But when the same German tenor is rendered in oil, style and subject are decoupled, and what might pass for elegance with less effort is revealed instead as a thin romanticism. The oppressively slick white space that burns through most of the paintings, achieving balance with the image only in one or two watercolors—especially Klara (December 2012), which tames the blankness by giving it almost half the composition and then corralling it with a few strokes as the subject’s flashing hair—is now skin, wall, brown hair, green shirt and blue jacket, with outlines serving to indicate color. Everything points to the face, as if expression were not supported and produced, but only located, by the material details that surround it. It becomes less the momentary but timeless emotional experience that forms our only incontestable reality and more like the punch line of a joke. But the thing about a joke is that it’s the very opposite of a strategic ambiguity—it either works or it doesn’t. (Through May 13, 2013)

Nick Relph, 'The Weather,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

There are young to mid-career artists today who jump nimbly across mediums and delight in the rich phenomenological possibilities of found objects and images. They tend not to work in a recognizable style, but instead create artworks that are united by sensibility—sly, mysterious, ironic, poetic. Think of Ryan Gander, Darren Bader, Adriana Lara and English artist and filmmaker Nick Relph, who is currently having his second solo show at GBE.

One room of the gallery houses The Weather (all works 2013), three sets of automobile tires—two Ford, one BMW—arrayed in rows, as if the vehicles they supported had suddenly vanished into some sort of ether. Or are they somehow hidden in plain sight? It’s unsettling to walk through each rectangular set—you half expect to smack into a chassis. Manufacturers’ markings remain on the tires—bits of text and colored stripes that recall Fred Sandback’s string sculptures, which similarly use minimal means to create the illusion of immensity.

The walls of the next room are covered in the kind of white mesh netting found on construction sites, and a set of stanchions in the center of the gallery are connected with white bands made of silk and soy. This sense that the show is still in development is underscored by the fact that numerous works are titled TBD—to be determined. In one film projected on that netting, silhouettes of birds flutter on branches; another film takes the form of a slide show of simple but handsome collages—images of textures and various people (many fashion types) cut and pasted together or laid one on top of another (think Schwitters or Villeglé at their sparest) and then scanned into a computer. It’s accompanied by the sound of birds chirping.

Temporary walls in the space are coated with wallpaper showing book pages, two with various images of the moon. These pages, some stamped by the New York Public Library, come from digitized images made for Google Books, and the stray lines and washed-out sections that result from the scanning process look like painterly marks—1960s Martin Barrés made by accident and by computer.

In the slide show of collages and the wallpaper, Mr. Relph plumbs the spaces and overlaps between the handmade and the digital. (Are those slides collages or photos of collages, or both?). The tire pieces—which became instantly iconic when A-Rod showed one at his house in Miami last month—are similarly concerned with the gap between what we see and what we expect to feel, a particularly contemporary mind-body problem as everyday life careens toward the virtual. It’s not immediately clear what all of this adds up to, but you’re left with an intriguing frustration, a rare and pleasant bewilderment well-suited to the present moment. (Through Feb. 23, 2013)

Detail view of a 2012 diorama by Bjarne Melgaard. (Courtesy the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan)

THE UPPER EAST SIDE ART SCENE sure is getting wild. Long the preserve of the staid and genteel (old masters, modern masters and the like), the neighborhood has recently been seeing more adventurous fare. Three gallery shows that exemplify the trend—and a fourth farther uptown—are of work by artists who share elements of the same profile: the bad-boy avant-gardist with machismo to spare, rebelling against aesthetic conventions, social norms or both.

If it were still in any way possible for artists to offend civilized society, the prolific 45-year-old Norwegian Bjarne Melgaard would be the man for the job. He has filled Luxembourg & Dayan’s tony townhouse with installations based loosely on his just-published book, A New Novel (H. Aschehoug, $35), a trippy narrative that follows an unflagging artist (“B”) through gay clubs, prostitution and the art world (which he especially detests), along the way documenting his insatiable appetite for drugs, steroid-enhanced muscles and sex, often of the sadomasochistic variety. Its centerpiece is a sex murder in Belgium that may or may not have occurred.

An entire floor is taken up by large dioramas populated by sinister-looking dolls (one of a man with chiseled musculature resembles Mr. Melgaard). In one, they’re lounging on a sofa in a room strewn with packaging for human growth hormone (used for bodybuilding and to combat AIDS wasting) and sex toys. In another, they’re in a dark dungeon, with one man on a kind of sex swing. A TV monitor displays a stop-motion film that lends a narrative to the latter diorama, and has what may be the most graphic content this writer has ever experienced in an art gallery.

Installation view of the third floor of Melgaard's show at Luxembourg & Dayan. (Courtesy Luxembourg & Dayan)

What prevents all of this from growing shocking-for-the-sake-of-it wearisome is that Mr. Melgaard has an exacting eye, a self-effacing side (the novel’s protagonist is oddly likable: he has a conscience and is looking for love just like the rest of us) and an absurdist sense of humor. A superb painter, he has toiled with a team of assistants to lovingly create terrifying (but also cartoonish) rooms with as much detail as those in Carrie Stettheimer’s prewar dollhouse at the Museum of the City of New York.

Mr. Melgaard has painted the walls of one room a violent orange and hung on them 13 paintings in his trademark high-pitch palette. They show what appear to be disfigured faces melded with rupturing organs, and they’re attached to the wall with hinges. Swing them open to reveal scrawled texts in the same paranoid tone as his novel: there are dark stories lurking behind every image in his restless world.

