These two iPhones are all there is to “The Distance of a Day”, an installation by the young Brooklyner David Horvitz that I just saw at the Art Basel fair, in the booth of Berlin’s Chert gallery. Last February, Horvitz got his mom to record a video of the sunset over the sea near Los Angeles, where he was born and grew up. At the same moment that she was taping, he was at a point almost opposite her on the globe, in the Maldives, taping the same sun as it rose. There was something  poignant for me in imagining our great sun as a tenuous link between mother and son. There was also a kind of almost scientific rigor in the piece, as it demonstrated a basic truth of astronomy. And, of course, it was also about virtuality: A deeply physical project that involves two people and the places they’re in comes to us care of an ephemeral digital record – in fact presented on the very phones that recorded the scenes.

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As my last Venice image, I give you one of the dioramas from Ai Weiwei’s new Biennale project, which he was not permitted to see installed. Six metal shipping containers,  looking  like huge minimal sculptures made of Cor-Ten steel, contain waxworks scenes based on Ai’s  memories of his jailing by Chinese authorities in 2011. Each one is sculpted at half of life size, and can be viewed through a porthole in the container’s side and its top. This view from on high shows Ai showering as his inquisitors look on, as they did whenever he did anything, however intimate. It’s important that Ai keep making art about his plight, and the plight of the other persecutees of China. There was, however, something just a touch in bad taste in his taking on a martyr’s role (the piece is called S.A.C.R.E.D., an acronym for the titles of the dioramas: Supper, Accusers, Cleansing, Ritual, Entropy, Doubt). After all,  he still commands the resources to have such posh objets manufactured, to have them shipped to Venice and then to have them installed … in a Baroque church no less. Is he trying to pass, camel-like, through the eye of a needle? We must remember, and he must remind us, that he stands for the plight of others who fare much, much worse.

Weirdly, I had a feeling that Ai’s tongue might be in his cheek with this piece – as it usually is.

Trying to accomplish what’s seemingly impossible, MySpace is gunning for a reboot—one that now boasts Justin Timberlake as minority owner. And as a ploy to lure back the millions of millennials (who in the last 10 years have decamped for Facebook’s less primitive pasture—one that now treads on privacy invasion), MySpace has tapped hipster poster boy and photographer Ryan McGinley to create a campaign celebrating its relaunch, which debuted on Tuesday.

If hiring McGinley (a photographer best known for taking nude portraits of severely underage-looking legals) weren’t enough evidence that MySpace is trying very hard to regain its “cool” quotient, then look at the roster of negligibly underground faces that join him in the commercial. Pharrell Williams, model Erin Wasson, beauty blogger Emily Weiss, singer Sky Ferreira, Ciara, and others bop and hula-hoop to The Orwells’s “Mallrats (La La La)” with mussed-up hair and cans of spray paint, wearing overalls and Saint Laurent stilettos, while doing little more than boasting their status as indie stars.

Most conspicuously, "This is Myspace," as the commercial is titled, features very little technology. There is only one cellphone sighting—one that doesn’t even involve connecting to the Internet. Actually, the Internet is not included in the commercial at all, effectively doing little to explain what the new MySpace is about. But that may be the point—to try and get the Internet-savvy to ultimately sign up and see what the new site is about for themselves.

First there were artists. Then there were ­patrons—rich people with enough good taste that they enabled artists to live and make their art. Eventually, patrons made room for speculators, fake collectors who reap great sums by tinkering with expensive artists’ prices. But in the days of art as an asset (think luxury yachts, but also gold bullion and Apple Inc. stock) few collectors are as prized as a bona fide celebrity. Rare birds with pterodactyl-size tastes, their penchant for opulence, public display, and immediate gratification make them the ideal marks for today’s wheeling-and-dealing art galleries and auction houses. And then, of course, there’s also our 21st-century, celebrity-ravenous, hair-trigger media.

In late May that hunger had its True Blood incisors out at Christie’s sale of a beloved if bizarre 20th-century American gem: Bea Arthur Nude, a topless 1991 portrait of the late Golden Girls actress fashioned by 51-year-old American painter John Currin. Sold for $1.9 million on the same bullish evening that saw the auction house rake in a record $495 million, it garnered far more Gawker and gossip traffic than the auction’s $56.1 million Lichtenstein or $58.4 million Pollock canvases. The reason? In a phrase: the crack epidemic–like qualities of the global fame game. To paraphrase the tagline from the Twilight saga—when groupies live online forever, what do you really live for?

