There’s more to the Met this spring than PUNK. Writer Nancy Lazarus headed up to the roof.

(Photo: Metropolitan Museum of Art)

And how many rains must fall before the stains are washed clean? This question, posed by Pakistani poet Salima Hashmi, is at the heart of Imran Quereshi‘s latest work, created for the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s roof garden. “This is an open space, and there will be lots of rain, so we’ll see what happens,” noted the artist.

During a rooftop museum press conference on Monday morning, the brisk weather cooperated, with partly sunny skies. But the theme of global violence and regeneration still casts a dark cloud over Qureshi’s artwork, on view through November 3.

Born in Hyderabad and now based in Lahore, Qureshi said he worked with the color red more as a political statement than to depict blood, but that changed in 2010, after a suicide bombing in his neighborhood. “When I saw TV images after the bombing, the area had transformed into a bloody landscape within seconds. I was thinking, how could a landscape full of life change so quickly? For me, this altered the meaning and symbolism of the color red.”

The artist specializes not only in expansive installations but also in miniature paintings in the style of the Mughal court. He said he’s fascinated by the New York City skyline, and for him the rooftop perspective reminds him of landscapes and miniature paintings.

Assistant curator Ian Alteveer said it took Qureshi about ten days, including breaks, to create his roof garden work. The artist used high-grade acrylic, rich in pigment and waterproof, so it did withstand the monsoon-like rains of the past weekend.
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Sound works and art fairs are rarely compatible. There’s the impetus to keep moving (must…see…everything), the ambient murmur, and for exhibiting galleries, the difficulty of peeling off fairgoers to don headphones or enter a booth for a bit of aural stimulation. Frieze New York tackles these problems with the help of luxury cars and technology. The fair, which runs through today, partnered with BMW on Frieze Sounds, transforming a sleek fleet of VIP shuttles into sound cocoons for the duration of the commute to Randall’s Island–of course, it helps that the BMW 7 Series has a sound system that suggests a full orchestra is hiding in the trunk. Cecilia Alemani (pictured), curator of Frieze Projects, organized the program of three specially commissioned audio works by Trisha Baga, Charles Atlas and New Humans, and Haroon Mirza, which are also accessible at a listening station inside the fair. Not a VIP? Not in New York? Not to worry: the Frieze Sounds are now posted online for all to enjoy. So sit back, relax, and pretend you’re being chauffeured to an art-filled island inside a shiny new 740i.

Tom Friedman, Untitled (Hostess Treats), 2013. (Photo: UnBeige)

Twinkies and their eternally shelf-stable sibling snacks have been absent from stores since Hostess shut its doors late last year, but a trio of the company’s beloved treats can be found at Frieze New York, which opens its second edition today on Randall’s Island in Manhattan. Luhring Augustine gallery’s solo booth by Tom Friedman includes this giant Twinkie, Ding Dong, and Sno Ball. The new work, being exhibited for the first time at Frieze, is made of Styrofoam (just like real Hostess foodstuffs!) painted to convincingly evoke spongy, cream-filled goodness. No word on whether Friedman’s snacks were snapped up at yesterday’s VIP preview, but we suspect the work will end up in the hands of megacollector Leon Black. His Apollo Global Management teamed with Metropoulos & Co. earlier this year to acquire Hostess and Dolly Madison products. The $410 million deal closed last month, and four bakeries that produce snacks such as Twinkies, Ding Dongs, and Ho Hos are slated to reopen this summer.

From across the pond and into a SO-IL-designed tent pitched on the banks of the East River, it’s Frieze New York, back for a sophomore edition after attracting some 45,000 visitors to its stateside debut last year. The fair, which opens today, is the largest ever hosted by Frieze, according to directors Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover. All that’s standing between you and the offerings of 189 galleries ranging from Air de Paris to Zeno X is the commute to Randall’s Island, the 480-acre park that Robert Moses first designated for recreational use–before that it was home to public facilities such as a boys’ home, a hospital, and a home for civil war veterans, which all sound like promising fodder for future Frieze Projects, the fair’s site-specific program of art projects. Prepare for your island adventure by watching the below video.

“The concerns of a painter are always the concerns of an abstract painter. The images that I use need to be detailed enough to preserve their inherent narrative, and at the same time they have to be open enough not to be too locked into that narrative. For either the abstract or non-abstract painter, the question is exactly the same: how do you hold onto detail and openness at the same time? In the case of these particular paintings, yes there are the metallic grays of the Atlantic Ocean. There is also the red that is contained in the name ‘Brazil.’ But the images are not limited within that context; they open up by association to a lot of other connections and places.”