In his book Mr. Melgaard writes, “Contemporary art is about telling people they are inadequate.” He may be joking—typically, with him, it’s impossible to tell.

Jack Goldstein, 'Untitled (Painting #43),' 1981. (Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

A BLOCK AWAY AT THE VENUS OVER MANHATTAN GALLERY, run by Observer columnist Adam Lindemann, there are 10 haunting photorealistic paintings that are as chilly and deadpan as Mr. Melgaard’s art is violent and sybaritic. Depicting bursts of colorful lightning or hulking World War II planes against starless skies, they are the work of the late Jack Goldstein, an original member of the the Pictures Generation who lost his place in front in the mid-1980s, suffered from drug addiction and killed himself in 2003. Today he’s obscure compared with the group’s stars, like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine.

The show, which serves as a tasty aperitif to the touring Goldstein retrospective that will hit the Jewish Museum in May, borrows its title from a painting by Rirkrit Tiravanija—“Where is Jack Goldstein?”—and seems primarily concerned with burnishing Goldstein’s myth as a romantic recluse. Patsy Cline songs play on a loop in the darkened gallery—he liked listening to country in his studio—and the paintings are dramatically spotlit.

Goldstein made most of these paintings in the ‘80s, a time when he was ceasing to make what had become his trademark artworks—short, looping films like the sublime 1975 Shane, depicting a German shepherd barking, which is on view in a side gallery. These paintings were crafted almost exclusively by assistants; the careful touch of artist Ashley Bickerton, as well as a group of Puerto Rican custom auto-body painters, assured their mind-blowingly pristine, flat finish. They are liable to overshadow just about anything hanging beside them.

Richard Prince, 'The Soft Parade,' 1994. (Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt)

UP ON 79TH STREET, Skarstedt is showing 10 large paintings by Richard Prince, a Goldstein contemporary whose early work fits the Pictures mold. Mr. Prince recently published a bizarre, though sort of funny, rant on his blog about me, apparently responding to something I wrote two years ago about how he's been running on empty his sexy “Nurse” paintings of the early 2000s. Though his recent rubber band pieces and copyright-tweaking antics have been fun, it's still true.

Thankfully, the series at Skarstedt, “The White Paintings,” dates from around the first half of the 1990s. The works are appealing confections that combine tasteless jokes (these came after his first joke paintings) and silk screens of cartoons (and other images) into hazy collages. The jokes are predictably middlebrow numbers on gender, religion and modern life. Intermixing them with the visuals—drawings of well-appointed apartments and martini glasses, a photo of a woman who appears to be a stripper—produces an easy upper-management charm in place of the undisguised condescension Mr. Prince usually employs when mining certain cultural forms. This is not redeeming art, but it is perfectly pitched to the indulgences of its target class, and is as satisfying, albeit unsavory, as a night spent dropping good money around town.

Installation view of 'Joe Bradley & Dan Colen: Epiphany' at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Lenox Avenue. (Courtesy the artists and Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

STILL FARTHER UPTOWN, at Gavin Brown’s Harlem outpost, is bro art (as an artist friend terms the work made by Mr. Prince and his progeny) from a younger set. There are just two works, one by Dan Colen and the other by Joe Bradley, and they are both huge—a key characteristic of the bro genre. The show is titled “Epiphany.” Mr. Bradley has painted a huge canvas with the word “jazz” in big white jazzy letters on a black background. Those already converted to his bracingly simplistic painting will swoon; skeptics will remain skeptical. In this case, when he’s clearly relishing a great time—a “jazz” painting in Harlem!—Mr. Bradley’s charisma is irresistible.

Mr. Colen presents a massive jumble of metal, roughly 10 feet tall, made of barbed wire, a fence, a gate and more. There is a basketball hoop in there too, as well as a large plastic Bart Simpson figure, a shredded T-shirt (“You’re not the boss of me,” it reads), a microwave and a garden hose. It looks like the remains of a neighborhood pummeled by Sandy, and you half expect to spot a body amid the tangle. But then you hear the birds chirping, live yellow ones that are part of the piece and feast on scattered feed, and it becomes a kind of sacred, if uncomfortably literal, shrine.

arusseth@observer.com

There's Christian Marclay's ingenious masterpiece, of course, a spliced-together tribute to the melancholic feeling of time and life passing, but there are other clocks that are coming undone or falling out of sync, like Anri Sala's tall, outdoor timepiece at Documenta 13 that was warped out of shape but actually worked, or Alicja Kwade's clock, high on a wall at SculptureCenter, that is behaving strangely, its body spinning eerily in place.

And then are Laura Owens's "Clock" paintings. They're breezy, bright abstractions, some outfitted with actual clocks, like colorful, joyful, semi-utilitarian versions of Gerhard von Graevenitz paintings. Karma has collected them all in a single volume, and it easily ranks as one of the most beautiful art books I have seen in quite a while. Every painting gets a full page—the recto on one side, the verso on the other, which allows one to flip through them easily, one by one. It's so intimate an experience—one is almost grasping the paintings—that you may begin to feel a subtle sense of ownership over them. Alas, they're out there in the world, and a bit larger than their reproductions here. (The book is an edition of 1,000.)

Often the clock hands—one, two or three of them—are disguised as painterly marks, and since they're frozen in the book, one can identify them only by turning the page and finding the battery pack that makes them hum. Some are graced with effervescently colored grids or clouds of color or thin brushstrokes that have actually been embroidered with stitching. (All of these, as you can imagine, look remarkable when seen from behind.) There are clock numbers, but almost never in the correct spots, next to the actual clock hands. Time is marching along, to be sure, but Ms. Owens's works don't much seem to care.

