Art World

WILLIAMSTOWN — A silly little thing, "Rock Fan" is a classic case of the flimsy gesture, the light-as-dust conceit, turned weighty and transfixing. Every time I see the work, by the artist David Hammons, on display at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, I do a double-take, and wonder: How did this craggy little rock, with its acne-cratered surface and bland, accordion-style fan, manage to come together so neatly? How can two objects, wildly unrelated and out of sympathy, merge and conspire so tenderly?

WHO Louis DiBiccari WHAT DiBiccari, the chef at Boston's Storyville and host of the innovative dining challenge series Chef Louie Night, launches a new endeavor on June 3 from 2 to 6 p.m. called CREATE: Six Artists, Six Chefs, One Canvas, at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Six regional artists, including Josh Falk and Emily Lombardo, and Miracle 5, will be paired up with six chefs like Brandon Arms of Garden at the Cellar and Douglas Rodrigues of Clio to collaborate on dishes inspired by the artwork.

NEW YORK - Is money destroying the art world? Right now, no one could be blamed for wondering. Last week, a version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" sold at auction in New York for a record $119.9 million. Meanwhile, art dealers who paid as much as $65,000 for a stand at the first New York incarnation of the prestigious Frieze Art Fair - a four-day extravaganza that ran through Monday - are now pulling down their displays and shipping scads of expensive artworks around the world, like so many luxury commodities.

WILLIAMSTOWN — A silly little thing, "Rock Fan" is a classic case of the flimsy gesture, the light-as-dust conceit, turned weighty and transfixing. Every time I see the work, by the artist David Hammons, on display at the Williams College Museum of Art in Williamstown, I do a double-take, and wonder: How did this craggy little rock, with its acne-cratered surface and bland, accordion-style fan, manage to come together so neatly? How can two objects, wildly unrelated and out of sympathy, merge and conspire so tenderly?

Theft: A Love Story By Peter Carey Knopf, 269 pp., $24 The Australian Peter Carey is a choral group; from novel to novel he soars or plunges from voice to voice, each with its differently piercing note and, for commonality, just a hint of disconcert. There is the silken 19th-century romance of Oscar and Lucinda sailing a glass church along a crook-backed outback river. There is the gripping reconstruction of Australian outlaws a century ago in "True History of the Kelly Gang"; a flamboyant imagining of the later life of Magwitch, a Dickens character, in "Jack...

BROCKTON — The chill was hard to ignore at the Fuller Craft Museum on a recent Tuesday, but that didn't concern the new director, Jonathan Fairbanks. The museum, struggling with a budget crisis, had decided to close three days a week. Fairbanks had no problem with turning down the heat to save money. The doors, though, were another matter. "If you close your shop, you're not going to have business," he said. "We have people knocking at the door. I'd love to let...

HARTFORD ­— The people in many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings look away. We see their backs, the edges of their faces. We cannot look in their eyes. They are small and solitary, and the world beyond them vast and somehow unreachable. You can see it in "Chambered Nautilus," one of a handful of Wyeth's exquisite, gritty tempera paintings in a penetrating show, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond," now at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The painting, made in 1956, depicts his mother-in-law, Bess James, confined to her bed. She sits up, bony hands wrapped around raised...

WHO Louis DiBiccari WHAT DiBiccari, the chef at Boston's Storyville and host of the innovative dining challenge series Chef Louie Night, launches a new endeavor on June 3 from 2 to 6 p.m. called CREATE: Six Artists, Six Chefs, One Canvas, at the Boston Center for Adult Education. Six regional artists, including Josh Falk and Emily Lombardo, and Miracle 5, will be paired up with six chefs like Brandon Arms of Garden at the Cellar and Douglas Rodrigues of Clio to collaborate on dishes inspired by the artwork.

In “Pop: The Genius of Andy Warhol,’’ arts writers Tony Scherman and David Dalton trace the ascent of the iconic Warhol from his blue-collar roots to the pinnacle of the New York art world in the turbulent 1960s. Warhol’s recipe for success combined hard-driving ambition and a nonstop work ethic with supreme alienation. This alienation, the authors argue, probably grew from Warhol’s self-consciousness about his working-class upbringing in Pittsburgh, as well as his looks; he also was plagued by chronic skin problems and a condition that affected the appearance of his genitalia.

Hilton Kramer, the former chief art critic at The New York Times and founding editor of The New Criterion magazine, has died. He was 84. Kramer's wife Esta said he had been suffering from a blood disease, and died early Tuesday. He had been in an assisted living facility in Harpswell, Maine. Kramer started his work as an art critic in the early 1950s and joined the Times in 1965 as art-news editor. He became the chief art critic in 1973. He left the paper in 1982 for The New Criterion, a monthly journal that critiques the arts and other topics.

