West and Kim Kardashian at the 2013 Costume Institute Gala at the Met. (Getty Images)

Next Tuesday, Kanye West, arguably the greatest artist of the present era, will release his sixth album, Yeezus. As Mr. West was finishing work on it, New York Times music writer Jon Caramanica visited him in Malibu, Calif., at Shangri-La Studio, which Bob Dylan and the Band had built in 1970 and is now owned by producer Rick Rubin. They had a pretty great conversation.

Mr. West, as is well known, is a contemporary art aficionado, and has had Takashi Murakami and George Condo design album covers for him. It turns out that Le Corbusier, who's the subject of a MoMA show that opens on Saturday, was a pretty big influence on the new album. From the interview:

Caramanica: One of the things I thought when I heard the new record was, “This is the anti-College Dropout.” It feels like you’re shedding skin. Back then, you were like: “I want more sounds. I want more complicated raps. I want all the things.” At what point did that change?

West: Architecture — you know, this one Corbusier lamp was like, my greatest inspiration. I lived in Paris in this loft space and recorded in my living room, and it just had the worst acoustics possible, but also the songs had to be super simple, because if you turned up some complicated sound and a track with too much bass, it’s not going to work in that space. This is earlier this year. I would go to museums and just like, the Louvre would have a furniture exhibit, and I visited it like, five times, even privately. And I would go see actual Corbusier homes in real life and just talk about, you know, why did they design it? They did like, the biggest glass panes that had ever been done. Like I say, I’m a minimalist in a rapper’s body. It’s cool to bring all those vibes and then eventually come back to Rick [Rubin], because I would always think about Def Jam.

Later, Mr. West tells Mr. Caramanica, "I understand culture. I am the nucleus."

You should really read the whole piece. It's pretty much guaranteed to make your day.

Thomas Ruff, '3D-ma.r.s.09,' 2013. (Courtesy the artist and David Zwirner)

Could it be an art world trend occasioned by the special effects of films like Avatar and The Avengers? A few months ago, rising star Trisha Baga had visitors at Greene Naftali don 3D glasses to better experience her complex installations and slide projections. Last fall, Christie’s made the somewhat tenuous claim that Warhol’s 1962 “3D painting” of the Statue of Liberty was meant to be viewed through 3D glasses, and it dutifully doled them out to prospective buyers and looky-loos alike. Now, at David Zwirner, 3D glasses are provided for viewing superstar German photographer Thomas Ruff’s recent “ma.r.s.” series. Grab a pair from the box near the entrance and enjoy the aerial views of the red planet, originally captured by NASA. In 3D-ma.r.s. 10 (2013), the planet’s carbuncular surface seems to pop right into the gallery. Move around it and the irregular bumps shift and stretch, appearing to follow you. Put the glasses on backward to reverse what recedes and what protrudes—the enormous crater dominating 3D-ma.r.s.09 (2013) will stick out like a Bundt cake.

Despite its recent popularity, 3D is not a particularly new gimmick. Google it and you’ll encounter those classic 1950s photos of theaters full of enraptured, goggle-eyed moviegoers. That at this point 3D is, by the breakneck standards of technological change, an old technology may be the subtle point Mr. Ruff is making by showing the “ma.r.s.” series alongside his new so-called “photograms,” though these large works were not made the old-fashioned way like those of Man Ray, Moholy-Nagy and other intrepid Modernists. Instead of placing objects on photosensitive paper and exposing the arrangement to light, Mr. Ruff used a “virtual darkroom,” custom software that allowed him to create and move shapes, and add and adjust color. “When I first had the wish ... to try photograms,” he said during a recent press walk through the exhibition, “I very soon realized that it’s very complicated.” The darkroom allows for chance; a computer program facilitates control.

Mr. Ruff’s use of an anachronistic title for a technologically innovative series—these “photograms” could never have been made in a physical darkroom—contrasts with previous bodies of work that embrace their new media origins, like his “jpegs”: dramatically enlarged and printed Internet thumbnails, or his “Night” series, the very technology of which (infrared night vision) contained his commentary on the Gulf War. The title, however, does not detract from their visual pleasure. These dynamic abstract images would be well suited to a futuristic concert hall, as their forms glint and gleam like parts plucked from brass instruments: what could be the keys of a saxophone and the bell of a horn appear to collide with cymbals spinning off into space. The strongest works, such as phg.01 and r.phg.s02 (both 2012), are like music itself—the clangs and clashes of a crescendo take the form of sharp-edged shapes, and slow, mournful solos manifest in the velvety shadows.

I remember 1973 well enough. I had graduated college the year before and moved downtown into a Tribeca loft ($220 a month) and, along with two pals, had started my own art magazine, using after hours the facilities of my day job, which was doing paste-up for The Jewish Week. I earned $6 an hour and had more money than I knew what to do with.

I remember 1983, because that was the time of the East Village, when I lived on Ludlow Street (rent $150), was art editor of the East Village Eye, and showed, at Metro Pictures gallery in Soho, paintings of people kissing.

And I remember 2003, though I don't really have to, since by then Artnet Magazine was up and running; pretty much everything I had going on is archived online.

But 1993, what do I remember from 1993? I can locate myself physically, in a ramshackle loft on Clinton Street ($500 a month or, later, nothing, as the owner had no C of O for the building and therefore couldn't legally collect rent—a typical New York real estate story). I was a single father who took his 11-year-old daughter to school before going to the offices of Art in America on Broadway at Prince Street, where I had a part-time freelance job as a news editor. In 1993, I was poor.

My office was a gray-carpeted windowless cubicle filled with books, magazines, files and all manner of papers. There I opened mail and read the newspaper, or newspapers (The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times). Occasionally I would find out about things via the telephone, or at dinner parties. It was just-pre-internet; it's hard to understand now how anybody got any news at all.

I enjoyed the occasional company of a small group of freaks, bikers and beatniks—my friends—who would visit the office. Then as now I could count on them for whatever bits of genius might come my way. That's what editors do.

My art dealer pal was Frank Bernarducci, a fearless advocate of fast cars and cool art, whom I first met in 1984, when he had a gallery in the East Village. As an artist and critic with an abiding fascination with art and money, I always think it's a great time to be an art dealer, even during market downturns. Frank was "between galleries," i.e. not working. "The '80s art market boom was over and a lot of Neo-Ex art stars were scrambling,” Frank, who is now a partner in Bernarducci-Meisel Gallery, recalled recently. “Basquiat and Warhol were dead"—you could even say their reputations were flagging, hard as it might be to believe today, thanks to a poorly received show of collaborative paintings at Tony Shafrazi on Mercer Street—"and the YBAs were on the rise, shifting the focus of contemporary art to London, at least somewhat." By '93, the art market was climbing out of the recession, though we didn't necessarily know it. The following year would bring the first Gramercy Art Fair which kicked off our art fair era.

