Donatien Veismann’s 'About the Greek Ideal,' 2008. (Courtesy the artist and Envoy Enterprises)

Jimi Dams assembled the sculpture, video, and predominantly figurative paintings and photographs that make up "DIAcussion," his elegantly understated group show at Envoy Enterprises, with the goal of letting the art speak for itself. What it says—with a strong assist from Mr. Dams’s hanging, which draws a single, well-chosen work from each of nineteen artists and groups the pieces in formally thematic twos and threes—is that the variety of formal choices available to an artist is a microcosm of the variety of human beings. Nan Goldin’s photograph Valerie After Lovemaking, Bruno Dressing, Paris 2001, a supine female nude with her head facing left and the colors of real life subtly heightened, hangs above Kelsey Henderson’s oil painting Jenn, a supine female nude with the chalky colors and soft precision of a Philip Pearlstein, her head facing to the right. Next to Jenn hangs Winston Chmielinski’s Soft 7, a supine female nude in bright, simple colors, with her open legs facing the viewer and her upper body smeared beyond recognition. It’s a deeply appealing vision, certainly not wrong though maybe too pat, in which the basic nature of experience remains constant while each person has her own slightly different way of seeing it, perfect for herself but not quite right for anyone else. Johan Tahon’s extraordinary ceramic bust CAMPBELL (black) sits beside Xia Jing’s Underground #1, a large-scale photo of a charcoal portrait of a Chinese miner, and Donatien Veismann’s About the Greek Ideal, a large-scale photo of a photo of a bronze bust of Alexander the Great, on which Mr. Veisman spat: the young conqueror stares through the passing, DNA-charged mists of time. A snippet of Beethoven’s Ninth plays intermittently in Micki Pellerano’s short film Ashlar and Pentacle. Rounding out all this gentle humanism is Carlos Betancourt’s The Cut-Out Army, four photo prints on black canvas of more than a hundred separately posed, eccentrically costumed models. Their number takes the weight off of any given choice but loses none of the benefit. (Through May 26, 2013)

Jill Mason, 'One More Night,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Nicelle Beauchene Gallery)

Imagine walking into a costume party inside Alberto Giacometti’s sculpture The Palace at 4 a.m. The theme to this group show is the brief but influential, pre-Surrealist “Pittura Metafisica” movement, and the decorations are meticulous. The room is divided in two by Adam Putnam’s untitled colonnade of 12-foot-high arches. But their unpainted plywood piers and careful but incomplete cardboard crowns make a porous enough impression to leave the gallery’s halves suggestively indistinct. Setting the tone when you first walk in is Kristen Jensen’s Blushing Rock, a roughly shaped piece of white porcelain stained with peach and gray wash. It could almost be a phoenix’s egg, the skull of a woman asleep on her side, or a Brancusi, but it prefers instead to stop short of terminal specificity and float in the undifferentiated power of allusion. Three brown oil paintings by Jesse Chapman get at the peculiar power of dreams to separate the sensation of meaning from any static content. In The Figureheads, four figures float just above the surface of a misty green swamp, against a sky the color of mustard gas. (It’s like the memory of a premonition.) Their features are worn away, and three of them are missing their arms, but their mottled, woody surfaces evoke the unspoken promise of early spring. Trailing down from each figure’s right leg is a deep canoe, its color dark and unbroken. Jill Mason’s oils, in a brighter palette of blues and pinks, also converge figures for uncertain purposes, but she comes at this prewar uncanny valley from the opposite direction: instead of Mr. Chapman’s people, which look uneasily like things, Ms. Mason has objects that wink and vamp like people. Three lovely untitled casts by Jennifer Paige Cohen use stucco, plaster, and fragments of clothing to recreate the impression made in the world by other people’s shoulders and knees. (Through June 9, 2013)

'Siegfrid’s' (2013) by Alex Hubbard. (Courtesy the artist and Maccarone)

The hints of melancholia and breezy bathos that have long made Alex Hubbard’s work so interesting are strongly present in his newest pieces, called “one-person portable drinking bars.” These five Kienholz-worthy stalls are each about the size of two phone booths and stocked with alcohol, complete with a working beer tap. You can saddle up to the bar with its lone chair, pour a drink and enjoy it while staring at yourself in a mirror. It’s playful and humorous—until it gets lonely. Whatever Mr. Hubbard means to get at with these boîtes—the inherently solitary nature of looking at art?—this show, his sophomore outing at Maccarone, has him bringing his typically inventive, light touch to a variety of mediums, and continuing to eschew a signature style, a refreshing stance in a city that all but demands its artists adopt a recognizable brand.

