Going to Hollywood. (Courtesy PMC)

Yesterday, the Academy announced its nominations for the Oscars. Exciting news for the world of pop culture, less so perhaps for the art world, which is generally more curious about shows of a different kind—those that will be opening in Los Angeles’s galleries on Oscars weekend.

The most-talked-about exhibition tends to be at Gagosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills. Back in 2008, when Julian Schnabel was on the menu, John Waters characterized the event to The Observer as “Hollywood’s chance to wear black and look at art and pretend they’re New Yorkers,” and the opening dinner tends to be a star-studded affair. (And there's even been a kind of synergy with Hollywood: in 2011, Oscars co-host James Franco showed work at Gagosian.) The Observer has learned what’s on offer this year, and it promises not to disappoint: up this time is new work (including new paintings) by Richard Prince, one of Gagosian’s star artists. Mr. Prince’s last solo exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, in 2005, also in the Oscars slot, was his first with the gallery. Like other of Gagosian’s Oscars-timed exhibitions (think Andreas Gursky in 2010), it augured his joining the Gagosian stable, which he did in 2008. That show was also of major new paintings, in that case his “check paintings,” so called because he had pasted canceled checks onto the canvas.

But Mr. Prince, whose show opens on Feb. 21, won’t be the only game in town. On the following evening, in nearby West Hollywood, Ohwow gallery is debuting new pieces by young artist Nick van Woert in his first solo show with the gallery, called “No Man’s Land.” On the 23rd, Prism Gallery opens a show of Mario Testino—he’s been called “fashion’s favorite photographer,” which should ensure a glitzy crowd—and, on that same night, Regen Projects opens an exhibition of a very different photographer, Catherine Opie, who was in the news over the summer as one of the artists to depart the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, over curator Paul Schimmel’s departure. Also exhibiting photography is Perry Rubenstein, with a show of Iwan Baan. Meanwhile, L.A.-based artist Henry Taylor, who had a large one-person show at MoMA PS1 last year, will present work at Blum & Poe.

And that’s just a sampling of L.A.’s rich art offerings that week. Sure, as Mr. Waters put it, Angelenos may take art as an opportunity to make like they’re New Yorkers. But as things continue to heat up on the city’s art scene, New Yorkers might want to book their tickets for Los Angeles.

Lemon Fizz. (Courtesy Arizona)

There are many things to be excited about this Art Basel Miami Beach, but perhaps none as unusual and potentially delicious as the debut of Richard Prince's Lemon Fizz Arizona drink at select venues around town. Where can you find this new drink? A flack offered us some assistance.

The drink is being officially presented at a trio of events. First comes the Domingo Zapata private party for the unveiling of his mural at the W South Beach on Wednesday evening. Thursday night brings the grand launch at the Chez André club at the Shelborne Hotel, hosted by Mr. Prince, Larry Gagosian, Fulton Ryder and Arizona. Then, on Friday, the HaVen Gastro-Lounge will host a party with a cocktail called The Fresh Prince. Its ingredients: Absolut Citron vodka, simple syrup, fresh pressed ginger and Lemon Fizz. Sounds like a fine mixture. There will be ice cream made with the stuff too, produced by combining sorbet made with Lemon Fizz, candied ginger, pomegranate, fresh basil and a "splash of liquid nitrogen."

The PR helpfully sent along a list of places of other places where the limited-edition beverage will be on offer, which is available below. Some lucky Basel goers who are already in Miami have sampled the drink!

Private Parties
12/3 – Ornare’s 6th Annual Tastemakers Showcase
12/3 – Rubell YPO Dinner @ Soho Beach House
12/4 – Art Miami VIP Preview and CONTEXT VIP Preview benefitting the Miami Art Museum
12/5 – Pop Up Piano Event @ The Perry South Beach
12/5 – Artsy @ Soho Beach House
12/5 – VIP Art Event w/Fabian Basabe & Marcello Jori @ Ocean House
12/5 – The Hole Gallery Concert/Playboy performance by ASAP Rocky @ Delano
12/6 – 5th Annual Museum Professional & Curators Brunch
12/6-8 – Silencio Party Series @ FDR, Delano
12/6 – The Buoniconti Fund VIP Reception
12/6 – Owners Party @ WALL w/Abby Rosen
12/6 – Zadok Art Gallery Grand Opening
12/6 – amfAR: Inspiration Miami Beach
12/7 – ACRIA Brunch @ Delano – Hosted by Donna Karen
12/7 – VIP Brunch @ Zadok Art Gallery for Art Historians (private)
12/7 – Ocean Drive Magazine ‘s “The Art of the Party” Art Basel Miami Beach Soiree @ Star Island residence
12/8 – Bakehouse Art Complex
12/8 – Diane Lowenstein Fine Arts

