Isa Genzken, Benjamin Buchloh, Cadere, Marcel Broodthaers, Maria Gillisen and unknown at Brussels's Palais des Beux-Arts vernissage, Sept., 26, 1974. (Photograph by Jacques Charlier/ Courtesy Herbert Collection, Ghent)

Artists Space's Books & Talks venue, which opened in Tribeca last year, is home to a tastefully curated bookshop, has hosted numerous talks, screenings and discussions, and served as a studio for Peter Fend. Soon it will present its first fully fledged exhibition. On the evening of May 10, it opens "Documenting Cadere: 1972–1978," which looks at the life and travels of the Polish-born artist André Cadere (1934–78), who's best known for the thin, striped cylindrical sculptures he called Barres de Bois Rond—"round bars of wood."

The show, which originated at Modern Art Oxford, in England, was organized by Lynda Morris, and focuses on "work [that] was often realized through public walks or provocative appearances at exhibition openings." It will include documentation, correspondance and interviews. Here's a bit from the tantalizing news release:

Cadere undertook actions in cities across Europe and also in New York. His first visit to New York occurred in 1975, and further trips over the following three years saw Cadere exhibit work in galleries such as David Ebony Gallery, as well as in public spaces. In both 1976 and 1978, he presented a Barre de Bois Rond at locations such as a grocery store, a Chinese restaurant, and a model agency during afternoon walks along West Broadway. During his visits to the city Cadere met and engaged in dialogues with artists, gallerists and writers including Ian Wilson, Benjamin Buchloh, Ileana Sonnabend, Lawrence Weiner, Sarah Charlesworth and Sylvère Lotringer.

The show runs through July 7.

Meanwhile, Books & Talks is showing one of the Aaron Flint Jamison pieces for Artists Space's great show, "Frozen Lakes," which recently got extended. You have through next Sunday, March 31, to catch it.

Installation view of Metahaven's 'Transparent Camouflage' (2013) at Artists Space. (Courtesy the artists and Artists Space)

A bit of exciting news this Monday morning: two very fine shows have received extensions to their runs. Ragnar Kjartansson's nine-screen video piece at Luhring Augustine, "The Visitors," now runs through this Saturday, March 23 (it had been scheduled to close March 16), and Artists Space's rich and captivating "Pictures" update, "Frozen Lakes," will now close Sunday, March 31.

Coincidentally, I reviewed those shows for The New York Observer—here's the item on "The Visitors," and here's the one on "Frozen Lakes."

Don't miss these exhibitions!

“Pictures” showcased then-rising stars like Sherrie Levine, Robert Longo and Jack Goldstein, who explored found imagery in order to create deadpan artworks that, in part, investigated how the media stages and frames images. The artists in “Frozen Lakes,” Mr. Kalmár and Mr. Birkett argue in their news release, “shift their attention from the dialectics of production”—the mode of the “Pictures” gang—“towards the conditions of circulation.” James Richards’s film Rose Bud (2013) shows images from a number of iconic photography books—Robert Mapplethorpe, Man Ray—in which sexually explicit scenes have been scratched out; it looks quaint today, when illicit images flow freely on the Internet and censorship takes the form of firewalls.

The artist collective Metahaven’s multimedia project Transparent Camouflage (2013) shows how artists can give visual form to the flows of information that define our era. A sprawling chart maps the history of WikiLeaks, and gray T-shirts ($40 a pop) celebrate Julian Assange. (Those seeking a more luxurious memento can buy a colorful silk scarf—$150 each—with “WikiLeaks” written on it amid a tangle of alluring, colorful patterns.)

Similarly sleek is a 2012 sculpture by Shadi Habib Allah that comments subtly on the relationship between real and virtual. The shell of a red hot rod has been fitted around a high-definition video camera. A film in front of it shows two men constructing the piece in an auto-body shop as they discuss politics, money and all-you-can-eat buffet options. It feels uncanny to stand next to the sleek finished product as you watch it being built.

The artist closest in sensibility to the original “Pictures” gang is, perhaps, Ed Atkins, whose own high-definition videos dramatize banal events in a manner that recalls the work of Goldstein, a quintessential “Pictures” artist. In Death Mask II: The Scent (2010) the opening of a fold-up calculator is slowed down and set to music—and thereby transformed into an epic event. Death Mask III (2011), Mr. Atkins’s 35-minute masterwork, is composed of long shots of a mountaintop, the middle of the ocean and a woman standing on a beach. The film goes in and out of focus, the tint of the colors onscreen change and the music shifts abruptly. Little alterations allow the viewer to see these scenes anew.

