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Hedge fun. The logo topiary at the Party in the Garden, hosted by the Museum of Modern Art.

• A new Diane Arbus biography? A new Diane Arbus biography! Journalist Arthur Lubow has inked a deal with Ecco to publish A Secret About a Secret: The Life of Diane Arbus. Word on the street (and by “the street,” we mean the deal report at Publishers Marketplace) is that the book “reveals the extraordinary facts of her life and explores the way she used her gift for intimacy to probe complex ideas about identity in a manner revolutionary to both her art and her time.” Tide yourself over by reading “Arbus Reconsidered,” Lubow’s 2003 piece in The New York Times Magazine, which ignites thusly: “‘Giving a camera to Diane Arbus is like giving a hand grenade to a baby,’ Norman Mailer said after seeing how she had captured him, leaning back in a velvet armchair with his legs splayed cockily.”

• And speaking of colorful characters (monumental lips! glittering eyes!), the Cyclops Trannies are back. The colorful paint-marker portraits by assume vivid astro focus, exhibited earlier this year at New York gallery the Suzanne Geiss Company, are now available in book form. This evening (6-8 p.m.), Printed Matter hosts a reception and signing with the artists. Stop by the store anytime in the next week or so to check out two editioned neon works from avaf in the window. Next up, in June, is a window installation by book artist David Sandlin.

• Commencement season is in full swing, and the New York School of Interior Design celebrated its 175 graduates with the help of Amy Lau. The interior designer was the keynote speaker at Friday’s NYSID commencement ceremonies, where she received an honorary doctorate in fine arts along with Martha Stewart, Architectural Digest editor-in-chief Margaret Russell, and interior designer John Saladino.
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Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.

Dueling bathing beauties: Boo George traveled to Oslo to photograph Norway’s “It” couple, Iselin Steiro and Anders Danielson, for the cover of T: The New York Times Style Magazine. At left, George Hoyningen-Huene’s 1930 photograph “The Divers, Paris.”

• Got Polaroids? The Foundation for the Exhibition of Photography, in connection with MIT and London-based publisher Thames & Hudson, is at work on a major project on Polaroid photography. Slated to open at MIT in late 2015 and then travel internationally, the show will cover Polaroid-related art, science, and technology. “This is a call for submissions,” William A. Ewing, who is curating the art aspects of the project with Barbara Hitchcock, told The Art Newspaper recently. “It demands the best of the best material. This is not a community project, we want the stuff that can hold its own against the art of the period—and it was a long period, from 1950 to 1990.” Deborah Douglas and Gary Van Zante are in charge of the project’s science and technology aspects.

• Five finalists have been selected for the Urban Land Institute‘s Urban Open Space Award, a competition that recognizes “an outstanding example of a well-used public open space that has spurred regeneration and the transformation of its surrounding community.” Two NYC projects—the High Line and Pier 25 at Tribeca Section in Hudson River Park—made the final five, along with Railroad Park (Birmingham, Alabama), RiverWalk Urban Waterfront Calgary, Alberta), and Tanner Springs Park (Portland, Oregon). The winner, to be announced in October, will receive a $10,000 cash prize, and if we know this group, they’ll blow it all on bulbs and shrubs.

• Author and graphic novelist Neil Gaiman delivered the commencement address and picked up an honorary doctorate at the University of the Arts in Philadelphia. Among his advice for the graduates: make mistakes. “If you’re making mistakes, it means you’re out there doing something,” said Gaiman last Thursday. “And the mistakes in themselves can be useful. I once misspelled Caroline, in a letter, transposing the ‘a’ and the ‘o,’ and I thought, ‘Coraline looks like a real name…’” Watch the full speech (his first-ever university commencement address) here.