“Bent Paintings,” a recent series of large, thin flexible urethane molds of various little cosmetic bottle-sized objects and the surface they sit upon come in a variety of colors—mandarin, raspberry, lilac and gray—and are flopped over, crumbled up on the ground or hung daintily from the walls. They’re goofball riffs on Daniel Spoerri’s food-strewn tables from the 1960s or maybe even Matthew Barney’s overwrought assemblages. They’re paintings as barely-there objects, unfixed and unstable, as happy on the ground as the wall.

Still from 'Hit Wave II' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and Maccarone)

The real highlight, especially for those fondly recalling Mr. Hubbard’s contribution to the 2010 Whitney Biennial, is a 6-minute video, Hit Wave II (2013), which also maneuvers in painterly realms. It’s made from a number of separate scenes, shot at different angles, which are pieced together into a beguiling collage. Mr. Hubbard appears in the video in a full-body painting suit as he rolls out sheets of primary colored paper, cuts them and sprays paint about. Process and product align. As he wields his tools, a man in a suit, the magician Magical Ramón, stands nearby, performing his own sleights of hand with a deck of cards and a top hat. In a voiceover, Mr. Ramón describes the tricks of his trade. “These guys are doing this every day,” he says, “trying to get your money.” Don’t get hustled, in other words. In a world filled with imitators, Mr. Hubbard has the real touch. (June 1, 2013)

Atmosphere. (Courtesy Billy Farrell)

The mood at the Dia Beacon benefit on Sunday should have been dreary. In the basement of the old factory in Beacon, a man and a woman read years past and future into an empty, columned parking lot, a piece by On Kawara that, coupled with the nature of Sundays, threatened to lend to the proceedings a literal undercurrent of ennui. Plus it was raining.

Instead the collectors, artists and dealers who mingled on the first floor seemed content, their spirits lifted by the bloody marys at the door and, undoubtedly, the architecture of Robert Irwin, who was honored at the lunchtime gala.

“If I had a dollar,” Dia Director Philippe Vergne said in his welcome address, “for every time someone told me, ‘God, the light is beautiful, God, the space is so fluid, God, there’s a certain je ne sais quoi about Dia Beacon that makes the experience so clearly in the service of the art…’” Here he trailed off. The point was, he said, most people seem to attribute Beacon’s success to a lack of human intervention, “and they’re wrong.” Such was the soft touch of Mr. Irwin, who declined to comment except to say that he actually hadn’t been back since he built the thing.

“Yeah, so, he has a really big penis,” said Timothy Greenfield-Sanders, finishing a story as I approached (“We’re talking about Philippe,” he joked, after I said I was a reporter). Everything really does look better at Dia, lighting-wise, the photographer said, except perhaps the Warhols that surrounded us at that moment. “And I love Warhol more than my mother.”

“If we’re talking about light, the Agnes Martins do so well here,” said his daughter Isca, also an artist. “Because the light changes the painting.” Mr. Greenfield-Sanders agreed, and he’d seen the works currently on display in something like ideal circumstances.

“These paintings I’ve seen at her house,” he said. “In a barn, she had a barn—they look better here—but it had kind of a skylight. She gave me a Valium. We each took a Valium and sat there looking at her paintings, and then we had lunch.”

“Does a minimal painter only take minimal drugs?” asked Isca’s husband, Sebastian Blanck.

“Right,” Mr. Greenfield-Sanders said. “It was a blue one, I think that’s only five milligrams.”

Mr. Vergne had also talked up another Dia project during his introduction: Thomas Hirschhorn’s monument to Antonio Gramsci, which opens at the Forest Houses projects in the Bronx this summer. Mr. Hirschhorn, Mr. Vergne said in his address, had taken a break from hauling “thousands and thousands” of wooden pallets to the Bronx to spend the day in Beacon.

“Philippe,” Gavin Brown said as the reception wound down, greeting the director with a complicated handshake that required some snapping and instruction on his part. “I’m never going to the South Bronx.”

“Oh, you live in Harlem anyway,” Mr. Vergne said. “So shut up.”

You guys Yankees fans?

“Is that basketball?” said the Brit.

“No, iz ice hockay,” said Mr. Vergne, heavily frogging his accent. “You know, I was a figure skater when I was a kid.” He turned to Mr. Brown. “I know you might not be surprised.”