In 1993, "I had time to do some things I'd always wanted to do,” Frank went on, “like write, and some things I didn't, like get married." He was working on a novel, an art-world potboiler about a dealer who ends up accused of murdering his beautiful girlfriend, who is also his most successful artist. Later on, in the early days of Artnet Magazine, which was launched in 1996, we serialized the beginning chapters, though I never got to find out how it ended.

Another occasional visitor to the AiA office was Carlo McCormick, the art critic, curator and sometime nightclub doorman whose long orange hair and funky street fashion gave him the air of an Acid Prince, as High Times once dubbed him on its cover. A downtown bohemian of enduring bona fides—in the '80s I would style myself as his "driver" on our late-night bar rounds—Carlo was even then unprofitably out of step with the mainstream avant-garde, championing such things as Alleged Gallery, whose first significant show, "Minimal Trix," a show of skateboards, opened in 1993.

"My life was pretty much centered on Ludlow Street back then, and Max Fish, which was at its peak," Carlo said. His crew included Kembra Pfahler and her D.I.Y. hair-metal band, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black; filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, then at work on Dead Man with Johnny Depp; and Shepard Fairey, who had not yet hit the big time. It was the dawn of "street culture," and despite the fact that, as Carlo put it, some "art people looked at me as if I were a pedophile hitting up the young boys," it was a time when "graf artists and such were turning the tee shirt into a youth culture canvas where new designs and the ironic use of logos turned into this discrete visual language by which kids could signify to one another."

Another member of that same gang was Mike Osterhout, a Bay Area conceptualist who had relocated to the Lower East Side and launched the Church of the Little Green Man, a blasphemous kind of anti-cabaret that required communicants to ceremonially burn a dollar bill upon entry. I remember clearly his invocation when it came time for the sermon, the most dreaded part of the service—"brothers and sisters, there will be no sermon today."

Mike now lives in the sticks outside Rock Hill, N.Y., where he hunts deer and turkey and has an actual 19th century church building, where services continue. This August the congregation gathered to celebrate man's best friend, the dog, an event that opened with an abstract bit of music produced by micing a big bone and giving it to a pit bull to gnaw on.

In 1993, Mike remembered,  "I lived at 7 and C, worked the door at the Fish, lived with my crazy bitch girlfriend and was pretty miserable. Or did you want to know what you were doing? There I can’t help you."

Mike had written something for Interview magazine and had the idea to use this beat-up antique newsstand on the Prince Street side of the building as a kind of mini-museum—a foil to what was then the Guggenheim Soho, around the corner. It didn't work out. "How the rich can hold onto every square inch and beat you down amazes me," Mike said. The owner “wanted to control every aspect of that goddamned newsstand. I finally gave up in the idea." Kenny Scharf did something there, and now it serves muffins.

Probably the most idiotic thing that happened for me personally in 1993 began with a visit from Paul H-O, another Oakland refugee who rode motorcycles and was (and is) an all-around surf guru. Paul dropped by the office one day with a video camera and asked, "Hey, you want to go out to galleries and shoot some tape?"

Paul would be producer, director, editor and co-star of what became Art TV Gallery Beat, a half-hour-long public access cable television show. We'd go to art galleries and make jokes—"what IS that?" was our reprise—and were often asked to leave. Paul put together a compilation of "great ejections." I vividly remember Rob Storr asking me, sotto voce, in the lobby of the Marian Goodman Gallery building, "Aren't you embarrassed?" Watching some of the footage now, I have to wonder why I wasn't—particularly when I catch a glance of myself in a clown-like 555 Soul outfit.

But then, what accomplishments we had! What exhibitions we reviewed!

One of our first shoots was at Gagosian Gallery, then in spacious garage-like quarters on Wooster Street in SoHo, where Chris Burden had hung an oversized globe like a mammoth beehive, its gnarly surface covered with a network of toy train tracks. At the Dia Art Center, we visited an installation of giant rats by the German artist Katharine Fritsch. There we quoted art critic Roberta Smith, who had ventured in The New York Times that the circle of 16 outward-facing giant black rats, their tails joined into a large knot, were something of a new esthetic experience—a work that makes you feel like you're about to be eaten.

1993 was the year that Anselm Kiefer had his watershed show at Marian Goodman featuring, in the front gallery,  a huge pile of discarded canvases placed in a towering stack along with uprooted sunflowers. In the back was a heap of oversized gray books, purportedly masturbated over for years. It all had something to do with the end of an unhappy marriage.

With an all-too-appropriate sense of noblesse oblige, Gagosian didn't care if we taped in his gallery or not, but for Kiefer the camera was forbidden. Thus Paul's then wife, Barbara Dahl, sneaked the camera into the gallery in her bag, shooting reality-show style through the purse's narrow aperture.

A similar ban on filming was in place at the opening of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, but the museum director's, David Ross, whose practice it was to stand at the entrance to the museum greeting visitors, when asked if video was allowed, just gave us a wink. And thus we caught on tape the inimitable art historian Irving Sandler proclaiming, "the barbarians are at the gate!"

The 1993 biennial was by far the most outstanding in recent memory, an iconographic carnival with multiple metaphors writ large inside and out. Parked at the curb in front of the Breuer Building was a red toy fire truck blown up to life size, properly announcing the esthetic conflagration within, the work of Charles Ray. Inside, the lobby gallery was filled with a self-contained room, practically vibrating with concentrated electrical voltage. It  was Chris Burden's "Fist of Light," a collection of lamps so powerful that the blazing light was blinding, or so the artist said. Admission was forbidden.

Upstairs was the largest-ever puddle of fake plastic vomit, courtesy Sue Williams, and downstairs, in the basement space, the Puerto Rican artists Coco Fusco and Papo Colo had dressed in tribal gear, including war paint, and put themselves on display as natives inside a cage. Visitors could get a souvenir Polaroid of the scene for $1; somewhere I still have a custom photo of Ross himself posing with the two artists.

Now thats what art is all about! Reviewing some of the Gallery Beat tapes with Paul at his Brooklyn studio, one thing about 1993 becomes eminently clear. We may have been stupid, but at least we were thin.

editorial@observer.com

'The Scream' at MoMA. (Spencer Platt/Getty Images)

Before Norwegian businessman Petter Olsen sent his version of Edvard Munch’s The Scream to the auction block at Sotheby’s New York in May, where it sold for $120 million, he spoke to the press about what he thought the work meant. At the time, Mr. Olsen’s pronouncements sounded, at least to me, a little bit off. The Scream, we’re all taught, is about existential angst, the individual crying out, alone in the universe, but Mr. Olsen, who’d lived with the work his entire life, had a more expansive view.