Public Happenings
12/5 – Art Miami and CONTEXT Art Miami After-Party at the EPIC Hotel
12/6 – The Lunch Box Gallery Opening
12/6 – Miami Art Museum Party on the Plaza
12/7 – Lincoln Schatz Book Signing
12/8 – The Lunch Box Gallery Opening

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

(Courtesy Arizona)

It's true. Richard Prince and Arizona have teamed up on a new drink. It is called Lemon Fizz, and according to Bevnet—"The Beverage Industry's Source"—is "a slightly carbonated beverage that contains natural lemon flavor and is sweetened with high-fructose corn syrup, honey, and sucralose." Sounds delicious.

The drink will cost $.99 to $1.25. It debuts at Art Basel Miami Beach. The photograph above pretty much speaks for itself. Can't wait.

Ms. Gordon. (Courtesy Getty Images)

Interview just put up an interview with Richard Prince, conducted by Kim Gordon, guitarist and bassist for Sonic Youth, whose 2004 album "Sonic Nurse" used a Prince Nurse painting for its cover.

There are some great tidbits about the artist's new show at 303 Gallery, and how the works there came about. Here's Mr. Prince:

It started out pretty silly. I asked myself a question: If Hollywood cast the part of an artist, what would they have the artist do in the movie? It sort of started that way. And I thought whatever Hollywood would have an artist do would be pretty simple and kind of stupid. My daughter had braces at the time, and I would find these tiny little rubber bands that were always popping out of her mouth. So that gave me an idea. I used the bands to make the letter O. Then I started to write the word "asshole" around that letter, and I decided to call them "the asshole paintings." That's how it started.

I dropped the Hollywood part. And then one day I decided to work with a larger rubber band. I decided to find out everything that had to do with rubber bands. And then one day, I stretched the rubber band I was using and I wanted to make the shape stay, and I realized I couldn't stick it on with paint, that wouldn't hold it, so I just picked up my staple gun and stapled it. The two gestures were married that afternoon. It was kind of a lightbulb moment. And somehow the blackness of the band created a line that didn't look like a rubber band anymore. It became part of the surface. And yes, you're right about the randomness of the shape. It's just whatever. You can do them pretty quickly, too.

That show closes tomorrow and is great, don't miss it!

Screening: Andy Warhol's Paul Swan at Light Industry
Light Industry will screen Andy Warhol's 1965 two-reel film of dancer Paul Swan, who was 82 at the time and still performing at weekly salons. The film will be introduced by art historian Douglas Crimp. --Michael H. Miller
Light Industry, 155 Freeman, Brooklyn, 7 p.m., $7

TUESDAY, MAY 15

Gala: The Whitney Art Award
The Chelsea event space the Waterfront plays home to the Whitney's gala Art Award ceremony. The award is designed by Nicole Eisenman and is going to Peter Brant, the Henry Luce Foundation and the advertising firm Oglivy & Mather. —Dan Duray
The Waterfront, 222 12th Avenue, New York, 7 p.m.

WEDNESDAY, MAY 16

Screening: Raymond Pettibon, Sir Drone, at Anthology
While Mr. Pettibon is beloved for his Black Flag covers and his endless stream of handsome ink drawings, he also produced a handful of almost unbelievably amateurish videos in the late 1980s focused on various subcultural moments. For Sir Drone (1989) (arguably the most watchable of the bunch), which is being screened as part of the Migrating Forms festival by Electronic Arts Intermix, the artist joined with Mike Kelley and Mike Watt (of Minutemen fame) to present young musicians forming a punk band. Two shorts by Cory Arcangel complete the set. —Andrew Russeth
Anthology Film Archives, 32 2nd Avenue, New York, 9:15 p.m., $10

