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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Making Your Market: Baibakov's Moscow Project

Russian art center owner and heiress Maria Baibakova is racking up frequent flier miles these days, not that she needs them. (Her father is mining oligarch Oleg Baibakov.) While traveling this year, the 24-year-old founder of Baibakov Art Projects, a private, non-profit contemporary art center in Moscow, has scoped out art scenes in India; Cairo, Egypt; the UAE; and Cape Town, South Africa. Baibakova said she sees similarities between developing art scenes in the places she's visited and in Moscow, a city that's not exactly thought of as a contemporary art destination, though Baibakova would like to make it one. One similarity: a need to cultivate better-informed audiences.

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What Can't He Do?

James Franco, movie star and America's best-known MFA student, has opened his first solo art show. Curated by P.S. 1 and Art International Radio founder Alanna Heiss, The Dangerous Book Four Boys at Clocktower Gallery features Franco's short films, photographs, drawings and sculpture. It's on view through September.

The title is a play on Conn and Hal Iggulden's guide to mischief, The Dangerous Book For Boys, a gift to Franco from a friend. Scrawled-on pages of the book, framed in plexiglass, constitute the drawing portion of the show. As a whole, the show can be seen as a grown-up interpretation of boyhood interests: Violence and sight gags are key, with a strain of sexual confusion. In one film, an anonymous young man smashes apart a plywood house; another film, the self-explanatory Dicknose in Paris, stars Franco with a rubber penis tied to his face. A window at the gallery entrance reveals a Little Tikes log cabin scored with bullet holes.
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