Dennis Hopper, the legendary American actor and director who died in 2010, was a person who, in the words of his daughter, “liked things to be bigger and stronger.” His film work reveals as much: he commanded the screen in Easy Rider, Apocalypse Now, and Blue Velvet.

This is “Sonambient Sculpture”, made by the great sculptor and designer Harry Bertoia in 1977, after this once-famous artist had started falling from favor. I saw this table-top work, about three feet wide and made from “berylium copper”, in the booth of Lost City Arts at the Collective Design Fair now on in New York. It’s a lovely piece of late-modern formalism – except that it’s more than that. Like many of Bertoia’s pieces, it’s also an “instrument”, of sorts, responding to your touch with a lovely chiming jangle. (Click on the image to see and hear it in action). It must partly be about resisting the “don’t touch” message that most sculpture comes with.

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I spotted Sebastian Errazuriz’s “Piano” shelving yesterday, in the Cristina Grajales booth at the new Collective Design Fair in New York. It’s a truly clever concept: The separate bars (or “keys”) that make up the shelves can be pulled down as needed, depending on the objects than you want to display. Two thoughts, though: First, if the shelves were engineered without gaps they could be used for books, which is the most pressing, and ever-changing, shelving need for most of us (bars pulled half-way down could even act as bookends); second, as things stand, there’s a danger that such witty and attractive shelves could encourage knick-knacky tendencies in even the most restrained of us, infecting modern spareness with Victorian clutter. Just because you own something nice doesn’t mean you have to display it…

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This is a still from “Head”, a strange video by Cheryl Donegan that’s in the show called “1993” at the New Museum in New York. (Click on the image to watch the video.) The piece – surprise, surprise – was made in 1993, and feels like a comic take-off on the “procedural” videos made by conceptual artists two decades earlier. (“Watch me doing something; watch me doing something else.”) Here, Donigan seems to sexualize their work, and inject some gender and power issues into their art-about-art premises.

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How does a Hollywood legend tell the love of his life how he feels? If you are Gregory Peck, you buy her Fernand Leger’s Les deux figures. The intimacy of the contrasting figures in the painting represented to Peck the love he had for his longtime wife, Veronique Peck. The painting, which Peck bought in 1984, is expected to go for between $3-5 million, and is among notable works by Picasso, Soutine, Monet, Pissarro and Derain to be auctioned off Wednesday night in Christie’s Impressionist & Modern Art Evening Sale. 

I was left dumbfounded by almost every picture in the current Albrecht Durer show at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, but this 1514 engraving of Saint Jerome at work in his study is one of the artist’s most virtuosic demonstrations. (I’ll be Daily Pic-ing others over coming weeks.) Riding a favorite hobby horse of mine, however, I wonder how many viewers recognize how strange it is that Durer gives precisely half the normal view you’d expect in an image like this: The scene’s viewpoint (or vanishing point) is at the far right edge of the picture rather than smack in its center, as prescribed by the standard perspective constructions recently mastered by northern artists like Durer. It’s as though Durer had taken a conventional image and sliced it down the middle. I’ve suggested technical explanations for the use of eccentric perspectives in 17th-century Holland, but in this earlier case I wonder if there isn’t a kind of almost theological point: When modern sinners try to witness a long-gone sacred scene, etiquette insists that they stay on its margins. Sanctity must be approached crabwise. 

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This story is published in collaboration with Creative Time Reports.

Illinois's Tamms supermax prison, built in 1998, was a scary place. Prisoners were not allowed phone calls and were barred from visits or activities. Men incarcerated there were permitted to leave their cells only to shower or exercise alone. And unlike most prisons, food was pushed through the doors of each cell rather than served in a cafeteria.

This is a still from a strange video called “Blood”, by the young American artist Leidy Churchman. (Click on the image to view the video.) It’s in a group show at Robert Miller gallery that’s all about the influence and afterlife of Lee Krasner, the great Abstract Expressionist. “Blood” fits perfectly: It offers a kind of “live” update on Krasner-era abstraction. The camera shows us paint and colored objects being pushed around on a surface, so you’re never sure whether the “work” at hand is that surface itself or the video you’re watching of it getting marked – and whether either one should qualify as abstraction, since they’re so present as real stuff in the world. Churchman puts the “action” back in Action Painting.  

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I think Richard Serra’s “One Ton Prop (House of Cards)”, from 1969, is the summation of his art, and one of the great works of the last 50 years. The piece – four quarter-ton sheets of lead, four-foot square and held in place by their weight – is now on view in David Zwirner’s beautifully Brutalist new gallery in New York. This “Prop” is all about risk: Physical, artistic and aesthetic. And then the product of that risk turns out to be wonder and pleasure, even beauty. The risk is real, so it produces genuine sublimity. In Serra’s more recent, crowd-pleasing works, the risk is all simulation – no one will die and pleasure’s guaranteed – so the effect is that much less potent.

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“If you can’t breathe through your nose, you open your mouth to continue breathing,” says Newsha Tavakolian. The Iranian photographer is using a famous Farsi aphorism to talk about what it’s like to work in her country’s repressive atmosphere these days.  It’s a theme that informs her portraiture, which has become more emotional and poetic as creative opportunities in Iran have become riskier.

“The Fall of Icarus”, by Hendrick Goltzius, is one of my all-time favorite images by one of my all-time favorite artists. (Click on the picture to see it much enlarged, which is crucial to its appreciation.) The piece is from a series of four similar engravings called “The Four Disgracers” (great name for a rock band), printed in 1588 and now on view at the Metropolitan Museum in New York. I love the tiny figure of Daedalus, still safely bewinged in the far background, and the gormless expression of his  teenage son, tumbling to earth after  flying too close to the sun.  The funny thing is that this image, which feels like classic Goltzius, was in fact based on a design by the painter Cornelisz van Haarlem. I don’t know if that means I need to downgrade my rating of Goltzius or increase my praise for Cornelisz van Haarlem – both hard for me to do.

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Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa: On Friday, I claimed to have found the earliest YouTube-ish cat video, filmed in 1979 by the artist B. Wurtz, but I warned that someone was bound to point out some still earlier contender. That someone was the Vancouver publisher new-documents.org, who immediately tweeted out the fabulous "Cat Food", shot by Joyce Wieland one full decade before Wurtz did his piece. (Click on today's image to watch it – and let me know if you've got a still earlier cat film up your sleeve.) I'm doubly ashamed of my lapse because Wieland (who died in 1998) sits in two categories of artists I follow especially closely: Pioneering women, and Canadians. I know and love Wieland's work, but this piece had passed me by. It suddenly occurred to me that it's a kind of animal lover's tribute to – or piss-taking of – Warhol's great movie "Eat", which I only recently saw (and in which the cat's appearance is too brief to make the piece count as a contender).

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