A series of postcards from 1997 by Ken Okiishi (they're dated 1997–2001) brings the story full circle. In them, he writes to established photographers, including “Pictures” artist Cindy Sherman, asking them about their relationships with their subjects. Mr. Okiishi writes of being a gay man traveling through Europe with his straight best friend, with whom he has fallen in love. He describes snapping photographs of his travels and wondering what to do about his personal life. Art can make us feel and think in new ways, the piece argues, but acting on those revelations is a separate matter. (Through March 24, 2013)

Opening and Performances: “Some Sweet Day,” at Museum of Modern Art
This week, MoMA begins its three-week dance series "Some Sweet Day," which pairs some of the brightest talents in conceptual dance from the Judson Church era to today in dialogues that explore the boundaries of movement. Steve Paxton, Jérôme Bel, Sarah Michelson and Faustin Linyekula are some of the dancers in the performance series that occurs at various times in the atrium over the course of the exhibition. Steve Paxton opens the dialogue with his works Satisfyin Lover and State, presented at various times on Wednesday and Sunday. Jérôme Bel responds with The Show Must Go On, presented at various times on Saturday and Sunday. Saturday at 4 p.m., join Sabine Breitwieser, chief curator of the department of media and performance art, and guest curator Ralph Lemon as they lead the two dancers in a discussion about their work. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, New York, Oct. 15–Nov. 4, times vary.

TUESDAY, OCTOBER 16

Auction: Dialogues Between Art & Design at Phillips de Pury
Murray Moss curates a selling exhibition of work that straddles the line between art and design. Some of diverse artists included are Maarten Baas, Paul Cézanne, Kazimir Malevich, Frank Stella and Robert Wilson.—Michael H. Miller
Phillips de Pury, 250 Park Avenue, New York, 11 a.m.

Conference: Leaders in Software and Art at the Guggenheim
A group of talents in the fields of both software and art gather to discuss the growing intersection of the art and digital realms. Participants include keynote speaker Laurie Anderson, as well as Luke Dubois, Mary Huang and Tristan Perich. —M.H.M.
Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, New York, 8 a.m.–11:45 p.m., full day tickets: $500

THURSDAY, OCTOBER 18

Discussion: "A Reflection on Documenta 13" at Artists Space Books & Talks
Besides organizing a hulking series of programs and exhibitions for Documenta 13 in Kassel, Germany; Kabul, Afghanistan; Cairo; and Banff, Canada, the show's artistic director, Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, also worked with a team to publish 100 notebooks with various writings. Theorist Avital Ronell will share a presentation on the ambitious project, Ms. Christov-Bakargiev will offer a response and Lawrence Weiner will make some remarks. Ms. Christov-Bakargiev will also present a lecture on her Documenta on Saturday at 5 p.m. at Cooper Union, and will be followed by debate among artists Mariam Ghani, Joan Jonas and Michael Rakowitz, who were part of the show. —Andrew Russeth
Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, 7 p.m., $8

Opening: William Copley, "The Patriotism  of CPLY and All That," at Paul Kasmin Gallery
William Copley was one of the great heroes of postwar art in America, running a gallery in Los Angeles, collecting work by European Surrealists and giving artist grants. He even donated Marcel Duchamp's last piece, the mysterious installation Étant donnés, to the Philadelphia Museum. He was also one of his era's most adventurous figurative painters, crafting not only bawdy, sex-filled scenes, but also paintings rich with symbols of the United States, which will be the featured in this show. —A.R.
Paul Kasmin Gallery, 293 10th Avenue, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Benefit Auction: “Take Home a Nude,” at Sotheby’s
It's time again for 'Take Home a Nude,' the benefit auction at Sotheby's. Mingle with artists and hopefuls vying for the chance to take home their very own nude portrait, all for a good cause. Check out our write-up of last year's event to get the idea. --R.J.
 Sotheby's, 1334 York Avenue, New York, 6 p.m.