“Next year I want you to make your remarks on a cordless mike,” Mr. Brown said, “Skating around the room.”

Then everyone scooted to a well-lit room around the corner to eat lunch amid the John Chamberlains. Valium was not on the menu. —Dan Duray

Cooper Union. (Photo by David Shankbone)

Cooper Union’s spring semester may have ended last week, but some students are still in school—specifically, in President Jamshed Bharucha’s office. The students, who began occupying the seventh floor of the brownstone Foundation Building on May 8, oppose the board of trustees’ recent decision to charge tuition for the first time in 150 years. Administrators state that the school’s longstanding financial problems leave them no choice.

“We do it only because the institution was hurtling toward bankruptcy,” said Dr. Bharucha, seated in an empty classroom on the second floor of the school’s controversial 41 Cooper Square building, a $166 million, Thom Mayne-designed structure that went up in 2009. “There’s a misconception that there are other ways that are less draconian.” Currently, Cooper covers the $38,500 tuition cost for all students. Starting with the class entering in 2014, 25 to 30 percent of students will pay about $19,250, while 25 to 30 percent will continue to receive a full scholarship. The rest will pay on a need-based sliding scale.

Students who oppose the new policy say that it will undermine the school’s meritocractic tradition. “The moment you do that you have two lists—one for the people you really want to get in and one for the people you know can afford it,” said one architecture student who spoke on condition of anonymity.

The occupied Foundation Building is off-limits to non-Cooper folk, but on May 20, fourth-year student Victoria Sobel, one of the sit-in organizers, told Gallerist by phone that about 14 students were occupying Dr. Bharucha’s office that day. This isn’t your parents’ 1968-style academic occupation. Videos recorded in Dr. Bharucha’s office document students talking, working on computers and cleaning—one Vine shows a Dustbuster inhaling crumbs off the carpet. “At night everyone gets work done,” said one student. “The guards play ukulele.”

Though there are fewer protestors than there were before classes ended, Ms. Sobel said she and other students will stay put until their demands, which include Dr. Bharucha’s resignation and student representation on the board of trustees, are met.

“I know that when you’re in a protest, you want to see the change now, but boards are deliberative bodies,” said Dr. Bharucha, who does not intend to step down. “The committee on trustees has been gathering data on what the models are for student representation on boards and looking at the pros and cons.”

Ms. Sobel said she felt it was inappropriate to compare Cooper to other schools. “I don’t want them to research other models,” she said. “We want something new.” A vote of no confidence in Dr. Bharucha and board chairman Mark Epstein had attracted 2,192 online signatures as of press time.

“The financial crisis predates me,” said Dr. Bharucha. “It’s part of leadership that you’re going to get people wanting to pin something on an individual … but I feel at peace with the fact that I told the truth very fast as I saw the numbers being added up.”

“The fundamental reason for our financial problem—it’s not the building,” he said, referring to the costly construction of 41 Cooper Square, which critics like Reuters blogger Felix Salmon have repeatedly cited as an example of financial mismanagement. “It is the simple but unsexy fact that our revenues have not kept pace with inflation. This goes back 45 years.”

Tensions between student protestors and the administration spiked on May 9, when the Cooper Union Emergency Management Team, which includes Dr. Bharucha and other administrators, sent students an ultimatum via e-mail, asking that they leave the office by 6:30 p.m. or face “disciplinary action, which may include dismissal and/or denial of their degree.” Security guards hired for the occasion—the president later said he did not know they were armed—manned the stairwells.

“They also bolted shut the bathroom doors on the seventh floor and turned the water fountains off so that the people occupying the office wouldn’t have access to water or hygiene,” said one architecture student.

The administration has not taken further steps to remove the protestors, though it has not ruled out withholding diplomas. “I’ll just say that we’re not looking to be vindictive,” said Dr. Bharucha. “We have every hope that we can resolve this in a way where it isn’t necessary to impose penalties like that.”

Ms. Sobel says she and other protestors are not particularly concerned, given the pushback such penalties would elicit from supporters of the occupation. She said these supporters are what make her optimistic that the sit-in could result in changes at the school. “This is the first time I’ve seen the Cooper community rally like this,” she said, noting the outcry from parents, alumni, faculty and prospective students, among other groups. On May 13, Dr. Bharucha met with the student occupiers in his office for the first time—a conversation both parties described as somewhat strained.

