The site of Callie Curry's future art center in North Braddock, Pennsylvania. (Courtesy Swoon Studio)

You may have seen Dustin Yellin’s show at Half Gallery in April, but come September, the artist will put aside his resin specimens and will do your hair, for the right price. Mr. Yellin is one of the many artists including Mickalene Thomas, Natalie Frank, Duke Riley, K8 Hardy and Dzine who will be offering up their services for a few hours at Pearly’s Beauty Shop on the night of September 8.

This one-night only evening of pampering and partying, which begins at 7 p.m. and goes until midnight, at SEE, an exhibition space in Long Island City, is the brainchild of artist Callie Curry (aka Swoon) who is raising funds for her "community-activated" art center that she's building in an old church in North Braddock, Pennsylvania.

Ms. Curry—who famously invaded the 2009 Venice Biennale via hand-crafted boat—got the idea when she was doing the nails of her assistants during a break and figured it would be a fun, wacky way to raise money for her arts center, which is scheduled to open in the fall of 2013. “This event will be raising money for a new roof,” Ms. Curry's assistant Marie Goble told Gallerist during a phone call.

As for what each of the artists will be doing, that’s still very much up in the air though some have already stated their preferences. “I'm dying to do very Weimaresque makeup jobs,” painter Natalie Frank told Gallerist over email. But she will also be doing nails. Chris Stain wants to paint peoples’ bodies, while Duke Riley will most likely be giving tattoos.

Prices will range from $5 for a flourish to $500 for a full-on service by one artist, such as a “full set of nails” by Ms. Curry or a “hair diorama” by Mr. Yellin. What is a hair diorama? “It isn’t a real thing,” said Ms. Goble who explained that artists will essentially be turning your hair into a sculpture. And it’s first-come-first-serve.

The $20 entrance fee will also get you into the party with DJs Dirtyfinger, Roofeeo, Manhate and 3 Kings International Sound and music, installations and performances by Lady Circus’ Anya Sapozhnikova, Marshall LaCount and Shenandoah Davis.

You may not be able to afford one of Ms. Thomas’s collages, but she might do a little flourish to your cheek on the fly for five bucks.

Natalie Frank, 'Portrait of S' (Courtesy the artist and Fredericks & Freiser)

Author Jonathan Safran Foer is teaming up with Samuel Messer, a painter and associate dean of Yale School of Art, on a retrospective exhibition at Fredericks & Freiser gallery in Chelsea. The only thing is, the retrospective, which opens June 21, is for a fictional character named "S—."

"Retrospective of S" is really a summer group show—with a twist. The paintings in this female artist’s show are actually done by 10 different artists selected by Mr. Messer: Natalie Frank, Rochelle Feinstein, Francesca Lo Russo, Josephine Messer, Judith Linhares, Njideka Akunyili, Caitlin Cherry, Chie Fueki, Jackie Gendel and Jennifer Packer.

Mr. Foer wrote all 10 of the wall texts, which don’t so much describe the work as delineate the narrative of the biography of this fictional character.

The artwork in turn corresponds to the various stages of S's life, beginning in 1964, when she was 14 years old (“With no artistic training whatsoever, and only the public library as an art education, her youthful work flowed directly, and without mediation, from her imagination”), through her penniless beginnings as an artist living in a five-story walk-up (“At the age of 21, and with no money, belongings or plan, S — moved to New York”), her development (“S —’s fascination with the representation of sex acts took full flight on the cusp of the 80s”) and her critical acclaim (“S —’s 1993 show at H — Gallery propelled her into the art stratosphere”). It concludes in 2010 when S is 60.

Though he’s curating the show, Mr. Messer told Gallerist that he doesn’t yet know what all of the artists are creating. But he’s flexible. He views the project along the lines of the historic collaboration between artist Robert Rauschenberg, musician John Cage and choreographer Merce Cunningham. “The only premise was it was going to be a 30-minute piece and none of them knew what the others were going to do until the night of the performance,” he said.

Similar to that creative triumvirate, the artists in this show don’t know what the other artists are creating. Some will be bringing new work painted specifically for the show while others will be bring pre-existing work that is era-appropriate. “Rochelle gave me something from the '90s,” said Mr. Messer.

Artist Natalie Frank was given the text for S's biography entitled The Onset of the Loss of Tactility, 2000. It begins:

In January of 2000, S's husband, Simon Miller, died after a prolonged battle with cancer. That spring, she began a series of paintings of people who were in the process of losing one of their senses.

"The loss of tactility and the loss of the senses perfectly describe the current work I am doing," Ms. Frank told Gallerist over e-mail. "In this, her/his hands are contorted and the face partly obscured by shadow, disintegrating, as memory does to the images we keep in our heads."

