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Among the buzziest booths at this year’s Armory Show is that of Sean Kelly, which features work by the likes of Marina Abramović, James Casebere, Alec Soth, and Kehinde Wiley. The New York gallery is also spotlighting three recent additions to its stable of artists: Idris Khan, Nathan Mabry, and Peter Liversidge (on Tuesday, Sean Kelly announced its representation of Terence Koh). Just around the corner from Khan’s mini-museum of clouds trapped in lucite is “Wooden Mail Objects” (2011), a shelf of rulers, protractors, and chalkboard erasers that London-based Liversidge mailed to Kelly, sans envelopes, over the course of three months. Beside the stamp-covered objects is the artist’s deadpan installation proposal, written on his trusty manual typewriter. Liversidge is also represented by what he describes as a text piece: a hand-held embosser placed on a white podium. It, too, is accompanied by a framed noticed. “Whoever reads this proposal is invited to take a one-dollar note from their pocket, wallet, or purse. In their other hand they should take up the embosser and place the note within it’s [sic] jaws,” he explains. “Then apply pressure and emboss the note with the text piece concealed within.” Pull out your dollar to reveal the imprint of a single word: free. No word as to how much this work sold for.

Installation view of Michael Riedel booth at the Armory Show. (Courtesy David Zwirner, NY)

Imbibe with care at the Armory Show, which opened today on Piers 92 and 94 in Manhattan, because directly opposite the Pommery champagne bar is the unusually spacious booth of New York’s David Zwirner gallery. Fairgoers who attempt to investigate its southwestern portion, bathed in bold color, will discover a perfectly aligned sheet of wallpaper that reproduces the trio of panels that hang on the neighboring wall. This creative paradox is the work of Frankfurt-based artist Michael Riedel, whose site-specific installation is both dazzling and refreshing—and collectors agreed: the booth sold out within 30 minutes of yesterday’s VIP preview.

“David asked me to do something similar to one of the works that we showed at Art Cologne a few years ago, where I doubled the neighboring booth with wallpaper,” Riedel told us. “But I knew the environment would be different here, with fewer solo presentations and less open space, so I decided not to use the neighbor’s booth but to reflect my own work instead.” That work is three large-scale panels silkscreened with posters in repetitive patterns of text and shapes harvested from his past projects. “This is also the first time I’m doing a wallpaper that’s not just black and white,” he added. In other words, color—the selection of which Riedel insisted was random but happened to be purple, at least until last night’s gala opening, when it was overlaid with a jazzy turquoise version.

Post-Armory, Riedel will be gearing up for a solo show at the Schirn Kunsthalle in Frankfurt. The exhibition, opening June 15, will be his first retrospective. “Usually when I show it’s very pure, the presentation of one group of work, but this will be combining the newer work and the older work,” he said. “It’s a new situation for me, but I look forward to it.” Given the frequent appearances of posters, logos, and painstakingly arranged morsels of text in his work (his 2011 exhibition at Zwirner was, after all, entitled with the pangrammatic chesnut “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog”), we couldn’t resist asking him about his relationship to the design world. “A lot of graphic designers like my work a lot,” he said. “But I’m very naïve in graphic design, so maybe that’s why they like it.”

Mayor Michael Bloomberg addresses members of the press at the 24th annual Art Show as artist Sarah Sze looks on. (Photo: UnBeige)

It’s Armory Arts Week in New York, with a dozen art fairs opening today and tomorrow throughout the city. According to the number crunchers at the office of Mayor Michael Bloomberg, all the art action—during what is typically a slow time for tourism—will draw approximately 80,000 visitors and generate $55 million in economic activity. Looming largest on the ever-growing fair landscape are, of course, the Armory Show, which opens to the public tomorrow over on Piers 92 and 94, and the the Art Dealers Association of America’s Art Show, which kicked off yesterday at the Park Avenue Armory with a gala preview. Confused yet? Not to worry, Bloomberg has a handy mnemonic device that will help you keep your Armories straight. “Get this—write it down! The Art Show hangs in the Armory on Park, and the Armory Show is parked in a hangar on the river,” he said gleefully at a press conference held yesterday. “You have to work very hard to get that right, but we did it.” Bloomberg credited his speechwriter with the wordsmithing. “I’m so proud of this,” he added later, before repeating the catchy sentence. The mayor addressed members of the press standing before the booth of Tanya Bonakdar Gallery, which is featuring the intricate assemblages of New York-based Sarah Sze. Bloomberg invited Sze, whose work is also currently on view at Asia Society, to join him at the podium. “Sarah is going to exhibit at the Venice Biennale next year. Anybody wanna go?” he asked the crowd. “Yeah, me too.”

