The Newsstand, which opened earlier this month in the Lorimer/Metropolitan G and L train connection in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, was curated by Lele Saveri of the 8-Ball Zine Fair for creative media company ALLDAYEVERYDAY. Lodged in the space of a former MTA newsstand, there are international zines and offerings from publishers like Desert Island Books, Miniature Garden, Dashwood Books, Hamburger Eyes, and Peradam, and some magazines organized by McNally Jackson. A sticker machine sits out front, and small stacks of press are even offered for free. When I stopped by, there was a photo shoot happening (as you do with a hip, underground, well-curated art newsstand), but there seemed to be a fair amount of people stopping by anyway from the endless travelers in movement through the station.

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VENICE — Chinese dissident artist Ai Weiwei’s six-part “S.A.C.R.E.D.” (2011–2013) is a stark installation that sits beneath a round, heavenly fresco by the late Baroque artist Sebastiano Ricci, surrounded by the works of other Italian Old Masters, including a fresco by Alessandro Vittoria, an altarpiece by Renaissance artist Lazzaro Bastiani, and a chapel with works by Mannerist painter Palma il Giovane.

Entering from the street, you walk into a typical Venetian church interior, but in place of pews you see six oversized iron boxes that at first resemble a Minimalist installation. Upon further inspection, you discover windows and “skylights” that allow you to peer into six scenes from the artist’s 81-day incarceration in 2011.

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Frank Lloyd Wright’s Guggenheim Museum in New York is one of the most famous contemporary art institutions in the world, and yet part of that fame, lending the place a kind of quasi-notoriety, is the idea that the building itself isn’t actually a great venue for showing art. Or as architecture critic Paul Goldberger wrote a few years ago in The New Yorker, “the charge that the building upstages the art has become part of its legend.” In my experiences at the Guggenheim, I’ve found that the legend often holds true — the perpetually sloping spirals of the space make for excellent wandering but distracted art viewing.

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Although I live in Los Angeles and my father now resides in Florida, we’ve been collaborating on single-panel cartoons for the past year. Monday through Friday I email him a short paragraph and then he illustrates it by hand, scans it and sends it back. Sometimes there are tweaks to be made, but for the most part he nails it the first time.

My father attended Pratt Institute on an art scholarship and started his elementary school career as an art teacher but for the past three decades or so, he’s had no time to pursue his craft for his own edification.

In 1977 my mother was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. As her health deteriorated, they both had to retire prematurely; she because it’s hard to teach from a bed and he to take care of her. After moving from Long Island to Fort Myers my father continued to be my mother’s sole caretaker.

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The battle over the future of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ collection is still only a theoretical one, but that hasn’t stopped high-profile people throughout the state from taking sides. The latest entrant into the fray is Michigan Attorney General Bill Schuette, who says the art cannot be sold to help cover the costs of Detroit’s bankruptcy.

Schuette released a 22-page opinion on Thursday, the Detroit Free Press reports, along with a statement that echoes the argument of DIA Director Graham Beale:

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I still remember the ripples of titillation — occasionally marked by muffled, satisfied guffaws — that spread predictably through the art world when Jeff Koons first exhibited his shiny white and gold porcelain sculpture, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” (1988) at Sonnabend in 1989. The sculpture was part of the series, Banality, which became a definitive step toward garnering the kind of attention Koons has always craved.

Besides being perfectly, shiny white, as only glazed porcelain can be, “Michael Jackson and Bubbles” was noteworthy as the first of Koons’s perfectly sealed, oversized Fabergé eggs. Unlike the original “Imperial” Fabergé eggs — which were priceless trifles painstakingly made for the Russian royal family’s amusement — Koons’s overpriced baubles do not open, revealing a surprise. The only revelation they offer is the immaculate perfection of their gleaming surfaces, from porcelain to stainless steel.

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Earlier this week there was a brief spark of hope that the Michigan Legislature would swiftly pass a bill to try and prevent a potential sale of the Detroit Institute of Arts’ (DIA) collection. That spark has been put out, at least for now, by both the State House of Representatives and Governor Rick Snyder.

Although the state Senate has moved quickly on the bill sponsored by Republican Senator Randy Richardville, the House of Representatives is insisting on going on summer break first. A spokesman said the House wouldn’t consider the bill until the fall, according to the Detroit Free Press.

Even worse, though, is the article’s statement from Governor Rick Snyder, also a Republican, about the situation regarding the city and its beloved museum:

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The massive Domino Sugar Factory that faces the East River with its iconic yellow sign is expected to soon be dwarfed by towering skyscrapers. However, there are some supporters who are rallying to get public support to turn the old factory into a cultural center.

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With the arrival of accessible photography came a developed culture of portraiture for not just the living, but the dead. Up until the 1830s with the creation of the daguerrotype, creating an image for remembrance of your loved ones was reserved for the rich, who could commission paintings. Yet with photography came a way to preserve a family member’s image before they disappeared into the earth.