“The Scream for me shows the horrifying moment when man realizes his impact on nature,” Mr. Olsen told the Financial Times, “and the irreversible changes that he has initiated, making the planet increasingly uninhabitable.” After last week’s storm, which killed more than 40 people in New York, destroyed homes, and damaged art, artist studios and galleries in Brooklyn and Chelsea, that reading of the painting seems painfully on point. Munch couldn’t have known about the coming climate change, but it’s all there in the work—in its original title (Scream of Nature) and in the sky and land that appear to undulate behind the bald figure.

Until visiting The Scream two weeks ago at the Museum of Modern Art, to which it has been loaned for six months by its new, anonymous owner, I had forgotten that it has three figures: besides the alarmed man who gets all of the attention, there is another man in a top hat, his head bowed as if in deep despair, and a third man, further in the distance, who stares out at the landscape, strangely unaware—or in denial—of the fact that the world is coming undone around him. Factoring in those other two, it’s easier to follow Mr. Olsen’s thinking: when it comes to the effects that humans are having on nature, most of us are the second or third person.

In the United States, at least, most politicians and even many businesspeople (who would seem to have a vested, profit-driven interest in staving off climate change) have been incapable of addressing, or even acknowledging, the problem.

During recent times of political and humanitarian crises, artists have proved to be effective activists when others have failed to respond. In the late 1980s, ACT UP’s performance art-inflected activities, like its “die-ins” and trenchant sloganeering (“Call the White House. Tell Bush we’re not all dead yet”) brought outside attention to the high cost of AIDS drugs and the federal government’s refusal to act. Art affected policy and saved lives. (The case of the British artist Chris Drury suggests that some fear it could again: the University of Wyoming removed a public sculpture that he made that critiqued the coal industry after lobbyists complained.)

But today’s major international artists have been largely silent on climate change, and there are no iconic works that point to the issue. That may be because picturing the crisis is an impossible task. How do you cut to the heart of an issue that involves massive bureaucratic inefficiency and invisible forces, and one that takes place over such a wide span of time and space?

In the days following the storm, art critics worked to understand the horror through historical artworks. After riding out the storm in Washington, D.C., The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones wrote of the sublime, even "lurid" landscapes of the Hudson River School. What came first to my mind were the turbulent boating scenes of Winslow Homer that show nature in all of its awesome power. But these are, basically, dramatic depictions of meteorological conditions, and old ones, at that—hardly satisfactory representations of what is taking place today.

Some artists are at work on more complete, or at least more adventurous, ways of showing the crisis. At this year’s Documenta, the prestigious exhibition held every five years in Kassel, Germany, American artist Amy Balkin displayed replies she received to letters she sent to UNESCO representatives, asking them to nominate the Earth’s atmosphere as a World Heritage Site. Each explained why that was impossible, for a variety of reasons. Working the levers of bureaucracy to their logical conclusion, she showed the global failure to address the issue, and provided 50,000 postcards for people to continue her lobbying efforts.

Then there are less literal statements. In Tino Sehgal’s refusal to make tangible objects, there is a sense that art needs to work in other ways, that it should eschew stuff for ideas, and consider its carbon footprint. He channels the late Conceptual artist Douglas Huebler’s dictum, “The world is full of objects, more or less interesting; I do not wish to add any more.”

Fend harvesting algae in New Zealand. (Courtesy the artist and Peanut Underground)

Exactly 24 hours after power was restored to most of downtown Manhattan on Friday evening, the ever-inventive New York artist Peter Fend—once dubbed “the Lawrence of Arabia of the art world,” by his onetime collaborator, Richard Prince—opened a new show at the tiny East Village project space Peanut Underground called “What to Do Next,” showing drawings he’s made about how a variety of environmental topics, including how to harvest seaweed in New York to make methane gas that could be used to produce electricity. It’s a project he’s dead serious about realizing, but he’ll need help for that to happen.

Installation view of 'What to Do Next' by Fend. (Courtesy Peanut Underground)

Mr. Fend completed some of his new pieces by candlelight while the power was out, and while his ideas may seem fanciful, it’s not necessarily an artist’s job to craft perfect, polished solutions. They can point out unexplored paths, float new ideas and lead the way when necessary.

Mr. Fend, who will make work at Peanut through Nov. 18, has also suggested that artists should play a role in the battle over the environment, taking the satellite monitoring of the world as “a primary function of art in a society at ecological risk,” as a means to visualize in some way the growing catastrophe.

There are many things that we know art cannot do. It cannot literally feed people (save for a cooking piece by Rirkrit Tiravanija here and there), and it cannot cure disease. But what if we thought of its power through another apocalyptic image—a meteor speeding toward the planet? From millions of miles away, even a tiny push can divert its doomsday course far off track. Art can often provide that push, though the meteor in this case, as Sandy has demonstrated, is closer than we would like.

Some of the images coming out of Chelsea this week—of art-filled basements flooded with water, of careers and archives vanishing overnight—should provide plenty of reasons for the art world to act. Back in 2008, the Danish-Icelandic artist Olafur Eliasson, whose current show at Tanya Bonakdar Gallery in Chelsea was damaged by Hurricane Sandy, wrote that, “due to climate change and our anticipation of its potentially disastrous consequences, we find ourselves participating in a new kind of collectivity based on ecological awareness ... The individual no longer comes first, but only exists as part of a plurality.” In other words, we can’t continue to think we inhabit a Scream world, where we’re lone actors, despairing or oblivious. We’ll have to get used to the fact that we’re all connected in this, and fast. Art may be able to help.

'WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER' (2011) by Weiner. (Courtesy the artist and 20x200)

In the meantime, a Lawrence Weiner text piece from 2011 that was once merely poetic is looking increasingly ominous: WATER FINDS ITS OWN LEVEL HOWSOEVER.

arusseth@observer.com

A still from 'Home 3' by Breuning.

As hard as it is to believe—weren’t we just on Randall’s Island for Frieze?—the New York art season has officially begun. The first real event came last Tuesday with the premiere of Olaf Breuning’s film Home 3, a gloriously unhinged panegyric to the city, at Soho’s Swiss Institute. It was drizzling, so PR reps were outfitted in Jabba the Hutt ponchos, welcoming everyone back together after their time away, their trips to Basel, Kassel, Genk, Amagansett.

But things really began in earnest on Thursday evening in Chelsea with the first opening receptions of the year. Throngs took to the Chelsea streets. (Doesn’t it feel a little bit more crowded every year?) Hope always springs eternal among the city’s art types in September, but people seemed especially ebullient this go-’round.

Gagosian's 12th gallery, in Paris. (Jean Nouvel Ateliers)

And why not? New York is a boomtown for art at the moment. Over drinks last week, a dealer marveled at the “arms race”—the space-and-location contest—taking place all around town, and not only at the top end. The expansionary ethos is trickling down. At one end of the spectrum is Gagosian, the original expander, who, with 11 global galleries under his belt, just made a point of telling everyone (via Bloomberg News) he is bringing $130 million worth of art to a fair in Rio de Janeiro this week, and who is soon to open a second gallery in Paris and a cafe and shop on the ground floor of his Upper East Side headquarters. Nipping at Gagosian’s heels are Zwirner and Pace, which, even as they expand on their home turf, are hatching London branches.

