It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

As this episode progresses, Rick becomes increasingly bored with Capote, who forces him to join him in venues where a repairman stands out. During a lunch at La Cote Basque, the Midtown eatery where Capote and his friends often dined, Rick talks about hacksaws and handiwork while socialites such as C. Z. Guest discuss Gore Vidal, the author who sued Capote over libel. (Capote countersued; Capote lost.) “Who’s Gore Vidal?” Rick asks, with Schnabel inflecting his voice as though he were genuinely confused.

By now, the blow jobs are beside the point. In bed together, Capote seeks one while they are watching an episode of The Love Boat, and a disaffected Rick says to wait. Maybe he’ll do it during commercial break, he explains.

Andy Warhol, who really did star in an episode The Love Boat, playing himself, flashes by on screen. (Warhol appeared on the show in 1985, a full seven years after this episode takes place.) “Look, your friend Andy’s on Love Boat,” Rick says.

“My God, it’s a horror show!” Capote responds. “They put embalming fluid in his foundation, didn’t they.”

Schnabel’s appearance on Feud is the latest art-world connection that has emerged on the series, which streams on Hulu, although the others have been set more within the world of the show rather than outside it. Babe Paley, a major art collector, is one of the show’s protagonists, and last week’s installment featured a musing on a Diego Rivera painting of a nude C. Z. Guest. Meanwhile, in this episode, the Ella Beatty character, a young version of the actress Kate Harrington, visits artist Richard Avedon’s studio, where she is photographed dancing.

The Headlines

BIENNIAL BONANZA. The Cape Town, South Africa–based curator and artist Khanyisile Mbongwa has been tapped to organize the next Liverpool Biennial in England, which will open in June of 2023, ARTnews reports. On Wednesday, the Biennale de Lyon in France also announced the artists slated for its September show. “Fragility” is its focus. Across the pond, the Whitney Museum has released a 63-strong roster for its upcoming biennial, which arrives in April. The participants skew older than in past editions, Alex Greenberger notes in a breakdown of the list in ARTnews, and 25 percent were born outside of the United States. Also on the calendar for April is the opening of the Venice Biennale . The lineup for the main show has not yet been revealed.

HOMECOMING. Thomas Gainsborough’s storied Blue Boy (ca. 1770) painting has gone back on view at the National Gallery in London 100 years after it was last shown there, before being shipped off to California railroad tycoon Henry Edwards Huntington, who had purchased it. (His namesake museum in San Marino, California, loaned it this time.) “It is a remarkably beautiful picture, it’s striking, it’s moving, it’s beautifully painted, it’s enormously sort of romantic,” the gallery’s director, Gabriele Finaldi, told Reuters. Not everyone is taken with the angelic youth. Guardian critic Jonathan Jones writes that it “makes you wonder if as a nation, when it comes to art and the soul, we have something missing.” Yikes! In Apollo, scholar Juliet Carey has a deep dive on the piece, noting that it is but one of a “whole gang of ‘Vandyke’ boys (and men), which collectively illuminate themes of childhood, adolescence and masculinity, dress and the manufacture and politics of silk and satin.” It will be on view in London through May 15.

The Digest

Dealer Vito Schnabel has paid $9.2 million for the gallery space he had been renting on West 19th Street in Manhattan’s neighborhood. “It’s an incredible space with amazing light,” Schnabel said. “The artists love it and embrace it as well.” [New York Post]

An anonymous collector has put forward funds to help pay for the legal defense of Yulia Tsvetkova, an artist facing criminal charges for posting feminist drawings online, Sophia Kishkovsky reports. [The Art Newspaper]

The estate of the renowned Filipina artist Pacita Abad, who died in 2004, is now represented by New York’s Tina Kim Gallery. A major Abad retrospective is on deck for the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis in 2023, as is a solo show at Kim. [ARTnews]

The Royal Institute of British Architects’ International Prize for best new building went to an 80-bed hospital in rural Bangladesh that was designed by Kashef Chowdhury and his firm Urbana, which is based in the capital city of Dhaka. [CNN]

NFT-Y! A granddaughter and great-grandson of Pablo Picasso are selling NFTs of a ceramic piece by the artist, ARTnews reports. “I think it fits within Picasso’s legacies because we are paying tribute to him and his way of working, which was always being creative,” the grandson, DJ Florian Picasso, said. Meanwhile, actor Johnny Depp is selling NFTs of his paintings of friends and people he admires, Page Six reports.

