mr. Safer’s distaste for the outré to Hilton Kramer-style conservatism, it is worth noting that he is speaking as an artist himself.

People magazine has written about his paintings a number of times. In 1993, after his first broadside, Mr. Safer revealed to the magazine that he likes art “that knocks me out. It has to hit you not just intellectually, but somewhere in the neighborhood of the heart.” Thus, he has painted hotel rooms that he stays in while traveling. “Who is going to memorialize Room 409 of the Holiday Inn unless I do?” he told People. And he said, way back in 1982, “I find it marvelously therapeutic.”

Roused by Mr. Safer’s attack, New York critic Jerry Saltz challenged him to curate an exhibition, of his own work and that of others. “I promise to review it fair and square,” Mr. Saltz wrote. “Deal?”

Mr. Safer declined the offer, in a statement to The Observer. “Mr. Saltz’s challenge is tempting, but I decline on the grounds that I have better, more pressing challenges as a working reporter,” he wrote. “As for his eagerness to judge my talent as a curator and painter, that is a pleasure I choose to deny him.”

Mr. Safer continued:

"I would, however, suggest to Mr. Saltz that he, as a pseudo gatekeeper of the visual arts, also has better things to do. The first might be to rediscover that 60 Minutes is alive and well and leading the pack in news broadcasts. It will certainly broaden his knowledge in any number of areas including by the way, the arts."

editorial@observer.com

A version of this article will appear in the April 4 edition of The New York Observer.

Artist Talk: "Kara Walker on Andy Warhol," at Dia Art Foundation
As part of its "Artists on Artists" series, the Dia Art Foundation invites Kara Walker to speak on the subject of Andy Warhol. Ms. Walker is known for her frank and often disturbing silhouettes that explore power dynamics along lines of race, gender and sexuality. Ms. Walker's major survey exhibition, "Kara Walker: My Complement, My Enemy, My Oppressor, My Love," which Dia director Philippe Vergne helped curate, premiered at the the Walker Art Center, Minneapolis, in February 2007, after which it was presented at the Whitney and many museums worldwide. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Dia Art Foundation, 535 West 22nd Street, 5th floor, New York, 6:30 p.m., $6

WEDNESDAY, MARCH 28

Opening: Yang Fudong, at Marian Goodman Gallery
For his third exhibition with Marian Goodman, Yang Fudong will present three new works that explore the artist's themes of historical fantasies, theatricality and the conflation of fiction and reality. --Michael H. Miller
Marian Goodman Gallery, 24 West 57th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Screening: Dirty Looks at Judson Memorial Church
Camp may be dead, but we're not getting over it anytime soon. Dirty Looks, a monthly screening series of queer experimental film and video, will be showing early work by Bruce and Norman Yonemoto on Wednesday in the Judson Memorial Church. The California-based brothers' colorful videos from the 1980s play with soap opera, melodrama and advertising to examine the manipulative style of pop TV.
Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South, New York, 8:30-10:30 p.m.

THURSDAY, MARCH 29

Opening: Nari Ward, "Liberty and Orders," at Lehmann Maupin
Aiming to "cover" himself, artist Nari Ward undertook the process of becoming a U.S. citizen. Now, in his second solo show at Lehmann Maupin, the artist explores the issues of law and authority that were raised during his naturalization. Some of his works seek to imbue documents with emotional resonance, like Casings, which transforms an NYPD stop-and-frisk report to relate it more directly to the body. —R.J.
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Panel: "Are You Experienced? How Psychedelic Consciousness Transformed Modern Art," at CUNY's James Gallery
Times critic Ken Johnson--who just wrote a book about psychedelics and art, titled Are You Experienced?--joins the painter Carroll Dunham (a reliable mind-bender) and anthropologist and historian of science Nicolas Langlitz in conversation on "the enduring influence that the use of hallucinogens and the psychedelic experience has had on American culture." Miciah Hussey, a Ph.D. candidate in English at the CUNY Graduate Center, moderates. (Mr. Dunham's 2010–11 painting Bathers 4 (posture) is pictured.) --Andrew Russeth
The James Gallery, The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 365 Fifth Avenue, New York, 6:30 p.m.