• Event designer extraordinaire David Stark has taken to the web in his search for a star intern. He has partnered with Apartment Therapy on its “Design is not Taught” contest. In addition to a three-month internship with David Stark Design and Production, the winner will have the opportunity chance to work with Stark one-on-one to edit and curate his or her portfolio. The intern’s final project? To single-handedly design Apartment Therapy’s holiday party. Click here for details.
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“Ladies and gentlemen, design is a popular subject today. No wonder, because in the face of increasing competition, design is often the only product differentiation that is truly discernible to the buyer.” That this sentiment came from Dieter Rams comes as no surprise. What’s striking is the date of his remarks, delivered to an audience at Jack Lenor Larsen‘s New York showroom in December 1976. He ended on a cautionary note: “I imagine our current situation will cause future generations to shudder at the thoughtlessness in the way in which we today fill our homes, our cities, and our landscape with a chaos of assorted junk,” said Rams. “What a fatalistic apathy we have towards the effect of such things. What atrocities we have to tolerate. Yet we are only half aware of them.” The full transcript of this disturbingly prescient speech is now available online thanks to Vitsœ, for whom Rams designed the eminently modular 606 Universal Shelving System in 1960. The big occasion is the legendary designer’s birthday: he was born 80 years ago today in Wiesbaden, Germany. Celebrate by treating yourself to Sophie Lovell‘s masterful monograph Dieter Rams: As Little Design As Possible (published last year by Phaidon) or a gorgeous poster of Rams’ famous “Ten Principles for Good Design,” available exclusively from Fab.com.

Remember those commercials featuring Zack the Legomaniac? His real-world, adult equivalents are known as LEGO Certified Professionals, a designation that only a dozen people worldwide have achieved. One of them is Adam Reed Tucker, a Chicago architect-turned-“architectural artist” that now builds exclusively with tiny plastic bricks. “Working with my hands, creating art and sculpture, the freedom to create and explore my own vision of design without computer reliance, and to share architecture with the world all made this a natural move for me,” he says. “I wanted to work on ways to inspire and motivate those familiar with architectural elements and those with no design knowledge at all.”

Tucker is to thank for the LEGO Architecture product line, launched in 2008 with kits devoted to the Sears Tower and the John Hancock Center. He’s also the tireless brickbuilder behind “LEGO Architecture: Towering Ambition,” on view through September 3 at the National Building Museum in Washington, DC. Tucker’s 15 globe-spanning LEGO landmarks (including the Empire State Building, Frank Lloyd Wright‘s Fallingwater, and the Burj Khalifa) recently got some new neighbors, as the museum welcomed LEGO versions of 15 Central Park West (downsized by its original designers, Robert A.M. Stern Architects) and a couple of hometown favorites: a Metro station (ZGF Architects) and a traditional center hall colonial home (Gulick Group). Total brick count on the three models? 77,000. This weekend, Tucker returns to the museum to put the finishing touches on his LEGO White House. Stop by between noon and 4 p.m. on Saturday or Sunday to join in the architectural fun. Can’t make it to Our Nation’s Capital? Build your own LEGO White House (considerably smaller than the museum version) with this 560-piece kit. No word as to whether the gift shop also sells a LEGObama figure to place inside.

(All photos courtesy of the Metropolitan Museum of Art)

“I never thought people would want to wear clothes with monkeys and bananas on them,” said Miuccia Prada of her spring 2011 collection, a retail smash that featured madcap cotton separates printed with baroque scrolls, embroidered monkeys, and thick stripes. And the bananas? A wink at Carmen Miranda and Josephine Baker. More than 70 years earlier, when Miranda was still working the carnaval circuit in her native Brazil, Elsa Schiaparelli was feeling a circus theme. The designer described her summer 1938 collection as the “most riotous and swaggering” one she had ever created, and illustrator Christian Berard immortalized the “circus parade at Schiaparelli’s” in Vogue. “Clowns, elephants, horses, decorated the prints with the words ‘Attention a la Peinture,’” said Schiaparelli of her Barnum-infused couture. “Balloons for bags, spats for gloves, ice-cream cones for hats, and trained Vasling dogs and mischievous monkeys.” The two fanciful collections meet at long last in the “Naïf Chic” gallery in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s spring Costume Institute exhibition, “Schiaparelli and Prada: Impossible Conversations,” which opens today.

