Davy Rothbart's new collection of essays My Heart is an Idiot often dance on the edge of some sort of comic blade, full of sinister or dangerous moments that turn funny, warm, and even slightly mystical in a head-scratching way. You really don't know what is going to happen when you let your walls down, Rothbart will tell you, and admirably, he will follow his own advice into any awkward situation.

As a typical downtown New Yorker I don’t go to the upper west side much; however, to sit down and talk with Annina Nosei, I quickly made travel plans. I met Annina six or so years ago when we were both art dealers. She is the gallerist who “discovered” Jean-Michel Basquiat, but there is so much more to Annina. We sat in her apartment overlooking the Hudson River and across from a stunning early Basquiat.

Of his experience at the 2007 Frieze Art Fair in London, art historian Hal Foster observed that, “This expanded market can sustain any number of interests, positions, and projects. The art world shares a vocabulary with ‘the new spirit of capitalism,’ without any need for them to touch, let alone contest, one another.” Such a nouveau-capitalist effect in the United States had, in fact, predated the first Frieze by a year.

Stux Gallery · New York, NY

With their intense amount of detail and the artist’s superb draftsmanship, Nicolas Touron’s paintings relate to the work of European graphic artists such as Dutch cartoonist and graphic designer Joost Swarte, introduced to a U.S. audience in the pages of the influential magazine RAW, edited by Art Spiegalman and Françoise Mouly, as well as the dreamlike worlds of American cartoonist and animator Winsor McCay, creator of the comic strip Little Nemo in Slumberland. To achieve this graphic effect, Touron draws black outlines with pen and then fills them in with paint markers, a laborious and precise process that leaves little room for error or uncertainty.

Ron Feldman · New York, NY

PPhotographer and UC Santa Barbara professor Richard Ross presented Juvenile in Justice, an extensive documentary survey of juvenile detention centers (JDC’s) throughout the United States, this January at the Ronald Feldman Gallery in New York. His medium format—color digital ink-jet prints—were accompanied by didactics that explained what we were looking at, and provided quotes from the incarcerated youths.

David Zwirner Gallery · New York, NY

Luc Tuymans is an artist who, in this recent exhibition at David Zwirner in New York, chooses to focus his artistic energy into subjects some might refer to as banal or anti-climatic. However, as the artist has chosen to remove the importance of the subject, what is left is solely a painting. For The Summer is Over, his tenth solo exhibition with the gallery, rather than use the insurmountable amount of images that are available to us via the Internet and media, he instead has made paintings of things from his daily life, including those seen en route to the studio.

David Kordansky · Los Angeles, CA

There is a definite pleasure in seeing old (what if I call it vintage) work in a new context. It is especially interesting as an artist to see how a curator frames or grounds a show with a certain nod to history, to precedence, and to the archive. Too often today artists are making work that is highly if not offensively derivative. And because art is an undisciplined discipline, the responsibility to acknowledge one’s source materials is not drummed into you with an MLA handbook and the threat of expulsion.