The Map and the Territory

The most celebrated and controversial French novelist of our time, Michel Houellebecq, now delivers his magnum opus—about art and money, love and friendship and death, fathers and sons. The Map and the Territory is the story of an artist, Jed Martin, and his family and lovers and friends, the arc of his entire history rendered with sharp humor and powerful compassion. His earliest photographs, of countless industrial objects, were followed by a surprisingly successful series featuring Michelin road maps, which also happened to bring him the love of his life, Olga, a beautiful Russian working—for a time—in Paris. But global fame and fortune arrive when he turns to painting and produces a host of portraits that capture a wide range of professions, from the commonplace (the owner of a local bar) to the autobiographical (his father, an accomplished architect) and from the celebrated (Bill Gates and Steve Jobs Discussing the Future of Information Technology) to the literary (a writer named Houellebecq, with whom he develops an unusually close relationship). Then, while his aging father (his only living relative) flirts with oblivion, a police inspector seeks Martin’s help in solving an unspeakably gruesome crime—events that prove profoundly unsettling. Even so, now growing old himself, Jed Martin somehow discovers serenity and manages to add another startling chapter to his artistic legacy, a deeply moving conclusion to this saga of hopes and losses and dreams. [purchase]

Gusmano Cesaretti

Roberts & Tilton gallery in Los Angeles presents an exhibition presenting new and vintage photographs by Gusmano Cesaretti, curated by Aaron Rose. The main gallery will feature work from the early period of Cesaretti’s career (1970s) in which he immersed himself in the East Los Angeles culture. His photographs of this era celebrated a sub-culture that had rarely been captured before. The exhibition will include twenty-four vintage, unique prints that have recently been discovered and will be shown for the first time in Los Angeles. An Italian immigrant who moved to Los Angeles in the 1970s, Cesaretti quickly became fascinated by East Los Angeles. Inspired by the colors, people and graffiti that populated the East Side, he began to capture the vulnerability and uncensored quality of this area. Always honest when shooting his subjects, Cesaretti presents them as they are: violent, loving, confident, scared, full of life. It is this energy and conflict inherent in those who occupy the edges of society that drives his photographic investigations. On view until February 18, Roberts and Tilton, 5801 Washington Blvd, Culver City, CA 

Banks Violette at Blum & Poe

Blum & Poe gallery in Los Angeles presents an exhibition of new work by Banks Violette, his first one-person exhibition in Los Angeles. Simultaneously rooted in Minimalist form and contemporary in its use of industrial materials, Violette’s artistic practice freely employs diverse media, such as neon tubing, powder-coated steel, glass, salt, resin, and aluminum. Violette draws inspiration from a variety of subcultural communities, including hardcore punk and drone metal bands like Sunn O))), political conspiracy theorists, both left and right-wing religious fanatics, and most recently NASCAR and the iconography which populates the sport’s predominantly southern fan base. As if arrested in time, Violette’s sculptural objects and installations function as elegant reminders of darker moments past and present. On view until February 11, Blum and Poe, 2727 S. La Cienega Blvd, Los Angeles, CA

Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week

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Sperone Westwater gallery in New York presents an exhibition of white marble sculptures dating from 350 B.C. to the present day. This survey includes Greek and Roman antiquities, Neoclassical sculptures, and works by modern and contemporary European and American artists. The exhibition, entitled Marble Sculpture from 350 B.C. to Last Week, is on view until February 25, Sperone Westwater,257 Bowery, New York, NY.

Oliviero Toscani Launches New Calender

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Italian shock photographer Oliviero Toscani has released a new calendar at an unveiling in Florence, Italy -- a calendar featuring 12 penis close-ups in an ad for a group of companies that make naturally-tanned leather. The flamboyant photographer launched the calendar at an event in Florence also attended by famously well-endowed Italian porn star Rocco Siffredi, who said that people should "de-dramatise" sex and put an end to "bigotry". Toscani last year focused on women's genitalia for a calendar for the same Vera Pelle consortium, which brought censure from Italy's advertising watchdog.  Toscani is best known for his controversial ad campaigns for the Italian clothes maker Benetton, which itself courted controversy last year with a series of photo montages of rival world leaders kissing each other.

Paul Morrissey & Andy Warhol's Trash

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...... Trash [Andy Warhol's Trash] is the second film in a trilogy, written and directed in 1970 by filmmaker Paul Morrissey. Probably the most original film and the freest of this trilogy, Trash is an icon, a cult object that reflects the climate of American culture immortalized by the famous New York underground cinema scene. Trash has destroyed classic Hollywood conventions while adopting a new style itself full of clichés......STILLS FROM TRASH is on view January 14 to February 25 at the Galerie Françoise Paviot.

