All told, Cambridge’s summit on evil last Sunday turned out to be good. Budding gnostic and MIT graduate student Ross Cisneros, one of six candidates in the institute’s visual-art program, had convened “Regarding Evil,” bringing together a “wise clergy” (in his words) that included natty artists Ronald Jones and Julian Laverdiere; bespectacled political scientist Jodi Dean; black-clad, snuff-taking, muscle-bound musician, Church of Satan associate, and Charles Manson friend Boyd Rice; and the presence of Manson himself (in the form of two incoherent missives written from prison). Matthew Barney

With the Bush twins sighted recently at hipster hotspot Freeman’s and indie provocateur Vincent Gallo proclaiming his admiration for George W. and Nixon while promoting his last film (spawning the label “hipcon”), painters Mathew Cerletty and David Scanavino’s “Neocon”—a show of young downtown artists (and one father figure, Robert Moskowitz) at Gavin Brown’s Passerby—couldn’t be more timely. I was half expecting a show cooked up by the Project for the New American Century (the invite even sported a Ronald Reagan commemorative stamp), and the show did offer up a sampling of neocon-inspired

Daniel Buren’s exhibition “Eye of the Storm: Works in Situ” opened Thursday night at the Guggenheim, with a three-tiered scale of exclusivity: ultra-privée at 6:00, when director Thomas Krens made his opening remarks, hailing this as a “great night for France;” 7:30 (my ticket); and 9:00 for la foule. It seemed that the entire French art world—or at least that of a certain generation—had turned out for the US apotheosis of un trésor national. The charming Lucien Terras served as my chaperone through Frogville, introducing me to Pompidou director Alfred Pacquement and Buren himself,

Throughout the day following the opening of Rachel Feinstein's second solo turn at Marianne Boesky, all anyone wanted to know was who had been there the night before. In fact, there was only one question: Was Marc Jacobs there?

Yes, Marc Jacobs was there! At the dinner, held at funky El Quijote (in the Chelsea Hotel), he was at the head table with a very glam Anna Sui, who had the ear of Sotheby's Tobias Meyer, who had the eye of art consultant Mark Fletcher, who was at the elbow of collector (and sometime John Currin model) Dianne Wallace, who was opposite Feinstein and Currin, who administered

Last week I took the morning train to Cologne. On the new high-speed line, the trip from Frankfurt only takes an hour (you feel like you’re playing some kind of virtual-reality game), and I didn’t even manage to finish reading the newspaper before I had to get off and attend to the strange question: What can you do with a hole in the ground and half a million dollars? That’s what Nicolaus Schafhausen, the newly appointed director of Cologne’s as-yet-unbuilt European Kunsthalle, has to figure out. (I was a member of the jury that picked him, so you can blame me if it turns out to be a failure.)

One of very few publicly funded galleries in the East End, the Showroom has a civic remit that primarily involves giving deserving artists their first London exhibitions. Last year, though, it expanded its brief to include an annual conference, which is why, during last Saturday’s freakish burst of warm weather, several dozen delegates elected to sit in the gallery’s windowless, triangular back room and listen to Thomas Lawson and Nicolas Bourriaud debate the modernist tropes encoded in The Incredibles. OK, so this was an uncharacteristically light moment but permissible: The conference’s title

The Hort’s ginormous annual Armory Show brunch at their ginormous three-floor Tribeca loft was rollicking. As I entered their sprawling kitchen/living area, I noticed Jack Pierson’s funkily unmatched letters spelling out “Being Alone” over the mantle, and half the art world having bagels and coffee and schmoozing away. There was a lot of great work: Nicole Eisenman, Karen Kilimnik, Andrea Zittel, and Marlene Dumas among others; too much to absorb after my megadosage uptown, lest my head explode. Charlie Finch, the yenta from Artnet, was centrally located on a couch: “There’s Rhonda Lieberman,”

Dear Artforum diary, my mission this time was to attend several collectors’ open houses, where big art buyers esteemed for their shopping prowess graciously extend their hospitality so that fellow Armory Show VIPs can check out their stuff. What Imelda Marcos is to footwear, these people are to cutting-edge art. It was a weekend-long schlepathon—in heels, though they weren’t required—but also a chance to see big-ticket contemporary art in its intended setting: some of the swellest pads in Manhattan. Alas, I skipped Jeanne Greenberg’s. The uptown dealer’s event was first thing Friday

The opening of P.S. 1’s locals-only megasurvey “Greater New York 2005” marked the climax of a protracted and, for some, rather fraught selection procedure. Doleful also-rans nursing lukewarm beers in P.S. 1’s courtyard reported having had up to five studio visits with the show’s curators and still not making the cut; others complained of having had their initial invitations to participate humiliatingly revoked. Some of those who did secure a spot on the roster were not informed of their inclusion until mid-February and were then asked to make new work in time for the opening. Even the official

On Friday night, I found myself in a newly renovated loft above the former McBurney YMCA on Twenty-third Street, ambling among the candles and lace that filmmaker Mary Jordan had strewn about liberally in loving tribute to underground film nonpareil Jack Smith. The event was ostensibly a showcase for edited segments of Jordan’s forthcoming documentary Jack Smith and the Destruction of Atlantis; refreshingly, on a weekend during which it seemed that everyone in New York was selling something, the only thing on offer here was Smith’s dream of absolute beauty in an anything-goes environment. If

How many of the seemingly thousands of art-world revelers drinking to Damien Hirst on the Lever House terrace Friday night knew that what they were really celebrating was the end of art? At least that’s how it felt on West Twenty-fourth Street, where Gagosian presented Hirst's first show in New York since the former YBA gave up the bottle for more sober pursuits. Like painting. Executed in photo-realist style from pictures in magazines and print ads, the thirty variously sized works on view depicted Hirst's familiar fascinations with soul-killing violence and living death. One painting showed

At 4 pm on Thursday, a mere hour before the doors of the 2005 Armory Show opened for the preview gala for which ticket-holders had paid as much as $1,000 a head, the floor was still buzzing with non-paying “professionals”—a pre-preview group that, in something of a gaffe on the part of the fair’s organizers, included not only the press and museum dignitaries but a number of “discretionary” guests (read: collectors) invited by dealers who, for the first time, were permitted a pass or two for favorite clients unprepared to pay to shop. By 4:15, fair administrators had taken to the floor with