The Kicker

THE SWEET SMELL OF SUCCESS. Artist Charles Ray, a master of meticulous figurative sculptures in milled steel, aluminum, and handmade paper, has four major shows this season, including one at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, which features an enchanting new cypress piece inspired by the archangel Gabriel. In a profile in the New York Times, Ray told critic Jason Farago that, when he began working with that material in the 2000s, “everyone was using old socks and teddy bears and stuff. All contemporary art smelled like a secondhand thrift store. And I had this beautiful piece that just reeked of Japan.” [NYT]

The platform, whose name is pronounced like the word “artificial,” launched on Friday with an auction of Francesco Clemente NFTs. Like other NFT enterprises, ArtOfficial will stage sales that sometimes come with added perks for buyers. In today’s auction, the buyer of Clemente’s Milarepa’s Dream (2021), an image of a heart pierced by a white flag, will be able to have their portrait painted by the artist within a year of purchase.

In the coming months, works by artists represented by Vito Schanbel’s gallery, such as Jordan Kerwick, Spencer Lewis, Ariana Papademetropoulos, Julian Schnabel, and Gus Van Sant, will be available, along with a few artists not represented by the Gallery. 

Vaynerchuk and Schanbel developed the idea for ArtOfficial less than a year ago. “Within 30 or 40 minutes it was very clear that there was potentially an opportunity to provide exceptional value for top contemporary artists,” Vaynerchuk said. “We could provide a really strong NFT strategy for artists who are navigating this incredible shift in consumer behavior.” 

Schanbel said that ArtOfficial is a place where works are not just sold but created. Describing the platform as “an extension of my gallery,” he added, “It’s not just a sales platform.”

ArtOfficial aims to foster artists’ creation of NFTs, and it’s not alone in that regard. NFT platforms like Foundation, OpenSea, and others offer curated selections of work from established and rising artists. Schnabel said that ArtOfficial is different from these in that it is “more selective than other platforms.”

ArtOfficial faces steep competition. In recent months, galleries like Pace have launched their own platforms with the aim of offering NFTs by the artists on their roster, while other enterprises like Christie’s are working with artists to create NFTs of their works. It is clear that more art world NFT platforms are coming, though whether the community that often dictates the value of these projects will come to embrace these enterprises remains to be seen.  

Ron Gorchov, Machpelah, 2005, oil on linen, 78 by 70 inches.

This exhibition, Ron Gorchov’s first in over a decade, offered an overview of the painter’s work since the 1970s. The 75-year-old Gorchov started his career in New York in the late 1950s, making Abstract Expressionist-derived paintings. Abandoning this approach in the 1960s, he began to develop works that were characterized by an eccentric mix of formal and expressive concerns. In a non-programmatic manner, he linked the issues of abstract image-making, nonrelational composition and objecthood.

The earliest paintings in this exhibition employ the shaped-canvas format (a bowed surface and rounded-off corners) that became Gorchov’s signature. These shaped canvases feature scruffy monochromatic grounds over which float paired forms (generally thin verticals). Another device he used to emphasize the objectness of his paintings was to leave exposed the ragged edge of the canvas and the staples used to attach it to the stretcher. By these various means, Gorchov makes the viewer aware of the painting’s surface and support.

Ron Gorchov, Joseph Brandt, 1993, oil on linen, 67 5/8 by 58 1/8 by 10 1/4 inches.

