One of the most exciting trends in art today is the breakdown, at very long last, between established media and categories – between fine art and photography and craft, for instance. In an exhibition now at Show Room gallery on Manhattan's Lower East Side, the New Yorker James Hyde, best known as a painter, has merged acrylics, ceramics and photography, all combined in single objects. It's surprising how such a simple move – on view here in a piece called "On Over" – can still leave viewers usefully adrift. It's as though we need to find new eyes for taking in Hyde's painteramicography.

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In this week's Newsweek – in the iPad and International editions only – I write (and speak, on video) about Roy Lichtenstein's career-spanning survey at the Art Institute of Chicago. I try to pull away from our usual concentration on the "fun" of his comic-book and pop-culture references, and emphasize his interest in the larger print-culture that continues to condition us.

His "BenDay" dots are my crucial evidence.

Lichtenstein’s printer's dots never help him render a real scene and its colors, as Benjamin Day, their 19th-century inventor, intended them to. They aren’t even true magnifications of the dot-field on a page in “Donald Duck” or “X-Men” – or, in this case, a nudie magazine. They float free of such specifics, as untethered symbols of a world derived from print. (They can also be unnerving, creating a dizzying optical dazzle that undermines the cheeriness we associate with this painter, and that maybe takes a dig at the power of print.)

I'm just old enough to remember a brief-ish moment in the seventies when weavings, of one kind or another, seemed to be taking their place as serious contemporary art – and a lot of that was thanks to an art-trained weaver and sculptor named Sheila Hicks. She's now getting her first show at the "serious" Sikkema Jenkins gallery in Chelsea, and it seems to signal a moment where the art world is ready to turn back to "craft" such as hers. Her giant hangings and textiles are fabulous things, but I'm particularly fond of her "Minimes", such as the two shown here. Hicks travels with a tiny loom, the way other artists carry a sketchbook or point-and-shoot camera. The "Minimes" are her drawings, and have all the freshness and variety of casual jottings.

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August Sander's photographic "inventory" of the German people in the first half of the last century  is endlessly fascinating – as it proved, yet again, in a selection I saw at Edwynn Houk in New York. As I've written before, what interests me about the project isn't its initial premise, but its obvious impossibility and guaranteed failure – a failure that must have been perfectly evident to Sander, as a sophisticated member of the lefty German art scene. An inventory of a people only reveals that a people cannot be inventoried. The whole thing can be read as a repudiation of the idea of national identity, rather than a sober exploration of it.

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Last night at Christie's in New York, this painting by Mark Rothko – "Orange, Red, Yellow", from 1961 – sold for $86,882,500, the auction record for an artwork made after the Second World War. As with last week's auction-record sale of Edvard Munch's "Scream", for $119.9 million, the price may have less to do with the work's earth-shaking importance or quality than with how easy it is to take in. If there's one thing to say about almost any Rothko, it's that it looks fine – and this one looks finer than most. 

I'm not claiming that Rothko made over-the-sofa pictures, but "Orange, Red, Yellow" sure would go great with a couch. Whereas I'd like to imagine that the very, very greatest works of modern art – the ones that set the art-historical records, as it were – are so challenging, they might give a billionaire pause before bidding. Maybe the true gems in most sales are the works that fetch less than they ought to.

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Last year, I listed Tacita Dean as one of the 10 most important artists working today. Had I ranked my choices, she would have stood toward the top. Her contemplative films (never videos) unpack the world the way Cezanne and Chardin do. On Sunday, the New Museum in New York opened a show of her cinematic portraits, in which she takes lingering looks at Claes Oldenburg, Cy Twombly, Julie Mehretu and (at especially great length) the choreographer Merce Cunningham. I talked to Dean about these works in Monday's Daily Beast, and you can click on the still on this page for footage that gives a tiny taste of the Cunningham piece. (It's literally 1/100th of the total.)