To restore free tuition, Dr. Bharucha said, “would take a new endowment of $300 million over and above the capital campaign goals we have judged to be realistic.” The administration projects it will raise about $13 million per year going forward.

“It’s impossible to understand the way they’re deriving these numbers because they won’t allow us to see the books,” said Ms. Sobel.

“It’s so complicated that for some it seems more like something opaque is happening,” said Dr. Bharucha. “Unless you’re willing to actually sit and learn that complexity, it’s quite natural to just get angry and assume something untoward is going on.”

Both students and administrators indicated that communication is critical but presently nonexistent.

“We’re speaking different languages,” said Ms. Sobel.

Still from Maria Petschnig's 'Petschsniggle' (2013). (Courtesy the artist and On Stellar Rays)

Everything in our virtual life is clean, transparent, and meaningless. But there’s a nagging disconnect between a body image that’s been catastrophically challenged and dissolved and the body itself, which hasn’t gone anywhere. We’re like children playing hide-and-seek in a house we no longer believe in. So before projecting her videos Vasistas and Petschsniggle onto the walls of On Stellar Rays, Austrian-born, New York-based artist Maria Petschnig covered those walls with hastily slapped up wood paneling and installed a drop ceiling of acoustic tiles. This ought to be claustrophobically ominous, but instead of evoking that dread, it simply alludes to it. Gopa, a kind of drooping, faceless velvet head mounted on the wall, or Mycroft and Sack, two mattresses stuffed like diapers or death masks with lumpy padding, likewise bring to mind Louise Bourgeois sculptures under glass: the language is the same, but it’s been aestheticized or intellectualized in a way that leaves the viewer fascinatingly unsure of her footing. The video Petschsniggle begins with a shot of two identical naked women—Ms. Petschnig and her twin sister—in tight rope nets, laid out in an empty bathtub as if to dry or air-drown. For about seven minutes, in a house decorated just like the gallery, Ms. Petschnig and her twin play twin games: they ride down the stairs on a mattress, they ride each other like horses. They cut a peeled cucumber into pieces. In the bathtub, wearing masks made of stockings, the artist’s sister carefully leans over her and spits on her face while Ms. Petschnig tries not to laugh; in another cut, standing and soapy, their eyes meet for a moment, but no message is exchanged. Maybe a sharper comparison would be to the giddy, blasphemous moment early in the last century when words like “damn” and “fuck” began to explode across the public vernacular even as they rapidly lost their force: in most mythologies, dismemberment is a time of new beginnings.

Obrist. (Photo by Yang Fudong, Shanghai 2009)

At 8 a.m. two Sundays ago, Hans-Ulrich Obrist was at his midtown hotel, pouring packs of orange powder into a glass of water. He was casually immaculate in a checkered blue suit with a pressed white shirt. Mr. Obrist, co-director of London’s Serpentine Gallery, was in New York for the Frieze Art Fair; the release of his book Do It: A Compendium, published by Independent Curators International; the opening of Expo 1, the ecologically-themed exhibition he helped organize at the Museum of Modern Art and its sister museum MoMA PS1; and a few dozen gallery shows, studio visits, meetings and parties.

"I stopped coffee," Mr. Obrist said. He was speaking with the speed of an over-caffeinated teenager, his arms jittery and cutting the air for emphasis. He sleeps four or five hours a night. He wanted to meet at 7 a.m. I told him I didn't think that was possible. Even this early, I was guzzling a succession of cups of black coffee to jolt myself into something resembling consciousness. Mr. Obrist gets by on "the excitement and the curiosity. And I drink a lot of green tea, a lot of things for the immune system--vitamins and stuff. Because I travel a lot and I always get these colds."

“No coffee,” he added, as if he might really miss it.

Art fair culture has come to define the globalization of contemporary art. After Frieze comes Art Basel Hong Kong, then the Venice Biennale, then Art Basel, in Switzerland. Mr. Obrist, who has curated hundreds of exhibitions and is a friend of artists (his ongoing interview project, which he has occasionally done in 24-hour spurts, has amassed thousands of hours of tape) is seemingly omnipresent at these events.