At the other end there are the contenders, the smaller shops looking to stake out a spot in a crowded marketplace. Some are joining forces. Jack Hanley and Nicelle Beauchene just grabbed a new building on the Lower East Side, as has Canada, which has hitched its wagon, space-wise, to the blue-chip Marlborough. Lisa Cooley and Maxwell Graham have traded up, and Laurel Gitlen is on the move. In the West Village and Chelsea, Michele Maccarone and Alexander Gray are growing, and 303 Gallery’s Lisa Spellman is eying new-and-improved Chelsea digs.

But amid all of this bustle there is, on the top tier, a discouraging aesthetic consensus. And that, too, has sadly trickled down. Many artists are on autopilot, and it doesn’t help that collectors—who continue to gobble up autopilot art—are too, as Jerry Saltz has noted in the past. In polite company, everyone agrees that most shows are pretty good—“everyone’s going along to get along,” as an artist friend put it.

In a recent essay, the photographer Carter Mull lamented the “overabundance of nostalgic abstract painting in the world today.” And it is lamentable, but so, for that matter, is all the visually dead nth-generation post-minimalist conceptual sculpture, the half-baked ironic art and the overwrought political work.

Though Mr. Mull particularly chastised the Lower East Side’s relatively green dealers for this pervasive conservatism, there, at least, it is somewhat understandable. Profits are smaller at their price points, and one rough season, one bad art fair, can spell disaster. Many L.E.S. dealers say their businesses are growing at steady, sustainable rates these days—and hence those expansions.

(And, really, can we blame anyone—artists or dealers—for not continuing to innovate once they’ve struck gold? Or for shoehorning themselves into established approaches in order to strike it? Gold is needed: Brooklyn, where many of these people live, is now the second-most-expensive place to live in America, after Manhattan, according to a new study.)

Detail of Lassry's 'Collie (Sky),' 2012. (The artist and David Kordansky Gallery)

Despite its outbreak of conservatism, the L.E.S. is still where much of the most interesting art is being shown, where you are most most likely to get bowled over by something truly strange. Adventurous artists, curators and dealers are testing new models, and, with great brio, risking failure. There is plenty to be optimistic about.

Much of the exciting new art is as modest in scale as the spaces in which it’s shown. Unlike the grandiose spectacles so common in the Chelsea bazaar, it rewards close looking. At the most recent Whitney Biennial, we saw that it is comfortable being interdisciplinary and collaborative, embracing dance, music, film and fashion.

I’m speaking here of work that can be deadpan and digital or elegiac and personal and poetic, or all of these things—of artists and outfits like Michele Abeles, Talia Chetrit, Lucas Blalock, Elad Lassry, Ryan Foerster, Margaret Lee, Chris Wiley (also the most astute critic of emerging photography), Josh Kline, Esther Kläs, Amy Yao, Travess Smalley, Zak Kitnick, Georgia Sagri, Dis magazine, Elad Lassry, Darren Bader, Ryan Trecartin, K8 Hardy and A.K. Burns.

Kogelnik's 'Outer Space,' 1964. (The Kiki Kogelnik Foundation and Simone Subal Gallery)

Those are the newer names, and you’ll see them plenty this season (some are in hotly anticipated group shows coming up at SculptureCenter and MoMA), but it’s not just the youth that’s garnering attention. Over the past few years the art world has found a new enthusiasm for older artists, including many not well known in the U.S. At Callicoon Fine Arts, Photios Giovanis is opening the season with octogenarian Lebanese artist and writer Etel Adnan. On the Bowery, Simone Subal has the late Pop artist Kiki Kogelnik. Earlier this year Mr. Graham showed Peter Fend, whose art takes the form of inventive proposals to environmental and political problems—stretching art to its outer limit. MoMA has a retrospective of the great Polish sculptor Alina Szapocznikow. MoMA PS1 has grabbed “Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980” from Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum. (PS1 is one of the great institutional success stories of the past year. Though it’s easy to lampoon director Klaus Biesenbach’s zest for celebrity, he and curator Peter Eleey are moving nimbly to bring in new art as it’s made. Even its bizarro Performance Dome has been a vital site for experimentation.)

Alina Szapocznikow's 'Petit Dessert I (Small Dessert I),' 1970–71.

But your best bet for aesthetic revelation will lie with the scrappy outfits—their bills paid by a month-to-month combination of volunteers, day jobs, grants and the odd sale—that are percolating on the periphery of gallery neighborhoods, and that eschew straightforward exhibitions (and, usually, artist representation) for heady admixtures of disciplines and activities, some of which can barely, by conventional standards, be considered art. One example is 155 Freeman, the new space run by the DIY Public School, publisher Triple Canopy and film-purveying Light Industry in the north section of Greenpoint, not far from Rawson Projects, Real Fine Arts and Cleopatra’s, three other galleries excelling far from the Chelsea crowd.

Christine Hill, 'Volksboutique Small Business Berlin,' 2010. (Felix Oberhage/P!)

Back in Manhattan, Prem Krishnamurthy, a co-founder of the design outfit Project Projects, is opening a—yes—project space on the Lower East Side called P!, which will showcase anything that happens to strike his fancy. His M.O.: “It’s just the idea there are certain things that I would like to see in the world.” He elaborated, “It will be a space that can function as a meeting point for different kinds of objects and communities.” First up is a show of work by photographer Chauncey Hare, prints by graphic designer Karel Martens and a “performative/relational project” by Christine Hill about neighborhood businesses.

Not far away, down on Division Street, Ingrid Chu and Savannah Gorton, operating under the name Forever & Today, Inc., are hosting unusual exhibitions and events in their 100-square-foot storefront. The multitasking cosmopolitan collective Slavs and Tatars—which also has a show at MoMA—arrives next month. “It’s the idea of contemporary art being in the moment, but always changing,” is how Ms. Gorton explained her venture’s name. “It’s also kind of a joke. People would say, ‘It sounds like a soap opera,’ and we would say, ‘Yeah, it is kind of a soap opera, running a little nonprofit.’” Other fledgling outfits in the area include the Artist's Institute, which is devoting its season to the consideration of Haim Steinbach, and Summer Guthery's Canal Series, which hosts periodic events in a space at West Broadway and Canal that have ranged from a film shoot to an Alice B. Toklas–inspired feast.