Catherine Deneuve Honored

Catherine Deneuve will receive the Film Society of Lincoln Center's 39th Chaplin Award on Monday, April 2, 2012 in New York City. The annual gala is the Film Society's largest annual fundraiser, benefiting the ongoing programs of the Film Society of Lincoln Center. At an Alice Tully Hall ceremony, an array of notable guests and celebrities will salute Catherine Deneuve. The evening will include films clips and a party to celebrate Deneuve's career in cinema.

Tomas Tranströmer's Deleted World

Tomas Tranströmer's new collection of poetry, entitled The Deleted World, is a short selection of haunting, meditative poems from the winner of the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tomas Tranströmer can be clearly recognized not just as Sweden’s most important poet, but as a writer of international stature whose work speaks to us now with undiminished clarity and resonance. Long celebrated as a master of the arresting, suggestive image, Tranströmer is a poet of the liminal: drawn again and again to thresholds of light and of water, the boundaries between man and nature, wakefulness and dream. A deeply spiritual but secular writer, his skepticism about humanity is continually challenged by the implacable renewing power of the natural world. His poems are epiphanies rooted in experience: spare, luminous meditations that his extraordinary images split open—exposing something sudden, mysterious, and unforgettable. [purchase]

Ai Weiwei: Interlacing

Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is the first major exhibition of photographs and videos by Ai Weiwei. It foregrounds Ai Weiwei the communicator – the documenting, analyzing, interweaving artist who communicates via many channels. Ai Weiwei already used photography in his New York years, but especially since his return to Beijing, he has incessantly documented the everyday urban and social realities in China, discussing it over blogs and Twitter. Photographs of radical urban transformation, of the search for earthquake victims, and the destruction of his Shanghai studio are presented together with his art photography projects, the Documenta project Fairytale, the countless blog and cell phone photographs. A comprehensive book accompanies this exhibition. Ai Weiwei – Interlacing is on view at the Jeu de Paume in Paris from February 21, 2012 to April 29, 2012.

Coming of Age in America

Coming of Age in America: The Photography of Joseph Szabo is the first museum retrospective of this Long Island photographer whose work presents a dual portrait of adolescence on Long Island and summers on the Island’s iconic Jones Beach. Szabo poignantly portrays teens on the cusp of adulthood, documenting his subjects in moments of uncertainty, reflection, longing, bravado, and exuberance. The restless teens and unselfconscious bathers seen in Szabo’s black and white photographs evoke timeless memories of our own, similar teenage years and summers at the beach. This exhibition opens tomorrow January 14 at the Heckscher Museum of Art in Huntington, New York and runs until March 25 (Heckscher Museum of Art 2 Prime Avenue Huntington, NY 11743).

Josef Koudelka's Gypsies

Aperture's new edition of Koudelka: Gypsies rekindles the energy and astonishment of this foundational body of work by master photographer Josef Koudelka. Lavishly printed in a unique quadratone mix by artisanal printer Gerhard Steidl, it offers an expanded look at Cikáni (Czech for "gypsies" )--109 photographs of Roma society taken between 1962 and 1971 in then-Czechoslovakia (Bohemia, Moravia and Slovakia), Romania, Hungary, France and Spain. The design and edit for this volume revisits the artist's original intention for the work, and is based on a maquette originally prepared in 1968 by Koudelka and graphic designer Milan Kopriva. Koudelka intended to publish the work in Prague, but was forced to flee Czechoslovakia, landing eventually in Paris. In 1975, Robert Delpire, Aperture and Koudelka collaborated to publish Gitans, la fin du voyage (Gypsies, in the English-language edition), a selection of 60 photographs taken in various Roma settlements around East Slovakia. Gypsies includes more than 30 never-before-published images and a new text by Roma scholar and sociologist Will Guy, who also wrote the essay for the 1975 edition. Guy contributes a new, in-depth analysis of the condition of the Roma today, including the most recent upheavals in France and Europe. Find a copy here.

Collage Culture

One of the coolest new publications of late–Collage Culture: Examining the 21st Century's Identity Crisis is a new book written by Aaron Rose and Mandy Kahn and designed by Brian Roettinger. Sure to spark debate, a pair of writers examines our century's identity crisis via two separate essays. In "The Death of Subculture," Aaron Rose (director of Beautiful Losers and co-curator of MoCA's record-smashing exhibit Art in the Streets) makes an impassioned call to arms, urging the next generation of artists to end the collage era by adopting a philosophy of creative innovation. And in her essay "Living in the Mess," Mandy Kahn (columnist, Foam magazine) considers whether the collage of references that surrounds us might negatively affect the way we feel. A companion recording of this incendiary work of non-fiction contains readings of the book's texts with an original score created by No Age. A box set edition of 100 is available which contains a cassette tape of a recording of a discuss between the two authors, books, postcards, an LP, and signed photographs by Autumne de Wilde. [Find a copy here]