Driven not by the painting’s quality, it’s astronomical price, or the fact that Currin was a broke house painter when he brushed a starlet’s boobs onto Arthur’s body, the event nevertheless escalated from B-list celebrity Twitter twaddle into an international Internet sensation. It started when comedian Jeff Ross posted a photo of himself standing next to the Arthur painting (or a very good likeness of it) with the tweet “Biggest surprise of my life. Thank you @jimmykimmel—the most generous guy in the world!,” Kimmel was subsequently thought to be unmasked as the painting’s mystery spendthrift. That is until Kimmel himself chimed in to deny purchasing Currin’s painting in the first place: “Contrary to ‘news’ reports, I didn’t buy the Bea Arthur painting—not even for @realjeffreyross—but I did buy the Mona Lisa Lampanelli.”

At Francois Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi museum, Rudolf Stingel has covered every inch of every floor and wall of its palatial spaces with industrial wall-to-wall printed with blow-ups of classic Eastern carpets. Yes, it’s a one liner, but it’s loud enough to be impressive, and its Islamic accent gives it special leverage, in Europe and the world now, as well as in a city that once made its money (and culture) from ties to the East. Once upon a time, no self-respecting Venetian altar went without a carpet like these ones.

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This is at least the third time I have Pic’d the early works of Richard Serra, because I find such evident pleasure in looking at them. This installation, however, shows that this was not always how they came across. The photo was taken at a fascinating show now at The Prada Foundation in Venice, whose ancient palazzo has been mashed-up with an inch-by-inch recreation of “When Attitudes Become Form”, the great 1969 exhibition at the Kunsthalle in Berne, which first brought conceptual art into focus. What comes across most strongly in the Venice revisitation, however, is how much more present the “forms” now seem than the “attitudes” that shaped them – with these Serras as a classic example of how object-heavy this conceptual show really was. Period works that now seem all about their aesthetics, that is, once felt entirely about the ideas behind them, since their visuals  had yet to gel in our minds as art. Here’s my bet: That that’s true of a huge number of Old Master objects as well. They once would have seemed full of attitude, couched in almost illegible forms.

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Troubadours strumming their guitars on street corners. Breakdancers flipping around subway poles. Magicians pulling reluctant passersby into their juggling tricks. Whether viewed as an earsore or a vibrant addition to urban life, street entertainers have been a constant presence in major cities all over the world.  And, as all metropolis dwellers know, they run the full gamut of talent. But every once in awhile you stumble across buskers who are so incredible you wonder why they’re on a street corner and not headlining a world tour.

In Portugal, a group of three friends are preparing to set out on a 100-day, 20-country, social-media fueled search to discover the best of the best of these largely unknown street artists. The project, called “Hello Europe,” was started last summer, when friends Guilherme Duarte, Ivo Tavares, and João Mendes decided they had grown tired of their day jobs (as a software engineer, chef, and product designer, respectively). “I really started to feel an urge to change my life, to try other things and find my way,” the 28-year-old Duarte says. “We started thinking about what would make us happy.”

The three decided they wanted to create a project that would give them an opportunity to travel. While brainstorming, they realized each had spent a good chunk of time photographing and videoing street artists. A few years before, Duarte remembers, he and Tavares watched a performer in Amsterdam climb a lamppost while juggling a soccer ball, and the group ended up playing a pick-up match on the street. It was a moment they always remembered, and it contributed to their decision to focus the project on promoting Europe’s most talented street artists, who generally receive little recognition. “We see life with the same eyes,” Duarte says of his co-founders.

This is a moment from "The Imitation of Life", Mathias Poledna's projection in the Austrian pavilion of the Biennale gardens. It's a three-minute animation of a singing donkey in a sailor suit goofing around in nature, done in the most traditional Disney style and screened on classic 35mm film. It could absolutely pass for a pre-feature short from the 1930s, although all its characters are  newly conceived by Poledna and its cels were drawn and painted in 21st-century Hollywood. That makes the piece a strange hybrid, sitting somewhere between appropriation and nostalgic craft. Or maybe it's a kind of remade readymade, and gets its power from using Disney as "serious" contemporary art. Among other things, its endless scroll of  credits makes you realize how few resources are normally poured into fine art, compared to even a minor animation.  
The donkey sings the phrase  "I've got a feelin' you're foolin' with me", which makes me think he stands for all of us watching the work – or at least for all jackass critics.

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In Newsweek, Blake Gopnik writes that: 

Ever since Duchamp’s urinal hit the scene in 1917, and possibly for a dozen or more decades before that, what has set artwork off from other things in the world is not what it looks like or what it references or anything it does, but the fact that we’ve been invited to contemplate it as art.

The video above, by an artist who goes by Ken Tanaka (or David Ury) turns the garbage can, empty space and cardboard boxes of a dismantled exhibit into a piece of art that has people worked up, just by acting awe-struck by its supposed intended message (when of course it has none). In many ways, this spoof captures precisely the issue Gopnik seeks to highlight in his spectacular essay.