This interest has continued throughout his career and is a fundamental aspect of two large freestanding constructions consisting of vertically stacked, monochromatic shaped canvases. One of them, a piece that was first shown in the 1970s but only recently completed, the 20-foot-high Entrance (1972/2005), consists of two 15-foot-wide canvases—one yellow, the other blue—balanced like a lintel on two posts of equal height, one made of four differently colored canvases, the other of six shorter ones. By the 1980s, however, Gorchov was creating asymmetrical pairs of organic forms or singular shapes. Continuing to employ a shaped support, he turned to spontaneously painted forms and drawn elements that can only be described as expressionistic.

The most recent works in the show—a group of modest-sized, somewhat painterly striped compositions in a conventional, flat rectangular format—seemingly mark Gorchov’s abandonment of the shaped canvas. Across his different formats, Gorchov has emphasized the primacy of color, process and form; he is not a conventional formalist who would reduce painting to its essential qualities. Instead, in the manner of painters such as Ralph Humphrey and Al Held, Gorchov has pursued a supremely personal brand of abstraction.

Bruce High Quality Foundation, “The End of Western Art. “

COURTESY THE ARTISTS/ACA GALLERY

Known for its irreverence, anonymity, and unrelenting impishness, the Bruce High Quality Foundation has resurfaced with its first show in three years, a solo outing titled “The End of Western Art” that is on view at ACA Galleries in New York through June 21.

The last time we heard from the collective of Bruces, as they’re called, was back in 2017, when their free, unaccredited art school, the Bruce High Quality Foundation University, was closing after eight years of outside-the-box arts education. Fittingly, this new show could be seen as an art history class of a kind: each BHQF work is presented alongside a piece by an artist to which it alludes. Names on the guest list include Pablo Picasso, Chaim Soutine, Albert Pinkham Ryder, Marcel Duchamp, and Joseph Cornell. One pairing is a chalkboard covered in frenetic scribbles with a Joseph Beuys readymade—an eraser—perched next to it. School is very much in session.

The Bruces are committed to their shadowy identity, and thus declined to speak with ARTnews. However, Nemo Librizzi, a collector of the group’s work, who curated the show with ACA director Mikaela Sardo Lamarche, was eager to attest to their powers. “Unlike other artists who are inspired by the artists who came before them and try to conceal it,” he told me, BHQF’s members “lay it all bare and show you the puppet strings.”

Bruce High Quality Foundation, “The End of Western Art. “

COURTESY THE ARTISTS/ACA GALLERY

Some piquant examples of the group’s engagement with the art of the past have included Public Sculpture Tackle, which saw Bruces in football-gear pummeling public artworks throughout New York, and Floating Island, for which they stuck a faux Christo & Jeanne-Claude gate atop Robert Smithson’s Floating Island as it circled Manhattan.

One of the most dramatic juxtapositions in the show takes the form of a deep stare between two busts of Egyptian pharaohs. In one corner is a weathered sarcophagus from the Late Dynastic Period, and in another is a cigarette-smoking, spatter-painted ceramic version of the same sarcophagus. There’s a strange, palpable tension between the two of them. “If that’s not a modern altarpiece,” Librizzi mused, “I don’t know what is.”

Bruce High Quality Foundation, “The End of Western Art. “

COURTESY THE ARTISTS/ACA GALLERY

Once viewers pass through the eye-line of the sarcophagi, the group’s most recent pieces are on display: Play-Doh replicas of ancient Greek and Roman antiquities from the Metropolitan Museum of Art sit in a glass case alongside antiquities that the Bruces would like you to believe are on loan from the Met but are in fact mostly loans from private collections. As with all the works in the show, these sculptures are unlabelled, challenging viewers to guess which are authentic and which are not.

“They’re wandering through the world of art, and they are thumbing their nose at some of it and want to draw a mustache on some of it,” Librizzi said. “But a lot of it they really respect and regard highly.”

Tom Sachs, Sandcrawler, 2018.

