The Serious Joke: The Objects of Jay Heikes

For the past five years, Jay Heikes' work has revolved around one big joke. In the 2006 Whitney Biennial, the artist showed stills from a video that showed him as a stand-up comic, puppet in hand, telling a joke about a pirate and its obstinate parrot. Shot in one take while Heikes was finishing graduate school at Yale, So There's This Pirate (2005) follows the parrot's refusal to obey its owner and the pirate's resultant identity crisis, mimicking the artist's constant evaluation of his own work.
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Birds and Beans

For two years, multi-instrumentalist Andrew Bird and aritst Ian Schneller have been planning a "sonic arboretum" of different-sized horns.

"The horns kind of evolved from being more this Victrola aesthetic to more a plant-like shape, some sort of prairie flowers, kind of facing toward the sky," said Bird, in an interview in advance of his performance at the Guggenheim Thursday night. "So I kind of like this idea of possibly modeling different environments through these horns. I'm interested in the acoustics of different environments: If you're in Zion National Park and you're surrounded by these canyon walls and these trees, what kind of sounds fill this space? Or if you're in a field of soy beans, what does that sound like?"
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Nate Lowman Does It for the Kids

Nate Lowman's new installation at 80WSE Windows, "Stay In School," features recycled images, ripped from magazines and newspapers, which capture young people engaged in violence and tomfoolery. They're simply "weird situations," Lowman says.

For "Stay In School," Lowman constructed sheetrock walls in the exhibition space, and then took a hammer to them. Pairs of images are displayed on the walls and within them. On one wall, the jagged hole reveals a black-and-white photograph of boys in military garb; below, a pixilated image of the poster for the film about disturbed adolescence, Thirteen. Next to it, Lowman posts a newspaper image of a baby dressed as a suicide bomber (an unfortunate joke made by the New York Post), above a blown-up photograph of 1980s-era California skate punks, framed in torn-up sheetrock. The third and final window frames a photo of a young couple, the man holding a gun against his girlfriend's head, above a tabloid cover chronicling the scandal over Prince Harry's Nazi Halloween costume.
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Basquiat: Behind the Interview

Jean-Michel Basquiat: The Radiant Child, out in select theaters today in New York, draws on before-unseen footage of filmmaker Tamra Davis in conversation with the artist, and new commentary from Basquiat's contemporaries and supporters, among them Julian Schnabel, dealer Bruno Bischofberger, and longtime girlfriend Suzanne Mallouk.

The documentary also revisits what was once thought to be the only existing video-taped interview with Basquiat, short clips of which feature in Radiant Child: a 1982 interview at Basquiat's Crosby Street studio, conducted as part of a program on "Young Expressionists" by the video magazine ART/new york.
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