As for Mr. Foer, while he does create collage work, according to Mr. Messer, he’s sticking to the role of writer for this collaboration. Here is one of the wall texts he’s produced for S, reflecting her life in the ‘80s:

4. All Sex Work And No Play, 1979

S —’s fascination with the representation of sex acts took full flight on the cusp of the 80s. What began as a kind of ironic lark — “My brush got dirty” — developed into a deep investigation of paint and flesh. Critics have noted the remarkable absence of sexuality in these explicitly sexual scenes — it is possible to look at a painting like this one without blushing, or becoming aroused, or feeling a need to either avert one’s eyes or stare.

The mingling of art and pornography was already well-trod ground by this point, yet it was these paintings that brought S — her first significant critical attention. “It is easy to make any old thing sexy,” a reviewer observed. “Here we have the impossible: sex made into any old thing. But what a beautiful anything!”

Nicole Maloof, Yale University School of Art, 'Monkey,' 2012 (Courtesy the artist and VIP MFA)

It’s late spring, time once again for the age-old tradition of the MFA thesis exhibition. Graduating art school students put on a final show of their work, in a rite of passage that marks the beginning of their lives as officially accredited artists, with all the struggles that entails: finding a studio, finding a gallery. The thesis shows, at least at the top-end schools like Columbia, Hunter and Yale, have also become a way for collectors and dealers to sniff out talent. It’s just a matter of making all those trips to all those schools. As of last week, there’s a brand new twist on the MFA thesis show, one that doesn’t involve any schlepping. VIP MFA, which launched last Friday, is the first-ever juried art fair that gives arts professionals and collectors a crack at the new talent emerging from 58 art schools around the world, from Manhattan to Mumbai—and it happens entirely online.

VIP MFA’s organizers are James and Jane Cohan, and Internet entrepreneurs Jonas and Alessandra Almgren, founders of the two-year-old VIP Art Fair. That fair hosts galleries, which pay for virtual booths in which visitors to the site can view artworks, along with their price ranges; prospective collectors buy work by calling the dealers, or using the fair’s customized chat function. A whopping 100,000 people from 155 countries have registered on VIP’s platform.

As for VIP MFA, there are limits to its comparison to a thesis exhibition; many of the students whose work is featured have yet to graduate, while others graduated in 2010 or 2011. Student work appearing at brick-and-mortar art fairs is pretty rare, but exhibitions of student work by commercial galleries is not unheard of. Back in 2006, when New York gallerist Jack Tilton held his “School Days” exhibition—a show of promising young talent from places like Hunter and Yale—the show, to some, exemplified an overheated, youth-obsessed art market with collectors tripping over each other to get to the MFA thesis exhibitions, clamoring to discover the next Warhol. It had critics and art professionals wondering if the practice was exploitative and harmful to the development of the downy art youth.

And yet, as brazen as “School Days” may have been, it really wasn’t anything especially new. And neither, in some respects, is VIP MFA. The general feeling among academics is that grad students, unlike undergrads, can fend for themselves.

“Dealers started to cannibalize MFA programs some years ago,” said Bruce Ferguson, former dean of Columbia’s School of the Arts and current dean of the School of Humanities and Social Sciences at the American University in Cairo. “MFA students know what the issues are and what the problems are. I don’t think they are innocent or being exploited.”

Even before putting on “School Days,” Mr. Tilton visited schools. “I would stick by the rules and wait for the MFA thesis shows, and [artists] would already be picked up. You have to get in early or you miss the boat.”

But VIP MFA’s platform allows purchases with the click of a single button, making it more effective than a thesis exhibition, or even a group show at a commercial gallery, at delivering student work directly into the hands of collectors.

Browse the site during the fair’s week-long run (it ends on June 8) and you’ll likely encounter the paintings of Chris Hood, a recent graduate of the San Francisco Institute of Art. A few of his works look polished, others amateurish. A large, Pop-inspired painting of a grid of 12 identical flowers in various shades of gray is one of the more clean, eye-grabbing works. It carried a reasonable (for today’s art market) price tag of $2,400. That, coupled with the ability to purchase it on the spot, probably made it candy for the impulse buyer. On the opening morning of the fair, its sale, along with a smaller painting of two hands clapping, was met with a celebratory Tweet from VIP MFA: “Chris Hood from SF Institute of Art 2 artworks SOLD.”

Acquisition of artwork at an art fair has never been so seamless, or so impersonal.

THE VIP ART FAIR has not exactly been an unmitigated success.