-Artist Francesco Clemente, in an interview with Alex Bacon for The Brooklyn Rail, on the works in “Clemente > Brazil > Yale,” an exhibition on view through June 2 at the Yale School of Art

Pictured: Francesco Clemente, “Father,” 2006-2007. (Photograph by Beth Phillips)

This 1999 photo taken on the shores of Italy’s Lake Garda will be shown in “Martin Parr: Life’s a Beach,” opening tomorrow at Aperture Gallery. (Photo: Martin Parr/Magnum Photos)

A man recently arrived at a Manhattan federal building to apply for a passport, became agitated, and ended up trying to hide from authorities–in the ceiling. Securing a passport to the arts is much easier–and comes with minimal risk of being arrested and taken to Bellevue for psychiatric evaluation–thanks to The New Yorker. The magazine and its promotions department are gearing up for the eighth annual Passport to the Arts gallery crawl, evening cocktail party, and silent auction (to benefit Creative Time) this Saturday, May 4. A $55 ticket gets you a “limited-edition passport” that each of the 19 SoHo and Chelsea galleries on the self-guided tour will stamp with a replica of a featured work of art. And with a list of participating galleries that includes Jack Shainman, Aperture, and ClampArt, this year’s Passport to the Arts promises to be quite a trip.

Richard Misrach, “November 20, 2011, 3:36 PM” (2011). Courtesy Fraenkel Gallery.

“I grew up in L.A. and went to Berkeley from ’67 to ‘71. I started out as a math major and ended up in psychology, but that was also when Berkeley was just going insane. I didn’t take formal classes in photography at all. I started taking photographs of tear gassings on the Berkeley campus with my uncle’s camera….I was being exposed to Berkeley street riots and the politics of the time, which was very important to me, but I was also being exposed to the f/64 school of photography—Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Dorothea Lange—and I was just falling in love with photography, so I found that that combination of social, political engagement along with my passion for the aesthetics of the medium of photography were coming together very fast and hard. For the last forty years I think my work has reflected those two polarities, and it’s been sort of interesting the way they have been pushed. They’ve never really reconciled—art and politics.”

-Richard Misrach today at Paris Photo Los Angeles, in an on-stage conversation with John Divola and curator Douglas Fogle. Misrach’s work is on view through June 16 at the Cantor Center at Stanford University. A exhibition of his new largescale photos opens next Saturday at Pace/McGill Gallery in New York.

• “[S]tripped of most traditional linguistic elements, the short film has to move fast, but it must strive not to confuse the viewer with too many objects or jarring cuts,” writes Stephen Apkon in The Age of Image: Redefining Literacy in a World of Screens, new this month from Farrar, Straus and Giroux. The book inspired this short film (above) by Daniel Liss.

• And speaking of short films, the Tribeca Film Festival has selected the winners in its six-second film competition. Watch all of the jury’s top picks in under a minute here.

• It’s the end of an era for Cooper Union, which will begin charging undergraduates tuition beginning next fall.

• The design community and members of the general public are protesting MoMA’s decision to raze the building that Tod Williams Billie Tsien designed for the American Folk Art Museum. The Architectural League drafted this open letter requesting MoMA to provide “a compelling justification for the cultural and environmental waste of destroying this much-admired, highly distinctive twelve-year-old building.”

• All is fair (use) in love and appropriation? Artist Richard Prince emerged largely triumphant in yesterday’s appeals court ruling on the copyright case involving his 2008 “Canal Zone” series, which used portraits from Patrick Cariou‘s Yes, Rasta book.

The awards-gala season is in full swing, and Creative Time is cooking up a night to remember at Brooklyn’s Domino Sugar Factory. The arts organization, which recently trotted out Nick Cave‘s soundsuited steeds in Grand Central terminal, will cap off the month with an April 30 benefit to honor the multitalented Julian Schnabel. Mario Batali is handling the food, daughter Lola is crafting the playlist, and the likes of Laurie Anderson and Al Pacino are lining up to praise the man of the moment in charming yet succinct video tributes. As you prepare to fetch your credit card to buy a ticket (after all, gala proceeds provide nearly a third of Creative Time’s annual budget), watch Anderson’s salute to Schnabel:

Two of of the seven 2013 Time 100 covers, which feature portraits by Mark Seliger.

Today Time revealed its annual selection of the 100 most influential people in the world, and while we remain suspicious of any list that includes both Christina Aguilera and Elena Kagan, it’s difficult not to enjoy the logistical wonder that is the Time 100 issue. On newsstands tomorrow, the massive editorial effort commissions a diverse group of notable figures—many of them Time 100 alumna—to write a paragraph or two about the chosen influencers. And so this year we get Richard “I know a thing or two about building spaceships” Branson on SpaceX and Tesla founder Elon Musk, Claire Danes‘s clear-eyed look at the uniquely vanity-free and shameless Lena Dunham, and Michael Bloomberg‘s cliché-ridden paen to Jay-Z, who emerges as a 21st century Gatsby that gets the girl–she also made the Time 100–and the American Dream.

Art and design stars that made it onto this year’s Time 100 include Apple’s Jony Ive, Michael Kors, who joins the likes of Uniqlo honcho Tadashi Yanai and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg in the “Titans” category; artist Ed Ruscha, who Richard Lacayo likens here to “a SoCal Magritte;” 2012 Pritzker laureate Wang Shu; and Jenna Lyons, executive creative director of J. Crew. “She has made fashion relatable,” writes fashion designer Prabal Gurung of Lyons. “Being fashionable doesn’t mean being trendy; it means having a sense of style. Jenna has made J. Crew more than a brand or a company–it’s a philosophy that believes in style.”