The faults of “Regarding Warhol” are not only formidable, they are surprising, given the Met’s recent vaunted postwar exhibitions like “Robert Rauschenberg: Combines” in 2005 and “Jasper Johns: Gray,” in 2008. The most egregious of its errors is that it spreads itself too thin to register an actual curatorial premise: 60 international artists spanning half a century would be a mere gloss on any topic. Warhol’s influence could have been better examined through a modest and subtle exhibition that took on only one decade and location—1980s N.Y., 1960s Düsseldorf and 1970s L.A. come to mind. But the Met show is structured according to baggy, catchall categories—“Daily News,” “Portraiture,” “Queer Studies,” “Consuming Images,” “No Boundaries”—within which works by dozens of artists are paired with Warhol’s, willy-nilly.

And bizarrely: to state, as one wall label does, that Gerhard Richter’s 1964 Cow (Kuh) “anticipates Warhol’s own Cow Wallpaper from two years later” misrepresents the historical relationship between Düsseldorf’s Capitalist Realism and New York Pop. There is much of this kind of visual rhyming: Cory Arcangel’s more recent video pieces (in which early Nintendo Super Mario clouds float by) are paired with Warhol’s metallic polyester Silver Clouds of 1966, Polly Apfelbaum’s floral floor installation with Warhol’s flower paintings. There is a predominance of blondes and people in blond wigs (in the section on portraits, Karen Kilimnik’s painting of Paris Hilton as Marie Antoinette is juxtaposed with Elizabeth Peyton’s 1995 painting of Kurt Cobain, Blue Kurt, and an untitled photograph by Cindy Sherman). The effect is glib. More attention to strategies of representation and less to facile connections based on subject matter would have served the Met well.

A number of artworks here are chestnuts trotted out of the Contemporary Curating 101 storage bin, including Bruce Nauman’s Eat Death (1973), Felix Gonzalez-Torres’s Untitled (Portrait of Ross in L.A.) (1991) and Allan McCollum’s Ten Plaster Surrogates (1982-1990). There should be a two-year moratorium on including any of these in any exhibition. The selection of the most recent artworks is inexplicably bad. Naming Cory Arcangel, Ryan Trecartin and Kalup Linzy as the designated young inheritors of Warhol seems like the kind of selection only someone who knows next to nothing about contemporary practice could possibly come up with. Off the top of my head, Josh Smith, Alex Israel, Ryan McGinley, Wade Guyton, K8 Hardy, the Bernadette Corporation (see more on that below), Cheyney Thompson or Cleopatra gallery’s CKTV Karaoke project might have worked better.

Still, the show has its merits, and great-looking art speaks for itself: when the Met fails, it fails grandly, with impeccable loans. Perhaps fittingly, the New York this show most closely resembles is the gallery at Christie’s during an auction preview: 45 major Warhols, including the fetching Nine Jackies (1964), the early, scribbly Icebox (1961), an iconic silver Marlon and the great Big Campbell’s Soup Can, 19¢ (Beef Noodle) (1962); eight great works by Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke, including Polke’s early Plastik-Wannen; and major pieces by Jeff Koons, Alex Katz, Ed Ruscha and Christopher Wool. Showing work this fine is a veritable public service, and anyone who tells you not to see the show based on the poor curation alone just isn’t moved by good modern art.

The first piece you see after you exit the exhibition is Warhol’s colorful Ethel Scull 36 Times, 1963; jointly owned by the Met and the Whitney museum, it points to where things are going. With its upcoming annexation of the Whitney’s Breuer Building (when that museum moves to its new downtown Renzo Piano digs), the Met is taking on a period of art—the art of today—that is generally regarded as the territory of other institutions, like the Whitney and MoMA/PS1. This show indicates an insouciance toward stepping on toes. “Regarding Warhol” doesn’t pretend to be smart, tight or linear: lacking a conventional through line, it gives us a scattershot accumulation of familiar names and big-ticket artworks. A show like this one shakes things up, both intentionally and unintentionally: it reveals our own assumptions about familiar art-historical and institutional party lines and demands that we come to our own conclusions about the mess of influences, accidents and critical elisions that make up contemporary art. Museums like the Louvre—with its recent successful collaborations with William Kentridge and Cy Twombly—might provide a better model, but whatever happens next, the genie is out of the bottle.