Kerstin Brätsch for Das Institut & United Brothers, 'sunshields for Iwaki Odori' 2012. Photo-shoot with United Brothers and Das Institut in Fukushima, Japan, 2012. (Courtesy the artists)

So carved in stone are New York’s gallery hours—10 a.m. to 6 p.m.—that one gallery actually named itself after them. Casey Kaplan 10–6 is now simply Casey Kaplan, but for the most part those hours have persisted, with some exceptions, like those Lower East Siders who can’t bother to arrive before noon. These days, however, there are so many shows around town that it’s become difficult for gallery-goers to fit them all in during business hours. Mercifully, some have blasted through the iron walls of 10 to 6, and a few have gone so far beyond them that one could take a 24-hour tour of the city’s art scene. Let’s do it.

Start late. Through Oct. 14, the Lower East Side’s Miguel Abreu Gallery (36 Orchard Street) is open Wednesday through Sunday, from dusk until midnight, for its first show with German artist Rey Akdogan. It’s titled “Night Curtain” and includes abstract slide projections and light works—ideal for viewing in darkness.

After a long visit there, head over to one of the classics of the late-night movement, the Dream House of La Monte Young and Marian Zazeela, on the third floor of 275 Church Street. It’s just reopened for its 20th season after a summer hiatus, and it offers pumping, mind-cleansing drones in a pink-purple room Thursday through Saturday, also until midnight.

After a while up there, it might be time for a drink. Go for it! The Home Alone Gallery is not going anywhere. Located just a few blocks away at 54 Franklin Street, the space, which was started by artists Nate Lowman, Hanna Liden and Leo Fitzpatrick a few months back, never closes. (Granted, it’s just a window at street level.) Through Oct. 7 it has a show by British artist Sarah Lucas—a chair (with some unusual accoutrements) hung from the ceiling and a photograph of a toilet.

That modest display will keep you for only so long—you’d be forgiven for going home to bed. (The adventurous can scope public art in the city’s privately owned public spaces, a few of which are open 24 hours a day, or city parks, which close at 1 a.m.) But wake up early: starting Oct. 2, one can visit Gavin Brown’s Enterprise (620 Greenwich Street) beginning at sunrise—6:53 a.m. that day. Tuesday through Saturday, GBE is staying open from sunrise to sunset for “Maler, den Pinsel prüfend,” a solo show of German artist Kerstin Brätsch with new glass works, lit only by natural light.

The reception for Ms. Brätsch’s show is Saturday, Sept. 29, from 5 to 8 p.m., and will include an outdoor performance by Das Institut, which she cofounded, and the United Brothers duo at around 6 p.m., as the sun nears the horizon. The hours of the exhibition will grow shorter with the days. When the show closes on Oct. 27, the gallery will shutter at 5:59 p.m.—just about back to regular hours.

Opening: Hannah Weinberger, "Le Moi Du Toi," at Swiss Institute
Basel–based artist Hannah Weinberger's first show in the United States promises to be a supremely minimal affair, at least visually: just white curtains along the walls and multidirectional speakers spread throughout the space. Aurally, though, the gallery will be filled: those speakers will play electronic loops composed by Ms. Weinberger that viewers can navigate on their visits. "There is no beginning or end to the permutations that the exhibition incites," the SI's release states. Should be interesting to see how the opening goes with all of that sound playing. —Andrew Russeth
Swiss Institute, 18 Wooster Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: David Armstrong, "Night and Day," at Half Gallery
Half Gallery displays Kodachrome pictures by David Armstrong documenting life on the Lower East Side, ahead of a new book by the photographer. Expect cameos by René Ricard, Philip-Lorca diCorcia, Jean-Michel Basquiat and John Waters. For the opening, do not expect elbow room. —Dan Duary
Half Gallery, 208 Forsyth Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Screening: "An Evening with Cinema 16" at the Kitchen
Curator Molly Surno pairs five short films by the likes of Standish Lawder, Sabrina Ratte, Viking Eggeling and Len Lye with a newly commissioned score by Matteah Baim. —Michael H. Miller
The Kitchen, 512 West 19th Street, New York, 7 p.m., $12

WEDNESADAY, JUNE 27

Opening: Caro Niederer, "Paintings," at Hauser & Wirth
The Swiss artist brings 18 of her paintings to the Upper East Side with this, the first paintings-only show for the multidisciplinary artist. Ms. Niederer has been with the gallery since she was 22. At the time, gallery co-founder Iwan Wirth was 16, so rest assured this exhibition will be authoritative. —D.D.
Hauser & Wirth, 32 East 69 Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