During a fair, the art world’s social curiosities are magnified. A day becomes a race to see how much you can fit in. Why not try to make it to the dessert course of that third gallery dinner, just to show your face? It's a game to see who can shake the most hands. But for a curator like Mr. Obrist, who prides himself on knowing everyone and everything, it's also invaluable research. Over the course of a single cigarette, I once witnessed him roll up to an art fair in a car, run inside, come back out murmuring to his companion about what impressed him, then get back in the car and head to the next event, like some kind of highbrow European Roadrunner. In an overly hormonal art world, where every opening and after-party signifies some kind of opportunity, Mr. Obrist’s pace alone has become nothing short of legendary.

"I think the art fair is very much a form of urbanism," Mr. Obrist said. "I think something really happens to the cities when such a fair happens. The city becomes an exhibition, it's amazing."

He grew up in Zurich, "addicted" to the Giacometti sculptures in the Kunsthalles. At 16, he was already hanging around artists. At 17, he visited Eric Fischli and David Weiss, the Swiss duo, while they were working on their iconic film The Way Things Go, a carefully calibrated series of chain reactions. That visit set off its own series of chain reactions--he'd travel around Europe seeing gallery and museum shows. ("Trains were my living room," he said.) He visited Gerhard Richter in Cologne. On a school trip to Paris, he snuck away to see Christian Boltanski. He did the same in Rome and visited Alighiero Boetti. The older artists were amused by his ambition and vast knowledge. He wanted to "listen to artists' ideas and try to make them happen."

"Boetti took me to his astrologer and drove me to meet his artist friends," Mr. Obrist said. "He said how bored he was to be an artist because he's always asked to do the same thing. And he told me you can't become a curator who's boring. This was like a short cut of 20 years. I believed one could not just do routine exhibitions. Boetti also said, 'Oh you're so slow, you need to get faster.'"

It was now 9 a.m. and Mr. Obrist was off to a studio visit with a private artist he wouldn’t name who works in secret and didn't want anyone to know she was in town. So, an hour break, and then meet at Cafe Select in Soho, where he would discuss details of 89Plus, an open call collaboration he runs with Simon Castets that focuses on new digital media. I finished my fifth cup of coffee and was so awake I walked all the way from midtown.

It happens to have been at the Café Select in Paris, 20 years ago, that Mr. Obrist came up with Do It. Many of his ideas have emerged out of conversations with others. It was also at a cafe in London that he founded the "Brutally Early Club," a salon-style discussion that meets at 6:30 a.m. And through a discussion with Fischli-Weiss, he designed his famous "Kitchen Show," a group exhibition curated in Mr. Obrist's unused kitchen. ("I never cook and I never actually made a coffee in my life," he said.) The idea for Do It, conceived with Christian Boltanski and Bertrand Lavier, was to ask artists to come up with sets of instructions that could be carried out by other artists.

Today, he was running 15 minutes late for his meeting with Mr. Castets and the young artist Brad Troemel, co-founder of the Tumblr-based art project Jogging. He recently coined the term "aesthlete," which is as good a summation as any of new media art: "a cultural producer who trumps craft and contemplative brooding with immediacy and rapid production."

"Anything I write is a kind of artist statement, indirectly," Mr. Troemel said after Mr. Obrist had hurried in and took a seat. Mr. Troemel was explaining his practice of making fairly useless objects (three donuts balanced between a wooden plank, a watermelon with a handle) and selling them on Etsy, the arts and crafts ecommerce site. Mr. Obrist was frantically scrawling notes on scraps of paper. He explained that he tried to order Mr. Troemel's book, Peer Pressure: Essays on the Internet by an Artist on the Internet, on Amazon, but purchased a book instead by a different Brad Troemel, which he has added to his shelf at home that is dedicated to the wrong books by homonym authors (like by Robin Day, the TV moderator and not the designer and so forth; Mr. Obrist fancies this a kind of evolving group show).

"We need to go," Mr. Obrist said to Mr. Castets.

"We haven't even gotten our order yet," Mr. Castets said.

"Well, we have to get it and get out of here."

Mr. Obrist asked if there were earlier writings by Mr. Troemel that he could look at. By this time, Mr. Troemel had been served his bowl of granola, and, like a well-mannered child, was careful to chew thoroughly and swallow before talking. I could nearly sense Mr. Obrist wincing in these seconds-long interims. The artist mentioned his essay on Dual Sites, the idea of online forums displacing physical gallery spaces and that "our appreciation of a resume is largely made up of recognizing accomplishments that we did not attend."