Downtown, at Artists Space, “Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years,” is a better, if more modest, demonstration of Warhol’s resonance in the contemporary art world. Here is the story of an art collective told through 19 low-budget flow charts of the sort that might narrate the history of women’s suffrage in a high school hallway (it’s an artwork: Bernadette Corp 1993-2011, 2012). The timeline’s text reads as though written on Adderall. Mass-produced tchotchkes like mugs and scarves are displayed in vitrines. All this was produced and curated by the three artists who make up the collective called the Bernadette Corporation, and whether or not you enjoy the effect will depend largely on whether you see their project as an obscure and brilliant reflection on the constructed nature of fame, or find these people silly, willfully hermetic and mind-bogglingly self-important.

The show opens in the 1990s, in a setting you may remember—the East Village bar Flamingo East—populated by a cast of supporting characters you may recognize, like downtown starlet Chloë Sevigny and the artists Mariko Mori, Pruitt + Early, Rita Ackermann and Charles LaBelle. Two of the protagonists have improbable names (Bernadette Van-Huy, Antek Walczak), the third the more pedestrian sounding John Kelsey. From this crew springs a manifesto of sorts. The name Bernadette Corporation drifts into use, apparently as the title of a fashion line, documented in this show by a flat-screen monitor displaying the BC Fashion Images Digital Archive (2012), and a dozen mannequins sporting outfits made up of gold-leafed leather, big hoop earrings, repurposed Adidas sportswear, Gothic script initials acid-etched on fur pelts, and lots and lots of eye shadow. The mannequins wearing these recreated Purple Magazine-style ensembles give the show the feeling of being inhabited by spunky art students, even when it’s empty.

Things get weird in 2002, when the fashion line inexplicably morphs into Reena Spaulings, a Gossip Girl-meets-Semiotext(e) novel. Mr. Kelsey then adapts the name of that novel’s protagonist as the name of a commercial gallery, and, at Reena Spaulings Fine Art (which still very much exists, down on East Broadway), goes on to foster the careers of actual artists, including Seth Price and Josh Smith. “Everybody was Fucking Everybody,” the timeline helpfully informs. A period follows that seems to center on Berlin, where the group makes cheap movies (and possibly writes a screenplay called Eine Pinot Grigio, Bitte, although it’s not entirely clear), and around 2009 they reorient to New York to create an epic poem illustrated with what look like replicas of 1990s CK One fashion ads, and apparently written by the actor Jim Fletcher and the artist Jutta Koether, although, again, none of this is entirely clear.

Nor does it need to be. The last work in the show is magnificently displayed in a freestanding pavilion reminiscent of the jewelry display hut in the Isabel Marant boutique: inside, Media Hot & Cold (2010), 10 books consisting of the Amazon consumer reviews of works like Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus and the Koran are sold as publish-on-demand hardcovers (“total bullshit,” “this guy is a hack,” “Matt rated it ***” some of the text reads). And it is this kind of third-hand information and gossip that is the actual content of the Bernadette Corporation’s art.

In truth, the work on display in “2000 Wasted Years” is more in line with literature than visual art. “Real” galleries blur with fictional ones, “real” artists with characters in novels and people struggling to be taken as real artists. The Bernadette Corporation’s narrative exists on a historical spectrum with Lost Illusions, Balzac’s novel of callow youth and urban artistic ambition, Michèle Bernstein’s All the King’s Horses and Jacqueline Susann’s The Valley of the Dolls., with some Laurence Sterne and some grad-school theory thrown in. The implications are reminiscent of the philosopher David Lewis’s 1978 essay on the difference between the falseness of the claims “Nixon wears a silk top hat” and “Sherlock Holmes wears a silk top hat.” Seen through this lens, the show is equal parts smart, funny and pathetic.

It is also symptomatic: right now, in Chelsea, you can visit Thomas Hirschhorn’s pictorial-career-chronology-as-artwork at the Dia Foundation and Mark Flood’s video satirizing an art-world reality show, at Zach Feuer gallery, and both become fodder for the Facebook timelines of wandering gallery-goers. This is the most striking way in which the Bernadette Corporation takes a page from Warhol’s playbook: they instigate new ways in which we might think about the manufacture of fame, and fame’s afterlife. In the case of both the Bernadette Corporation exhibition and the Met’s big group show, the real Warholian gesture is in the curating, which in both instances reads as self-promotion. Sadly, both endeavors lack what may be Andy’s most lasting legacy in both art and life—his pitch-perfect cool irony—and maybe, unlike everything else he did, that really is inimitable.

editorial@observer.com

Bernadette Corporation, "only she could be other," 2011. (Courtesy the artist and Greene Naftali)

Soho alternative gallery Artists Space today released some details about its planned fall retrospective of the work of the collective Bernadette Corporation, and it sounds like it is going to be a wonderfully heady affair. For one thing, the show carries the title "Bernadette Corporation: 2000 Wasted Years."The news release has more details offer:

Structured by a display architecture common to flagship stores, museum dioramas, and other immersive viewing environments, this exhibition will recast the works authored by Bernadette Corporation since their inception in the early ‘90s.