THURSDAY, MAY 17

Opening: Wes Lang, "Here Comes Sunshine" at Half Gallery
Wes Lang's new show at Half Gallery, to quote the copy on their website, "extrapolates from a diverse range of tributaries: tattoo flash, memento mori, Cholo signifiers, Basquiat's oil stick, Mike Kelley's 13 Seasons, Tao Te Ching." That's a lot of influences for such a small gallery! Swing by to see how they all fit. —D.D.
208 Forsyth Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Maira Kalman, "37 Paintings," at Julie Saul Gallery
Maira Kalman is known for her delectable, colorful drawings and paintings of narratives built of, in her own words, "moments of rapture," "moments of despair" and "moments of celebration." For her fifth solo exhibition at Julie Saul Gallery, she will present paintings and illustrations from books she's produced over the past two years, some of which have appeared in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and work completed while at the American Academy in Rome in the fall of 2011 including an embroidery. —Rozalia Jovanovic
535 West 22nd Street, New York, 6-8 p.m.

Opening: Nolan Simon at 47 Canal
The Detroit painter Nolan Simon has his first solo show at 47 Canal called, simply, "Paintings," which, as the press release reminds us, "hang on walls, naturally," except that the paintings in this show were made with a projector.  The artists says, “The show should really be called something like 'The LORD makes the world empty, and makes it waste, and turns it upside down.'” So...make of that what you will. --M.H.M.
47 Canal, New York, 6-8 p.m.

FRIDAY, MAY 18

Opening: Richard Prince, "14 Paintings," at 303 Gallery
The gallery's website lists as a description for this show only random phrases, including "the be all and end all," "the last place on earth that god didn't finish" and "these paintings should be shown to the man from Mars." The show is presented in conjunction with Gagosian Gallery, naturally. —R.J.
547 West 21st Street, New York, 6 p.m.

Opening: "Ideal Pole" at Ramiken
The indefatigable Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard helms this group show, which includes contributions from Richard Kern, Guy Bourdin and a number of unexpected figures, like the notorious art dealer Andrew Crispo. Mr. Melgaard's curatorial outing at Maccarone last year produced one of the messiest, most thrilling shows of the year. Here's hoping he does it again. Meanwhile, the list of participants for the show includes BAREBACKINGJESUS.COM. —A.R.
Ramiken Crucible, 389 Grand Street, New York, 12-6 p.m.

The night is divided in two, with a flashy live auction, as well as a silent auction, with a plethora of works likely to go for under $1,000.

Here's a selection of some of the work you'll see.

A Prince 'Spiritual America' redux. (Courtesy Artnet)

The Art Newspaper has a think piece today by Laura Gilbert that ruminates on how American artists used to appropriate copyrighted material all the time, and how it seems like it isn't done any more.

From the piece:

Koons hasn’t stopped using copyrighted material but now gets licences first—his “Popeye” series, shown in 2009 at London’s Serpentine Gallery, is just one example. Koegel says that although responses to Koons’s requests vary, “hordes of people” have granted permissions, including United Feature Syndicate, which had earlier sued him, and Marvel Comics.

Richard Prince, of course, is a major exception. Read it here!

Gregory Crewdson and Richard Prince (Courtesy The Observer)

Richard Prince wasn’t alone last night when he walked into the Yale School of Art to give a lecture. The “Visiting Artist in Sculpture” was accompanied by photographer Gregory Crewdson, who teaches at Yale, and who invited the artist to speak to his students, according to art dealer and TV personality Bill Powers who was also in the audience.

Mr. Crewdson opened by saying we were going to hear all about Mr. Prince’s early life as an artist and see some rarely seen work, such as his early postcard photographs and some of what he’s working on now. But with Mr. Prince’s first words, the elephant was brought squarely into the room.

“I was born in the Panama Canal Zone,” said Mr. Prince.

This factoid reminded us of Mr. Prince’s controversial Canal Zone series, a group of paintings he made by reworking images of Rastafarians by the photographer Patrick Cariou, which a court ordered him to destroy roughly a year ago. Mr. Prince appealed the decision, a move which is still working its way through Federal court in New York.

Mr. Crewdson asked Mr. Prince questions about the latter’s life and work, which Mr. Prince responded to with quirky colorful stories interjected with awkward reflections on artistic ownership, all while presenting a slideshow.