"My most famous show is the 'Kitchen Show,'" Mr. Obrist said. "More famous than any gallery show or museum show I curated. And it lasted for three months and had 19 visitors, and it was a rumor. So your idea of Dual Sites--it's totally new because of the Internet, but it's always existed. The most famous Marina Abramovic performances were attended by six people and then became a global rumor."

He asked for the check. (Two more cups of coffee on my part.) "We've only got about 20 minutes for the next meeting," he said.

A car was waiting for us outside and we raced around the corner to meet with three of the editors of the online DIS Magazine. "We are very late," Mr. Obrist said. "O-M-G we are very late!"

The DIS office was sleepy, aside from the music blasting through the room. Mr. Obrist rapidly finalized some details about an 89Plus project and asked them how the coffee table book they were working on was going. ("Slowly," each of them said.) Quite significantly, Mr. Obrist took the opportunity to visit the restroom before the next meeting.

"We're supposed to be at Socrates Sculpture Park at noon," he said, a little distressed, outside the DIS offices. "I don't think that's going to work." To no one in particular, he added, "We have to keep to the schedule." There was a brunch hosted by Gavin Brown for Rirkrit Tiravanija, in addition to Socrates, where instructions from Do It were posted for visitors to perform. There was also the Christian Holstad show at Andrew Kreps Gallery, in Chelsea. It was approaching noon, and he needed to be at PS1 for a 12:30 meeting with the museum's director, Klaus Biesenbach. Mr. Tiravanija, Lawrence Weiner and Clifford Owens, among other artists, would be there for talks and performances. Immediately afterward, Mr. Obrist and Mr. Biesenbach were to interview Yoko Ono.

He would skip the sculpture park.

I found Mr. Obrist again at 1:15 p.m., with Mr. Biesenbach in tow. In a fleeting moment of almost cartoonish relaxation, both were rubbing their bellies and talking of the heaviness of their lunch. Mr. Obrist offered a wide smile and took my arm, guiding me into the performance dome, a carnivalesque bubble resting awkwardly in the courtyard, where his event would be held.

The artist Lawrence Weiner came in, his long gray hair, missing from the top of his head, was wrapped in a tight bun at the nape of his neck, and the long scraggly beard, combined with the one silver earring, made him look more like he'd just walked in from a few years on the high seas instead of Jackson Avenue.

"I want to show you my Instagram," Mr. Obrist said, rushing over to him. "You write something down and I take a photograph of it. It's a celebration of handwriting!"

"Oh," said Mr. Weiner. He took Mr. Obrist's pen and wrote on the back of a schedule, "Hans Do It or Perhaps Do It Not."

Mr. Tiravanija entered with his dog, a black French English bulldog mix wearing a red collar that said "Service Dog."

"How does he service you?" asked Karen Marta, Mr. Obrist’s book editor.

"He helps me with my emotional instability," Mr. Tiravanija said.

"So he's your teddy bear!" Mr. Weiner chimed in. "What's its name?"

Mr. Tiravanija pointed to the collar. "HARRY."

"That's my father's name," Mr. Weiner said gravely. This elicited a chuckle from everyone. "I'm not kidding." Mr. Obrist was writing rapidly and saying that he needed a table because he has a "total table obsession. A table diminishes the anxiety of speaking in public." Someone handed him a cup of green tea. The crowd began to seep in.

Onstage, Mr. Obrist asked Mr. Weiner what he thought of Do It, conceptually.

"There is no dancer who doesn't want to be a singer and there is no sculptor who doesn't want to be a painter," Mr. Weiner said. "I find it a reasonably positive thing. I don't know what else I can say about it."

Mr. Tiravanija assured the audience that he "wasn't going to talk as much, I'm just going to do a Do It from the book. Is there anybody who's good with knives? Nobody?" (It was "Gilding the Lily Part V Recipe for Bucky Fuller" and involved burning a brandy-soaked peach with a match and feeding it to his dog.)

Belligerent and unsteady on his feet, Clifford Owens appeared onstage and asked, "Where's Lawrence? Did he leave? He's smoking outside. Go get him." Mr. Weiner appeared in an aisle. "Come up here and stand next to me," Mr. Owens yelled. He didn't budge. "Are you afraid?"

"No, I'm not afraid,” Mr. Weiner said. “I'm just bored."

"I met you at Hans-Ulrich Obrist's dinner the other night and I said you were a big influence on me and you said, 'Is that the best you got?'" Mr. Owens said. Then he proposed his own Do It performance: "I want to cut half an inch off Lawrence Weiner's beard and use it to make a painting which I will then gift to the museum—"

Mr. Weiner interrupted him: "I honestly and truly would like to know this thing about artists gifting things to museums. It has to go the other way. Do I have to participate? Artists are not in the position to be philanthropists."