Curators Harold Koda and Andrew Bolton reveal the striking similarities between Schiaparelli and Prada by focusing on seven areas of aesthetic kinship, from “Ugly Chic” and “Hard Chic” to “The Classical Body” and “The Surreal Body.” That last one is the showstopper, celebrated in a final gallery of mirrors (pictured directly above) that tricks the eye into perceiving an infinity of Dali collaborations, trompe l’oeil accents, furs, feathers, and pailletes, which Prada believes are irresistible to women. (“Paillettes are a typical form of eveningwear,” the designer has said. “Because I hate eveningwear, I try to make pailletes problematic—by making them so big or so heavy, for instance, that they become problematic.”) It can be a challenge to tell a Prada from a Schiaparelli, particularly when hefty fabrics and exotic textures are involved, but as Judith Thurman writes in an essay in the masterpiece of an exhibition catalogue designed by Abbott Miller of Pentagram, “Prada’s citations of Schiaparelli are an exercise in sampling, not imitation. They enrich and complicate, rather than merely translate her models, and they illustrate the way that critics and artists of every generation reinvent the formal language they inherit.” Prada is neither a copycat nor someone who is interested in translating the work of the contemporary artists she collects into covetable clothing. For her, art is an entirely separate barrel of monkeys.
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It’s shaping up to be a spot-on summer. Dot-loving artist Yayoi Kusama is the subject of a retrospective on view through June 5 at Tate Modern. The show arrives stateside, at the Whitney Museum, on July 12, just days before Louis Vuitton debuts a collection of ready-to-wear printed with two Kusama patterns. Vuitton stores around the world will be filled with displays of red and white spotted tentacles created by the artist, who recently celebrated her eighty-third birthday. Wallpaper* is right on the dot with this cover of its June issue, on newsstands today (subscribers received the limited-edition Kusuma cover, which is otherwise available only at newsstands in Japan). The photo shows Kusama at the National Museum of Art in Osaka, Japan, where she stands with one of her favorite works, “With All My Love for the Tulips, I Pray Forever” (2011), a trio of dot-covered tulip sculptures. The artist has personalized the cover with a “message of love” to Wallpaper* readers along with her Gustonian doodles.

Show the world your love of architecture with a t-shirt that supports Architecture for Humanity.

• Can you believe graduation season is upon us? Pratt Institute holds its commencement—the 123rd in its history—this afternoon at Radio City Music Hall. In addition to approximately 1,300 bachelor’s and master’s degrees, honorary degrees will be awarded to artist Ai Weiwei (he’ll accept his doctorate of fine arts via video feed), architect Santiago Calatrava, patron of the arts and education Kathryn C. Chenault, and Philippe de Montebello, director emeritus of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and Fiske Kimball Professor at NYU’s Institute of Fine Arts. Calatrava will deliver the commencement remarks.

• The Met Ball wasn’t the only black-tie event in town on Monday. Over at Avery Fisher Hall, the focus was on food, not fashion, as Alton Brown emceed the James Beard Foundation awards gala. In the restaurant design category, Bentel & Bentel triumphed for their overhaul of famed Le Bernardin, while graphic gourmand Richard Pandiscio took home the Outstanding Restaurant Graphics medal for his work for the Americano at Hotel Americano. Meanwhile, Jeff Scott‘s two-volume, 900-page Notes from a Kitchen: A Journey Inside Culinary Obsession (Tatroux) was named best photography book.