Opening: Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith "Cash from Chaos/Unicorns & Rainbows," at Team Gallery
This collaborative exhibition consists of footage from Alex Bag and Patterson Beckwith's public access shows, which were 29 minutes long and aired at 2:30 a.m. on Channel 34 between 1994 and 1997. To give you a sense of the attitude here, each episode began with the artists destroying the footage from the week before. --M.H.M.
Team Gallery, 83 Grand Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Mira Schor at Marvelli Gallery
Mira Schor, a much-loved painter and writer who is well-known for her defense of both the painting medium and intuitive expression, will be showing recent work at the Marvelli Gallery. The press release for "Voice and Speech" declares that painting is, for Schor, "a primary meeting ground between 'voice' and 'speech,'" which makes sense; Schor champions the unique potential of both visual and verbal language. --W.K.
Marvelli Gallery, 526 West 26th Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY, MARCH 31

Symposium: Independent Art Spaces, and Book Launch: Art Spaces Directory, at the New Museum
As part of its current triennial, the New Museum has joined with ArtAsiaPacific to compile a directory of more than 400 international art spaces. To mark the book's publication, co-editors Eungie Joo and Ethan Swan will host panels with figures guiding the development of those spaces today. The first discussion brings together Participant Inc. founder Lia Gangitano, Artists Space director Stefan Kalmár and others to consider the "unique challenges" of these venues, while the second ventures into the non-physical realm, considering spaces sans real estate. --A.R.
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, 12 p.m.

Tuesday morning's rally outside Sotheby's. (Photo by Whitney Kimball)

The Teamsters have scored a powerful ally in their battle with Sotheby's, which locked out its union art handlers last fall. A few weeks ago, Robert F, Kennedy, Jr., an environmental attorney, opted to move a charity auction for his nonprofit organization, Waterkeeper Alliance, from Sotheby's New York "out of respect for the striking Teamsters." (Just to be clear--they're not, actually, striking, which would imply that they have voluntarily left their jobs; they are protesting the lockout.)

This came as a welcome surprise to the Teamsters, considering that James Hoffa, Sr.--the father of now-Teamsters general president James Hoffa--and the Kennedys had been involved in very public clashes over the years. Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy pursued Hoffa in court between 1957 and 1964 on fraud and bribery charges, landing him a 13-year prison sentence.

But the latest move by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. suggests that all of that is water under the bridge. In a Feb. 13 letter to Jim Hoffa, which was quoted in the Detroit News on March 8, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. writes:

I know that our families have been at odds in the past. But you and I have spent our lifetimes fighting off the right wing attacks on the union movement and battling to making our country live up to her historical ideal as a template for justice and democracy. Our success will require a large and durable middle class that can only come from a strong union movement.

To that, Hoffa responded in a letter, excerpted on the Teamsters' website:

Thank you for joining in with the chorus of labor unions, Occupy Wall Street and others who believe in economic justice and a strong middle class, to help the art handlers. This injustice is yet another example of the class warfare being waged by the top 1 percent.

The Teamsters also cited Mr. Hoffa's statement: "The problems facing working families are far more serious than our fathers' past conflicts. Robert F. Kennedy Jr.'s decision to stand up for the locked-out Teamsters at Sotheby's tells me what a good man he is."

Recent years have seen a surge in interest for such shows as 2010's "Josef Albers/Ken Price" at the Brooke Alexander Gallery, and his 2010 solo show at Matthew Marks. As evidenced by his bright palette and globular shapes, Mr. Price was highly influenced by "low art," especially folk art and cartoons. LACMA is currently planning a major retrospective of his work, which will travel to the Nasher Sculpture Center in Dallas and the Met in 2013.

Click the slide show above to see work by Mr. Price.