Weegee is having quite a moment. Right on the heels of the new West Coast Weegee exhibition Naked Hollywood: Weegee in Los Angeles, the International Center of Photography has put up a new show called Weegee: Murder is My Business. Focusing on the pioneering photographer’s most productive decade, between 1935 and 1946, Murder is My Business showcases the gritty, rough, and utterly arresting images that defined an tabloid sensibility for decades to come. These are tremendous photographs, showing Weegee’s innate understanding of how composition and tone can both document and manipulate. They also make clear how far tabloid  photography has fallen.

Weegee: Murder is My Business
January 20 – September 2, 2012
The International Center of Photography
1133 Avenue of the Americas
New York

Anthony Esposito, booked on suspicion of killing a policeman, New York, by Weegee

Helen Frankenthaler, second-generation Abstract Expressionist and painterly innovator, has passed away. After studying art at Bennington College, Frankenthaler met and dated the preeminent modernist critic Clement Greenberg, and found her way into the burgeoning New York art scene of the 1950s. She met leading artists Willem de Kooning, Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline, and her future husband, Robert Motherwell, and quickly developed her artistic practice. Inspired in part by Pollock’s drip paintings, Frankenthaler began pouring paint directly onto raw canvas, staining it with large swathes of color. This technique galvanized subsequent generations of painters, including Kenneth Noland, Morris Louis, and other members of the Color Field movement. Frankenthaler was 83.

Above: Canyon, 1965, acrylic on canvas

Nan Goldin’s incredibly personal and emotionally potent photographs are major signposts in the recent history of photography, and have had an indelible influence on subsequent generations of photographers. Her photos also helped reveal our society’s deeply ingrained voyeuristic impulses. We are drawn to her photos not only because of their formal accomplishments, but also because of their raw, emotional power. With Scopophilia, her new show at Matthew Marks Gallery organized around our “love of looking,” Goldin tackles that voyeuristic need head-on. With a slideshow, an exhibition method intricately tied to her practice, and through prints, Goldin pairs her classic photos of love, death, sex, fun, and abuse, with images she took of painting and sculpture in the Louvre. This combination throws light on how viewers engage with her  photographs as both art objects and documents, and questions our commitment to the crises (of AIDS, sexual abuse, and drug addiction) they depict. Goldin’s questions are arresting. As they become canonized, are her images elevated (or reduced) to the level of Titian’s paintings? Does that diminish their power? What was their power in the first place?

Nan Goldin: Scopophilia
Matthew Marks Gallery
October 29 – December 23, 2011
522 W 22 Street
New York

A store based on the book by the fabulous Miranda July.

It Chooses You Resale Shop
Partners & Spade
40 Great Jones
NYC 10012
Open until December 11, 2011.

“Mayhem” is a curious title for the Whitney Museum of American Art’s recently opened mid-career retrospective of Sherrie Levine’s work. Walking through the museum’s spare galleries is as sedate a subdued trip to Soho’s neo-modern furniture boutiques – a quiet room of smoked-glass skulls encased in mahogany vitrines, a long passage of three perfectly aligned, spotless snooker tables, a dark gallery walled with washed-out photos of flowers.

Not that this couldn’t be precisely the point curators Johanna Burton and Elisabeth Sussman are trying to make, as Levine’s work has always dealt with commodification and consumption in one form or another. But is that this exhibition’s goal? Sherrie Levine: Mayhem traces Levine’s career from photo-based work of the late 70s, through the heyday of appropriation art (of which Levine was a star), to her more sculptural work of the 90s and 00s, and positions objects and photographs from different periods in dialogue with one another, an arrangement the curators hope will “provoke new associations and responses.” Hence, the infamous After Walker Evans: 1-22 series, classic Walker Evans photos Levine rephotographed from an exhibition catalogue, is hung above Fountain (Madonna), a gold-plated urinal set under glass at foot level.

The “new associations and responses” are meant to address questions of art historical meaning and authenticity, subjects Levine has always been explicitly engaged with. Throughout her career, the artist has played insider art games,  her new work reflexively quoting from the preceding modernist canon. But I found these galleries much more involved with how we engage with art objects as products displayed, bought, sold, and displayed again. Duchamp’s urinal has ossified in conceptual gold for many generations of artists, but it is also literal gold for collectors, and for the increasingly complex constellation of dealers, collectors, independent curators, etc. who make their living in the shadow of the art market. Imagine the bidding war Duchamp’s original urinal would inspire in today’s post-war and contemporary auctions. Looking at Levine’s Crystal Skulls: 1-12, displayed under spotless glass, I couldn’t shake that window shopping feeling, and though I have no doubt that Levine herself is very interested in producing this disconcerting experience, I am less certain as Burton and Sussman are.

That being said, I’m still thinking about the Evans series’ moiré effect, and dreaming about red and white snooker balls. What better reason to (re)visit a show?

Sherrie Levine: Mayhem
Through January 29, 2012

Whitney Museum of American Art
945 Madison Ave. at 75th St
New York, NY 10021

Photography, top to bottom: Whitney Museum of American Art, Danny Kim, Whitney Museum of American Art

For those who may have missed this experience, artist and game developer Pippin Barr has created a browser-based video game called The Artist Is Present: From purchasing a ticket at the entrance to the artwork on the wall you would have queued to get to Abramović the experience feels somewhat authentic (queue times vary according to the time of day, from 20 minutes to over four hours).