Ask around the art world and you hear a lot of people who are enervated by the status quo, even as they promote it. (This writer included, sometimes.) But things may be changing. There is a feeling in the air that the excesses that characterize the top end can be sidestepped and countered. New artists and new models offer alternatives. Let’s see how the next 10 months play out.

arusseth@observer.com

(Home 3 image via Breuning's Tumblr. Work by Szapocznikow © The Estate of Alina Szapocznikow/Piotr Stanisławski/ADAGP, Paris. Photo by Thomas Mueller, courtesy Broadway 1602, New York; and Galerie Gisela Capitain GmbH, Cologne)

Tom Friedman's 'Untitled (A Curse)' (1992) in 'Invisible: Art About the Unseen Exhibition' at the Hayward Gallery, London. (Courtesy Getty Images)

Last week, following Margo Leavin Gallery's announcement that it plans to close after more than 40 years in Los Angeles, we asked readers to respond to Leavin director Wendy Brandow's assertion that the public's interest in gallery exhibitions has declined. She told the Los Angeles Times:

“People are approaching art differently today. They’re not seeking out the thoughtful, complete statement that artists make when they create gallery exhibitions. … The exhibitions have been such an important part of what we do, and they are no longer valued as much by the public.”

Readers delivered a wide variety of takes on the subject.

Vienna-based artist and dealer Lisa Ruyter agreed with Ms. Brandow. "Absolutely true, I'm dealing with it in Vienna too," she wrote, and others joined her, with Los Angeles-based independent curator Terry Myers declaring that the "statement is accurate." On Facebook, a Chelsea dealer wrote, "Yes. It seems to be true," and, echoing a sentiment expressed by many, added, "Art fairs have replaced the gallery in large part as the place for acquisition decisions."

But plenty disagreed, including New York magazine's senior art critic, Jerry Saltz. "People still love gallery shows," he wrote. "A lot. Artists do. I do. I have not met a person in the art world that dislikes gallery shows." Another New Yorker, writer Paul Laster, concurred: "People do still love to look at art in galleries." He added, in an opinion voiced by some, that "Margo Leavin has definitely lost touch with the times."

As many emphasized, the art market has changed dramatically since Ms. Leavin opened her gallery in 1970. Most notably, art fairs have proliferated, going from just a handful at that time (Art Cologne began in 1967, Art Basel in 1970) to hundreds today. "The Walmartization of the world continues apace—the art world is not immune from it and art fairs are a reflection of that," Chelsea dealer John Cheim wrote. As one anonymous commenter said, "Successful galleries are participating in at least 5 fairs a year. Its a shame that galleries even have to worry about focusing on art fairs as much as they do."

Fairs, it's clear, are increasingly keeping both dealers and collectors busy. As art advisor Todd Levin wrote:

The bulk of gallerists’ time is increasingly taken up with creating and protecting their brand, and then inserting that brand into all possible markets, whether it be China, India, Dubai, or Russia—and one of the most expedient ways to do that is through the world wide network of art fairs. In fact, this lack of centralization means that many collectors seemingly go to galleries less and less these days. They just go from art fair to art fair. And art fairs are meant to cater to one niche of people within the art world—the collector.

But even as art fairs become increasingly essential to galleries' financial survival—as sources of new buyers and a large percentage of annual revenues—there seems to be a renewed interest in the "complete statement" historically provided by galleries and their exhibitions. Think of Zwirner and Wirth's 2008 staging of Dan Flavin's 1964 Green Gallery show, Dayan & Luxembourg's 2010 reprisal of Jeff Koons's "Made in Heaven" series, Tate Modern's reconstruction of Keith Haring's Pop Shop for its 2009 "Pop Life" show or the numerous exhibitions about Ferus Gallery.

This focus on exhibitions may be born out of anxiety, a feared sense of loss (think of music followers' persistent worry that digital singles will replace albums), but as one Facebook commenter pointed out, "there are more galleries than ever before....more and more shows," and as Rachel Corbett reports in this week's issue of The Observer, galleries are fighting to build larger and larger spaces, to stage larger and larger exhibitions. Visiting Chelsea on a Saturday can feel like visiting a suburban mall—the crowds are large and the stores are huge (they also have international branches). Of course, most of those people aren't buying, but, many of them artists, they are looking—on the hunt for something to value in an aesthetic, if not a monetary sense. And, considering that artists' markets are often revived following on interest from younger artists, the two things are not, at the end of the day, unrelated. —Andrew Russeth

Many of today’s superstar artists, like Jeff Koons, Takashi Murakami (who also did a West record cover) and Damien Hirst not only do not shy away from publicity-rich spectacles, but embrace and engineer them with a vigor that would have impressed even Andy Warhol. Mr. Koons dreams of hanging a 70-foot-long smoke-puffing locomotive over the High Line, a public-art bauble par excellence; Mr. Murakami donned a plush flower costume and waved to fans from a float in Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade. As for Mr. Hirst, he trumped his epic 2008 single-artist Sotheby’s auction (which garnered $200.7 million) with this year’s Spot Challenge, the globe-trotter’s version of the contest on the back of a cereal box, for which all 11 Gagosian galleries fell into line behind him. These artists demand the love—or at least the attention—of the masses.

Nevertheless, it is rarely the nature of cutting-edge contemporary art to offer itself up so easily to the general public, which accounts for a counterbalancing force, a way in which the avant-garde maintains the initiates-only atmosphere that has always defined it. So it was that just as the last of the 128 people to successfully complete the Spot Challenge card were having their cards stamped at the beginning of March, a painting of a musician by the British artist Merlin Carpenter was going on view at the Independent art fair in Chelsea, after having been locked away during a show at the Berlin gallery MD72 the year before. During that show, collectors willing to part with €5,000 (about $6,900 at the time) were afforded the privilege of viewing the work. Those among the general public interested in viewing Mr. Carpenter’s latest work were strictly excluded from the real painting, able to view it only in reproductions printed on playing cards.

Welcome to the world of secret art. Artists are organizing exhibitions open to just a few people, in out-of-the-way or hidden locales, and making art that operates on rumors or may go unnoticed by all but the most perceptive, clued-in viewers. Still others are concealing their identities through pseudonyms or acting collectively under layers of assumed names and fictive institutions.

Though you might not know it, quite a bit of this willfully obscured art has alighted around New York in the past year or so. Last month, at Frieze New York, a smattering of shopping carts filled with battered belongings were to be found on the lawn outside the fair’s tent on Randall’s Island. Unmarked on Frieze’s public-art map, they were, in fact, sculptures by Swiss provocateur Christoph Büchel, the belongings of homeless people that he had his gallery’s employees purchase for up to $500 a cartful. They were for sale for a hundred times that price, though the only way to know this (until news of the project broke on The Observer’s website and in the daily edition of The Art Newspaper) was to hear the rumor and make inquiries.

A few weeks ago, Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard tucked pieces from a new clothing line by the painfully hip label Hood by Air in a corner of the basement of the Lower East Side gallery Ramiken Crucible, typically used as office and storage space, as part of a show he organized. Ramiken has also rented a tiny, decrepit storefront about a mile away on Delancey, where they host fly-by-night shows visible only from the street: the lights are on, but the door is locked. Passersby are often to be seen peering in, baffled. First, there were a few dozen chairs by Andra Ursuta—their tops are molds of people’s behinds outfitted in day-glo jeans—but those recently gave way to small plaster piece by Gavin Kenyon. There are no press releases for the Delancey shows, and no listing of its existence on the gallery’s website. It’s hiding in plain sight. Rumors spread quickly in the art industry, though, and the Ursuta show hit blogs and Twitter shortly after it first appeared.

