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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CINCINNATI — The Village at the Lift publicity tent has massive, thick walls of white canvas rising high enough to support a second floor balcony. Normally used for large parties, the tent was eerily empty despite it being the opening Friday of the 2009 Sundance Film Festival.

Back in a corner, sinking so low into a couch that he seemed to be touching the floor, was James Gandolfini, who passed away last Wednesday from a heart attack. But when I saw him he was in in Park City, Utah to speak about the political comedy In the Loop, his first major role since wrapping eight years as mob boss Tony Soprano on HBO’s The Sopranos.

For whatever reason, maybe Sundance gridlock, perhaps some competing publicity events, none of the other journalists showed for the interview. So I spent solo time with the normally press-shy Gandolfini inside a tent that could hold a thousand Tony Sopranos.

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Art school grad Carina Úbeda Chacana unveiled her exhibition, Cloths, at the Center of Culture and Health in Quillota, Chile late last week and it was composed of a display of five years of her own menstrual fluid along with dangling apples meant to represent her ovulation. As part of the hanging display, Chacana stitched the words “Production,” “Discard,” and “Destroyed” below each of the stains.

While art world watchers are probably not surprised by the concept or the execution, the mainstream world still reacts with shock at the thought that anyone would consider menstrual blood or a woman’s menstrual cycle the subject or material for art.

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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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CHICAGO — Last December, rumors about a North Korean unicorn lair circulated on the internet. Word got out that an ancient Korean king once rode this mythical beast. But soon it was discovered that this “unicorn” was not an actual unicorn, but rather an English mistranslation of the word “unicorn.” According to a report on International Business Times, the animal was actually a “beast with a dragon’s head, a deer’s body, the tail of a cow, hooves and a mane.” Because North Korea is known in the US for mysteries like these, and because the internet loves to consume bizarre or “weird” news, headlines about the supposed mythical unicorn creature lived for a while in readers’ minds.

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The new neon Playboy bunny and the concrete “box” and car just outside Marfa, Texas (image courtesy Marfa Public Radio and used with permission)

AUSTIN, Texas — In a strange sequence of events, it seems that the Hugh Hefner Empire wants — and has recently obtained — a lease on 6,500 square feet of land west of Marfa, Texas, which is best known in the art world as the home of artist Donald Judd’s Chinati and Judd Foundations.

The news first trickled out from Far West Texas through an May 30 article from local Presidio County newspaper Big Bend Sentinel replete with diagrams and working sketches, albeit with no comment from Playboy Enterprises or specifically Neville Wakefield, the curator purportedly responsible for the project. It’s worth noting that Wakefield is no stranger to Marfa, he curated Ballroom Marfa’s Auto Body exhibition that was on view from September 30, 2011 to February 12, 2012, and he is also the creative director of Playboy’s Special Projects division — his coming out party last month was featured in the New York Times’ T Magazine.

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Last week when I found myself in Times Square late in the evening hours, there was a man in a perfectly pressed suit, sitting in chair before the TKTS booth staring intently into space. There was a girl in glittery underwear and bunny ears hopping around a construction area for tips. There was the golden off-the-clock mime asking for a cigarette from a businessman who had also just left the office. In other words, at any hour in Times Square, especially in the evening, has some seedy tone of surreality. Similarly, this week’s Times Square After Hours program, called Cabin Fever: An Alpine Fantasy, was a performance event with its own more elevated touches of the surreal, most notably a human/taxidermy collaboration.

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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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If you only know Crispin Hellion Glover as a quirky actor with the gift of an unsettling gaze, then you’re missing out on the major focus of his career as the producer of experimental films that lunge voraciously into taboos. And it’s easy to miss, as the only way to see these films is when he screens them himself. This past weekend, Glover stopped by the Museum of Arts and Design for a two-night installment of his slideshows and films, and later this month he’ll return to IFC.

The program at MAD called It Is Crispin Hellion Glover began both evenings with Glover striding out on stage, bearded and wearing a three-piece suit, then giving an intense reading of eight of his books (he’s also an author), each with a first person stream of consciousness. These were followed by screenings, with It is Fine! EVERYTHING IS FINE. (2007), a murder mystery in 1970s TV style that just happens to have a man with severe cerebral palsy as its villain, on the first night, and What Is It? (2005) on the second, where every character but Glover’s has Down Syndrome, and a massacre of snails occurs.

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Here’s something you may not have known: there’s a massive art factory in North Korea that makes monuments, sculptures, statues museums, and more for at least a dozen countries around the world. In a fascinating story in Bloomberg Businessweek, writer Caroline Winter lays out the details — or at least those she can gather — of Mansudae Art Studio in Pyongyang, which takes up 30 acres, employs 4,000 people, 1,000 of them artists, and also includes a soccer stadium, paper mill, sauna, and kindergarten. Why does every story that comes out of North Korea seem somehow more bizarre than the last?

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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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Some say bartenders are artists for the way they slowly pour their homemade grenadine into a glass creating layers of alternating colors. Others insist they’re craftsmen and craftswomen; choosing the label of “mixologist” in recognition of their recipe skills.

Belly up to the bar, whether at historic landmarks like Louisville’s Old Seelbach or cutting edge destinations like Employees Only (EO) in Manhattan’s West Village or your worn and friendly neighborhood tavern and ask yourself the question at the bottom of every empty glass.

In this post-postmodern age, are bartenders great artisans and are craft cocktails truly an art? Documentary filmmaker Douglas Tirola makes his case for bartending as a new art form via his feature Hey Bartender, which begins its platform release Friday in New York.

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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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The performance that almost incited the well-heeled of Paris to a ravenous riot is celebrating its centennial. Even now the pounding score of Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring that debuted on May 29, 1913 is unnerving with each instrument falling over a complex tumult. While The Rite of Spring is today mostly celebrated as a musical event, it was as much a visual one, with a shocking flat-footed dance, a stage set featuring an eerie painted backdrop, and grim folkloric costumes. It’s appropriate then that one of the most transfixing of the projects marking the 100 year occasion is a digital visualization of the piece.

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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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