• And speaking of kitchens, artist and kitchen semiotician Martha Rosler is preparing for her first solo exhibition at New York’s Museum of Modern Art, and it’s a doozy. Come mid-November, she’ll transform the museum’s atrium into a giant “meta-monumental” garage sale. That’s where you come in: the general public is invited to donate items—clothes, books, records, toys, costume jewelry, artworks, mementos—for Rosler to sell. Click here for the schedule and collection locations for donations. Why not seize the opportunity to get your artwork into a MoMA show?
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Maurice Sendak, Caldecott-winning author of classic children’s books such as Where the Wild Things Are, died this morning due to complications from a stroke. He was 83. His most recent book was Bumble-Ardy (HarperCollins), the tale of a mischievous pig named Bumble who has reached the age of nine without ever having had a birthday party. He takes matters into his own hands (well, cloven hooves) and invites all of his friends to a masquerade bash that quickly gets out of hand. In discussing his widely beloved work, Brooklyn-born Sendak was always quick to credit his mentors, the late Ruth Krauss (The Carrot Seed) and her husband Crockett “Dave” Johnson, who wrote Harold and the Purple Crayon. The most valuable lesson they imparted to the budding children’s book author, whose big-headed kids were initially rejected by publishers for being “too foreign-looking”? Be truthful. “If there’s anything I’m proud of in my work—it’s not that I draw better; there’s so many better graphic artists than me—or that I write better, no. It’s—and I’m not saying I know the truth, because what the hell is that? But what I got from Ruth and Dave, a kind of fierce honesty,” Sendak said in a 2005 interview, “to not let the kid down, to not let the kid get punished, to not suffer the child to be dealt with in a boring, simpering, crushing-of-the-spirit kind of way.”

Juergen Teller, “Pettitoe, Suffolk, 2011,” a photograph from his “Keys to the House” series exhibited earlier this year at New York’s Lehmann Maupin gallery.

“I can achieve something in a very quick moment. But it does get very personal. I think I open up a lot too. I don’t come around as the archetype fashion photographer dude, playing the big guy with the horde of assistants. I let them know I’m also nervous or insecure. Then I let them relax. The way I photograph is quite hypnotizing. I found a way to hide my insecurity—I have two cameras and I photograph like this [mimes cameras in each hand moving hypnotically] and this helps me to figure out what I should do, where they should go…it’s so intense, so psychologically draining, it’s like my brain works on overdrive in those minutes—or hours or days—I’m photographing. That’s why I can’t do it so much because I’m really super-concentrated. Other people think it’s a stupid snapshot—I get that a lot—but it’s very precise. And it has to be very fast because if I’m on a job or something, I can’t just doodle around and days go past and I take a picture. Sometimes there’s a lot of money involved and I have a responsibility to the client to get the fucking thing done. A lot of other people say, “Stand like that, stay like that,” and they do a Polaroid and everyone—all the assistants, the hair and makeup, everyone—stands around looking at the Polaroid or nowadays looking at the screen, then they say, “Let’s do it, shoot,” by which time the model is so tense the Polaroid is better than the end product. I ease that up where they don’t feel necessarily, ‘This is the big decisive moment.’”

-Juergen Teller interviewed by Tim Blanks in the fall 2012 issue of Style.com/Print

“Before microphones and television were invented, a leader had to stand in front of a crowd and bellow,” notes Rick Stengel, managing editor of TIME. “Now [one] can tweet a phrase that reaches millions in a flash. Influence was never ­easier—or more ephemeral.” Which makes the task of selecting TIME‘s list of the 100 most influential people in the world all the trickier. This year’s list, announced today and on newsstands tomorrow in the magazine’s April 30 issue, includes those who have wielded influence through fashion design (Sarah Burton of Alexander McQueen), exquisite gadgets (Apple CEO Tim Cook), political cartoons (Ali Ferzat), Nordic cuisine (René Redzepi of Noma), and spandex underthings (Spanx founder Sara Blakely).

Then there’s the influencer who is lauded for his way with time itself: Christian Marclay, creator of the 24-hour cinematic odyssey known as “The Clock.” Geoff Dyer was up to the task of composing a concise yet evocative summary of the video piece, which he describes as stemming from an idea “audacious in its simplicity and herculean in execution.” As for the writer’s own experience of the work—well, it’s something of a chrono-cautionary tale. “During the film’s opening run in London, I had intended to stay long enough to get the gag—10 minutes?—before hurrying on to a lunch date,” writes Dyer. “It was so hypnotic, so thrilling, that I ended up watching 20 hours over a month, arranging life and appointments (for which I was invariably late) in such a way as to catch previously unseen segments of that celluloid epic called a day.”