Jacobs and LVMH chairman Bernard Arnault in 2006. (ARTE France/ANDA MEDIA)

“I was somewhat amazed not to see a single handbag in the first show,” says LVMH honcho Bernard Arnault toward the beginning of Marc Jacobs & Louis Vuitton, a documentary by Loïc Prigent. “However, he has made up for it since.” The film, screened last night for a capacity crowd of fashion lovers at FIT, delves into Jacobs’ transatlantic roles at the helm of both Louis Vuitton, the leathergoods powerhouse for which he inaugurated ready-to-wear in 1997, and his own fearlessly quirky label. It’s a rare behind-the-scenes look at the designer and his team at work on two spring 2007 collections in Manhattan and then Paris, interrupted only by a triumphant trip to Tokyo, where Vuitton held a champagne-soaked encore presentation of the previous season’s looks in a translucent pod erected for the occasion. “The things you have to do to gain new markets!” LVMH exec Yves Carcelle tells Prigent with a grin, yelling over a live set by Grace Jones.

After six months of fly-on-the-wall filming of Jacobs and interviews with the likes of Sofia Coppola and Larry Gagosian, Prigent was most stunned by a member of the Vuitton creative team he met while on the Tokyo trip. “I asked her what she did, and she told me ‘I’m here for the belts. In case one hole is not right and they need another hole. That’s what I do,’” he explained in a Q&A following the screening. “The belt girl blew me away. Keep in mind that they were putting on the same show as they had a couple of months before—with the exact same models.” Prigent also singled out “the bag people” at Vuitton as particularly…innovative. “They had all these unbelievable ideas,” he said, having been allowed to film design meetings but required to blur the “mood boards” lest competitors’ steal ideas. “It was all this crazy stuff, things with Mickey Mouse. Crazy!”
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(Photos: UnBeige)

Hallucinations are par for the course at the Javits Center, particularly during the biannual New York International Gift Fair (NYIGF, to those in the know), during which the cavernous space is chock full of innovative gizmos, colorful homegoods, and enough “accent pieces” to sink an ably-piloted Italian cruise ship. And so when, shortly after selecting the Chick-a-Dee smoke detector as our pick for a Bloggers’ Choice Award earlier this month, we spied Queen Elizabeth II clutching her handbag and waving regally to passersby, we chalked it up to good ‘ol gift show burnout. But this was no monarch mirage! Kikkerland Design convinced the Queen to get a headstart on her Diamond Jubilee festivities with an appearance at their NYIGF booth, where she helped to promote a new limited-edition version of the company’s “Solar Queen.” Designed by Chris Collicot, the grinning figurine waves daintily when placed in sunlight, and the Jubilee edition is tricked out with a brooch and a crown. Meanwhile, Collicot promises that the Queen will soon have a companion in Elroy the Solar Corgi.

“It had a great feeling of unreality. I mean, I was a designer of china; I was not in the business of killing Stalin. Imagine yourself! Most of the time I did not believe that I would have an opportunity to relate this to anybody. I really did not. There was very little probability that I would live—nobody wished me well.”

-Designer Eva Zeisel (1906-2011) in her prison memoir, published in issue 14 of A Public Space. On Thursday evening, Cooper-Hewitt director Bill Moggridge kicks off a new year of Bill’s Design Talks with a tribute to Zeisel. Joining Moggridge on stage at The Greene Space will be art critic Jed Perl (The New Republic) and the designing duo of James Klein and David Reid (KleinReid), who collaborated with Zeisel on a series of ceramics and prints. Buy tickets here.

“The audience was made to suffer. At one performance the only person allowed to sit was Duchamp. He said, ‘I am very old, and I cannot stand, please let me sit down.’ I thought, ‘Maybe it’s a trick. But then again, he was very old.’ I think Duchamp went to everybody’s performances. ‘Nekropolis I’ ended with us all becoming mice, dressed in burlap bags. We crawled out into the audience slowly; we couldn’t see. Then we were supposed to just drop somewhere and not move until they went home. According to the story I wound up on the feet of Duchamp. But I couldn’t see who it was. It’s a good story, but as time goes by you wonder, ‘Did this really happen?’”

-Artist Claes Oldenburg recalls for Carol Kino what actually happened at the Happenings, in an article published in today’s New York Times. A critic writing in 1962 described “Nekropolis I” as enjoyable for “the heavy slow clamor of these bulky creatures crawling and messing around in that bulky ‘environment’ of burlap, paper, paint, and other assembled junk.” Oldenburg was singled out for having “made wonderful nondescript jungle sounds and heaved his considerable weight from mound to mound like a natural denizen.”

Pictured: Lucas Samaras, left, and Oldenburg in a scene from “Nekropolis I,” from 1962. (Photo Claes Oldenburg; All rights reserved Robert R. McElroy/VAGA, NY)