This is the group's first-ever retrospective, and it spans from its "origins…in the organization of parties in downtown New York" through to its recent shows—"A Haven for the Soul" at Galerie Neu in Berlin in 2010 and "Stone Soup" at Galerie Meyer Kainer in Vienna in 2011, the latter of which "distilled the communicative capacity of images to a murmur, with its straight-faced promotional campaign of nudity, jewelry and potatoes."

Artists Space's curator, Richard Birkett, and its executive director and curator, Stefan Kalmár, are handling curatorial duties. Mark your calendars: the show runs Sept. 9 through Nov. 18. While you're waiting, why not take an hour-long break from work and watch the group's 2003 look at radical political activism, Get Rid of Yourself? As the release explains, it "opted for seductive contagion by circulating modes of protest along with scripted passages featuring downtown actress and fashion icon Chloe Sevigny."

Discussion: Whitney Biennial Curators in Conversation with Michelle Kuo at Artists Space Books & Talks
The Whitney Biennial is just about over—the final festivities occur on Sunday, June 10, the same day that the last of its galleries close for de-installation. The biennial's co-curators, Jay Sanders and Elisabeth Sussman, and its film program co-curators, Thomas Beard and Ed Halter, will join Artforum's editor in chief, Michelle Kuo, to discuss the exhibition and the critical response it received. This is first come, first served, so it may be wise to arrive a bit early.
Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, 7 p.m., $5 donation

WEDNESDAY, JUNE 6

Party: The Whitney Art Party
The Whitney's annual Art Party is set to pop this year, with a swanky venue in Soho, music by Japanster and a collaboration between Kreemart and Kalup Linzy that is sure to be bonkers. —Dan Duray
Skylight Soho, 275 Hudson Street at Spring Street, New York, 9 p.m.–1 a.m., $350

THURSDAY

Opening: “Andrepolis,” at The Hole
This week, the Hole presents “Andrepolis,” an “all encompassing representation of the art culture” at the center of which is Andre Saraiva, street artist and nightclub impresario and owner of the global nightclub Le Baron. If it’s anything like his exhibition earlier this year, at Half Gallery, you can expect a scene as packed and attitudy as you’d see at any of his clubs. —Rozalia Jovanovic
The Hole, 312 Bowery, New York, 6-9 p.m.

Opening: “Young Curators, New Ideas IV,” at Meulensteen
For the fourth, and most ambitious, installment of “Young Curators, New Ideas,” 12 curators present work from 29 artists across 7,000 square feet of space on two floors. This group exhibition, organized by Mr. and Mrs. Amani Olu—Mr. Olu, you’ll recall recently departed from Nadine Johnson to start a gallery—will kick off with music by Derrick Adams and DJ Impostor. The “Young Curators, New Ideas” is an annual show that aims to re-imagine established mediums, materials and concepts, and investigate how contemporary issues are resolved (or not) in an art context. —R.J.
511 West 22nd Street, New York, 6–9 p.m.

FRIDAY, JUNE 8

Extended Hours: "Summer Night" at the Frick
This sounds pretty much like heaven on Earth: free admission to the Frick on a Friday night for a full three hours after it typically closes. Stroll through the museum's shows devoted to Renaissance sculptor Antico and Saxon jeweler Johann Christian Neuber, and see how the museum's new portico gallery fares as the sun sets on the Upper East Side. Alex Katz once quipped, "If we only wanted to look at masterpieces, we'd spend all our time at the Frick." This can be your masterpiece night.
The Frick Collection, 1 East 70th Street, New York, 6–9 p.m.