THURSDAY, JUNE 28

Opening: "Creative Growth" at Uffner
Amie Scally, deputy director and curator at White Columns, helms this show of  10 artists associated with the Creative Growth Art Center in Oakland, Calif., a nonprofit space that offers adults with various disabilities studio and gallery space. Among the artists are the late Judith Scott (who makes sculptures that are often wrapped with voluminous amounts of twine and who has work on view in the Matthew Higgs–curated show at James Cohan) and Aurie Ramirez (whose figurative drawings have a hint of William Copley's rich color, idiosyncratic line and sinister charisma). —A.R.
Rachel Uffner Gallery, 47 Orchard Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Ella Kruglyanskaya, “Woman! Painting! Woman!” at GBE
The sassy women in Ella Kruglyanskaya’s bright and splashy paintings seem to have taken tips from the films of Quentin Tarantino—they’re brainy, they do yoga, they tote guns and they have cat fights. When they go to the beach, watch out. These dauntless babes sport bathing suits that bear images of human mouths uncomfortably close to their crotches. Those with castration anxiety, be warned. —Rozalia Jovanovic
Gavin Brown's Enterprise, 620 Greenwich Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Opening: Group show, “Friends with Benefits,” at Lehmann Maupin
For its summer group show, Lehmann Maupin asked five of its artists—Tony Oursler, Angel Otero, Tim Rollins, Mickalene Thomas and Nari Ward—to pull together a group of artists whose work they wanted to encourage. The resultant exhibition, curated by Carla Camacho and Drew Moody, includes artists Derrick Adams, Scott Andresen, David Antonio Cruz, Nicole Awai, Matias Cuevas, Max Galyon, Wilfredo Ortega, Linda Post, and Sebastien Vallejo. If only all fresh-faced artists could have such brilliantly behaved friends who are a little higher up on the food chain. This show will please without any hassling entanglements. —R.J.
Lehmann Maupin, 201 Chrystie Street, New York, 6–8 p.m.

Book Signing: Ryan McGinley at Spoonbill & Sugartown
Artist Ryan McGinley will be on hand at Williamsburg's Spoonbill & Sugartown bookstore to sign copies of his new book, Ryan McGinley: Whistle for the Wind, which is being released by Rizzoli. —M.H.M.
Spoonbill & Sugartown, 218 Bedford Avenue, Brooklyn, 7:30 p.m.

Installation view of "Elastic Tango" (2011) by Sturtevant. (Courtesy the artist and Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

LAST WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON, a slight woman with grey hair styled in a short, spiky, pixie-ish cut was sitting on a sofa at the West Village gallery Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, overseeing the installation of a three-part video piece she made that features short clips from television and the Internet, including flags waving, preachers preaching, Betty Boop singing, a frog jumping and a couple ballroom dancing. She is 82 years old and commanding. Her name is Elaine Sturtevant, but she prefers to be called Sturtevant. That’s what it says on the announcement card for her exhibition, which features a close-up of the face of an inflatable sex doll. Sturtevant.

When Sturtevant tells you to write something down, you write it down. “You should write that down!” she said to us. Here is what we wrote down: “It’s trying to give power to words and to articulate visibilities.” She was talking about the video installation, called Elastic Tango. “I decided that taking video and producing that into a theater piece only by visuals would create a very dynamic piece of art,” she said. “There are three acts; it’s very classical.”

It’s strange listening to someone talking about words when you’re writing. “So you take words and you make them thought,” Sturtevant continued. “My show at the Museum of Modern Art in Paris did that extremely well, so that the visuals carried all the weight, and they articulated the thinking.” Sturtevant lives in Paris. Things are going well for her in Europe. She currently has a retrospective at the Moderna Museet in Stockholm; it’s the latest in a number of major European museum exhibitions she has had over the past decade.

Sturtevant is a thief, and a very wily one. Ask people about her, and this is what you’re likely to hear: an interviewer once demanded Warhol reveal how he made his silk-screened paintings. “I don’t know,” he deadpanned. “Ask Elaine.” He wasn’t joking. Sturtevant made Warhol flower paintings shortly after he did, in 1964, using screens that he willingly supplied. She did his Marilyns soon after. She went on to repeat pieces by Duchamp, Lichtenstein, Oldenburg, Beuys, Stella.

Recently, one of Sturtevant’s early films, a 1972 work called Warhol’s Empire State, has been screening nightly on the High Line. It’s a refilming of Warhol’s eight-hour film Empire, a static shot of the Empire State Building. You watch the Sturtevant film on an outdoor screen, so that if you move a bit you see the actual Empire State Building. Watching Sturtevant’s film, High Line curator Cecilia Alemani wrote over e-mail, is “like being lost in a hall of mirrors, in a continuous play of refractions between different time zones and different levels of reality and fiction.”

STURTEVANT IS A HALL of mirrors. She remains little known in New York, where she lived and worked for years. She hasn’t had a full American retrospective in nearly three decades, even though she is a clear, if peculiar, forebear—by decades—to the so-called appropriation art that has been the subject of a great deal of courtroom drama lately. “She’s as much a mystic and as mysterious a character as you’d want to find in the art world,” said James Harithas, who organized her 1973 retrospective at the Everson Museum of Art in Syracuse, N.Y. “I don’t know any details of her life.”

Neither does this newspaper, despite our best efforts. During our interview she asked to go off-record when we asked such questions; usually, she simply declined to answer. Relatively recent attempts to interview her have been Dadaist exercises. In 2009, she appeared onstage at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis with curator Philippe Vergne and recreated an interview published in Frieze magazine in 2004, when she was in her mid-70s. “What film has most influenced you?” Mr. Vergne asked. “Any film by Quentin Tarantino,” she replied nasally. “Because he is a concrete example of a vast, barren interior man—a big-time cyber jerk.” A few minutes later, he asked who was currently her favorite musician. “Notorious Big.” She used the word “big,” instead of the rapper’s acronym, and drew it out to a whine.

Here is how critic Nancy Princenthal put it in Art in America magazine seven years ago: “[S]he is nothing if not scrupulous about deflecting personal scrutiny, having long since turned herself into a more or less ageless, stateless androgyne.” This much is on the record: she was born in Ohio in 1930, got her B.A. at the University of Iowa and moved, in the 1950s, to New York, where she earned an M.A. from Columbia. “I’m never going to tell you,” she replied in a whisper, when we asked her what she studied. Then she told us. Sort of. “Basically it was seeking out the base of language. … Seeking out the power of language,” she said.

