Apr. 3, 2008 

GOODROW TO JOIN PHILLIPS
Gérard A. Goodrow has joined the auction house Phillips, de Pury & Co. as business development director, effective Apr. 1, 2008. Goodrow remains in Cologne at a new Phillips office and showroom, where he is tasked with finding new avenues of "client development" -- i.e. cultivating buyers and sellers -- and starting other "new business ventures." The energetic Goodrow recently left his post as director of the venerable Art Cologne fair, where he oversaw several initiatives to restore the event’s fading luster, including moving it on the calendar from fall to spring.  

RED DOT LONDON TO LAUNCH
You can’t stop Red Dot! The hotel fair, already with incarnations in Miami Beach and New York (where it was just seen at the Park South Hotel during Armory Show Week), is now launching a London version to coincide with the 2008 Frieze Art Fair, Oct. 16-19, 2008. It is held at the four-star Radisson Edwardian Grafton Street Hotel on Tottenham Court Road. Up to 60 rooms are available for intrepid dealers. More info at www.reddotfair.com

MIDGET BIENNALE FOR BERLIN?
The Berlin Biennial is set to light up the German capital, Apr. 5-June 15, 2008. And alongside it, visitors can look forward to the world’s first Midget Biennale, Apr. 3-6, 2008, held at Mariannenplatz 1, about two kilometers from the Berlin Biennial’s site at the KW Institute of Contemporary Art. Titled "From the Caves to Art Basel and e-flux," the ambiguously described Midget Biennale claims to offer "art that everyone can be a part of" under the grandiose theme of "The Third Way for Communism." As for the list of participating artists, interested parties are told to come to the event and see for themselves.

As it turns out, the Midget Biennale is a project of the Polish performance artist Katarzyna Kozyra, who has a history of collaborating with a team of dwarves to stage stunts at major arts events -- guerrilla interventions that have largely been, ahem, overlooked, at least as far as the art press is concerned. These include running a "Midget Gallery" during the 2006 Berlin Biennial, an attempt by a team of male dwarves dressed in Bavarian garb to "squat" the 2006 Frieze Art Fair, and a performance by this same team of dwarves at Art Basel in 2007, trolling the halls with a shopping cart. See www.themidgetgallery.com for more info.

PATTI SMITH AT FONDATION CARTIER
Iconic New York punk-rocker Patti Smith is currently getting the monographic treatment as a visual artist from the Fondation Cartier in Paris. Titled "Land 250," Mar. 28-June 22, 2008, the show highlights the artworks she made from 1967 to 2007. The exhibition includes her Polaroids of significant objects in the life of tragic artistic figures, such as Rimbaud’s typewriter and Virginia Woolf’s bed (works that have been seen, among other places, at Robert Miller Gallery in New York last year [see "Aura Photography," Dec. 7, 2006].)

Also on view are drawings by Smith from the collection of the Museum of Modern Art and the Centre Pompidou, film collaborations directed by Jem Cohen, Robert Frank and Robert Mapplethorpe, and a recording of Smith’s audio performance of The Coral Sea with Kevin Shields. For the duration of the show, the Fondation bookstore is being transformed to reflect the artist’s personal library, and visitors can enjoy Smith’s selection of books, CDs, films and objects.

MASS MOCA TEAMS UP WITH BERKSHIRE BOTANICAL
After the disaster that was MASS MoCA’s junkyard-as-art collaboration with intractable Swiss installation artist Christoph Büchel [see Artnet News, May 22, 2007], who can blame the institution for wanting bouquets? MASS MoCA is teaming up with the Berkshire Botanical Garden in Stockbridge, Mass., to offer "Cultivate," opening June 7. The show features environmental works designed specifically for the garden by Betsy Alwin, Vaughn Bell, Leila Daw, Christopher Frost, Petra Groen, Christopher K. Ho & Daniel Bouthot, R. Elliott Katz, Lynn Kobel, Joseph Smolinski, Luke Stettner & Mac Carbonell and Jennifer Zackin.

"Cultivate" is a more pastoral companion to "Badlands: New Horizons in Landscape," opening at MASS MoCA itself on May 25. On its home turf, the ever-intrepid institution is serving up a survey of 21 artists’ responses to the environmental crisis. Participants include the Center for Land Use Interpretation, Anthony Goicolea, Ed Ruscha, Alexis Rockman and Jennifer Steinkamp. "Whereas the artists at MASS MoCA present a more intense look at the declining landscape, the artists creating works for the Berkshire Botanical Garden in "Cultivate" take a nurturing approach to nature and attempt to open our eyes to the symbiotic relationship we have with the land and see the world around us in a new way," says Denise Markonish, curator of both shows.

PETER SAUL RETRO SET FOR JUNE ‘08
The first major U.S. retrospective of work by madcap political expressionist Peter Saul opens at the Orange County Museum of Art in Newport Beach, Ca., June 22-Sept. 21, 2008. Organized by guest curator Dan Cameron, the exhibition includes 50 paintings and drawings dating from the early 1960s to the present. The exhibition subsequently tours to the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, Oct. 18, 2008-Jan. 4, 2009, and the Contemporary Art Center in New Orleans, Feb. 14-May 24, 2009. 

ANGUS FAIRHURST, 1966-2008
Angus Fairhurst, 41, British artist who is known for his sculptures of gorillas as well as more gnomic sculptures and other works, has died a suicide during a walk in a remote part of Scotland on Mar. 29, 2008. A member of the Young British Artists group who participated in the "Freeze" art show of students at Goldsmiths College in 1988, Fairhurst exhibited in "In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida" at the Tate in 2004 (with Damien Hirst and Sarah Lucas) and also worked with Sadie Coles HQ in London, Contemporary Fine Arts in Berlin, Georg Kargl in Vienna and Paul Kasmin in New York.

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