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On May 24 the news broke that Detroit’s emergency manager, Kevyn Orr, was considering whether the city could or should sell off the art collection of the Detroit Institute of Arts(DIA) to help pay back its debts. In the roughly week and a half since then, loud reactions have been heard from many corners of the art world, as well as writers in various media outlets and Michigan politicians themselves. The reactions pretty much range from “this is a bad idea” to “this is a terrible idea.”

For his part — and not surprisingly — DIA Director Graham Beal told the New York Times that he didn’t think the museum’s collection really could be sold, since it’s held in the public trust:

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What is the bizarre pleasure in looking at art in banal rooms? Is it the economic disparity between the blue-chip objects and their more middle and lower class surroundings that make them interesting? Maybe this unexpected contrast emphasizes that context is everything in the realm of modern and contemporary art. Well, presenting Great Art in Ugly Rooms.

Outside of the white box, do these works lose a little of their power to inspire? It amazes me that Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase, No. 2″ (1912) looks surprisingly at home in a wood-paneled room, or that the Barnett Newman easily blends into the bargain store surroundings by visually being transformed into a generic super graphic. Some of the art does look out of place, like the work by Jean-Michel Basquiat, which is far too edgy and busy for a typical fast-food chain.

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The New York Times explains the video and lyrics, whose translations are too vulgar for reprinting in the newspaper:

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This day may have been inevitable, but now it’s finally here. In its attempt to take over the world -- or at least everything that can be bought and sold in the world -- Amazon is launching an art gallery.

There aren’t many available details yet about the endeavor, but an email announcement for an informational event was forwarded to Hyperallergic. It reads:

This summer, Amazon is planning to launch a Fine Art Gallery where customers will be able to purchase original artwork offered by a select group of invited galleries via Amazon.com. You are cordially invited to a special event in New York where we will introduce the Amazon Art marketplace to New York galleries … We have received overwhelming support from the galleries that have already joined the platform, and we would love the opportunity to offer your gallery’s selection in the Amazon Art store.

We reached out to Amazon for more information, but a public relations representative at the company replied, “We’re not able to comment at this time but stay tuned.”

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A few months ago, on a February evening in Grand Central, Brooklyn-based artist Enrico Miguel Thomas carried his drawing board a few paces away from where he had been set up, illustrating from a counter  — leaving behind a bag full of markers and a folded-up easel. After a brief moment of gathering the necessary detail on his subject, a process he characterizes as having taken no longer than five minutes, he turned to find a swarm of police officers gathering near his bags, which were less than ten feet away. After approaching the officers, claiming the bags, and identifying himself as an artist, the MTA police insisted on “clearing” his property with a K-9 bomb-sniffing dog.

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SAN FRANCISCO — Pollution and health have been on the Chinese mind as of late. From dead pigs in Shanghai to tips for avoiding bad air in Beijing, a clean environment can be difficult to find. Smog and water pollution have become a feature of China’s urban landscape, creating a hazard not just for Chinese citizens but people all over the world.

Traditional Chinese ink paintings are often known as shanshui, or mountain and water. Unfortunately, much of China’s water is no longer drinkable, and its mountains are difficult to find behind the smog. It’s a topic ripe for creative exploration.

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While staggering auction record peaks were summited this week by some talented human artists, a more amateur representative of an underrepresented artist species is expected to gain some auction attention of his own. Photographs by Mikki the chimpanzee that show blurry views of Moscow are estimated to fetch between $75,000 and 100,000 at Sotheby’s.

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For as long as there have been cameras, there have been photographers who've captured the intimate, unaware moments of human existence. Masters like Eugène Atget and Henri Cartier-Bresson defined photography as an art form with their images of people simply going about the business of being themselves. And the recent posthumous fame of Vivian Maier is ample proof of our obsession with the beauty of the unposed moment.

Yet in a world in which anyone with a phone -- which is pretty much everyone -- can be an amateur lensman, the opportunity to go too far is always present, if fuzzily defined. There is an entire genre of creepy quasi-porn gleaned from surreptitious photos of women, and a whole new class of sex offenders thanks to it. And Instagram, when not fulfilling its primary function as a chronicle of other people's meals and manicures, is often one big exercise in "Look at that stupid person over there." But in a daily world of questionable ethics, photographer Arne Svenson has managed to come up with a new head-scratcher. For his latest project, he didn't go out to the street. He peered into the window.

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André Malraux, the prolific French critic and Minister of Culture under Charles de Gaulle, once wrote that art is an “anti-destin,” a revolt against destiny. And by that measure, the country’s recently-released report calling for a tax on internet-connected devices to fund cultural production qualifies simultaneously as artless and a work of art in itself. The generally well-intentioned document, authored by Pierre Lescure, a special advisor on France’s “exception culturelle” doctrine, was presented to President François Hollande on Monday, and Le Monde reported that it marks a departure from the aggressive copyright-protection tactics previously favored by Nicholas Sarkozy’s conservative government.

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