GAMBLING CAME TO NEW YORK at just the right moment. Yes, for a long time we have had the ponies, and yes, technically, it has been legal to bet on sports at a few physical locations around the state since 2019. But as of January 8, 2022, gambling on sports became legal in the Empire State via smartphone app, making it as easy for its residents to lose their life savings as it is to swipe a fatefully wrong direction on Tinder. The timing was no fluke: The NFL playoffs began the following weekend. Artforum readers may be unfamiliar with so-called American football, but for reference, you could

OVER MIDNIGHT HOTPOT, artist Ming Wong, curator Kenji Praepipatmongkol, and I pored over the hefty catalogue for Singapore Art Week (SAW) 2022, which earlier this month boasted a staggering 130-plus virtual and in-person events, the most in its decade-long history. This year’s off-kilter mascot—blue googly eyes against a yellow background, reminiscent of the Cookie Monster—was true to its slogan: “Art Takes Over.” The sheer volume of events seemed to suggest Singapore’s ravenous appetite for art.

For the second year in a row, the Tanjong Pagar Distripark, a shipping-port/warehouse-turned-art-nucleus,

“THE PRAYING MANTIS is eating my bees,” Moza Almatrooshi wails as we watch in horrified fascination. A second ago, the mantis seemed to be asleep; now, it holds its fuzzy victim daintily in its forelegs, taking thoughtful little nibbles as if savoring an amuse-bouche. The bee is part of the artist’s work in “Staple: What’s on your plate?,” the remarkable inaugural show at Hayy Jameel, a mammoth new art center in Jeddah. Dealing with food politics and sustainability, standouts include an austere ode to the migratory hilsa fish from Pratchaya Phinthong, chocolate sculptures from the Cercle d’Art

IT WAS IMPORTANT TO ME to be there for it all: the Poetry Project’s Forty-Eighth Annual New Year’s Day Marathon reading. Beginning at 11 a.m. and ending just after midnight, the fundraiser is my favorite New York City tradition, a sentiment echoed by many of the more than hundred and sixty poets who performed remotely over the course of the day on January 1, 2022. The Poetry Project—an institution by and for poets predicated on the virtue of nonhierarchical community-building—has been around since 1966, offering readings, lectures, workshops, and intergenerational mentorship to emerging writers.

“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,