Director Deborah Kampmeier, whose previous film was the controversial (and poorly reviewed) Hounddog, is now making a biopic of the southern writer Carson McCullers called Lonely Hunter. Jena Malone of Donnie Darko fame will play McCullers. Read More
Well, here's a weird one. The pregnant performance artist Marni Kotak, who has done things like reenact the first time she had sex, will be giving birth inside of Bushwick's Microscope Gallery for a piece titled, "The Birth of Baby X." Beginning tomorrow, Ms. Kotak will be living in the gallery as she waits for Read More
Christie's is first out of the gate with details about its fall contemporary art evening sale in New York, announcing that a classic 1961 Roy Lichtenstein that shows a man slyly looking through a peephole will headline its Nov. 8 auction, where it is expected to sell for between $35 and $45 million. Read More
"He became known as the man of a thousand lies," said magician Derek DelGaudio at the Kitchen last night, explaining that Marco Polo's compatriots back home found his tales of the East to be unbelievable. This was all prelude to a magic act, or performance piece, listed in the program as "A Walk Through China." Read More
Yesterday Sloan Fine Art at 128 Rivington sent out an e-mail blast saying they would be moving. This Saturday, October 8, will be the last day the space will be open to the public. The tone of the e-mail was more excited than dire, but there was still speculation that the move was the result Read More
“We thought we should get closer to the neighborhood,” said Adam Weinberg, director of the Whitney Museum. We were standing in the giant warehouse of Pier 57 and it was still sparsely populated, which called attention to the vastness of the space. Mr. Weinberg was talking about holding the first offsite Whitney fall gala just Read More
If you've worked in, or reported on, the contemporary art world long enough, you're familiar with the idea of the obsessive collector. This is the collector who just can't stop acquiring artworks, and who has built his or her house to accommodate the collection, adding rooms that are designated as galleries, rooms from which furniture has been all but banished. Read More
As protestors continue to rally for a variety of causes downtown, at the "Occupy Wall Street" protests in Zuccotti Park, a Twitter account called @OccupyArtWorld has begun lobbying for change within the art industry, firing off a stream of biting criticisms of today's contemporary art world. Read More
All kinds of rumors have been going around in New York publishing about who would win this year's Nobel prize for literature. Cormac McCarthy? Haruki Murakami? Philip Roth? In the end it went not to a novelist, but to a Swedish poet, Tomas Tranströmer. Read More
Gramercy Park, that private, impeccably kept plot of green in midtown east, is not the first place one might think to look for significant Modernist sculpture. Today, that changed. The park, led by longtime trustees Arlene Harrison, a 40-year resident of the neighborhood, and president of the Gramercy Park Block Association and Rev. Tom Pike, Read More
The painter Jenny Saville will be featured in a solo show at the Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach, Fla., the museum announced today. The show opens on November 30 and marks the Young British Artist's first solo show in the U.S. It will include 15 drawings and 15 paintings from the artist dating from 1992 to the present day. Read More
Paul LaFarge's new novel, Luminous Airplanes, is both a regularly formatted novel and an online "hyperromance" (for more on what that means read the history he just wrote over at Salon). For his book party then, he decided he couldn't just have cheese cubes, wine and the usual sidelong glances and gossip. Instead he organized a participatory experience of his work that was something between a haunted house and a contemporary art installation. Read More
Melville House, the Dumbo-based indie book publisher, kept confusing us when they started posting all over the internet about "adopting a penguin" and "penguin lost." Just because when we think of books and penguins, we have been conditioned by extensive branding and aggressive tote bag marketing to think of one Penguin only . But this promo has nothing to do with that penguin, but rather is about the books Death and the Penguin and Penguin Lost by the Russian crime novelist Andrey Kurkov and penguins, real ones, as in the kind that live in Antarctica. Read More
Philipp Kaiser, a curator at the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, is making a 5,600-mile move, having been picked as the new director of the Museum Ludwig in Cologne. Read More
Learning to sing the complicated songs of Stephen Sondheim fluently, remain rue to your own style, and examine fresh interpretations at the same time is a challenge few singers have managed to master. Karen Akers is the rare exception. In her ravishing new show at the Algonquin’s fabled Oak Room (through Oct. 29) she looks at the brilliant composer’s erratic tempos and captivating lyrics through a magnifying glass, finding new meanings under, behind and on the edges of lyrics less courageous performers inevitably pass over. The result is adventurous and thrilling. Read More