Mr. Owens shouted back that he didn't know how he would pay his rent this month, and that he was evicted in December. He proposed another performance: Mr. Tiravanija would join him on stage--that idea was shot down with a severe shake of Mr. Tiravanija's head. So another idea: Five people would carry Mr. Owens out of the museum, across the street and into the Shannon Pot--the Irish bar nearby. There, he would stage a "private performance." Slowly, a group of four men stood and gathered at the base of the stage. Finally, Agnes Gund, the collector and philanthropist, stood and helped carry Mr. Owens across the street. The irony was not lost on Mr. Owens.

"Aggie Gund!" he bellowed at Mr. Weiner, resting in the arms of the five volunteers. "Carry me out of the fucking museum, Lawrence! Carry me out of the fucking museum!"

"OK thank you!" said Mr. Obrist, hopping onstage fast and smiling awkwardly. He was joined by Mr. Biesenbach, and everyone watched as Yoko Ono, in a black leather vest, black hat and black sunglasses, idled up to them, the room letting out a collective gasp when she tripped and fell face forward, then breaking into rapturous applause as she jumped back up, went over to a microphone, screeched and squealed for about 30 seconds, made some sex noises and screamed, "Do it!"

She slumped in a chair. Mr. Biesenbach brought up a recent Times article about carbon dioxide levels being at their highest in 3 million years.

Ms. Ono said, "I'm not that worried about the future of the human race because we will do it!"

"You talk about raising awareness," Mr. Obrist said. "How has social media changed your activism?"

Ms. Ono said, "If the Earth is so unbearably bad and we can't survive, what's going to happen is we're going to look around for another planet."

"I was wondering, Yoko, if you are an idealist," Mr. Obrist said.

Ms. Ono said, "I'm a realist. I believe in an incredible super power in us, which is still dormant. We're all just hiding. Through hiding, we're doing a lot of things, really. It's going to be all right. We're going to make it."

At 4 p.m., Mr. Obrist was signing a stack of Do It books in a corner of the performance dome. He was worried that Mr. Weiner was upset by Mr. Owens's performance. "Clifford is always bringing me to the verge," he said, "like I have to react or something."

I noticed a small tear running down the back of his suit jacket, the sole crack in Mr. Obrist's fine-tuned existence. I asked what his plans were. There were still galleries in Chelsea, maybe the Lower East Side.

"I honestly don't know what I'm doing next," he said.

mmiller@observer.com

Installation view. (Courtesy Bradford Robotham/The Jewish Museum)

If you’re turned off by the bombast of infinitely escalating auction prices and big-tent contemporary fairs, take refuge in the elegant first American retrospective of Jack Goldstein. Organized by Orange County Museum of Art guest curator Philipp Kaiser, and in New York by Jewish Museum Assistant curator Joanna Montoya, the show is the gloomy B-side to the relentless pop staccato of blockbuster contemporary art. Yet artists today owe much to this cult figure.

“I can’t stand to look at anything that my hand does,” Goldstein once griped. For his 1975 MFA graduation show as part of the first class at Cal Arts, he buried himself alive. His work would follow this trajectory towards total disappearance. Appropriation wasn’t just a slick move with him, as it is for Richard Prince. Goldstein was the lonely poet of appropriation art. To make a movie, he isolated the lion from Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer film promo and projected it on a wall, where it roars endlessly. His records are stock film sound pressed to red and white vinyl: “The Lost Ocean Liner,” “The Burning Forest,” “Three Felled Trees,” read some sad titles in the series Suite of 9 Records with Sound Effects, 1976.

Still from Jack Goldstein, 'Shane,' 1975. (Courtesy Galerie Daniel Buchholz, Berlin/Cologne, and the Estate of Jack Goldstein. © Estate of Jack Goldstein)

Born in Montreal and raised in Los Angeles, Goldstein in 1977 was part of the watershed “Pictures” show at Artist’s Space. He became famous within the art world in his lifetime, and was always ambitious, but his greatest legacy is conveying the sense of isolation inherent in appropriation. The title of the show cites Goldstein’s quip to the effect that there must be 10,000 Jack Goldsteins in the phone book.