He discussed his “tear sheets” job at LIFE magazine, which required him to tear up magazines and collate hard copies of articles to send to authors. It was that post which first sparked his interest in re-photography, the practice of photographing other photographs. At the end of each day, he was left with the advertisements, which he would take down to his studio and photograph.

“Those images weren’t associated with an author,” Mr. Prince said. “At least not in my mind.”

He remembers hanging up his first work of “re-photography,” a term he claims to have coined though many other artists would practice it, and the initial response. “The reactions I would get—it was kind of embarrassing.” He said his guests would be confused. “They didn’t quite know what it was—was it my photograph?”

And while he was soon being introduced to other artists like Laurie Simmons, Sherry Levine and Cindy Sherman some of whom worked in re-photography, and who “had similar thoughts in their heads,” he didn’t feel like he belonged to that group. “I had a chip on my shoulder,” he said. “I wanted things to be factual.”

He spoke of his series of photographs of cowboys, that would be known as his Marlborough Men, because they were re-photographs of advertisements for Marlborough cigarettes. He put up a picture of a cowboy riding a horse through a prairie against a blue sky. It was transfixing.

“The first time I titled an image,” he said, “I called it Cowboy.” At his first showing of the images, at an Upper East Side gallery Baskerville and Watson, not one image sold. The implied joke seemed odd in light of the fact that his works sell for large sums, particularly the Canal Zone works at question in his pending litigation, one of which sold for $2.3 million.

Mr. Prince stopped making photographs in 1986 and took up writing out jokes on paper. In 1999, he returned to photography, and cowboys.

“I was never interested in the cowboys,” he said. “I was interested in what they were in.” He looked up at the image on the screen of a generic-looking mountain range without any humans.

Then, he returned to the subject of cowboys, this time painting them. He likened the his practice to beach-combing. “It came in with the tide. You can claim it. You can take it home with you that day.”

He showed us slides of his early and rarely seen “post-card” photographs, beautiful images of monuments and urban European cityscapes that he took while he was a student in Europe. But he didn’t show us any images of sculpture, which he claimed to be working on.

“What kind of sculpture are you doing now?” we asked Mr. Prince after the lecture.

He said he was now making sculptures of cowboys. “A young cowboy,” he said. “The cowboy as a young boy. And humorous sculpture. Like oxymorons. A ten foot pole. A pole that is ten feet long.”

The email in question. (Courtesy @HalfGallery)

Earlier today, man-about-town Bill Powers of Half Gallery tweeted an email he received from artist Richard Prince with the subject header, "U watch 60 min episode on art?" In the body of the email, Mr. Prince wrote, "no, but my mother did..." Though we're sure Mr. Prince loves his mother, his email seems like a dig at Mr. Safer for being out of touch.

While Mr. Powers tweeted that it seemed like a "21st century joke painting," Mr. Prince wrote further on his blog that his mother really had watched the show.

4/4/2012
My mother called me this past Sunday and told me she had just watched a segment on the art world on Sixty Minutes, (she's 94)...and wanted to know if I'd seen it. I told her "no." She said they talked about Cindy Sherman and Barbara Gladstone. (My mother has trouble seeing but no problems hearing.)

Mr. Prince asked his mother who did the reporting for 60 Minutes. "She said, 'Morley Safer,'" writes Mr. Prince. "I said, 'oh... isn't he the guy who paints watercolors of the hotel rooms where he stays when he's out on the road?'"

Whether or not he paints hotel rooms when he's on the road, he has at least exhibited his watercolor paintings of hotel lobbies in the '80s. Mr. Safer, who told New York Magazine in 2006 that he has been painting since he was six years old (“It’s a lifelong hobby”), had a gallery show in 1980, his only show of record. At this two-person show at Central Falls Gallery in SoHo, Mr. Safer presented "Paintings of Hotel Lobbies" alongside the "Sketches from the Courtroom" by courtroom artist Marilyn Church. His paintings reportedly sold for $200 to $500 and Walter Cronkite even bought one. Mr. Safer did mention on his 60 Minutes segment that Cindy Sherman's work was also being sold for $250 in the early '80s. Maybe his digs at the contemporary art world are sour grapes? We may never know. But we would like to see some of those paintings of hotel lobbies.