But it does make for excellent fodder for discussions, film screenings, “interactive experiences,” and more thought-provoking happenings at New York’s Rubin Museum of Art. The reliably innovative cultural hub, the only museum in the United States dedicated to the Himalayan region, is now putting the finishing touches on “The Ignorance Series,” a fresh line-up of public programs that will explore how the unknown permeates our lives and impacts our perceptions of the world—at a time when it seems as if every answer is just a smartphone Google search away.
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Designer Peter Olaf with (from left) the 2012, 2013, and 2011 Tour de France trophies.

The 100th Tour de France wrapped up yesterday in a spectacular “jubilee” burst of yellow near the Champs-Élysées finish line, where Kenyan-born Briton Chris Froome added to what’s proving to be a banner summer for the United Kingdom (see also: Andy Murray at Wimbledon, the highly awaited Baby Prince). In addition to the yellow jersey, Froome was presented with a hand-cut crystal trophy from Czech-based Lasvit.

Since 2011, designer Peter Olaf has masterminded the series of hand-blown, hand-cut trophies, which are produced for the overall winner, best under-25 rider, best sprinter, and best climber. Each trophy, the product of hours of sizzling glassmaking toil, is over two feet tall and weighs almost eight pounds, according to Lasvit. Among the special touches for the 100th Tour is a layer of opal glass that was ground using wedge-shaped cutters, revealing the crystal underneath and producing a decorative design with a strict, geometric shape.

What’s better than making sandcastles? Watching artists make sandcastles while enjoying summery snacks and refreshments! Our friends at Creative Time are heading back out to Far Rockaway, Queens on Friday, August 9th to host the organization’s second annual artist sandcastle competition. A group of selected artists and their teams will gather on the sand near the Beach 86th Street boardwalk to battle it out for special prizes from esteemed judges. The free-and-open-to-the-public day of fun will kick off at noon, with castle-building starting at 2:00 p.m. A post-awards party is planned for that evening at Rippers.

While you have your calendar out, circle October 25th and 26th, the dates of this year’s Creative Time Summit at NYU’s Skirball Center for the Performing Arts. The freshly expanded conference, titled “Art, Place, and Dislocation in the 21st-Century City,” will bring together artists, activists, students, critics, curators, and other culture vultures for more than 30 presentations by the likes of Vito Acconci, Lucy Lippard, Rick Lowe, and Rebecca Solnit (and maybe you?) as well as on-stage debates, short films, and regional reports by leading curators. A new “pay-what-you-choose” ticket pricing structure ensures that the event will fit your budget. Read more

When the good people at David Zwirner e-mailed us with news of the New York gallery’s fourth annual summer pop-up bookstore, we briefly considered keeping the news to ourselves, so great is our obsession with admiration for many artists in the Zwirner stable (Luc Tuymans! Marlene Dumas! Lisa Yuskavage!). Somehow, we’ve managed to suppress our selfish impulses to let you know that for two weeks only—Monday, July 22 through Friday, August 2—Zwirner will offer up deals galore on a selection of rare and out-of-print books, signed artist catalogues, DVDs, and more. The David Zwirner Pop-Up Bookstore, hosted with ARTBOOK | D.A.P., will be open weekdays from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m., and you know we’ll be there bright and early to ensure first dibs on anything and everything related to Michaël Borremans. OK, and we’ll probably hoard all the Neo Rauch stuff, too. Because all’s fair in love and pop-up bookstores.

Francophiles abound at UnBeige HQ, and with Bastille Day approaching, we’re stocking up on macarons and planning to sing La Marseillaise whilst astride a carousel horse that’s been around since the Third Republic. We sent writer Nancy Lazarus to preview the world’s first traveling festival of vintage carnival rides and carousels as it makes its stateside debut.

Lady Liberty is green with envy. While the famous statue just reopened to the public, another French attraction, Fête Paradiso, makes its debut tomorrow on a neighboring isle in New York Harbor. The collection of late 19th and early 20th century carousels, swing sets, pipe organ, and games arrived here after six months of planning and a four-week installation period (by a French artisan family that rebuilt the rides on the island). The carnival rides will be open and operational during weekends through September 29.

“Governors Island is known for its fantastic view of the Statue of Liberty, and now we can further celebrate French-American relations,” said Leslie Koch, president of The Trust for Governors Island during a preview this week. She noted that the event’s exotic name derives from the film Cinema Paradiso, though “it’s hard to imagine it all here in the middle of New York City.”