The first fair, in January 2011, was beset by technical difficulties that left dealers without the vaunted chat function. The site was temporarily shut down, and dealers couldn’t update the “back room” viewing function. The fair was reduced to something akin to an ordinary gallery website, and dealers, some of whom had paid around $20,000 for a booth, were not happy. In compensation, VIP offered partial refunds.

The second edition, which took place three months ago, was aided by an influx of $1 million by art collector Philip Keir and investor Selmo Nissenbaum. It ran smoothly and offered amenities like “insider tours” and videotaped discussions with dealers, but in terms of sales it doesn’t seem to have been much of an improvement. “The fair was unfortunately a waste of time for us this year,” dealer David Zwirner told Forbes. “We didn’t have any significant traffic in the booth, nor did we meet new collectors. I’m uncertain this format will work moving forward.”

VIP has spawned several spin-off ventures, such as VIP Paper (works on paper) and VIP Photo (fine art photography) and, now, VIP MFA, the purpose of which, Mr. Cohan explained, is to give artists exposure to a “broader public”—meaning “collectors, dealers and critics”—while also “serving our audience who are obsessed with contemporary art.” The average collector who visits the site is “not going to be your blue-chip Warhol buyer,” he explained. “It’s going to be someone who has a thirst for less-expensive, edgier work.” The most expensive piece is around $42,000; most of the work ranges from $400 to $10,000, far cheaper than the $500,000-and-up pricetags on a portion of the pieces on VIP (students split sales with VIP 50/50).

Not just anyone makes it onto VIP MFA. According to Gregorio Cámara, manager of VIP MFA, the fair approached administrators of the world’s top MFA programs and asked if they wanted to be involved. They could choose to either nominate students or have an open call. Even if school administrators were unreachable, or chose to not get involved, as was the case with Yale, Columbia and Goldsmiths in London, VIP MFA was not discouraged from spreading the word to students themselves.

In the end, the fair received applications from 380 students from 58 schools in 25 countries, with each student submitting up to 10 jpegs of artworks. Those were then submitted to the fair’s team of six judges, who selected 100 students to participate in the fair and chose three winners for a monetary award (Chris Hood got $10,000 for coming in second; first place was $15,000 and third $5,000) to be split with their schools. Whether or not a school would accept the money was a different story. Gregory Amenoff, chair of the visual arts department at Columbia University, said that had one of the participating Columbia students won, the university, which chose not to participate on the institutional level, would not have taken the money. “If someone’s lucky enough to get it, we’re going to turn the money over to the student,” he said, adding that his attitude toward any student who chose to participate in the fair was, “good luck, I hope they get the big goddamn award. And get a good studio and proceed with their life.”

If VIP Art Fair derives its legitimacy from the galleries that participate, VIP MFA gets it from its panel of judges, to whom the fair pays an undisclosed sum: all of them are esteemed figures in the art world. There is Matthew Higgs, director of New York alternative space White Columns; Kate Fowle, executive director of Independent Curators International (ICI); RoseLee Goldberg, founder and director of the Performa biennial; and Joachim Pissarro, an art history professor and director of the Hunter College Art Galleries. There are also two artists, O Zhang and Diana Al-Hadid. Jens Hoffmann, director of San Francisco’s CCA Wattis Institute for Contemporary Arts, was appointed a judge, but had to pull out due to his affiliation with another art fair, Art Basel.

“It’s not clear exactly what it is,” Mr. Higgs conceded, when asked about VIP MFA. “What happens now is the question.” He said his reason for getting involved “is the same reason White Columns participates as a not-for-profit in an art fair: Our hope is that we find an audience of people who were unaware of us before. So my optimistic goal for these artists, is that, like the five or six people on the panel, another five or six people might come across their work for the first time, and it might lead to a subsequent opportunity.”

That opportunity would mean a lot to today’s art school grads, who emerge into a dismal economy burdened with tens of thousands of dollars in student loan debt and little chance of finding a day job.

Then again, exposure isn’t necessarily what students, who are still developing their work, should be looking for. Instead, said Columbia’s Mr. Amenoff, they may need time to experiment and be free of the pressures of the art market.

Mr. Tilton sold about half the work in his 2006 “School Days” show, but only a handful of its artists have gallery representation today. “If you pick 10, and two to three stay on track, you’re doing great,” said Mr. Tilton, “Not a lot of artists make it big.”

