When the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia ran aground off Isola del Giglio in January, killing 32 people, its captain made headlines because, far from going down with the ship, he fled the scene and was ordered by a coast guard officer to return. Remember those tapes? “Listen [Captain] Schettino,” reads the English transcript, “you saved yourself from the sea, but I am going to … really do something bad to you …  I am going to make you pay for this. Go on board, [expletive]!” The Swiss artist Thomas Hirschhorn found poetry in this. Read More

The New York Times reports that the Kitchen’s fall lineup will include, among other acts, “Y? O! G…A,” an exhibition by Matt Keegan and Eileen Quinlan. Neither artist practices yoga, but somehow mats are involved. Read More

This past Thursday afternoon, the singer Adam Green flitted around the gallery The Hole, installing a show called “Houseface” that features 30 or so paintings he’d made in the last six weeks. “Houseface” has a simple enough concept: deconstruct a select group of faces and then use them to make architectural paintings. The faces in question are those of Elmo and Big Bird from Sesame Street, and Garfield the cat. At the gallery, Mr. Green, 31, picked up a painting and put it down. He cycled through a pile of four. He gave instructions on where to put a two-foot-high papier-mâché mushroom from the Super Mario Brothers video games, a separate installation in The Hole’s second room. He wore a low-brimmed hat and a scraggly beard and looked very much like the messianic Bob Dylan at the end of The Last Waltz, minus the pacific nature. A blonde girl came in to help hang the works (it was a bit of a last-minute installation), and he tried to say something along the lines of “Hi, how are you? Thanks for coming by,” in a casual way, but went through all the words and body language so quickly that he seemed to be talking to himself. Read More

Jeremy Kost, whose photographs of drag queens, transsexuals and celebrities are being exhibited alongside Warhol’s Polaroids at a temporary gallery at 150 11th Avenue, says he’s fond of freaks. He began his career in “the bowels of the East Village” (that’s his phrase for it) essentially by accident. Read More

This week Luxembourg & Dayan opened a show by the Italian Surrealist painter Domenico Gnoli with an impressive number of the artist’s works, which feature meticulous paintings of the up-close quotidian. The catalogue for the show includes an interview with the artist conducted by Maurizio Cattelan, which is not nearly as odd as you think, despite the fact that Gnoli died in 1970. Read More

A few weeks ago, Gilbert and George, the London-based artist duo, sat side-by-side in the basement theater of the Guggenheim Museum. They were promoting their upcoming show, “The London Pictures,” which opens this Thursday at the galleries Lehmann Maupin and Sonnabend, with a talk on their life and works to a packed house that featured familiar faces like Downtown dealer Gavin Brown and Christie’s honcho Amy Cappellazzo, who wore a suit that seemed to be a tribute to the signature kind always worn by the two men onstage. Both of them are now pushing 70, and despite being at the forefront of the avant-garde in their time, and the fact that neither crossed a leg during the talk, they sounded a little On Golden Pond as they reminisced about a trip to the countryside. Read More

This summer Walter Robinson, editor of Artnet, will curate a show at Haunch of Venison‘s tony new space on 21st Street. The show will open on July 18 and will run for two weeks, part of a summer program for the Christie’s-owned gallery that will feature shorter exhibits.

Mr. Robinson said the idea Read More