Nightmarish and erotically charged, the imagery in Helen Verhoeven’s new paintings leads one to suspect that the exhibition’s title, Stage Disasters, refers as much to the stage(s) of psychosexual development as to dramaturgical mishap.

The paintings in Lola Montes Schnabel’s first solo exhibition are fitting allegories for the infiltration of spectacle into every sphere of contemporary existence.

Allison Katz makes mille-feuille of “what ifs” and “why nots.” Her paintings are modest in scale and challenging on first encounter. Perfectly at home in Kasia Kay’s intimate West Loop gallery, they speak softly but have much to say. Themes are densely elaborated; verbs buckle under adverbs; and as the show’s title (copped from Shakespeare’s Love’s Labour’s Lost) suggests, much of the visual vocabulary on display oozes with innuendo.

In the forward to the new Mel Bochner book, Solar Systems and Restrooms: Writings and Interviews 1965-2007 (MIT Press), Yves-Alain Bois tells us that “the job” of a work of art, as Bochner conceives of it, is to “question, abolish, or expand boundaries.”

At the material level, a significant portion of the work featured in the exhibit—from Ruben Ochoa’s uprooted chain link fence to Mika Tajima’s bizarre pageant of shifting mirrors and distorted audio—pursues an aesthetic of fragmentation, disjunction, or, in the case of Walead Beshty’s safety laminate-encased, fractured glass boxes (an allusion to Duchamp’s damaged-in-transit The Large Glass?), just plain brokenness.

The necessary back story is as follows: Fabiola was a wealthy 4th-century Roman woman who, after divorcing and remarrying against the Church’s ordinances, renounced her sins and, alongside her more art historically canonized peer-saint, Jerome, embarked upon a life of penitence and service.

The slogan of Toronto’s LuminaTO arts festival is “see the world in a new light.” However, its organizers make no apologies about the fact that LuminaTO is very much about seeing the city of Toronto in a new light—as an emerging cultural Mecca.

In the December/January issue, the Brooklyn Rail published “A Call to Art Critics” by Irving Sandler in the open column Railing Opinion. Sandler’s challenge provoked a number of responses from artists, critics and observers, among them John Perreault, Alan Brilliant and Eric Fischl, which have been published in subsequent issues.

Pierre Klossowski and Hans Bellmer are two twentieth century figures whose controversial artistic production has limited their acceptance by the general public especially when compared with the international reputations of their immediate contemporaries. Paradoxically, Klossowski (1905-2001) was the consummate “insider.”

Hans Richter is best known to art history for his contributions to avant-garde cinema. “Rhythmus 21” (1921)—one of the earliest examples of abstract film—set a precedent for the application of painterly formalism to the expanding realm of cinematography.

There is a story Ronald Feldman likes to tell that serves to contextualize the exhibition recently on view at his Mercer Street gallery. While visiting the Soviet architectural team Brodsky and Utkin in their native Russia, Feldman and his associates dined at an upscale restaurant whose interior the two architects had designed. When the check came, Brodsky and Utkin insisted that they pay for the dinner.