Some of the show’s young artists, like Natalie Frank, Titus Kaphar and Keltie Ferris, made a splash at the time and have galleries, but the ensuing years haven’t necessarily been a smooth ride. We emailed Ms. Frank, whose upcoming solo show in October, at her new gallery, Fredericks and Freiser, will arrive a full six years after her last New York show. She explained that it was a “luxury and gift” to have the platform of the show at Tilton even at a time when she was still developing as an artist, but that she eventually needed to take some time to focus on her work. “I always saw the business of art as an entirely separate component from the art itself,” she said. “I think the studio and artist should be mindful to separate the two, and while keeping an eye on their interest in this transaction, protect the actual work from its influence. I don't know that it is for me to say whether young artists should take or not take a specific path.”

rjovanovic@observer.com

When I introduced myself as a reporter to Toni Morrison, she responded with a simple and curt, “No.” That should have been the end of that conversation, but I explained that I was reading the galley of her forthcoming novel, Home, and that I had 20 pages left to go.

“Oh!” she said, and her face lit up. “You’re gonna love it. The last 20 pages are great.” People were huddled around Ms. Morrison, who sat in a museum wheelchair and kept her gray dreadlocks tucked beneath a black fedora. They were snapping her picture with iPhones and looking a bit dumbfounded about being in the same room as her. She didn’t exactly smile for the cameras.

Standing right next to her was Lucy Lippard, the art critic who curated the first show at the first gallery to open in Soho back in 1968. She's since decamped for New Mexico. She was crashing with her son, who lives in her old loft on Prince Street.

“It’s very funny,” she said of returning to New York (she makes it out here once a year). “It’s all extremely familiar, like going back to the life I had for so many years, and at the same time everything’s different. That and this closed and this is there now and so forth. I keep asking, ‘What happened?’”

Across the room, the artist Liz Magic Laser was posing for photos. She was glamorous and wore a flowing dark blue dress. A gaggle of photographers had swarmed in on her and was snapping away.

“Can I have your name?” one of them asked and she told him, but he squinted in confusion.

She let out a small sigh. “Liz. Magic. Laser. My middle name is m-a-g-i-c. My last name is laser.”

“Oh, the acuity of it all,” said her friend, the actor Michael Wiener, watching with a smile.

“It’s my real name,” Ms. Laser said. “Elizabeth Magic Laser is on my birth certificate. Magic, my father put in there. He thought my birth was magical—slash—I might be a rock star. Or maybe it was the vestiges of the hippie days. But the last name was already Laser because my grandfather passed through Ellis Island in 1905. Lazarovich, a Lithuanian name.”

A loud hush sound could be heard coming from the other room. Arnold Lehman, director of the Brooklyn Museum, was at a podium and trying to introduce Elizabeth Sackler, for whom the Sackler Center is named.

“I really would appreciate a few more minutes of quiet,” he said. “This year’s ball coincides with the fifth anniversary of the Elizabeth A. Sackler Center, and I truly encourage you to visit it tonight. Shush. A true story: when Elizabeth asked me if I wanted The Dinner Party, I thought she meant the book she had edited on The Dinner Party. I, of course, said yes. Shush.”

Everyone vaguely stopped chatting long enough for Ms. Sackler to announce that her family has created a large endowment for the museum to create a permanent position for a curator of feminist art at the Sackler Center. She had not even finished the sentence before the room burst into applause. No other American museum has such a position. Ms. Sackler thanked the audience for quieting down.

As part of the night’s dinner, the museum asked young female artists to create centerpieces for the tables in the banquet hall. The painter Natalie Frank had propped portraits of people up on metal poles; on the back of each one was a mirror. Kate Gilmore piled up photographs of peoples’ feet. Malia Jensen’s table had big white blocks of sugar with breasts carved into the top of them. Ms. Laser adorned her table with honeydew melon halves that had cow’s horns sticking out of them. She recruited her friend Mr. Wiener to play the role of a waiter. I went over to the table and he plucked out the horns from one of the melon halves. He poured liquid from a bottle of mead into each horn and gave a toast about the theoretical meaning of honey and wine.

“With this nectar,” Mr. Wiener began and everything after that was a little dim.

Portrait I (2011) (Photo courtesy of Fredericks & Freiser)

The figurative painter Natalie Frank will join Fredericks & Freiser gallery, with a first show planned for the fall of next year.

"I'm excited to be working with a gallery that I respect tremendously, both personally and professionally, and that represents so many compelling artists,” Ms. Frank wrote in an email.

Ms. Frank is a Fulbright scholar who showed with Mitchell-Innes & Nash from 2007 to 2010. Willem de Kooning and Neo Rauch would be among her more contemporary influences, but her work plays with formal ideas much older than those artists. Reviewing a show in 2008, Art in America said: “Using an established visual language to capture elusive identities in contemporary society, Frank has developed a distinctive strain of eccentric traditionalism.” Mazel!