Nearby, in a Chinatown mall, the mid-career artist Dave Miko has been inviting select friends to see the painting show he’s installed in one tiny stall. As the artist and writer Sam Pulitzer put it in a recent essay, he’s “managing the show’s attendance to the point of obscurity.” The fact that Mr. Pulitzer—who also helps run a blog called Art Observations With Jerry Magoo, which publishes vitriolic, sometimes anonymous diatribes about various artists and curators—wrote this in Artforum foregrounds the peculiar logic of this type of art: one way or another, the secret needs to come out. To paraphrase that tree-falling-in-a-forest koan, if an artist puts an artwork in a show and no one knows about it, did it ever exist?

The sculptor Darren Bader has tested that one. Few people were able to say what he contributed to MoMA PS1’s “Greater New York” exhibition two years ago because his works were not labeled. (In fact, they included an M.I.A. song playing in a hallway, water bottles, a laptop showing an image and a copy of a Peter Halley painting.) And for a 2010 group show at Harris-Lieberman called “And so on, and so on, and so on...,” his name was listed on the checklist but there was no information about his piece. “It was a no-work work,” a gallery representative informed The Observer.

Then there are the no-artist artists. Late last summer a group of monochrome paintings went on display at Carriage Trade in Tribeca. Big slick works in loud colors—pink, blue, orange—they were attributed to someone named Henry Codax, but the uncomfortable thing about Mr. Codax is that it seems he doesn’t exist. He’s a character in a 2005 novel called Reena Spaulings—which is also the name of a fictional artist as well as a real art gallery on the Lower East Side, and the nom de plume of two other artists. Reena Spaulings the novel was written by an 18-year-old collective called the Bernadette Corporation, which will have a full-scale retrospective at Soho’s Artists Space this fall. (There is a real Bernadette, but never mind.)

A rumor circulated at the time of the show that the white-hot young artist Jacob Kassay and painter Olivier Mosset (who has painted monochromes similar to Mr. Codax’s for many decades) had teamed up to create the paintings and adopted the Codax name. Some pieces sold and a gray one popped up at Christie’s back in March, tagged definitively in the catalog as the work of Messrs. Mosset and Kassay, citing as evidence an Observer blog post about the ongoing rumors. And then, just before the auction, the auctioneer, according to several sources, read a note from Mr. Kassay denying involvement in the work. (This was first reported by blogger Greg Allen. According to a representative at Christie's, the statement from Mr. Kassay read, “The information in the catalogue attributing the work to artist Jacob Kassay is incorrect. Jacob Kassay was not a collaborator on this work.”) The rumor, one might surmise, was fine; market-established authorship not so much. So a handful of collectors now have on their hands artworks whose maker is nowhere publicly established.

There are scores of other recent examples of secret art—shows of paintings by Wade Guyton and Stephen Prina that appear suddenly, announced to only a select group, each year for a single day at Friedrich Petzel Gallery (most recently in March); a two-person show last summer at the Untitled gallery with a rear wall that, when pushed, swiveled and, like a James Bond-style hidden-door bookcase, opened onto a prodigious group show; the recent obsession over Kraftwerk’s über-secret studio in Germany in advance of the group's MoMA retrospective; the hidden rooms and trap doors in Swedish artist Klara Lidén’s shows (there’s one in her current New Museum retrospective); and a drawing by David Hammons at MoMA that was covered with a cloth and unveiled only a few minutes a week by appointment at select times. (Mr. Hammons is a patron saint of this type of secrecy: his contribution to the 2006 Whitney Biennial was an unexplained painting by Miles Davis—yes, that Miles Davis.)

Why this fixation on obscurity? It’s a common cliché that art mirrors society, but it also can work against it, and even attempt to ameliorate some of its shortcomings. As digital technologies began to connect people at distant locations in the 1990s, so-called relational aesthetics brought them back together, however superficially. In the 21st century, when information and, to be sure, capital travel invisibly and at breakneck speeds, artists are working to slow things down and disrupt the way viewers see art. “With one foot outside of the information superhighway, art has a chance to stay dangerous, provocative, unruly, independent and curious,” curator Anthony Huberman wrote in 2007 in a landmark essay on the topic called “I (not love) Information.” He argued such surreptitious tactics can allow “artists the focus to perfect a skill, to sharpen a single idea, to deeply pursue an obsession and to find an invested audience.”

Such tactics also, of course, enrich the aura of art and transmit a level of exclusivity—the more obscure the venue, the harder the entrée into its world, the more attractive the offering. Think of New York’s speakeasies, invite-only restaurants and temporary underground clubs (all firmly within quotation marks)—places without signs and websites, like the Back Room bar or the Bohemian sushi restaurant in Noho, or open only to members, as one of the pioneers of this trend, the cocktail bar Milk and Honey, once was. (One more relatively new art space on the Lower East Side called Cage operates on similar terms: its myriad activities are organized by a network of people and publicity is scant.)

What is thrilling about this new art is that, at its best, it really does alter the way we look at and think about art. At a moment when one can breeze through blogs to catch up on the latest art developments from Berlin to Brussels to Zagreb, there are real pleasures to be had in being forced to work a bit to see art in the flesh. As one young art dealer suggested to me, this secrecy allows for something of the initial thrill of learning about art for the first time—realizing that any item in a room could be that unidentified Darren Bader sculpture, that any person one meets might be Henry Codax.

Those Codax paintings may one day be ensconced within museums next to wall labels that explain their whole complicated history and reveal their maker or makers. If so, that’s perhaps just as well. By then, artists will have some new tricks up their sleeves.

arusseth@observer.com

Installation view of Karen Kilimnik's exhibition at the Brant Foundation Art Study Center. (Courtesy Joe Schildhorn/BFAnyc.com)

Neither Jean nor I ever liked girly art, those petite paintings in fancy frames and fussy works on paper, so it’s no wonder that the work of Karen Kilimnik was never very interesting to us. All I could see in it were frilly pictures of castles and bunnies, and a silly and bad portrait of Paris Hilton dressed as Cinderella. Why, I asked myself, would any painter make work that is willfully wan and whimsical, and that comes across as badly painted, even feeble? The work looked to me almost as though it were designed for failure.