©TOM SACHS/COURTESY TOM SACHS STUDIO AND VITO SCHNABELPROJECTS

Aficionados of mezcal and modes of transport in Star Wars movies will find a lot to like in sculptor Tom Sachs’s newest offering in New York: a wooden curio constructed in the form of a so-called Sandcrawler that has been cut open to house a mini bar holding bottles of fine Mexican libations along with citrus and salt to help them go down. Small ceramic cups are included, with hand-scrawled NASA logos of the kind that feature in Sachs’s “Space Program” accessories, and among them are signs of more earthly concerns: pictures from porn magazines and a box of condoms tucked away in a corner. All the elements add up to the makings of a starry night.

“It was this form begging the question: what’s inside?” Sachs said of the sculpture, which he had started as a Star Wars fan—the Sandcrawler is a giant vehicle that first featured in Episode I: The Phantom Menace—but then amended. He said he liked the contraption’s original unsullied shape, comparing it to something by Max Ernst, Tony Smith, or Lynn Chadwick—“all the high-modernist forms.” But after a couple years of it lying around, “I was like, ‘Fuck it—let’s cut it open.’ Then it turned into—or became a vehicle for [Ed. note: the pun was not lost on him]—all the ritualized activities I’ve been interested in.”

Tom Sachs, Sandcrawler, 2018.

©TOM SACHS/COURTESY TOM SACHS STUDIO AND VITO SCHNABELPROJECTS

Among those are the many meticulous gestures in the art of Japanese tea ceremony, which has figured in Sachs’s performative and sculptural “Space Program” works as well as a particular body of creations—a makeshift tea house, koi pond, and countless jury-rigged gizmos to help whip matcha into refined drinkable form—that he has installed in institutions including the Noguchi Museum in New York.

To show Sandcrawler, Sachs found an accomplice in Vito Schnabel, who is exhibiting the work for two weeks (closing after December 13) at his Vito Schnabel Projects space in Greenwich Village. “We used to surf in Rockaway together and I’ve always been a fan of his work,” Schnabel said. “This is kind of a prelude to our exhibition at my gallery in St. Moritz [in 2019], which has to do with space, Joseph Beuys, and an espresso machine that is kind of Nam June Paik-esque.”

For Sachs, the selection of his preferred tequila-affiliated elixir has different valences. “Mezcal is the drink of my studio,” he said. “It’s been the social lubricant of choice in the studio for 30 years of degenerate behavior—studio visits gone right. It’s also a drink that I discovered through an artist friend, Ron Cooper, who started bootlegging it across the border from Mexico to New Mexico in his jacked-up Cadillac. I first tasted it in Taos and have this kind of romance with it and artists from the ’60s.”

Among the characters he associates with it are Ed Ruscha, Dennis Hopper, Frank Gehry, Larry Bell, and Ken Price, who designed the graphics for bottles in the revered Del Maguey line of mezcals started by Cooper. “It’s like a combination of finish fetishists, Pop artists, conceptual artists—those are all like my fathers, and that was the drink of their community.”

There’s a seasonal valence, too. “I wanted to celebrate the holidays and alcoholism and ritualized drug consumption,” Sachs said, pointing at the bar/sculpture’s mirrored surface. “The thing I like about cocaine is that you’re in a very private space with people you may or may not know doing something illicit. You become bonded through that. It’s a lot like the tea ceremony—and having mezcal with someone is akin to that.”

Vito Schnabel Gallery in St. Moritz, Switzerland.

COURTESY VSG

Art dealer Vito Schnabel was arrested earlier this month at Burning Man in Nevada for possessing psychedelic mushrooms, according to a report by TMZ.

Schnabel, who has galleries in St. Moritz, Switzerland, and New York, was allegedly found to be in possession of Psilocybin, the scientific term for the Schedule I drug, and taken into custody by Pershing County Sheriffs department, which confirmed the arrest.

