We made you a map and a slideshow.

“Greetings from Captain John. There will be no swimming and no diving.” Sailing on the Frieze ferry to Randall’s Island, the driver told us that we were on our way to vacation, but cautioned against letting loose with freewheeling abandon. Once we landed, that ethos seemed to be in effect at the fair itself: dealers and collectors were having fun, and the fair was certainly crowded, but nobody was breaking out champagne in the early afternoon over skyrocketing sales.

Art fair week used to pain my sensitive art heart. Now all that’s changed; this year, we have a booth! This weekend, we’ll be heading to Frieze, NADA, Seven, Pulse, and Cutlog, and major openings of Jeff Koons, Jack Goldstein, and the Parsons Festival.

When government proposes finding “untapped capital” in the arts, artists may be wary. For the city, the growth of an arts district means money in the bank; for artists, it usually means finding a new apartment. Still, in last week’s Ideas City mayoral panel, a fairly compelling pro-tapping case was made by five former mayors of Austin, Nashville, Paris, and Miami, and the current mayor of Lexington, Kentucky—all of whom have significantly improved the living standards in each of their cities. Several told stories of recovering from a deep recession, often simply by nurturing local color, though that was prominently lacking in the panel itself.

We’ve already got a big fat bonerang for Michael Mahalchick, creator of Official Art F City Judy Chicago Wiener. So imagine our joy when we heard that we’ll get to see even more of him today at NADA! This morning, we received a dispatch from our editor Paddy Johnson, with cryptic but very tantalizing details about some sort of stripper-themed performance that’s going down at 4:30pm, for one hour only.

For the second year running, New York will host not just one, but two major art fair seasons within months of each other. Already fatigue seems to be the byword of choice for dealers, artists, and journalists faced with seeing the same, booth-friendly work throughout the year. For that reason, we look forward to the smaller shows that crop up in alternative spaces. “Wish Meme” dashed our expectations for a hopeful alternative to the blue-chip fairs.

Hurray! MonkeyTown, the avant garde screening, performance and dining venue is back! This summer, MonkeyTown will enjoy a 60 day run at Eyebeam. There’ll be chefs, there’ll be videos, there’ll even be an all terrine menu. I spoke to MonkeyTown Founder Montgomery Knott this week, and asked him about the program. Our interview is now up at The L Magazine.

Soap operas have nothing on the platinum card members of the art world.

“We’re all water in different containers,” writes Ono in 1967. “But even after the water’s gone we’ll probably point to the containers and say, ‘that’s me there, that one.’” Ono concludes, “We’re container minders.”

Guilty as charged. I am a furtive container-minder. But wandering through YOKO ONO: HALF-A-WIND SHOW at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt, the most comprehensive survey of Ono’s career to date, I soon give up trying to pin Ono’s work to a given practice or idea.

From the number of Berliners in galleries last weekend, you would think they were handing out free bratwurst.
Instead, they’d come for art, which fills every crevasse and hole in the city during Berlin Gallery Weekend. It’s similar to Gallery Week in New York, in that it brings big-name artists in for shows at major galleries and institutions. But thanks to cheap rents, you’ll just as often stumble across a show in a back alley, an empty shipping container, or somebody’s apartment. Here are the four shows that, more than the rest, had a little more soul.