Then, in the summer of 2005, I had a Kilimnik epiphany in the Bevilacqua la Masa Foundation, a palace in Venice that serves as an art venue during the Biennale. Ms. Kilimnik had been invited to take over the entire building with an installation, and the magic she created inside that beautiful but decrepit old palace changed my understanding of her work. I remember walking in and hearing the sound of birds chirping and espying, in the corners, little nests with plastic eggs and fake fuzzy bunnies. She’d strung the chandeliers with pastel colored ribbons, and made paintings of handsome princes and princesses arrayed in 18th-century splendor, surrounded by horses and gardens, castles and lavish interiors, all in the style of some bad painter who worked in a 19th-century mode and mixed present-day celebrities with ancien régime fairy tale whimsy. Ms. Kilimnik’s mad visions cast Leonardo DiCaprio as a prince, Kate Moss as a Park Avenue princess; she brought in Emma Peel, Scarlet Johansen, Nureyev. Hers was a fully kitsch-ified,  candy coated world that looked saccharine at first, but that revealed itself, on closer inspection, to be dark and disturbing.

In fact, Ms. Kilimnik is not a traditional painter at all, she is an installation artist, much like her contemporary, the revered and cultish Cady Noland. This has caused much confusion in parts of the art world, especially when we consider a much younger painter, Elizabeth Peyton, whose masterful portraits of celebrities and art world characters have often been compared to the historical or celebrity-derived works of Ms. Kilimnik. In this comparison Ms. Kilimnik invariably loses because she can’t compete with the masterful brightness and ice cream smoothness of Ms. Peyton’s canvases. But dig a little past the surface and you’ll find this comparison is myopic and non-sensical. Ms. Kilimnik’s paintings must be seen as part of her installations. They are images from an imagination that never reached puberty, and they are not competing with the classic portraiture by the likes of Ms. Peyton, even if, occasionally, their subject matter overlaps.

And so the brand new Kilimnik exhibition at the Brant Foundation in Greenwich Connecticut is a welcome and timely one because it convincingly presents the full range of her oeuvre.  Seeing a single painting reproduced in an auction catalog or hanging in an art fair has never done justice to her work, and almost all the gallery shows I have seen are chock full of sellable paintings but lack the chandeliers, the music and empty perfume bottles that are needed to complete her storytelling.

Mr. Brant’s support and patronage are significant in this regard. He is a seasoned collector who as a young man in the 1960s bought paintings from Andy Warhol and learned about connoisseurship from Bruno Bischofberger, the fabled Zurich-based dealer/investor/collector. A man of many talents, Mr Brant excels at squash and tennis, but in sports he is best known for his polo team White Birch Farm, which dominated US polo for over a decade (I did, however, manage to beat him a couple of times). The patrons of this show are a powerful businessman/art collector and his iconic supermodel wife (Stephanie Seymour); the setting is a beautiful old stone barn abutting polo grounds that have hosted the world’s best and most famous players—there is, in other words, arguably no better fantasy context in which to see Ms. Kilimnik’s work.

The show, which encompasses the entire Brant Foundation, includes an indoor garden as well as chandeliers, birds, landscapes paintings, the requisite portraits and several installations. It’s the first time since Venice that I’ve seen the full spectrum of Kilimnik’s creative output in one place. As such, it is a wonderful testament to her singular dream—or neurosis, depending on how you choose to read it. I came to love the work when I stopped focusing on the pictures and started thinking about the ideas. We are all to some extent locked in our childhood fantasies, whether fond memories of youth or the prison of those painful teenage years, and the effects of formative experiences stay with us, through nostalgia, or longing and melancholy. There is sadness in Ms. Kilimnik’s work, but I also see the childish joys and excitements of adolescent fantasy, even if it is filtered through the mind of a 56-year-old woman.

In my eyes Ms. Kilimnik’s oeuvre is a world unto itself, a strange, kitschy parenthetical expression in contemporary art. I don’t bother comparing her to her art star peers. For most of us, our private fantasies exist in the further reaches of our consciousness. Karen Kilimnik’s are right on the surface: like Peter Pan, she never grew up, and she never will.  This show is a tour de force, so “Brava” to you, Ms. Kilimnik, I hope lots of people make the effort to get up to Greenwich to see just how good it all looks.

Correction: May 16, 2012: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Karen Kilimnik suffers from Tourette syndrome.

editorial@observer.com

Wim Delvoye's "Cloaca Professional" 2010. (Courtesy the artist)

It's been just about exactly 10 years since Belgian artist Wim Delvoye presented his Cloaca—a giant installation that turned food into feces—at the New Museum. He has been a somewhat scarce presence in New York recently: he's appeared in a handful of group shows here, but his last major gallery show in the city was in 2005, at Sperone Westwater. Nevertheless, he has been busy.

The Associated Press reports that Mr. Delvoye has produced an even more elaborate version of Cloaca—Cloaca Professional (2010), it's called. (He's apparently produced at least five excrement-making machines.) It is now on display at the Museum of Old and New Art in Sydney, Australia, the institution "owned by eccentric and philanthropist David Walsh, who made his fortune as a professional gambler, and features one of the largest private art collections in the world," says the AP.

Here's the wire service describing the work:

A series of glass receptacles hang in a row with the machine being "fed" twice a day on one end. The food is ground up "naturally," the way it is in the human body, and the device produces faeces on the clock at 2 pm at the other end.

The smell is so powerful that not many visitors can take it.

"It put me off because of the overwhelming assault on the senses," said Diane Malnic, a Sydney-based accountant.

Thank you to Artnet for tweeting the story. Incidentally, that company's Walter Robinson wrote about the 2002 "Cloaca" show at the New Museum, describing it as "an elaborate anti-art gesture." (The museum served the contraption food from the restaurant Jerry's, which was then located not far away in Soho.)

In 2010, writing in The Brooklyn Rail, John Yau proposed, perhaps only partially as a joke, that Jerry Saltz should have picked it as the artwork of the decade. Now an Australian art critic has a chance to make that happen.

A still from Alex Israel's "As It Lays." (Courtesy the artist and Reena Spaulings)

Alex Israel is a youngish L.A. artist whose pastel-color panel paintings look like the sets of ’80s porn flicks; they’ve been selling like hotcakes at chic galleries in Paris and Berlin. I tried to see his recent one-man show at the übercool and cutting-edge Lower East Side gallery Reena Spaulings Fine Art, but the gallery is so übercool and cutting edge that, on the Friday afternoon I chose for my visit, it wasn’t even open. In fact, the two times I have ventured to this gallery in an attempt to see an exhibition, during regular gallery hours, they have managed to have the doors locked and the lights turned off. I’d given up on writing about Mr. Israel’s work, when I realized that I could simply review his new TV show, As It LAys, the one he’s recently uploaded to You Tube and for which he created a website: www.asitlays.com. This interview show, with Mr. Israel as host, reminds me of Andy Warhol’s famous “Screen Tests”: both projects are, in superficially different but actually very similar ways, forms of video portraiture.

