(Photo: Kevin Kennefick)

Last Saturday's persistent drizzle didn't deter art enthusiasts (and, we might add, the people who love them and own cars) from journeying east for the opening of the landmark exhibition of Sol Lewitt wall drawings at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art (MASS MoCA) in North Adams. Conceived by the Yale University Art Gallery in collaboration with Lewitt before his death last year, the project has been realized by the gallery, MASS MoCA, the Williams College Museum of Art, and the team of 65 artists and art students who executed the wall drawings, each of which began as a set of instructions or simple diagram.

Spanning Lewitt's career from 1969 to 2007, the large-scale drawings occupy nearly an acre of specially built interior walls that have been installed—per the artist's specifications—over three stories of a historic mill building on the campus of MASS MoCA. The 27,000-square-foot structure, known as Building #7, has been fully restored for the exhibition by Bruner/Cott & Associates architects. Through a series of elevated walkways, a dramatic new vertical lightwell, and new stairways, the architects have integrated the building into the museum's main circulation plan, which Bruner/Cott describes as now linked "in one elegant loop" (and Lewitt knew a little something about elegant loops).

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Last week at this time, the country was scrambling for costumes and poll results. Now it's good riddance to candy corn and campaign ads, at least until next year. We captured this week's Friday Photo last night while strolling up Manhattan's Fifth Avenue, the site of a shuttered Halloween shop. Guarding the cash register of the ephemeral holiday retail hub was a life-sized crimson ghoul who appeared none too pleased about the store's closure. His frustration extended to the results of the presidential election; perhaps not suprisingy, he was rooting for the red states.

Photo: UnBeige

Pinocchio, the Italian boy puppet who was the subject of a 1940 Walt Disney movie about his early life, died yesterday morning after falling from an upper floor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York City. Police have not determined whether the death was a suicide, homicide, or accident.

Pinocchio's body was found by Nancy Spector, chief curator of the Guggenheim, who discovered it floating in the fountain of the museum's Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda hours before the opening celebration for thanyspacewhatever, a group exhibition of installations by ten artists who emerged during the early 1990s. The show opens to the public today.

The only son of Gepetto, Pinocchio began life as a pine log and was the heir to one of Italy's smallest carpentry fortunes. He struggled for years in his attempts to become "a real boy," which he believed could be achieved with sufficient exhibitions of bravery, truthfulness, and unselfishness. After a dramatic early life marked by compulsive lying, influential encounters with a woman known as the blue fairy, emotionally scarring employment under the puppeteer Stromboli, and a harrowing journey into and out of a whale's stomach, Pinocchio enjoyed fame and steady income from the 1940 animated Walt Disney film based on his life. In 2004, he received an honorary degree in sociology from the University of Trento.

According to reports in the Italian press, Pinocchio had recently become estranged from his longtime insect companion, Jiminy Cricket. The split was rumored to have sent Pinocchio back to Pleasure Island, a rowdy playground-cum-work camp off the Amalfi coast. Shy, retiring, and reluctant to grant interviews, Pinocchio was last seen at New York's Marian Goodman Gallery with artist Maurizio Cattelan, who is known for his satirical sculpures.

(Photos: UnBeige)

Artbreaker Chip Kidd isn't the only design star who can fill Joe's Pub. At one of his two recent shows at the cozy Manhattan venue, multi-talented fashion designer and "masstige" pioneer Isaac Mizrahi and his trusty band, The Ben Waltzer Quintet, charmed the crowd with a mix of cabaret classics, anecdotes, and gifts. Shod in silvery Belgian Shoes and fueled by a light beer summoned from the bar (only two points on Weight Watchers, he pointed out), Mizrahi kicked off his set with Marlene Dietrich's 1931 hit "Johnny, Wenn Du Geburtstag Hast," made all the more impressive by his confession that he neither speaks nor understands German. "I could be saying anything. I wouldn't know," he cautioned the sell-out crowd, which included model Veronica Webb, his boyfriend Arnold, the debonair Korey Provencher, and other dedicated Mizrahi fans and friends.

Between songs, we learned that Artforum publisher Knight Landesman is handy with a tarot card deck ("Under those colorful clothes lurks the heart of a gypsywoman," said Mizrahi), and that in a past life, Mizrahi and his adorable dog, Harry, were a couple of nuns in 18th-century Spain. Appropos of the Betty Comden and Adolph Green-penned "Dance Only with Me," Mizrahi told of once finding himself seated next to Comden at a dinner party, where she praised him and his work. "I wanted to say, 'Are you sure you're talking about me? You might have me confused with Issey Miyake.'" She assured him she had the right designer, but when, months later, Mizrahi spied Comden and Green entering a restaurant where he was dining and went to greet her, she mistook him for the maitre d'.

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No, it's not Zaha Hadid's latest concept chair, but there is rapid prototyping and automotive paint involved. The fiery squiggle pictured at right is one of the ten recently announced finalists for the CityRacks Design Competition cooked up by the New York City Department of Transportation and the Cooper-Hewitt National Design Museum to develop a functional, innovative bike rack design that will raise the profile of cycling in the city. Having admired all ten finalist designs on display in the Cooper-Hewitt courtyard (see them installed and ready for use at New York's Astor Place), we were particularly intrigued by this one, designed by Francis Anthony Bitonti of FADarch in Brooklyn. "Alien is probably the best word to describe it," Bitonti told us of his creation, built from a modular system of parts using custom-developed software. "Because it lacks familiarity, the object appears foreign." And fascinating.

Bitonti's design process is entirely digital. "I use animation software to develop the forms and create an aesthetic sensibility for the project," he said. "I then write a series of simple computer programs that combine these objects in different ways. These algorithms help me produce complex patterns that would be very time-consuming and difficult to produce any other way." Then it's off to the 3-D printer, where the alien comparisons continue. "Data is extracted directly from the 3-D CAD file and is used as instructions for a robotic arm that fuses together layers of material."