Book Launch: Joy Drury Cox, The Old Man and Sea, at Dashwood Books
The artist Joy Drury Cox holds a book signing and release party for her new project The Old Man and the Sea at Dashwood Books. The book creates original drawings from the periods in an old copy of the book and was printed by the very hip Conveyor magazine. —D.D.
Dashwood Books, 33 Bond street, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Megan Whitmarsh "Revolution is a Circle" at Jack Hanley
Jack Hanley Gallery presents a solo show of work by Los Angeles-based artist Megan Whitmarsh, who uses hand-stitching and embroidery to create large fabric collages. The "revolution" of the title refers as much to the idea of rotation as it does to the other kind of revolution (i.e. the one that won't be televised...). —Michael H. Miller
Jack Hanley Gallery, 136 Watts Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 9

Talk: Fionn Meade on Joseph Beuys at the Dia Art Foundation
Fionn Meade, a writer and former curator at SculptureCenter (among other places), will discuss the work of Joseph Beuys. But really: what better way to spend a Saturday afternoon then upstate at Dia's Beacon location? --M.H.M
Dia: Beacon, 3 Beekman Street, Beacon, 2 p.m., free with museum admission, RSVP here

Screening: Iwan Schumacher, "Urs Fischer," at New Museum
Iwan Schumacher's documentary, Urs Fischer, makes its U.S. premiere at the New Museum, presented by Gavin Brown's Enterprise and the Swiss Institute. --Michael H. Miller
New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, doors at 6:30 p.m., screening 7 p.m. RSVP to rsvp@swissinstitute.net.

Talk: Georgia Sagri and Stephen Squibb at Artists Space Books & Talks
One of the really amazing and exciting things about the art world is that it is willing to tolerate and even celebrate (for better or worse) all sorts of unusual behavior from artists. To wit, a little more than six months after she was involved in an occupation of Artists Space, artist Georgia Sagri is back with the institution, speaking at its new Tribeca Books & Talks location. She'll be speaking with Stephen Squibb about "Working the No Work," an idea tied to her supremely and wonderfully peculiarWhitney Biennial installation/performances. —Andrew Russeth
Artists Space Books & Talks, 55 Walker Street, New York, 7 p.m. 

THURSDAY, MAY 31

Opening: Lawrence Schiller, "Marilyn & Me," at Steven Kasher
Lawrence Schiller, Norman Mailer's collaborator on The Executioner's Song, will have his first solo exhibition in the U.S., showing his photographs of Marilyn Monroe.  The exhibition, "Marilyn & Me," coincides with Mr. Schiller's book of the same name. --M.H.M.
Steven Kasher Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, New York, 6:00 p.m.

Opening: "Carl Andre/John Wesley: Serial Forms" at Mitchell-Innes & Nash
Here's a great idea. Take work by one of postwar art's wittiest painters and combine it with pieces by one of its most austere, innovative sculptors. The focus here is on their use of serial forms. This seems likely to be a soothing, refreshing combination, a crisp, clean counterpoint to the messy summer group shows that will soon be hitting the city's galleries. —A.R.
Mitchell-Innes & Nash, 534 West 26th Street, New York, 10 a.m.–6 p.m.

Gala: Madison Square Park Conservancy Honors Martin Friedman at Prince George Ballroom
The organizers of the Madison Square Park art program toast the newly created Martin Friedman Curator position with a gala at the Prince George Ballroom honoring the man himself. Philip Glass, Frank Gehry, David Hockney, Cindy Sherman, Charles Long, Leo Villareal, Agnes Gund and Adam Weinberg are to attend. —Dan Duray
The Prince George Ballroom, 15 East 27th Street, New York 6:30 p.m.–8:30 p.m., tickets only

FRIDAY, JUNE 1

Talk: TEDxChelsea
We once heard TED Conference founder Richard Saul Wurman describing his conference as a really great dinner party. Conversation breaks between the inspiring short talks are really important. Like it’s predecessor, this local spinoff event, TEDxChelsea, will present a day-long series of thought-provoking short lectures, this time around on the subject of art. As the lecturers include artists Jennifer Dalton and Eric Doeringer, art advisor Candace Worth, former Whitney Museum director David A. Ross and Pace Gallery public relations maven Sarah Goulet, it promises to be interesting. But don’t just come for the ideas, open yourself up to the “full program,” which means communicating with fellow “TEDsters.” It’s okay to let down your guard, even in New York. You’ve all been accepted. —Rozalia Jovanovic
School of Visual Arts, 335 West 16th Street, New York, 12-6:30 p.m.

