“WHO THE FUCK told you to put up the barricades?! They look terrible! Remove those barricades NOW!” I am eating breakfast at KHLEB-2, GES-2's in-house bakery, half an hour prior to the official opening’s scheduled time. So high are the histrionics that I momentarily wonder if I’m witnessing some kind of special guerilla performance portion of the inaugural program. Housed in a historic power station just across the Moskva River from the Kremlin, the serially-delayed GES-2 House of Culture represents the crowning jewel and biggest permanent footprint of the V-A-C Foundation’s international, and

THE EXHIBITION “MIGHT FEEL A LITTLE LIKE A FUN HOUSE,” Lauren Boyle tells me at the Centre d’art Contemporain Genève. Boyle, alongside Marco Roso, David Toro, and Solomon Chase, is part of the collective DIS, which, with the Centre’s director, Andrea Bellini, has curated this year’s Biennale de l’Image de Mouvement, titled “A Goodbye Letter, A Love Call, A Wakeup Song” and billed as “an exit from our human-centered, capitalist death drive.”

In preparation for it, each of the show’s three floors was divided into viewing rooms connected by dark, twisting halls. Visible from circular windows, these

ONE MUST BE PRETTY DETERMINED to make it all the way to Castello di Rivoli by public transport. An elderly gentleman who offered to be my guide from the Paradiso metro station strongly advised me against doing the last leg of the journey on foot. “I used to do it regularly when the museum first opened, but I’m no longer twenty-five,” he said. “The final ascent is a killer.”

Located some twenty kilometers from Turin’s city center, the formidable structure that has housed the contemporary art museum since 1984 sits atop a hill overlooking the Susa valley and the jagged peaks of the Alps. My reason

I KNEW I WAS LATE when the Instagram notification popped up on my screen. At 6 p.m. sharp, @hansulrichobrist was live from Palais de Tokyo, where Anne Imhof’s performers were starting their four-hour-long eschatological march. As I made my way inside, the procession had already dispersed, letting tension and impatience build up before the first act: a vulturous Eliza Douglas perched on a railing, engaging in a pared-down duet with her machinic double, an orbiting sound speaker.

The cheat codes to the German artist’s meticulous crowd control apparatus were swiftly delivered to me by a black-clad

“THE COLLECTORS aren’t coming to Abuja—I have to go to them,” Dolly Kola-Balogun, founder of Retro Africa, told me at the opening of the ninth edition of 1-54 Contemporary Art Fair in London at her booth, where she was showing Tyna Adebowale. Her prices, she explained as we discussed the shrinking collector base in Nigeria, are pegged to the dollar, which the Nigerian naira is increasingly weak against. “If I want my artists to be well-known and reckoned with, I have to travel.” 

This itinerant spirit is reflective of a burgeoning moment in London and other Western art capitals, where African

“THAT’S WHAT ARTWORKS ARE BEST FOR, aren’t they?” said Grayson Perry, posing in front of a painting by Sarah Sze. “Backdrops for photos!” It was Monday of Frieze week, and the British artist appeared at Victoria Miro’s “intimate dinner for eighty,” hosted inside its vast Islington space, as his alter ego, Clare, in pink Mary Janes and turquoise tights. After admiring Perry’s large silver necklace—a mini version of his sculpture Chris Whitty’s Cat, 2020—I ate pink macaroons, spied Zadie Smith, and papped Isaac Julien against another of Sze’s electro-dystopic abstractions.

I’d arrived at Miro from

THE AUTUMN BREEZE hit in the last days of September, filling Timișoara with a chill blowing in from its eastern European neighbors. I walked by the flaking ornate façades lining the serpentine streets of Romania’s third-largest city. A particular kick about biennials in smaller cities, besides getting to drink hot chocolate with the mayor (in this case, the newly elected, thirty-seven-year-old Dominic Samuel Fritz), is the invitation to creep into nooks and crannies that would otherwise go unnoticed.

Luckily, the malleable premise of the fourth Art Encounters biennial—an exploration of “the act

“LET'S JUST SAY that the Italian Ambassador is a great friend,” said Isa Lorenzo, owner of Manila’s Silverlens Gallery, from her Art Basel Features booth, when asked how she managed to get into Switzerland from Asia. “We self-quarantined for a week on the Amalfi coast. Luckily, we can sell art from the beach.”

With so many borders closed, many knew that this edition of Art Basel would be less international, perhaps even a return to the early demographics of the fifty-one-year-old fair. “In the 1970s, there were hundreds of people in the art world,” said Francis Outred, a London-based art consultant,

INDEPENDENT’S ABILITY TO CHOOSE locations that have private members clubs is unmatched. This year it had left Spring Studios, where someone told me it was outbid by Fashion Week, for the Battery Maritime Building, where a Cipriani recently moved in and bolted a gaudy nameplate to the facade, insisting it be called Casa Cipriani, which no one did. It’s an absurd place, but also a fitting expression of New Yorkers’ recent yen for dining in traffic and pretending they’re in the Veneto. People enjoyed six dollar Diet Cokes and plastic bowls of pasta on the terrace, which has spectacular views

A BLUE 1969 CADILLAC COUPE DEVILLE is parked on North Orange Drive across the street from Jeffrey Deitch’s LA gallery, a flying saucer affixed to the roof. License plate: UNARIUS. The sidewalk is swarming for the opening of “The Emerald Tablet,” a group show organized by and starring local painter Ariana Papademetropoulos. The crowd stews in the hot sun, phones waiting to be deployed as two men slowly toil around the car; what exactly everyone is waiting for remains enigmatic, at least to me. Eventually it becomes clear we are watching thirty-three white doves being laboriously stuffed into the

WINDSWEPT AND SOAKING WET, I took a seat on a Barcelona chair. Around me wall text was still emerging from behind sheets of protective plastic, and a bright red crane extended to fix a light in the ceiling. I’d been circling the expansive terrace of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie for a while, searching for a way into Mies van der Rohe’s immense glass box, which is finally reopening after a six-year overhaul led by David Chipperfield architects. Amid the rainstorm, the building’s inhuman proportions and impossibly clean lines seemed alienating and defiant. A huge, newly polished Henry Moore

AMONG THE MANY PROBLEMS the United States finds itself confronting in the summer of 2021 is a shortage of chlorine for its swimming pools. This shortage is not, as you might guess, because of ongoing hygiene theater or because you can cure Covid by injecting yourself with bleach. Rather it results from the (accidental) detonation one year ago of a chemical plant in Louisiana that produces half the US supply of chlorine tablets. Despite some workarounds, the explosion put a crimp in the sanitizing pipeline.

Los Angeles is a town smitten with swimming pools, absolutely nuts for them. During the