Schnabel has pleaded not guilty to the charge. If convicted, he could face up to five years in prison, according to TMZ. A representative at Schnabel’s gallery declined to comment.

A memorial to the Paris Attacks, in Toulouse.

VIA WIKIMEDIA COMMONS

GOINGS-ON IN PARIS

Many artists made work after the Paris attacks and exhibited in public spaces. Now the city of Paris is trying to find ways of preserving those works. [The New York Times]

Museum attendance in Paris has, unsurprisingly, dropped since the attacks. In the two weeks afterward, the Centre Pompidou had 50% less visitors. [The Art Newspaper]

HOW’S THE MARKET DOING?

The market for Old Masters work is doing a lot better than you’d think. Here’s an infographic that tracks its progress over the past decade. [Twitter]

MUSEUM TRIPS

Max Delany is now the director of the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art. [Sydney Morning Herald]

The story behind the Smithsonian’s show of—wait for it—photographs of airport towers. [NPR]

ART HISTORY FOR COUCH POTATOES

Simon Schama, Mary Beard, and David Olusoga will expand on Kenneth Clark’s epic documentary Civilization with a new series called Civilizations, which broadens the focus to include Asia, Africa, and the Americas. [BBC News]

ART HISTORY FOR GOSSIPERS

OMG, is Vito Schnabel, supposedly the boyfriend of Heidi Klum, actually dating 50 Shades of Grey star Dakota Johnson? [The Observer]

EXTRAS

Finally, a New York Times op-ed asks the question we’ve all been waiting for: Am I obligated to like my friend’s bad art? [The New York Times]

Karl Holmqvist and Klara Liden at House of Gaga. [Contemporary Art Daily]

The Brucennial 2012, billed with some measure of self-effacement as “the single most important art exhibition in the history of the world,” opened big last week, with visitors standing in light rain for up to 2 hours to get into the show’s beer-fueled launch party at 159 Bleecker Street in the West Village. On view through Apr. 20, the freewheeling salon-style survey features works by nearly 400 artists, solicited by the quasi-anonymous group Bruce High Quality Foundation with backing from their dealer, Vito Schnabel.

Hung floor to ceiling and sprawling over four levels, the show contains paintings, drawings, photos, sculptures, installations and videos by artists living and dead, famous and emerging, among them Keith Haring, Richard Prince, Ouattara Watts, Marianne Vitale, Aurel Schmidt, Sam Messer, Kathy Grayson and Dan Colen. Teeming with wit, visual energy and old-style bohemian camaraderie, the Brucennial, which is free to the public, seems perfectly attuned to today’s 99-percent moment.

Meanwhile, the New Museum (which began with similar insouciance long ago) now proffers a second inert Triennial—this time mislabeled “The Ungovernables”—and the closely watched Whitney Biennial garners its perennial “love this, hate that” reactions.

Over the weekend, the Brucennial was further enlivened by four performances of an amateur musical (complete with robes, masks, recorded music and live singing) titled Animal Farm. Though it bore little resemblance to George Orwell’s classic fable, the piece did tell an allegorical tale: namely, how mismanagement by the Chicken Trustees of Bruce High Quality Foundation University jeopardized 150 years of no-tuition policy at the noted art school—a crisis that the loyal alums, aka Piggy Artists, now strive to rectify. BHQF’s core members, in case you couldn’t guess, are all graduates of New York’s venerable Cooper Union, now mired in a similar dilemma.

With an ever-growing number of galleries scattered around New York, it’s easy to feel overwhelmed. Where to begin? Here at A.i.A., we are always on the hunt for clever, memorable shows that stand out in a crowded field. Every Thursday, we’ll post the 10 shows our team of editors can’t stop talking about.

This week we check out Rene Ricard’s big, ’80s-style canvases peppered with seemingly arbitrary images and nearly nonsensical inscriptions; Nadia Khawaja’s carpal tunnel-inducing rhythmic, abstract pen drawings; and Peter Blake’s cheery, butterfly-covered prints. See all 10 picks below.

