These are stills from “Metal Sculpture”, a wonderful 1979 film by the New York sculptor B. Wurtz which just went live (as a video) in the new issue of the online magazine called Triple Canopy. (Click on the stills to watch the footage.) The premise is simple, and charming: Wurtz talks about a new metal sculpture he’s discovered and which he assembles as we watch; it turns out to be a perfectly normal folding music stand. His (pretend) inability to recognize the object as the functional thing it is, and his desire to treat it only as art, is a kind of condensation of the spirit that animates a lot of the best art making. I’ve referred to it as aesthetic agnosia – an ability to perceive the stuff in the world but not to recognize what it is or how it works, like the famous Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat. Wurtz turns himself into The Man Who Mistook His Stand For His Art, and by doing so, made it so.

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The Libyan poet Khaled Mattawa and I agreed to meet by the Arch of Marcus Aurelius, in the heart of Tripoli. I was there a few minutes early and walked toward the familiar structure in that invisible atmosphere that surrounds us when we find ourselves in a place that has meant a great deal but from which we had been separated. I had not been back to the city of my childhood in over three decades. I left a boy; returned a man.

The sun was sharp. The shade beneath the stone arch was as physical and reliable as a lake. The structure was built some 1,850 years ago, a year or two after Aurelius came to power. I remembered the opening lines from one of Khaled Mattawa’s poems—“East of Carthage: An Idyll”—when he addresses the Roman emperor:

Look here, Marcus Aurelius, we’ve come to see
your temple, deluded the guards, crawled through a hole
in the fence. Why your descendent, my guide and friend

In case you haven’t heard, a nipple movement is sweeping the U.K. Ladies from Liverpool to Essex are increasingly looking to define, darken, and enlarge their areolae, shelling out as much as $1,800 for “tittooing,” a not-so-clever nickname for the two-hour tattooing procedure.

An extensive retrospective of the late American artist Keith Haring opens today at the Musée d’Art Moderne in Paris. The exhibition, titled The Political Line, showcases some of the highlights from Haring’s formidable career, which spanned just over a decade. (Sadly, the artist passed away in 1990 at the age of 32 due to complications related to HIV/AIDS.)

Through his art, Haring commented on some of the most important socio-political issues of his time and, fittingly, this exhibition trails the major themes that influenced his work: capitalism, mass media and religion, racism, and his campaign against drug use and AIDS (he himself was diagnosed with HIV in 1988). Ultimately, the messages he conveyed were just as important as the medium itself.

“This is not something that he simply put into his work: this is a reflection of who he was as a person,” Julia Gruen, director of the Keith Haring Foundation, explained at yesterday’s press conference. “What you are going to experience with this exhibition is the great passion and idealism of this young artist. He put part of himself out there, so that you can reflect and you can interact with the experience of his time. He was very engaged in his whole moment.”

Upon arriving in New York in 1978, Haring fell in love with the energy of the city—particularly its prolific street-art culture—and he painted some of his earliest works on billboards, in the subway, and in other available public spaces. As such, he became a great champion for the democratization of art. “The public has a right to art … Art is for everybody,” he once said on his desire to make his work accessible to all. His approach was also a most pertinent way for him to get his message across.

This lovely, funny image is by Elli Chung, from her show at Julie Saul Gallery in New York. The title is “KAWA AKAGO, An Infant Monster Who Lurks Near Rivers and Drowns People” – the show illustrates moments from Japanese folk tales – but that name does not at all reflect my first impressions of the photio. I saw this naked tuber as entirely within the Western tradition of nude beauties on riverbanks, with echoes of Titian and Courbet’s “White Stockings”. Rather than seeing a threat in it, I found a note of sadness, as the vegetable contemplates its failure to live up to that aesthetic and erotic tradition. 

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In this age of projected art, six screens demand equal billing with the images shown on them. The installation is by Heimo Zobernig,  and I saw it in a group show at Leo Koenig gallery in New York. In person, the effect is quite strange: By now, we’re used to found objects getting used as sculpture, but here it’s as though pedestals replaced the works that normally sit on them. Rather than fading into the background, like the well-trained servants of aristocracy, Zobernig’s screens insist on being recognized in all their individuality and distinct objecthood: Here’s one wearing a yellow belt; there’s one discretely detailed in green; here’s another, standing proud and taller than all his kin, in a suit of silver that’s brighter than anyone else’s.

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Designer and engineer Yuya Ushida “unfurls” his “SOFA_XXXX”, which isn’t X-rated, but gets its name from the X joints that give it both structure and expandability. (Click on the image to see a video of its laborious production, and then its fascinating use.) I saw the piece in the “Against the Grain” show at the Museum of Arts and Design in New York, where a wall text explained that its first prototype was made from about 8,000 recycled bamboo chopsticks – China alone throws out about 90 billion of them each year – which were hand-drilled by Ushida as a student project for the design academy in Eindhoven.  It seems that the versions of XXXX going into mass production may be made from plastic, and so won’t be as “green”. Maybe the trick would be to publish DIY plans for sofas to be made by anyone who eats lots (and lots) of take-out Chinese.