“I’ve come to New York with my toys, after many years of dreaming about restoring this ménage,” explained Fête Paradiso’s creative director and carnival rides collector, Régis Masclet. “I’d been working alone on these French festivals, but after a wonderful encounter with fellow collector Roger Staub, I’ve been allowed to realize my dream.”
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Ready your inner iconoclast for “Breaking the Rules,” the international conference of the Industrial Designers Society of America. Set for August 21-24 in Chicago, the megaconfab promises “an energizing, thought-provoking and potentially outburst-inducing three- day exploration of design, business, culture shifts and rule-breaking strategies that help you make the most of our evolving and often tumultuous economic climate,” according to conference chair Paul Hatch, president of TEAMS Design USA. Speakers include Dean Kamen (Deka Research & Development), Bruce Nussbaum (Parsons), and Bill Buxton (Microsoft Research). Regular registration rates end July 20, so act fast.

(Photo: James Ewing)

New York’s Park Avenue Armory is an insatiable monster of a space, able to accommodate art fairs and the Royal Shakespeare Company, atonal German operas and homespun missions to Mars, all with what feels like acreage to spare. Until now. Paul McCarthy’s “WS” manages to fill every orifice of the 55,000-square-foot Wade Thomson Drill Hall, oozing under the bleachers and out into the period rooms to tell the grimmest of fairy tales—the artist’s debaucherous take on Snow White, or White Snow (WS). Bring on the depraved Disney magic, because through August 4, the Park Avenue Armory is where nightmares come true.

“Let’s not beat around the bush, this is a really tough work,” said Tom Eccles, consulting curator at the Armory, at Tuesday’s press preview. “It’s painful.” Bracketing a kind of hellish studio backlot are giant elevated screens playing a four-channel video that follows WS from the forest—which alternates from a Rousseauian jungle studded with tropical megablooms to just plain trippy, depending on the lighting—into the home of the dwarves, an oafish, mentally challenged, and pants-free bunch who favor Yale and UCLA hoodies. A series of increasingly raucous house parties ends with Walt Paul (McCarthy himself, stealing the show as a Walt Disney-like character who unravels from inscrutable butler mode to a kind of coked-up Walter Matthau) on all fours in the basement “rumpus room,” sodomized with a broomstick—as if Bosch and Brueghel teamed up on an alternate ending for “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

The seven-hour feature, culled from some 350 hours of footage (“We couldn’t even watch it all,” says McCarthy), takes place mostly inside a thoroughly trashed, gravy-and-chocolate smeared replica of the artist’s childhood home in Salt Lake City. The ranch-style house has been recreated in three-quarter-scale, a choice that, when combined with the tightly shot, loosely edited cacophony of sins, foodstuffs, and liquids, makes for a claustrophobia- and queasiness-inducing viewing experience.
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Taking a good photo of a great building is no easy task, as Flickr or Instagram can demonstrate. Meanwhile, even the most expansive Pinterest page of stunning architectural images is likely to feature the work of a relatively small group of photographers–those who have mastered the tricky art and science of capturing the utility, spirit, and beauty of the designed environment. Many of those names are followed by “Esto,” the firm built on the image collection of Ezra Stoller. Esto assignment photographer Albert Vecerka was on hand last week at the Cooper-Hewitt Design Center for the latest in the museum’s “Harlem Focus” series. “I look to tell a story about a place; a neighborhood, a building, a room,” Vecerka has said. “Looking for the right light, right day, or right time of day is a part of that narrative, and it is no different for commercial assignments than for personal projects.” Watch the event below and then mark your calendar for June 26, when architectural historian John Reddick will be joined by curators and gardeners from the Central Park Conservatory Gardens to talk “Garden Design: The Art of Color, Variety, and Form.”

Less than two weeks stand between you and Dwell on Design, a veritable feast of modern design in the form of thousands of products, oodles of presentations, modern home tours, and demonstrations galore. This year’s ideas- and inspiration-fest takes place June 21-23 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. Among the highlights in store for the eighth Dwell on Design is a keynote address by architect and product designer Michael Graves (have you tried his tweezers?), who will share his insights on universal design and design’s direct influence on quality of life, and a series of panels–featuring speakers from organizations such as the Getty Conservation Institute, MOCA, LACMA, and Architecture for Humanity–tackling issues in the areas of design innovation, sustainable design, and the business of design. This year’s show also features the first Dwell on Design artist-in-residence, Tanya Aguiñiga. The Los Angeles-based furniture designer, craftsperson, and community activist will create a living exhibition of upcycled furnishings that after being displayed on the show floor will be donated to local shelters.

“For the past year, I have been working on a video that records my day-to-day activity in the studio. I have used color–or rather, monochrome–as the backdrop for narrative interruptions….I am fascinated by the viewer’s experiences of seeing only one color. In my film, I have attempted to insert a narrative into a monochrome color, tainting it and making it dirty, rather in the way a window functions in certain kinds of Modernist architecture. It’s intriguing that color is one of the most subjective categories in art; there is no single color theory, but only theories, making color a very useful interpretive tool. Since color defies logic, while remaining within the field of objective scientific measurement, it has the possibility of an absurd play of differences.”

-Los Angeles-based artist Matteo Tannatt, whose monochromatic benches punctuated Frieze New York as part of Frieze Projects.