A1 News Roundup: A Look at This Year's Turner Prize Nominees, Larry Gagosian Backs Mitt Romney, and More Top Art News

- THE BIG STORY -

London is abuzz with art this week, with Frieze on the horizon, David Zwirner and Pace both opening their first gallery outposts in the city, and… the opening of this year's Turner Prize show! Always controversial (even if it's controversial for being uncontroversial), the Prize—the world's most famous art award—is this year being vied for by an quartet of interesting artists: Luke Fowler, Elizabeth Price, Spartacus Chetwynd, Paul Noble. "Is this the best one yet?", asks Guardian critic Adrian Searle? It's certainly intriguingly diverse. The immediate bookie favorite for the win (with 5/4 odds) is Noble, an artist who for years has specialized in drawing meticulous, obsessive diagrams of a fictional city of his own invention called Nobson filled with little piles of poo. Then there are two video artists, Price and Fowler, who have contributed, respectively, a short film dealing with a deadly 1979 fire at a Woolworth store (mixed in with footage of the Shangri Las) and a feature-length film about the polarizing Scottish psychiatrist R.D. Laing. But the most exciting artist in the show has to be Chetwynd. A 38-year-old free spirit who lives in a nudist colony next to a cemetery, Chetwynd—who showed up to the exhibition's opening wearing an old dress and a fake beard—is the first performance artist ever to be shortlisted for the Turner Prize. For her contribution to the show, she has created a series of performative environments where aides clad in fantastical pagan costumes enlist visitors in performing strange rites under the auspices of a green papier-mâché "oracle" (it looks like a cross between a plant and a dead bunny) that supposedly reveals the future. Searle calls her work "rumbustious, bonkers, daft, and discombobulating," which sounds like high praise indeed. Click here to take a video tour of the show here.

- QUOTE OF THE WEEK -

"The most important quality as a dealer has to be your taste. If you're insecure, that would be difficult. Social skills matter but not as much as being decisive in your vision. An obsessed collector will buy the right painting from the devil. I've never been interested in a unifying style, I'm interested in looking for singular voices." - David Zwirner on art dealing in an interview with the FT's Jackie Wullschlager to inaugurate his new London gallery

- MUST READ -

"Horsemeat Is Off the Menu at the Dinette" - The proprietors of the avant-garde M. Wells restaurant have issued a statement responding to the outcry over its play to serve the flesh of steeds, saying, "We took it off because it upset so many people, which truly surprised us. That is not the effect we look for in our food, so away it goes." (NYT)

Words of Wisdom From Klaus Biesenbach - The dynamic MoMA PS1 director gave Kelly Crow a wealth of epigrammatic observations on the art world and curating, including the declaration that the word "curator" itself is overused. (WSJ)

So, Richard Phillips Painted Romney - The artist has taken a break from immortalizing Lindsay Lohan to enter the political fray by painting a mural of the Republican presidential candidate at the Rauschenberg Foundation. (Gallerist NY)

It's Tough Being an Artist to the Crown - Briton Alexander Creswell, a watercolorist who has 38 works in the Royal Collection, dishes on the rigors of painting Kate Middleton's wedding and other assignments that required him to dangle out of a helicopter. (NYT)

Jenny Holzer Dominates the Dallas Cowboys - The famed text artist is the latest contemporary star to be brought into Cowboys Stadium's impressive art collection, with her aphorisms slated to appear on the big board during games (including the gridiron-appropriate "ABUSE OF POWER COMES AS NO SURPRISE"). (Dallas Morning News)

"The Guggenheim's Prodigal Son" - Michael Kimmelman lyricizes a spiraled house that Frank Lloyd Wright designed for his son David—echoing plans he had for his famous Guggenheim museum design—but which very few people have seen, and now faces possible destruction. (NYT)

An Old Fashion Dylan Pretension Throw-Down - Michael H. Miller takes on ex-MoMA honcho John Elderfield's critically over-the-top mash note to Bob Dylan's new album in Artforum, in which he compares it to "Carl Jung's thoughts on James Joyce," by comparing it to his own undergraduate Dylanological drivel. (Gallerist NY)

Paris Museum Explores the "Art of Hair" - The strange and somewhat questionable Musée du Quai Branly is now tackling the dicey ethnography of hair color, "juxtaposing blondes, brunettes and redheads to show the evolution of stereotypes attaching to each: blondes as angels, saints and mothers; brunettes, as their opposites — adventurers and sex symbols; redheads as drama queens." (NYT)

- ART MARKET -

The Met Joined Artspace! - Some scrappy art e-commerce site has hooked up with the greatest encyclopedic museum in America—if not the world—and is now selling work by the museum's affiliated artists online. (Gallerist NY)

Larry Gagosian Is a Romney Supporter - The megadealer has given $7,500 to the Romney campaign, while, intriguingly, Shala Monroque (his glamorous occasional date out on the town) donated $10,000 to Obama and his L.A. dealer Deborah McLeod gave a whopping $71,600 to team Obama. (HuffPo, via Gallerist NY)

The U.K.'s Top 10 Collectors - With David Zwirner and Pace both opening new London outposts, and with Frieze returning to the foggy town in a few days, Coline Milliard surveys Britain's most powerful collectors of contemporary art. (Artinfo)

The Hard Economics of Art Fairs - Julia Halperin casts an analytical eye on the costs and benefits for galleries of doing these high-profile souks, revealing that most galleries surveyed "reported that art fairs alone account for an average of 60 percent —and as much as 90 percent—of their total business." (Artinfo)

Finally, a Blue-Chip Gallery With a Bar - When Hauser & Wirth opens its gargantuan new Chelsea gallery with a show of Dieter Roth in January the space will debut with a permanent bar designed by Roth's son, Björn. (Gallerist NY)

See Vladimir Restoin Roitfeld's New Show - The Observer provides a nice service to curious art worlders with this slide show of work that the fashionable independent dealer (and son of former French Vogue curator Carine) curated at Sotheby's hybrid S2 gallery. (Gallerist NY)

Sotheby's Poaches a Red-Hot Art Expert - Yamini Mehta is leaving her 14-year tenure at Christie's to become the rival auction house's international head of Indian and Southeast Asian art and antiquities, which is quite the brief considering it spans ancient to contemporary work in the booming art market. (Gallerist NY)

- IN & OUT -

Congratulations to Artspace artist An-My Lê and conceptual photographer Uta Barth for winning this year's MacArthur "Genius" grants! (NYT)

Alice Butler has won this year's Frieze Writer's Prize for her review of "The Historical Box" at Hauser & Wirth's London gallery, with the award being the chance to be published in an upcoming issue of Frieze for the tidy sum of $3,200. (Press Release)

MoMA has appointed its revered longtime architecture and design curator Paola Antonelli to be the museum's director of research and development, a new position that will "evaluate new initiatives and identify new directions and unexplored opportunities, particularly in the digital realm." (Gallerist NY)

Sculptor Julia Dault, whose work was a hit at the New Museum's last triennial show, has signed up with Harris Lieberman gallery. (Gallerist NY)

Ari Emanuel, the hard-charging Hollywood agent you may know as the inspiration for Jeremy Piven's character on Entourage (and as the brother of Rahm), has joined Los Angeles MOCA's board. (Gallerist NY)

Frank Gehry has signed on to design a new park and performing arts center in Miami for the National YoungArts Foundation, "a nonprofit that helps aspiring high school artists." (NYT)