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The late Mike Kelley made this drawing, and it’s now in the fascinating New Museum show of art from New York in 1993. The image is from a series based on the “Sad Sack” comic strip, except that Kelley has erased everything except the trash that is everpresent around the strip’s eponymous hero, a private in the U.S. army who gets everything wrong.  I love the way erasure becomes a tool for depiction and emphasis, and failure becomes a heroic condition.

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In his solo show at Andrew Kreps Gallery in New York, the German artist Peter Piller is showing a series of appropriated photos called “Umschläge” (German for “Covers”), which are just that: Images of the front and back covers of the defunct East German magazine called “Armeerundschau” (“Army Panorama”), whose layout juxtaposed a front image of a war scene and a back image of a pretty girl. According to Wikipedia, the magazine’s primary attraction was its “clothed pin-ups of women”, but the site also quotes the magazine’s longtime editor saying that its aim was to “prepare boys and men for their military service in the NVA [the “National People’s Army”], and to prepare women and girls to be good wives and girlfriends, to teach them to love soldiers and be willing to wait for them. We knew we had to convince women to love soldiers. If we didn’t, men wouldn’t want to go into the NVA.” That weird tension seems visible in Piller’s appropriations: A testosterone-laden front cover stands in strange tension with a remarkably chaste back cover that has to function as sexual bait for the magazine’s male readers and as a mirror for women viewing it. And then, in this issue at least, there’s a weird racial and colonial subtext as well. Sometimes, it’s enough for art simply to point out the world’s weirdnesses.

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This real pastry case full of plaster confections was made by Claes Oldenburg in 1962, and is in the show of his very early works that opens Sunday at the Museum of Modern Art in New York. In researching my New York Times profile of him that just went up on the paper’s Web site, I came to realize that Oldenburg’s glance at American consumption was hugely retrospective. Rather than contemplating the shiny chrome of the  Mad Men era, Oldenburg was looking back at the more modest material culture of his childhood during the Great Depression, when he first arrived in the U.S. from Sweden. 

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This still is from a video called “Walking on Carl Andre”, made in 1998 by Swiss artist Sylvie Fleury and now being shown on the street-front screen at Salon 94 gallery on the Bowery. (Click on the image to watch the full work.) The video takes seriously Andre’s invitation to walk on his minimal floor pieces, but treats them as cheesy fashion runways rather than elite artistic conceits. Fleury entertains the possibility that there’s more in common between fashion and art, between shoes and masterworks, than most of us want to let on.

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Takashi Murakami is a busy man. The prolific Japanese contemporary artist presented the world premiere of his first live-action feature film, Jellyfish Eyes, at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA) earlier this week, and he’s preparing for his latest show—a collection of towering fabricated sculptures and vibrantly colored, large-scale mural paintings—at Blum & Poe on April 13.

Despite his hectic schedule, Murakami seems unfazed. It’s the day after the 51-year-old’s LACMA event and a few days before the big show. Members of his company, Kaikai Kiki Co., Ltd., publicists, and cameramen are quietly buzzing in and out of the 21,000-square-foot Blum & Poe concrete art complex in Culver City, Los Angeles. He enters a white-walled room adorned with a few of his latest paintings, eating a sandwich. Long gone are his signature slicked-back-hair bun and pointy goatee, which have been replaced with a shorter do and a groomed beard. He is warm and approachable, and his English is broken—he uses a translator at times, but his passion is conveyed clearly despite the language barrier. Jellyfish Eyes represents Murakami’s directorial debut, the latest in a string of projects that blur the lines between art, fashion, music, and film. The Louis Vuitton handbags he designed in the early 2000s—the colorful LV emblems and floral designs that boosted the company’s branding—furthered his international fame. The artist has collaborated with Kanye West, creating an animated teddy-bear personification of the rapper in 2007 for his Graduation album cover and directing an animated video for his 2008 track “Good Morning.” His paintings have been featured around the world, from the Palace of Versailles in France to the Guggenheim Bilbao in Spain.

His life’s work revolves around a particular audience. “Each time my target is children,” Murakami tells The Daily Beast. He reflects back to when he was a child and the effect it had on him to see his first Francisco Goya paintings at a museum, how it made an indelible impression on his life, while at the same time “traumatizing” him. It’s sometimes hard to believe his life’s work is geared toward children, because there are dark undertones within his style of art, which he’s coined as “superflat”: the bright and flattened kawaii anime characters he’s designed, with an emphasis on Japanese pop culture and fine art. Skulls and decrepit and decaying monks are a reoccurring theme in his latest exhibit, and sexuality has always played a major role in his work—take, for instance, his 1997 Hiropon, a life-size plastic-fabricated sculpture of a naked girl with teal hair, milking her own enormous breasts. Murakami feels that young children, rather than adults, are most affected by art. It’s important for them to further their minds and question everything around them, even in regard to dark and confusing subject matter.