In the 1980s he made paintings: sleek, monumental, boxy things with appropriated pictures of air raid scenes from World War II, or of lightning storms and nature photographs. The images were airbrushed on by studio assistants, and they gleam with the smooth finish of car paint. These paintings are spectacular objects, some of the prettiest of the “Pictures”-generation work. They are as cinematic as yet-to-be Katy Perry video mood boards, yet they remain stark and mute.

Goldstein spent the last years of his life in Los Angeles writing aphorisms on a desktop computer and reading philosophy backwards “in order to break the narratives and mimic the lack of continuity that existed in my own life,” as he inimitably put it. Obviously he was depressed, and he was also using drugs; in 2003 he took his own life. The Jewish Museum exhibition is haunting, and its ghostly sense of absence and disappearance is made stronger by our awareness of the artist’s suicide. But he influenced the artists who would become today’s stars—Cindy Sherman and Jeff Koons among them—as well as lesser-known talents like Michael Majerus. In their work, and through his own, he lives on. (Through Sept. 29, 2013)

Glafira Rosales. (Courtesy Art Market Monitor)

Glafira Rosales, the Long Island-based art dealer who has been under investigation for allegedly selling counterfeit artworks by 20th-century masters including Pollock, de Kooning and Rothko through the now-defunct Knoedler & Company and other galleries, was arrested today and charged with filing false tax returns for the years 2006 through 2008 and deliberately failing to disclose an offshore bank account from 2007 through 2011, allegedly hiding $12.5 million she received from sales, according to Preet Bharara, the United States Attorney for the Southern District of New York, and officials from the IRS and FBI.

“As alleged, Glafira Rosales gave new meaning to the phrase ‘artful dodger’ by avoiding taxes on millions of dollars in income from dealing in fake artworks for fake clients," stated Mr. Bharaha in the announcement.

According to an article in Vanity Fair, Ms. Rosales, 56, sold around 20 paintings to the once-venerable Knoedler, which closed abruptly in late 2011 after a client threatened to sue when forensic tests suggested that a Pollock painting he purchased for $17 million was fake.

Ms. Rosales faces a maximum sentence of three years in prison and a fine of $100,000 for each of the three false-tax-return charges and a maximum sentence of five years in prison and a fine of $250,000 for each of the five charges that she failed to disclose offshore bank accounts.

(Courtesy Lyon Bienniale)

For the past few months, the Lyon Biennale has been releasing the names of artists that will have work in its 12th edition, which runs Sept. 12, 2013, through Jan. 5, 2014. Now the full list is out, and it is a handsome one, ranging from established stars like Jeff Koons, Tom Sachs and Yoko Ono to exciting younger artists like Trisha Baga, Helen Marten and Anicka Yi. Some 80 percent of the works are being specially made for the biennale, according to organizers. Other items of note: there will be a Performance Weekend Oct. 19–20, a Video Weekend Nov. 30–Dec. 1 and a Robotics Weekend ("It will be a discussion between artists, researchers and... robots," says a news release). Roe Ethridge shot promotional photos of attractive young people (see the image at left) and a pig.

The full list follows below.

Jonathas de Andrade Souza
Ed Atkins
Trisha Baga
Matthew Barney
Neïl Beloufa
Gerry Bibby
Dineo Seshee Bopape
The Bruce High Quality Foundation
Antoine Catala
Paul Chan
Ian Cheng
Dan Colen
Petra Cortright
Jason Dodge
Aleksandra Domanovi
David Douard
Erró
Roe Ethridge
Edward Fornieles
Gabriela Friðriksdottir
Robert Gober
Karl Haendel
Fabrice Hyber
Jeff Koons
Margaret Lee
Ann Lislegaard
Nate Lowman
MadeIn Company
Václav Magid
Helen Marten
Thiago Martins De Melo
Bjarne Melgaard
Takao Minami
Meleko Mokgosi
Paulo Nazareth
Paulo Nimer Pjota
Yoko Ono
Laure Prouvost
Lili Reynaud-Dewar
James Richards
Matthew Ronay
Tom Sachs
Hiraki Sawa
Mary Sibande
Gustavo Speridião
Tavares Strachan
Nobuaki Takekawa
Ryan Trecartin & Lizzie Fitch
Peter Wächtler
Hannah Weinberger
Ming Wong
Yang Fudong
Anicka Yi
Zhang Ding

Update, 6:30 p.m.: It seems that the initial news release we received with the artist list accidentally omitted two artists. They have now been added.