Frieze frame Sebastian Smee's piece on Frieze New York was most enjoyable ("Pondering an art world awash in wealth," Page A1, May 8). I was there; how right he is. It has become the contemporary equivalent of Art Basel. The role of these international art fairs has grown. They are a real cost to the galleries, but an essential one if a gallery wants to spread its wings and its goods to a global market. Too bad that Smee was not able to cover Pulse, the smaller show in the meatpacking district, which has traditionally displayed emerging artists or underrecognized artists from around the world.

NEW YORK - Is money destroying the art world? Right now, no one could be blamed for wondering. Last week, a version of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" sold at auction in New York for a record $119.9 million. Meanwhile, art dealers who paid as much as $65,000 for a stand at the first New York incarnation of the prestigious Frieze Art Fair - a four-day extravaganza that ran through Monday - are now pulling down their displays and shipping scads of expensive artworks around the world, like so many luxury commodities.

HARTFORD ­— The people in many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings look away. We see their backs, the edges of their faces. We cannot look in their eyes. They are small and solitary, and the world beyond them vast and somehow unreachable. You can see it in "Chambered Nautilus," one of a handful of Wyeth's exquisite, gritty tempera paintings in a penetrating show, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Beyond," now at the Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art. The painting, made in 1956, depicts his mother-in-law, Bess James, confined to her bed. She sits up, bony hands wrapped around raised...

BROCKTON — The chill was hard to ignore at the Fuller Craft Museum on a recent Tuesday, but that didn't concern the new director, Jonathan Fairbanks. The museum, struggling with a budget crisis, had decided to close three days a week. Fairbanks had no problem with turning down the heat to save money. The doors, though, were another matter. "If you close your shop, you're not going to have business," he said. "We have people knocking at the door. I'd love to...

Hilton Kramer, the former chief art critic at The New York Times and founding editor of The New Criterion magazine, has died. He was 84. Kramer's wife Esta said he had been suffering from a blood disease, and died early Tuesday. He had been in an assisted living facility in Harpswell, Maine. Kramer started his work as an art critic in the early 1950s and joined the Times in 1965 as art-news editor. He became the chief art critic in 1973. He left the paper in 1982 for The New Criterion, a monthly journal that critiques the arts and other topics.

Family Arts Festival Sept. 10 South Shore Conservatory One Conservatory Drive, Hingham 9 to 11 a.m. 64 St. George St., Duxbury, 1 to 3 p.m. 781-749-7565, ext. 33 www.sscmusic.org As the youngsters go back to school this month, it's the time of year when a light bulb goes off in parents' heads and they ask themselves, "What about their enrichment?" The South Shore Conservatory, the largest nonprofit community school for the arts in the state, serving 2,000 students overall, is hosting free samplings of music, dance, drama, and voice classes at the Family Arts...

Frieze frame Sebastian Smee's piece on Frieze New York was most enjoyable ("Pondering an art world awash in wealth," Page A1, May 8). I was there; how right he is. It has become the contemporary equivalent of Art Basel. The role of these international art fairs has grown. They are a real cost to the galleries, but an essential one if a gallery wants to spread its wings and its goods to a global market. Too bad that Smee was not able to cover Pulse, the smaller show in the meatpacking district, which has traditionally displayed emerging artists or underrecognized artists from around the world.

WALTHAM -- An overturned van, billowing smoke, juts out of a dumpster on the front lawn of the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. Amid the flowering trees and stylized architecture of this serene campus, the trashed van looks wildly out of place. Welcome to the world of Barry McGee, where everything is out of place, everybody feels the pain, and many are energized by his outlaw sensibility -- one that you'd never expect to see in an art museum, let alone on the campus of a private university.

In an age when memoir is ubiquitous and reality TV has eclipsed scripted drama, it’s sobering to recall a time when feminist artists were ridiculed and excluded for connecting the personal to the political and channeling it into art. “If you could identify, if you reveled in emotion [in your art], you were breaking the rules. It was all form and no content,’’ says Lynn Hershman Leeson, whose film “!Women Art Revolution’’ — or “!W.A.R.’’ — documents the history of the feminist art movement.

HOLT, England — He’s Britain’s most talked-about young artist. His paintings fetch hefty sums and there’s a long waiting list for his new works. It has all happened so quickly — he’s still getting used to the spotlight — and Kieron Williamson fidgets a little when he’s asked to share his thoughts on art. “Cows are the easiest thing to paint,’’ said Kieron, who has just turned 8. “You don’t have to worry about doing so much detail.’’ Paintbrush prodigy Kieron — dubbed “mini Monet’’ by the British...