“THERE ARE CERTAIN artists I call ‘the rumors,’” said Bill Arning, reached by phone at the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston, where he’s director. He mentioned the late post-Minimalist sculptor Bill Bollinger (whose comeback retrospective is at New York’s SculptureCenter right now), Japanese outsider Yayoi Kusama and the indefinable Lee Lozano—all of whom were once known only by a handful of artists and art historians, but who now are achieving various degrees of fame. “Sturtevant was one of the great rumor artists.”

In 1986, when Mr. Arning helped organize a Sturtevant show at the New York alternative space White Columns, she had just begun showing again after a break that began in 1974, a year after her Everson retrospective. (“I was writing, thinking, playing tennis and carrying on,” is how she described that hiatus to the critic Bruce Hainley in a 2003 interview.)

At the time, appropriation was in full bloom, with artists like Richard Prince and Sherrie Levine taking other artists’ works and making them their own. Mr. Prince rephotographed commercial imagery such as Marlborough ads, and Ms. Levine rephotographed iconic photographs by Walker Evans. “When the appropriationists came, it gave me negative definition, which is great because it gives you the ability to come in,” Sturtevant said at Gavin Brown.

She wasn’t copying the works—at root, a photographic process—but instead repeating them, mastering the actual techniques involved in their creation in order to make works that would look and feel as close as possible to the real thing. “She adopted style as her medium,” is how MoMA PS1 curator Peter Eleey explained it to us when we called him. “At least early on, most of her work looks like other people’s work, which makes it very challenging to describe and discuss.”

Pro-appropriation critics pulled out their Walter Benjamin texts and argued that the art signaled that originality itself was on the wane. Sturtevant has never bought that line. “There’s a difference between probing originality and saying it is the death of originality,” she has said, explaining the thrust of her work. “You’d have to be a mental retard to claim the death of originality.”

Sturtevant’s work was, in its way, original, and it terrified the art trade. “Commercial galleries really didn’t want to go near it because it was going to be threatening to all the things about scarcity and originality that they made their money on,” Mr. Arning said.

She showed steadily in the 1960s and ’70s, until her decade-long break, but it was never at the top galleries, even though she ran in the circle of Johns, Rauschenberg and others. When a Johns flag that was part of Short Circuit, a 1955 Rauschenberg combine, mysteriously went missing, Rauschenberg asked Sturtevant to produce a new one.

Though the era’s most powerful dealer was a fan, he never decided to represent her. The artist and collector Doug Davis once recorded story about when Leo Castelli, dealer to Rauschenberg, Johns and Roy Lichtenstein, came to his home and saw a Lichtenstein study he didn’t recall selling to Davis. “When I told him it was a Sturtevant, he gleamed with joy,” he wrote. “We spent the entire lunch talking about her.” In 1969, Castelli showed Richard Pettibone, who paints iconic Pop works (Warhol soup cans, Marilyns and Brillo boxes), often in miniature. Pettibones are illustrations of other works, not the result of actual repetitions. Sturtevant, on the other hand, “was doing Pop squared—taking these images that were already free-floating images and redoing them and thereby changing their authorship one more time,” as Mr. Arning said.

But she wasn’t only making waves with her repetitions. Being an outspoken woman likely didn’t help her cause. “She took the swings and barbs out there in the ’60s and early ’70s,” said Mr. Harithas. “The truth of the matter was that unless you were a white man, you didn’t get a break. Women didn’t get a break.”

The curator Sylvia Chivaratanond, who showed Sturtevant’s work at Perry Rubenstein Gallery in 2004 and 2005, concurred. “If you look at women artists of her caliber of her generation, they just weren’t being looked at,” she said.

But there she was, repeating the men, and in doing so opening herself up to all sorts of trouble. Mr. Harithas recalled Carl Andre screaming at her in a restaurant. “Her self-confidence was remarkable even though she didn’t have that much of a following at the time,” Bess Cutler, who showed her in New York in 1988, recalled in an e-mail. “She was very proud of her work and her ‘project.’ … And felt she deserved the very best, including a lavish dinner party after her opening.”

STURTEVANT HAS LONG had her supporters among artists and critics. “I think she is an artist equal to Jasper Johns or Rauschenberg,” the writer Bruce Hainley said. And now the art market is starting to catch up. A painting of a crying girl, one of her Lichtenstein repetitions, sold for $710,500 at Phillips de Pury & Co. in New York in November, far less than the $30 million a prime Lichtenstein original would fetch, but a record for Sturtevant at auction and more than twice the expected price. For her part, she recently signed with Gavin Brown, not exactly a traditional blue-chip dealer. “He’s bright, intelligent and tightly tied into our digital world of cybernetics,” is how she explains the relationship. “He also knows knowledge is not for understanding but for cutting. That’s impressive. Also, don’t forget he’s rather sexy. Voilà!”

Voilà. As for her current effort at his gallery, she wants Elastic Tango to “trigger thinking.” “One of the impetuses has always been to trigger thinking,” she said. “Even in the very beginning when I was doing painting that involved repetition, that was definitely to trigger thinking.”