Opening: "Everyday Abstract - Abstract Everyday" at James Cohan Gallery
White Columns director Matthew Higgs curates this show, a proposal for the 6th Berlin Biennale. Oh shoot, why not just run the whole artist list? Walead Beshty, Alexandra Bircken, Sarah Braman, Wolfgang Breuer, Tom Burr, Ernst Caramelle, Andy Coolquitt, Paul Cowan, N. Dash, Tony Feher, Michel François, Joe Fyfe, Kim Gordon, David Hammons, Richard Hawkins, Ann Cathrin November Høibo, Bill Jenkins, Sergej Jensen, Udomsak Krisanamis, Jason Loebs, Agnes Lux, David Moreno, Virginia Overton, Manfred Pernice, Judith Scott, Nancy Shaver, Gedi Sibony, Michael E. Smith, Josh Smith, Shinique Smith, Al Taylor, Bill Walton, Andy Warhol, Hannah Wilke, Philadelphia Wireman, B. Wurtz, Amy Yao. — Dan Duray
James Cohan Gallery, 533 West 26 Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

SATURDAY, JUNE 2

Fair: Bushwick Basel at Starr Space
Artist Jules de Balincourt may hate art fairs, but that hasn’t stopped him from putting on his own. Mr. de Balincourt hosts 11 of Bushwick’s leading galleries including Storefront Bushwick, Norte Maar and Regina Rex (which is actually in Ridgewood, Queens) for an art fair that’s “kind of a parody, kind of not.” On the one hand, it’s a scrappy riff on Art Basel, Frieze, NADA and their ilk. On the other, it will be carefully curated, takes itself somewhat seriously and will offer art for sale. If trolling hundreds of art studios during Bushwick Open Studios is too overwhelming for you, Mr. de Balincourt gives you a one-shot deal. The brave ones can venture beyond. —R.J.
Starr Space, 108-110 Starr Street, Brooklyn, 12–7 p.m.

DJ Princess Julia. (Courtesy Artists Space)

Soho stalwart Artists Space, which just opened its new Books & Talks space in Tribeca, is, in a sense, expanding again—albeit only temporarily—during the week of Frieze New York. From May 3 to May 6, the institution, directed by Stefan Kalmár, will host club nights, titled "NEIN POP," at subMercer, at 147 ½ Mercer Street, near Prince Street in Soho.

Each of those nights, DJ Princess Julia will spin, joined by guest DJs like White Columns director Matthew Higgs, artist Cheyney Thompson, No Bra, Jon Santos (who also helped organize the affair) and the pleasantly omnipresent Venus X. Queue-cutting wristbands are going for $10 a night ($20 if you want one for all nights) and a table for five, with a bottle of Kanon Organic Vodka, is going for $200.

The London Evening Standard has this to say about DJ Princess Julia:

One of the first-ever female DJs, she came to notice as a Blitz kid in the early Eighties, along with Marc Almond and Boy George. She was a resident DJ at the legendary Kinky Gerlinky nightclub and appeared in Visage's 1981 Fade to Grey video.

All of the proceeds from the events will support Artist Space. Wristbands and tables are available now.

An installation view of Artists Space's Charlotte Posenenske show. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

The SoHo alternative gallery Artists Space is marking its 40th anniversary this year, and today announced a bevy of activities that it has planned for the rest of 2012. Perhaps most exciting: its second location, in TriBeCa, Artists Space: Books & Talks, which we wrote about back in February, will open on March 31.

But there are other projects on the horizon! The artist Stephen Prina (who is showing at Petzel right now, and who had a one-night barn-burner of a collaboration there with Wade Guyton during Armory Week) is going to create a special concert to mark the anniversary, "bringing together some of the key protagonists from the past 40 years of Artists Space."

Also, the gallery will honor Alan Vega, one of the founders of the storied New York electronic band Suicide in the late 1970s, at its Friends of Artists Space dinner in May. Mr. Vega was a member of the downtown art world at the time the institution was founded, and created work for an issue of Art-Rite, the journal that Edit deAk (an assistant director at Artists Space) and Walter Robinson, produced at the the time. (A video that Ms. deAk, Mr. Robinson and Paul Dougherty made to accompany Suicide's "Frankie Teardrop" song in 1978 is on view at MoMA right now.)

One final bit of news: May 3-6, during Frieze New York, Artists Space will take over the SubMercer club in SoHo with DJs and midnight performance by artists like Emily Sundblad and Karl Holmqvist.

Next up at its SoHo exhibition space is "Radical Localism: Art, Video and Culture from Pueblo Nuevo’s Mexicali Rose," curated by Marco Vera and Chris Kraus.