“Always the Young Strangers” at Higher Pictures, through July 9
Named after a 1953 MoMA show curated by Edward Steichen, this summer’s version also features young, up-and-coming artists. The photo-based work here-all by women-includes Polaroids of a partially nude woman posing with some kind of sculptural construction by the collective MPA+Katherine Hubbard, Jessica Labatte’s inkjet print that looks like layered cut-out paper highlighted with neon spray paint, and LaToya Ruby Frazier’s annotated hospital fundraising letter.

Nadia Khawaja at Thomas Erben, through July 22
For her first solo show in the U.S., Lahore-based Nadia Khawaja has brought out a diverse body of work. Examples include a grid of 30 small color photos, all diptychs; videos that incorporate urban noises with close-ups of the artist’s face; and several intricate large-scale pen drawings that alternately resemble close-ups of fingerprints, vascular systems and tangled rope.

Barry Frydlender at Andrea Meislin, through June 18
The aptly titled “Travelogue in Pictures” includes recent, large-scale color photos-each a digital composite of multiple snaps-depicting five cities: New York, Los Angeles, London, Paris and Nazareth (Frydlender lives in Israel). In this succinct show, a park with stone walkways overlooking Paris contrasts sharply with the group of black-clad officers blocking a shop-lined street in Nazareth.

Jan Frank at Paul Kasmin, through June 18
The 30 recent drawings in this suite, accompanied by one painting, are rendered in ink and correction fluid on handmade paper. The trailing, energetic lines, offset by areas deliberately obscured or “veiled,” create a graphic dance that alludes to, without aping, Abstract Expressionism—especially the work of Frank’s fellow Dutch émigré Willem de Kooning.

Rene Ricard at 522 W. 23rd Street, through June 23
Sixty-five-year-old poet, art critic and scenester Rene Ricard was an early champion of Julian Schnabel, whose art-impresario son, Vito, here returns the favor by filling a Chelsea showroom with a selection of new paintings collectively titled “Sonnets from the Portuguese” (a reference to a series of 19th-cenury love poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning). It’s difficult to say exactly what relationship-except irony—the canvases have with the high seriousness of Victorian verse, but they’re certainly good fun to look at and puzzle over.

Richard Long at Sperone Westwater, through June 25
Richard Long takes on Sperone Westwater’s vast new (as of last fall) space on the Bowery, filling the gallery with his site-specific meditations on nature and travel. A giant mud-and-acrylic orb, 27 feet in diameter, is accompanied by photographs, text installations and smaller mud-on-slate wall pieces.

New Yorker Fiction/Real Photography at Steven Kasher, through July 9
Do you ever wonder how the photos that accompany the stories in the New Yorker are chosen? Steven Kasher’s show (organized with recently departed visuals editor Elisabeth Biondi), features 40 images published over the last 13 years, alongside excerpts of the stories they accompanied. On June 23, the gallery is hosting a panel discussion with Biondi, fiction editor Deborah Treisman, writer A.M Homes and photographer Malerie Marder.

Jiro Takamatsu at McCaffrey Fine Art, through July 1
Despite being involved in the Mono-Ha movement and a co-founder of the Hi Red Center collective, Jiro Takamatsu (1936–1998) is not well known in the West. This show, his second in two years at McCaffrey, includes sculptures (many in response to the Minimalist cube), paintings and drawings completed between 1965 and ’73.

Julio Galán at Ramis Barquet, through July 9
This retrospective offers several major works that are among the best the Mexican-born painter produced in his all-too-brief career (he died in 2006 at age 48). Galán’s raw, figurative canvases incorporate references to Catholic and pre-Columbian iconography, Mexican folk traditions and pop culture. 

Peter Blake at Mary Ryan, through June 18
Often called the godfather of pop art, Peter Blake will probably always be best known for his cover design of the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. But the British artist’s work has a boarder range that comes across in this witty show of new inkjet images on paper and canvas.