“I’ve been tracking simulacra for a very long time,” she continued. “One of the higher powers of simulacra is that it’s always concealed. ... It’s falsity presented as truth. That is very dependent on our cybernetic, digital world. Working with that for years, simulacra is a very tough nut. It’s not something that you just say, ‘Oh yeah, simulacra, let’s take care of that.’” She continues to read philosophy, mostly Foucault and Deleuze. Foucault is greater in her estimation, but Deleuze is “more playful.” “I keep trying to find other extraordinary philosophers, but I think once you get into Foucault, forget it.”

Her ideas can be obtuse, but her works afford simple visual pleasure. You can see an iconic contemporary artwork afresh, with its brand name removed. Her latest New York show comes, Mr. Brown said, at a “moment when the object is so rarefied and fetishized.” (Think of that Munch that sold for $120 million last week.) Which is not to say that she spurns the market: she is said to demand sizable sums for her repetitions.

“Sturtevant is like seeing double, which means you see more and more intensively,” Ms. Alemani, the High Line curator said, “and that’s quite a beautiful feeling to have in front of artworks.”

A number of years ago, Sturtevant invited Mr. Arning to visit her on the French Riviera. “At noon, she would come out of her studio, lock the door and we would all go have a nice lunch,” he recalled. “I became sort of obsessed with the fact that she never left the door open. We did not know what she was working on in there. She had this sense of privacy: ‘I will show you things when they are exactly ready and not before.’”

Only a single U.S. museum owns a major work by her—a Frank Stella Sturtevant (a Sturtevant Frank Stella?) donated to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles by the pioneering collector Eugene M. Schwartz, who also owned the Stella that informed it. But that may soon change. “My goal is for the Art Institute of Chicago to be the first American art institution to buy a work of art by Sturtevant,” AIC curator James Rondeau told The Observer.

The museum already has one. Kind of. Last year, the AIC acquired Short Circuit, that Rauschenberg combine with the Sturtevant-produced Johns flag, from the artist’s estate, through the Gagosian Gallery; it’s a Sturtevant, with an asterisk. “It’s a Trojan horse twice,” Mr. Rondeau said, of Short Circuit. Rauschenberg once termed it a “double document,” he said. “First it smuggled Jasper, now it smuggles Sturtevant. And Sturtevant still needs to be smuggled.”

arusseth@observer.com

Frances Stark, "Osservate, leggete con me," 2012. Three-channel digital video for projection, black and white with sound, 29:34 minutes. (Photo by Thomas Mueller/Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

"Are we gonna go on video?" the artist Frances Stark asked us when we caught up with her on Skype a few weeks ago. She was back in Los Angeles—she teaches at the Roski School of Fine Arts at the University of Southern California there—after being in New York for the opening of “Osservate, leggete con me," her show at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise in the West Village that runs through April 21.

"I didn't know if that was the plan," we typed back. "Your call!"

"Well let's start out this way..."

For a while, Ms. Stark, 45, was using that video feature to have sex with strangers—“camsex," it's called. She met these men on the website Chatroulette. One of her students introduced her to it. “We were in school and he said, oh but watch out there's a lot of dicks,” she said.

There are a fair number of dicks! The site skews male and young. (Give it a try.) “I was so fascinated and wanted to just be a voyeur—not of the sex but of the random people in their banal rooms,” she said.

Ms. Stark, in other words, did not set out to have camsex. But, she said, “at a certain point, I don't even remember the turning point oddly enough / but it just became like, huh, why not...” [A note on style here: since we talked via Skype, spellings have been preserved and separate messages have been noted with slashes.]

The texts from conversations with two of her online counterparts served as the script for My Best Thing (2011), an animated film that she made using free online software. Her character wears a leaf bikini; her lovers, a leaf or white underwear. A computer voice reads the dialogue, which includes talk of sex, but mostly art and politics and life. It appeared at the Venice Biennale and is now at MoMA PS1.

Ms. Stark’s show at GBE, “Osservate, leggete con me,” is comparatively understated: two video installations made of nothing but text from those conversations and some rudimentary furniture. The videos resemble cards from silent films or a Lawrence Weiner video that has become gloriously unhinged, infected somehow with Internet vernacular and a dash of obscenity or Owen Land. The main piece is broken into nine conversations with different partners. “i was encouraged/inspired to go for the repetition after I saw  kanye & jay-z on the watch the throne tour and they played, for an encore, N***s in Paris 9 times in a row!!!!!!” Ms. Stark said.

The seating for that video—a white L-shaped sofa—owes something to Kanye West as well. Ms. Stark sent over a digital file, we clicked it open and there appeared in front of us an image of Mr. West’s pristine bedroom, all whites and light tans. Not an artwork in sight.

Kanye West's bedroom.

“HELLO????” she said. “does the man have an art consultant?” “Hahahahahahahaha,” we cried, and she continued, “So this was clearly an inspiration. / actually i already knew i wanted it to be sparse.”

But to the conversations! They are tiny short stories packaged into just a few lines, which flip by, one by one, on the gallery's walls. In one, Ms. Stark’s online partner teaches her a bit of Italian: “sei una bella figa”—“you are a beautiful pussy.” That sort of thing. The economic crisis comes up. “Yes heavy situation here / in all Europe / the people are tired from this policy / we don’t have a future.” Ms. Stark: “and its even worse for the Tunisians." The unnamed man agrees, and adds, “but maybe I’m annoying you / u want see my cock? / not very big / but very hard.” End scene. On to the next conversation. ("The repetition thing...," she said. "i was very excited about that part of it because I was thinking about how it's 'always the same but always different' (what john peel said about The Fall)...") They are gripping, funny and very often moving—and they interconnect with the short video in the next room, Nothing is enough (2012), and My Best Thing. There are surprises we won't reveal here.