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(Photo: UnBeige)

Earlier this week, the New York branch of Sotheby's hosted "Creative Hong Kong," an exhibit organized by the Hong Kong Design Centre and highlighted by ten unique products born from collaborations between global brands and Hong Kong designers. Among the works on view were Eric Chan's ergonomically sound bamboo chair for Herman Miller and "Flora Banquet," a set of Royal Copenhagen dinnerware tailored for Chinese cuisine with graphic designer Kan Tai Keung's Chinese brushwork-influenced hybrid of painting and calligraphy. "Hong Kong design is characterized by its international perspective...the meeting of Eastern culture with Western culture," said Lorraine Justice, director of the School of Design at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, at Monday's press briefing.

The opposites really attracted in architect and designer Chi-Wing Lo's "Stringless Pleasure" mini-stereo system for KEF (pictured above), which you'll recall as the British company that partnered with Ross Lovegrove on those lovely Muon speakers. Made of shimmering antique wood accented with jade buttons and dials, the sleek stereo fuses craftsmanship and innovation, east and west, natural and synthetic—and that, and shelf space (a clever way to ensure optimal spacing between wall and speaker)! "I think of it as the mussing link between a musical instrument and a contemporary hi-fi system," Lo told us. He further described his concept, designed to celebrate last year's tenth anniversary of the British handover of Hong Kong to China, as "Hong Hong and China, bridged by sound." Click "continued..." for a closer look.

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Photos: UnBeige

Those who made their way to downtown Manhattan earlier today for the showing of designer Christian Francis Roth's comeback collection, Francis, in the gym of the St. Patrick's Youth Center found Mulberry Street decked out for the annual San Gennaro Festival, which runs through September 21. While one might expect a funnel cake stand (pictured above) operating beside a snaking line at lunchtime to be overrun with takers, the fashion crowd was more interested in the woman handing out complimentary copies of WWD and the list-wielding PR reps scribbling seat assignments.

The afternoon may have been a bust for the funnel cake sellers but more sweet treats were waiting inside for showgoers. The brown paper lunch sack-style gift bags—on each of which a very patient someone had written "Francis" with black marker—held a trio of "CFR" cookies from Cookie Panache. Their subway signage look was a nod to Roth's inspiration for his exuberantly colored, Teen Vogue-flavored spring collection: New York cliques, described in the show notes as "equal parts Gossip Girl, The Warriors, and A Clockwork Orange." Alas, the show didn't get out in time for attendees to make the San Gennaro Festival's 7th Annual Cannoli Eating Competition, which kicked off at 1:00 P.M. a few blocks away. There's always next year.

© Estate Martin Kippenberger, Galerie Gisela Capitain, Cologne

As Fashion Week transport options go, yellow cabs and black cars are the norm, but we're taking the eco-friendly, high-art high road and traveling to the Bryant Park tents and points south in the above creation of the late German artist Martin Kippenberger. "Worktimer" (1987) is a capacious pseudoauto crafted of steel that shares its minty-fresh, toothpastey hue with the famed Vitra-produced W.W. stool that Philippe Starck designed for Wim Wenders. And with those thoughtfully placed hooks to hold our attaché cases, who need headlights?

Once we're done with the Kippenbergermobile, it heads west, to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Los Angeles, where it will be prominently featured in the first major U.S. retrospective of Kippenberger's work. Titled "The Problem Perspective" (after a 1986 work from his No Problem paintings), the show opens September 21 and will assemble key bodies of work from 1977 to 1997, including paintings, sculptures, works on paper, photographs, posters, and books. "He leaves an exhaustive and challenging oeuvre, a few lifetimes of work in just 20 years, with numerous trails of associations that will take many years and many exhibitions to unfold," writes exhibition curator Ann Goldstein in the catalogue (designed by Lorraine Wild of L.A.'s Green Dragon Office). "It is a most problematic practice—and that is its great gift."

Photo: Robert Humphreys

It's a bird! It's a plane! It's an espresso bar made of abandoned washing machines, and it's among the recycled design masterpieces of Rotterdam-based 2012 Architecten. The Maytag-meets-Starbucks-meets-Sputnik creation will be featured in the third season of e2 design (say "e-squared design"), PBS's Brad Pitt-narrated environmental and green building series. 2012 Architecten is the subject of an e2 episode entitled "Super Use," a lush mini-documentary exploring how the architectural firm's partners elegantly repurpose everything from car tires to windmill blades as building materials. Other topics e2 tackles in its third season, which premieres online on September 1, include the Aga Khan's Al-Azhar Park in Cairo, a 500-year-old dump turned "urban lung"; the efforts of Renzo Piano to integrate the natural world into his design for San Francisco's natural history museum; and the work to rebuild New Orleans' Lower 9th Ward in a way that is environmentally, culturally, and socially sustainable. Hmm...how's the Big Easy fixed for washing machines?

Photo: Elizabeth Dalziel/Getty Images

As Michael Phelps prepares to go for gold medal #146 in another nail-biter at the Water Cube and Bela Karolyi comes down from the blood pressure spikes induced by last night's all-around competition in women's gymnastics, we bring you today's Friday photo to shed light on a type of Olympic spectator who is on pins and needles about, well, pins. John Schmidt (pictured above) came to Beijing from his home in Kentucky prepared to trade, sporting the vintage enamel-studded khaki vest that is the mark of a true collector. And apparently, these games have not disappointed. "Trading has been great," veteran pin trader Dan Baker told CNN of his experience at his thirteenth Olympics. "Everybody who is anybody is here and they all seem to have pins. And they are all beautiful pins."