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For the last couple of years, I've been looking at the mediocre art of the actor James Franco, and thinking there might be an element of brilliance in it. He provides such a generic, superficial version of contemporary art that it's like what a genius set decorator might supply for a Hollywood movie about the Chelsea scene. Could it be that Franco's entire art career has in fact been about him giving a brilliant theatrical performance as a generic  contemporary artist –€“ sort of like the one he played so well on General Hospital?

Franco's appearance last night for a 20-minute book talk at PS1, the MoMA affiliate, made me have significant doubts. Klaus Biesenbach, PS1's director, lobbed softball questions that, as he himself admitted, are what you toss out when you can't think of anything else: What Web sites do you visit? What did you do after school when you were 14? And Franco struck out on every one, yielding zero insight into why he makes art, or why we should care. He came across as what he may just be: A self-regarding Hollywood starlet who thinks that a career as an artist, however part-time, will somehow yield cultural status. When the audience started tossing out some tougher questions, Franco beat a panicked retreat.  

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My favorite piece at the first New York edition of London’s Frieze art fair, which previewed yesterday in a gargantuan tent on Randall’s Island, was this simple amusement-park booth out by the entrance. An artist named Joel Kyack had built the thing on a trailer, in classic state-fair style, and was giving passersby a choice between a free game of ring-toss (onto the funnel of a toy ship floating in a tub) and of roll-the-ball (up a ramp and into a hole barely big enough to let it in). It was good, clean, simple fun, with not a cent at stake or any grand ambitions possible, and was sure to remind all comers of the modest pleasures of doing something trivial, just for the sake of doing it, that we all had as kids. 

And then you headed into Frieze.

The thing about fairs that almost no one outside the art world recognizes is that you’ll almost never find an insider who actually gets pleasure from the damn things – I couldn’t find a single unabashed enthusiast among the dozens of acquaintances I ran into, whether artist, writer, dealer or collector. As one dealer put it, “The only thing that’s good about [Frieze] is that the light is even.” He counts other fairs, where it isn’t, as even worse.

The problem with staring at an old chestnut like "The Scream" – since last night, the auction world's record holder – is that it takes too much work to think or feel anything fresh. (I wrote about my final encounter with the Munch in today's Daily Beast.) That's why, at the same Sotheby's preview where "The Scream" was on view, I got way more pleasure from doping out this utterly obscure abstraction painted in 1914 by the absolutely unknown Belgian futurist named Jules Schmalzigaug. He seems to have been in almost on the ground floor of modernism, but somehow he fell through its cracks. Schmalzigaug committed suicide in 1917, when he was only 34, but instead of that tabloid death launching him to fame, it cast him into oblivion. One more thing: Schmalzigaug's piece is on sale in today's afternoon sale, with a high estimate of only $350,000, so there's still a chance to nab it before his stock rises. (And I'm not even asking for a cut.)

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Last night, at the opening of a group show at Hauser & Wirth gallery on New York's Upper East Side, I came across something I rarely see: A successful new riff on Duchamp. A young Brooklyn artist named Marc Ganzglass was showing a recent piece called "Turenne Railing". It counts as a  readymade, of sorts, because like Duchamp's famous urinal it transplants a functional object into the art world. In this case, however, Ganzglass took a 17th-century forged-iron railing he'd photographed in Paris, and remade it himself, by hand, to include in this show. (Ganzglass is 39 and relatively slight, and doesn't look like the trained blacksmith he is. He's also way smarter and more verbal than your comic-strip hammer-head.) I think of this piece as a new Duchampian sub-species you might call a "hand-made readymade". Instead of being about inserting the industrial into the old-fashioned world of hand-crafted art, it inserts old-fashioned craft and hard labor into today's industrialized art scene. But then, in talking with Ganzglass (and talking, and talking) I realized that Duchamp was sometimes up to something similar, as when he had his own urinal hand-copied in the sixties. Duchamp's work is never the one-liner it's made out to be, and Ganzglass adds new lines of his own. 

Matthew Day Jackson, the talented young artist who curated the show, says in his statement that art has to be "destroyed and rebuilt without referring to an operating manual." I'm not sure that's right. I think that, like Ganzglass, you mostly rewrite the same one.

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