Many of the men are sweet, almost docile, at times. “It's a really nice portrayl of straight men,” we offered. “yes I can make them sweet!” said Ms. Stark. She edits the conversations. It also probably helps that most of the chats take place “post-coital, so to speak.”

“no honestly,” she continued, “I don't think they act like this with everybody / it's because I'm especially patient and know something about anything they bring up / whereas some 20=-somthing hotty is probably not going to have much under her ‘sleeve.’"

So, as she hinted, there is a manipulative element, a sinister streak at work, as there is in most good works of art. She is attentive to some one of her online paramours, showering them with compliments. With others she is colder. It’s no mistake that the sumptuous “Catalogue Aria” from Mozart’s Don Gionvanni loops during that video. (The work's title comes from the aria also: "Observe, read along with me.") In the song, the Don’s book of lovers—640 in Italy, 231 in Germany, more than 1,000 in Spain, etc.—is revealed to one of the women he scorned. In contrast, Ms. Stark is, at least in part, turning herself in, putting herself on display. “which is of course not so nice for my bf,” she typed. “that I'm flaunting my promiscuity...”

One loses a sense of time on Skype, and after an hour of typing away, we were in a daze, which became hazier as the conversation went on. It felt nice. "this is my preferred form of existence!" Ms. Stark declared.

"It's really pleasurable, typing away like this," we admitted.

"see! / it's even more pleasurable having orgasms in between." She added later, "to me this is a moer enhanced realm of the epistolary. ...  I don't think I could've gotten this far with this whole thing if I didn't have physical confidence, if that makes sense. ... / it's also addicting having guys say you look 15 years younger than you are, and honestly / whenever I tried to stop / for a few days / I'd feel like I was changing...like it was a real youth serum!!!!!"

However, with the work complete, she no longer participates in camsex. Her teaching schedule and various other projects are keeping her busy—she's at work now on a sound piece that will play in the BMWs that provide rides to VIPs at the Frieze New York art fair. And so she's on Skype less nowadays, though she keeps in contact with some of the men she met. “I'm having some serious withdrawl symptoms,” she said.

One of the men she has kept in touch with provided a piano piece that accompanies Nothing is enough. “just the other day he asked me if we could do it!” she said. “hahahah I was shocked!

“oh wow,” we typed.

“he's having withdrawal symptoms of some sort too. / i said, ok let's see in an hour or so” ("The hour was sort of get him to calm down," she explained.)

“hahaha”

“and I just didn't feel up for it / it's a lot of work!"

A scene from the film.

Spencer Sweeney's loft and paintings serve as the home and works of Willem Dafoe's artist wife in the new apocalyptic Abel Ferrara movie 4:44 Last Day on Earth. This isn't news, per se, but it's an interesting little piece of trivia that J. Hoberman drops in his column over at Blouin Artinfo.

The movie concerns the end of the world and has received mixed reviews at this point. Here's a bonus video of Mr. Ferrara at Mr. Sweeney's studio ahead of his recent show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, "The Pharaoh's Lounge aka Party Paintings and Sauna aka The Life and Times of Spencer Sweeney."

A screen capture from VIP 1.0.

Let’s assume for a moment that Amazon.com is the best way to sell something to someone else online, the Platonic ideal of website retail. Imagine a version of Amazon.com that exists for just one week a year and requires you to have a little instant message conversation with a salesman as the first step to any transaction. If he likes you, or you’re known to him, he might take you to a “private room,” identical to any other inventory page, but where they keep the really good thriller novels. Fair warning! This version of Amazon.com has a reputation for being a little quirky technically as well. The chat function isn’t reliable, and the whole site once had to be taken offline for several hours, during that week of its existence.

This, in a nutshell, is the VIP Art Fair, a online endeavor that resembles no other online marketplace—and why should it? They’re selling works of art for up-to-seven figures, not thrillers—and whose very name seems antithetical to the professed egalitarianism of the Internet (though it stands for Viewing In Private). VIP was founded two years ago by New York dealer James Cohan, Internet entrepreneur Jonas Almgren, and their wives Jane Cohan and Allesandra Almgren, and earned many blue-chip supporters through its fidelity to the model of the art fair with private viewing rooms and constant on-hand gallery representatives. A debut fair last January that attracted top galleries like Gagosian, Pace and David Zwirner saw technical errors and frustration, and now, gearing up for its second edition this February, the site has embraced its technology side with a new staff and $1 million in angel funding from investors and collectors Selmo Nissenbaum, and Philip Keir.

The investment, Ms. Cohan said, represents a confidence in the company’s ability to change the way people buy art online, and in a marketplace that’s since seen new competitors like Art.sy and Paddle 8.

“There’s a journalist that I met who teaches at the Stamford MBA school who once told me that change rarely happens from within an industry, usually it comes from the outside,” Ms. Cohan told The Observer. “So he found us, as a case study, very unusual and very interesting. And I think what he’s saying is both true and untrue in terms of galleries and art fairs.”

Galleries often establish art fairs, Ms. Cohan said, pointing to David Zwirner’s father Rudolph Zwirner having started Art Cologne in 1968, Ernst Beyeler helping establish Art Basel in 1970, and Matthew Marks, Paul Morris and others banding together in the early ‘90s to start New York’s Gramercy International Art Fair in the Gramercy Hotel, which eventually became The Armory Show.

“This one obviously is pushing the boundaries,” she said of VIP, “and it’s a totally different delivery system for that art fair, but it’s the fundamental concepts of the fair we’re working with.”