“In a way, video games can be incredibly intimidating for players, with the premise that they’ll challenge you and be hard to play. This game is not hard, and it’s not necessarily fun either. It was hugely about it being authentic, for example in having the museum be closed sometimes. In a reduced sense, the game puts the player in the position of the artist; they’re expected to go through this ordeal of having to wait. It mirrors the idea of what Marina Abramović was going through. You’re performing yourself. I think it’s good for people to learn that games don’t have to cater to your every desire, they don’t have to be wish fulfilment,” Barr told The Village Voice’s Rosie Gray.

Reproducing and updating Massimo Vignelli’s classic 1970 New York City transit map, this new guide to weekend service interruptions is one of the best ideas the Metropolitan Transit Authority has had in a long time. (Not sure if this is one, though). Talk about improving quality of life: if anything needs to be an app, The Weekender is it.

The New York Art Book Fair
September 30–October 2, 2011
Preview: Thursday, Sept. 29, 18h–21h

MoMA PS1
22-25 Jackson Avenue
Long Island City, NY 11101

This Sunday, Tim Sweeney’s legendary and  highly influential radio show Beats in Space celebrates its 12th anniversary with a blow-out celebration in Brooklyn. Featuring heavy-hitters like Juan Maclean, Metro Area, Kim Ann Foxman, and our favorites Blondes, the BIS party sounds like THE perfect way to spend an early fall afternoon. Kind of like my day rave days, but with infinitely better music.

BIS 12th Anniversary Mix

Beats in Space 12th Anniversary Party
12pm to 9pm.
Sep 25, 2011.
59-61 N 6th St between Kent and Wythe.
Brooklyn, New York

Matthew Dear (Ghostly Intl)
Juan Maclean (DFA Records)
Metro Area (Environ Records)
Rub N Tug (Eric Duncan and Thomas Bullock)
Kim Ann Foxman (Hercules & Love Affair)
DJ Nature (Golf Channel Recordings)
Blondes (performing Live)
Tim Sweeney (BIS Records)

Buy tickets from Resident Advisor

There was a door because I opened it.
It was the muse. It had a human face.
It had to have to make the three parts fit.
The Cosmos Poems was fire that filled the space

With fire in Life on Earth. The sky
Became a blue lake I was bathing in,
But it was fire. The sun was burning. Fly
Me to the bottom where I’ve been. I’ve been

Completing Area Code 212.
I’ve been in heaven in Manhattan on
The bottom. Hell is what to live can do.
One day I went downtown but it was gone.

The World Trade Center towers still return
In dreams and fall again and fall again
And rise again and people scream and burn
And jump to certain death again and then

They rise back to the hundredth floor and turn
Their cell phones on and call to say goodbye.
The firemen coming up the stairs will burn
Their way to heaven. Everyone will die

And perish, die and live. The people on
The top floors use their cell phones to call out.
Death follows birth as sunrise follows dawn.
High pressure sends a sky-high waterspout

Fire balances on top of. It begins,
The universe begins and death begins,
And every living being burns and thins
Down to a flame that burns away and grins.

I heard them singing and set fire to it.
I hear their screams. Their corpses run in place.
They burst in flames to make the three parts fit.
My trilogy is fire that fills the space.

The muse now raised the laurel crown above
My corpse, and, praising me with what was fire
To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love,
Now set ablaze the funerary pyre.

Dead white males greeted the arrival of
My ghost by praising me with what was fire
To hear, which I breathed in, which burned like love.
I wore the crown of laurel they require.

Beneath a crown of laurel lived a liar.
White man speak with forked tongue with his lyre.
They scream like gulls, beseeching. They scream higher
And dive down, crying, corpses on a pyre,

And rise back the hundredth floor and turn
Their cell phones on. We call to say goodbye.
We firemen-coming-up-the-stairs will burn
Our way to heaven. Everyone will die.

You fling yourself into the arms of art.
You drool to sleep on consolation’s shoulder.
A living donor offers you a heart.
The muse does. Yours got broken getting older.

The UFO that offers you the heart
Replacement is returning from out there,
Deep space, but beaming brain waves saying, Start
Down there, unsheathe the sword inside the ploughshare,

And cut the kindness from your chest, and stick
The Cosmos Poems in the cavity.
A hummingbird of flame sips from a wick.
My tinder drinks the lightning striking me.

Exploding fireballs vaporize the gore.
The runners-on-you-mark can’t live this way.
The have to make the deal so they ignore
Their death and now the flames have come to stay.

They open windows. Now they brave begin
To lead the others to the stairs to die.
The money is the cosmic insulin
The partners in the firms must make. I fly

The UFO that offers you the hear
Replacement that’s arriving from out there,
Its home, while down here the red mist is art
Exploding on the sidewalk from the air.

And some jump holding hands, but most alone,
But some jump holding hands with my warm hand.
They wait inside their offices. They phone
This poem. They stay and while they do they stand.

When I consider how my days are spent,
I’d have to say I spend a lot of time
Not being dead. I know what Garbo meant.
My life is life emerging from the slime

And writing poems. Virgil took my hand.
We started up the steep path to the crest.
He turned to warn me. Did I understand
I would be meeting Dante? I confessed

I hated cold. To flee the urban light
Pollution in the night sky and see stars
Meant getting to a crest of freezing blight
And human nature inhumane as Mars,

And things far stranger that I can’t describe.
I greeted Dante. Maestro! Dawn neared. I
Was looking in the mirror at a tribe
In tribal costumes worshipping the sky.

It made no sense on Easter morning to
Parade in feathers down Fifth Avenue,
Except the natives worship what is true,
And firemen in white gloves passed in review.

The Jewish boy had done it once again.
Wood water tanks on top of downtown flamed.
The Resurrection has returned dead men
And women to the New York sky untamed.

- Frederick Seidel, 2002