The so-called “Screen Tests” that Warhol made in the early ’60s weren’t really screen tests at all. Warhol shoved his camera in his subject’s face and did a two-and-a-half-minute film. Whether it was a factory regular like Edie Sedgwick or Lou Reed, or some celebrity like Bob Dylan or Salvador Dalí, didn’t really matter, because in the end all the subjects were just meat to grind in Warhol’s lens, reminders that youth, beauty, sex, fame and fortune exist only in the moment.

Before As It LAys, Mr. Israel’s claim to fame was that he was once an assistant to the late L.A. artist Jason Rhoades and served as the doorman for Rhoades’s infamous “Black Pussy Soirée Cabaret Macramé” parties. Now Mr. Israel has succeeded in taking the Warhol screen test to a whole new level by doing interviews with celebrities and quasi-celebrities in which he reads a series of bizarre and awkward questions—to Rachel Zoe, “If you were to create the perfect salad, what would be the key ingredients?”—from a set of index cards he shuffles in his hands. His subjects are left trying to tell a personal story without help or support from their interlocutor. Mr. Israel’s portraits, which seem to both emerge from and comment on the current Facebook/Twitter sound bite zeitgeist, are painful in the way Warhol’s once were: they exist in an existential space devoid of human emotion or sympathy.

Unlike Warhol’s project, for the most part, Mr. Israel’s guests are older, passé. They are walking, talking pieces of L.A.’s cultural history. Taken together, they represent a sampling of L.A. personalities who were once at the center of the scene but now have one foot—or, in some cases, both feet—out the door.

A TV-style interview where the questions are read right off note cards in a harsh and empty environment is a strange thing to watch. But only a few of Mr. Israel’s victims realize they are being set up; most of them just writhe and sweat in their seats. I feel their pain. In the end I was left wondering: what is it like to have once been famous and important in L.A.? What comes after that?

His questions run the gamut from banal to bizarre. Adrienne Maloof, a reality-TV “housewife of Beverly Hills,” is asked, “Did you ever cheat on a test?” She answers without hesitation, “No, I helped others, the whole football team.” Yet she never seems to reflect on what she just revealed to us, namely her relations with the “whole football team.” Restaurateur Mr. Chow is asked, “In the battle between people and robots who wins?” His answer should have been “Get lost,” but instead he responds, “Nature is more precise than a machine, every leaf is unique, just like every thumbprint … a robot is a machine and therefore has limitations.” And it’s funny! It gets worse when 71-year-old singer-songwriter Paul Anka is asked, “Chocolate or vanilla?” and gives a three-minute monologue. Or when Jon Peters, the once-famous film producer and head of Sony pictures (and ex-Barbra Streisand hairdresser) gets caught in a trap when he’s asked, “Are you a good storyteller?” and answers, with candor, “When I was a kid I was more of a liar, but when I grew up I made those lies into a fantasy.”

Their moment in the spotlight may be over, but all of these guests are still dead set on proving their relevance, so much so that they are willing to talk at length to this unknown artist/interviewer. Most of them end up, tragically, revealing their hollow “screen test” side. L.A. is a city obsessed with youth and power; it must not be very pleasant to feel marginalized in a place where you were once the center of attention.

That said, it’s not all tragedy. At 95, Phyllis Diller gets credit, in my book, just for showing up. When asked, “Are you reading anything?” she supplies the riposte, “I cannot read. I am losing my eyesight.” Other interviewees didn’t have such an easy out, and that makes for moments that are strangely poignant. Asked, “What do you want the world to know about you?” the seven-time NBA All-Star James Worthy replies, uncomfortably, “Basketball is what I did for a living but it’s not who I am as a person.”

There are some deliciously awkward moments. Cheryl Tiegs, the ravishing beauty who in 1975 graced the cover of Sports Illustrated, doesn’t fare very well; she reveals that her favorite karaoke song is “At Last” by Etta James. Quincy Jones is asked, “What is your favorite color?” Doesn’t he remember the scene from Monty Python and the Holy Grail when Sir Galahad is asked the very same question and answers: ”blue … uh, no … green” and gets tossed down a ravine for his “mistake”? Clearly he doesn’t, because he sheepishly answers, “Purple, um … and lime, black and uh … orange,” then gives the camera a pained smile. Perhaps the most cringe-worthy of the interviews is the one with JFK’s nephew Bobby Shriver, who is painfully politically correct. “Who would you most like to meet?” he is asked, and he implausibly replies, “I once opened the door to a room and there was Luciano Pavarotti … it was too much for me.” How absurd for this to come from the man who created the global RED charity with his friend the rock star Bono. Oh, Mr. Shriver. Are we now to believe you were never into rock and roll, that all along you had us fooled, and were actually an opera buff?

Three of Mr. Israel’s guests managed to turn the tables on their host—no mean feat. Producer Rick Rubin answers every questions with a single word: “Yes … sometimes … somewhat … no …” Even when asked the final “What do you want the world to know about you?” he refuses to humor Mr. Israel. “I can’t think of anything,” he deadpans. Novelist Bret Easton Ellis takes Mr. Israel to task. When asked, “What do you want the world to know about Bret Easton Ellis?” he replies, “Nothing. I don’t want them to know anything.” Androgynous rock star Marilyn Manson steals the show with a performance. The question ”Have you ever considered going vegan?” is answered, “I considered having sex with a vegan but then I wondered if she would say, ‘Oooh, what’s in your semen?’” When asked, “If you could change one thing about your physical appearance what would it be?” he answers, “Not having such a big dick … it’s troublesome sometimes.” Yes, Mr. Manson, this must be a serious problem for you indeed!

I interviewed Mr. Israel in L.A. last week and tested my theories on him. Weren’t the questions written to make a mockery of the interviewees? He denied that, claiming that he hadn’t even written them. “My intern wrote mild-mannered questions,” he said. “I didn’t want it to be a talk show with hot-button questions.” Hadn’t he deliberately selected individuals whose moment of relevance had passed, whose stars had faded? He took offense at that interpretation. “That’s such a cynical view,” he said. ”I selected people who made a major contribution to the L.A. landscape at a point in time … that’s our city’s cultural history and I chose to celebrate it.”

As part of the Facebook generation, Mr. Israel is perfectly comfortable giving a campy and nostalgic embrace to L.A.’s history, while feigning ignorance of the tragic implications of living in the past. Perhaps he is earnest; his project, complete with his intern’s “mild-mannered” questions, really isn’t, after all, a cynical satire of the talk-show format. Still, am I a throwback to another era because I was looking for deeper meaning, even where there is none?

Perhaps I’m equally unrealistic because in growing older I still hope to grow better, or wiser, or at least more comfortable with what, where and who I am. In As It LAys, success, fame and cultural relevance are not the recipe for happiness or even personal satisfaction. The project reveals several variations on the theme of self-deception; perhaps with age this is something we all fall prey to. In the words of the great 17^th-century French thinker François de la Rochefoucauld, “One is never so easily fooled as when one thinks one is fooling others.”

editorial@observer.com