The technical failings of VIP’s inaugural edition are infamous among a segment of the art world, but the main issue was the instant messaging system—one of the fair’s big selling points, since dealer-buyer interaction was touted as equivalent to that of a real-life encounter one might have at an art fair. Sometimes it didn’t work at all, sometimes it would cut out 30 minutes into a conversation. One dealer said a message intended for one client was sent to another. Eventually it was temporarily disabled, and dealer interaction went to the phones, email, or Skype—a route that dealers pursue on their own anyway.

The chat function was the source of all of the site's problems, said VIP’s vice president of engineering Severin Andrieu-Delille, who joined the company after the first fair and built a revamped site based on the model pioneered by the outside firm Supermetric for the 2011 edition. The chat system was overwhelmed by too many users--in a way, the fair was a victim of its own success, with advance marketing bringing in not just interested collectors, but many gawkers and others who’d somehow wrangled access on the first day--and poorly structured so that if it failed it took the entire site down with it. Mr. Andrieu-Delille has since broken out the chat program, using an open-source, already established chat function not tied to any other part of the system. Asked about the ceiling for how many users might use the new system at any given time — VIP has 50,000 prospective buyers this year, up from 40,000 last year—Mr. Andrieu-Delille said there was none.

“Each of the servers is built on its own auto-scaling server, based on load or demand,” Mr. Andrieu-Delille said. “It’s all built to scale and we’re set for very, very high traffic.”

Last year’s hiccups didn’t go over well with some participating galleries. A group of them rallied together for a partial refund, which they received. A number of prominent galleries that participated last year declined to sign on for a second round, among them L&M, Gladstone, Cheim & Read, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, Michael Werner, Sean Kelly and Metro Pictures. Most of those galleries declined to comment for this article, or cited other business obligations as their reason for not participating in VIP 2012. This was the case with Gavin Brown.

“We’ll definitely be watching,” said sales associate Hannah Hoffman, who handled the gallery’s involvement in the fair last year, “and seeing how it goes this year, but last year we poured a lot into it and felt like we did what we could do. Now we think that it’s the time to watch what everybody else is doing and then maybe we could see for 2013.”

Those who returned from last year were given a discount for their loyalty, some with personal reassurances from fair honchos. Laura Pinello, director at the Peter Blum gallery, spoke with VIP’s director Noah Horowitz, who has since left the company to become a managing director of the Armory Fair.

“He explained a lot of the upgrades to the website, so we decided we’ll give it another shot out of respect to James and the idea,” Ms. Pinello said.

VIP is not a hard sell for most galleries. With booths priced between $3,000 and $20,000, it’s still significantly cheaper than any other in-person fair, and minus the cost of schlepping works. In an article about the first VIP, Mr. Cohan compared the price to that of an ad in Artforum.

This year VIP will host four fairs—the main one, and three smaller ones focused on print, photo and contemporary works—but with the new technology, the limit to how many fairs VIP may hold lies only with how many collectors are willing to attend.

If all goes according to plan, by 2013 VIP hopes to hold a number in “the low double digits,” according to Lisa Kennedy, the fair’s new CEO, who came to the company this year from Amazon subsidiary Quidsi Inc. The goal, Ms. Kennedy said, is to make sure their clients are not overwhelmed by too many events.

“There are tons of flash sites in the world; most of them email their audience every day and then over-email their audience,” Ms. Kennedy said. “Our objective is to create really incredible events. We want our users to open emails from us because they will know that when they hear from us it will be with something worthy of their attention.”

This year’s main fair sees around 115 participating galleries, some 25 percent of them new, scoring a total nearly equal to last year’s number, just over 130. One addition is New York secondary market dealer Christophe Van de Weghe, who was aware of last year’s technical snafus, but signed on without any sort of inquiries about the updated site.

“I think that they know if they would have these kinds of problems a second year, then their business is going to be finished,” he said.

“I don't have any expectations—what I really want is to meet new clients because that's what we art dealers like, creating new contacts,” he added, saying he hopes to reach buyers in countries where he’s never done business before. “It's more of an exciting adventure for me.”

Last year, many dealers chalked their participation up to the ability to reach potential clients from new markets like China. Demographic information from VIP said that its visitors in 2011 came from 196 countries, with only 28.1 percent of those users based in the U.S.

Paris and Salzburg dealer Thaddaeus Ropac was frustrated by the first fair’s problems, but has embraced the online format as a platform to attract new clients. His booth will host one-artist shows each day of the fair, and on opening day of VIP 2.0 the booth will offer a live webcam performance by Terence Koh.

Mr. Ropac is not a proponent of online buying—speaking of favoring the brick-and-mortar gallery model over anything else, he mentioned that he is set to open a massive new 30,000 square-foot space in the northeast section Paris in the near future—but he sees the fair as an innovative way to reach a new audience. In fact he’d actually rather people didn’t buy from him through VIP-- or at least, not immediately.

“People do it all the time,” Mr. Ropac said. “They get the catalogue from Sotheby’s and bid without ever seeing the work in person, and then they’re not happy with the piece because the color isn’t right or something. I don’t want to encourage these sales because I want to encourage the physical experience.”

The way ahead for VIP still lies in navigating the expectations for an art fair and the modern art market, said Ms. Kennedy, the fair’s CEO.

“What we are doing is changing the behavior in how art is experienced,” she said. “The shift in the way in which collectors and dealers communicate—passing JPEGs back and forth—is happening already day-to-day, week-to-week.”