Vito Schnabel, a New York art dealer and the son of painter Julian Schnabel, is among the stars of the latest episode of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, the FX TV series that chronicles Truman Capote’s volatile friendships with several female members of his era’s Manhattan elite.

It starts with a blow job. Schnabel, playing a repairperson named Rick, comes to Capote’s place to fix a garbage disposal. A dejected Capote, feeling as though he has aged out of relevancy in New York, strikes up a conversation, finding himself fascinated by this younger, less wealthy man from Illinois who rides a Harley-Davidson to work.

“I wonder if you’d be at all interested in having your cock sucked,” Capote suggests. Rick, who typically goes for women, accepts the offer, and later admits that it was the best fellatio he received. The two embark on a month-long relationship that eventually comes to an end when Rick admits he is engaged to a woman.

Schnabel has acted before, but only rarely, and never in such a mainstream role as this one. He’s better known for his self-titled gallery, which has spaces in New York and St. Moritz, Switzerland, and represents trendy artists such as Trey Abdella and Robert Nava. His gallery has also shown paintings by Gus Van Sant, the director of famed films such as Good Will Hunting and Milk. Van Sant helmed the majority of Feud: Capote vs. the Swans, including this week’s episode.

That Schnabel had been cast in Feud had been previously reported in the tabloids, which fixated on him performing alongside Warren Beatty’s daughter, Ella Beatty, who plays a young protégée of Capote in this episode.

On an Astroturf field, just outside the tent where Frieze Los Angeles is currently hosting its fifth edition at the Santa Monica Airport, is a literal rat race. The project, courtesy of LA-based artist Sharif Farrag, is part of a curated section titled “Set Seen” organized by the Art Production Fund.

For the work, Farrag has affixed ceramic sculptures, via zipties, onto several R/C cars that resemble large rats. Each is adorned with several iron-on patches meant to match the personality of each ceramic sculpture, including car numbers, license plates, and other decal-like symbols.

“I made the ceramics first and when I was picking out patches for each one I was thinking, how do I create a personality for each head,” Farrag told ARTnews as a race was going on.

For the performance, Farrag and his team, dressed in custom-designed white jumpsuits, line up six ceramic rats at the starting line and count down for the race. After three laps, a winner is declared. Oftentimes, the cars crash into each other and, by Thursday afternoon, a few of the rat sculptures had lost their ears. The first-place winner receives a trophy, topped with an orange ceramic cone made by Farrag, who presents it and takes a photo with the winner, just as if they had won a Formula One race.

“I wanted to build up energy by creating an incentive, so people actually wanted to win,” he said. “I’m learning that it actually makes a difference.”

In 2007, Ohio-based artist Ann Hamilton was in Los Angeles working on a sculpture, titled shell, in which she suspended a woman’s peacoat made from printer felt on a black wire hanger. She had been invited to the city by local print shop Gemini G.E.L. and its publisher Sidney Felsen. Hamilton, a MacArthur “Genius” fellow best-known for warping a range of materials from fleece to stone, attributes the unique origins and final form of shell to her time with Gemini.

Resembling armor without a body underneath, shell is made from felt etching blankets from the shop, and, amid a writer’s strike in Los Angeles, she collaborated with a film industry designer in need of work, who was enlisted through Felsen’s connections. The work came to be almost serendipitously “because this is Hollywood, and because of Sidney Felsen,” Hamilton told writer Joan Simon in a 2008 interview.

Enlisting established artists, like Hamilton, to create new work is perhaps what Felsen, now 99, is most widely known for. Having founded Gemini in 1966 with his fraternity brother and art collector Stanley Grinstein, Felsen is now the subject of a monographic exhibition, on view through July 7 at the Getty Research Institute in Los Angeles, that mines 50-years-worth of his photographic archive. The exhibition’s title puts it more succinctly: “First Came a Friendship: Sidney B. Felsen and the Artists at Gemini G.E.L.” The exhibition’s curator Naoko Takahatake selected images that Felsen took over more than five decades, culled from more than 70,000 images, donated to the GRI in 2019 by Jack Shear, the partner of Ellsworth Kelly, another frequent Gemini collaborator.

Alongside Tamarind Lithography Workshop and Cirrus Editions (both in Los Angeles) and Universal Limited Art Editions (in New York), Gemini G.E.L. was a part of a budding wave of art printers established in the 1960s and ’70s that attracted top artists as collaborators. Among them were Robert Rauschenberg, Richard Serra, David Hockney, Claes Oldenburg, and Roy Lichtenstein who could work through some of their most heady ideas in a different medium than they became famous for. In 1999, Claudine Ise wrote for the Los Angeles Times, that Felsen molded Gemini into “an arterial channel between the Los Angeles and New York art worlds.”

“When he really started getting serious about photography, he switched to a Leica and he preferred the rangefinder because of the quiet shutter,” Takahatake told ARTnews in a recent interview.

This essay originally appeared in Reframed, the Art in America newsletter about art that surprises us and works that get us worked up. Sign up here to receive it every Thursday.

In 1952, the New York–based critic Harold Rosenberg famously described a seismic shift taking place in American painting. No longer, he wrote, were artists coming to a canvas with a predetermined composition that they’d already worked out in a sketch. Now, a painter slathered on strokes and dribbled paint directly. 

A few years later, halfway around the world, two Japanese artists, Kazuo Shiraga and Akira Kanayama, took Rosenberg’s idea a step further—eliminating not just the sketch, but also the brush and the human hand. 

Shiraga and Kanayama, who are being showcased right now at New York’s Fergus McCaffrey gallery, both found canny ways to produce abstract paintings without lifting a finger during the mid-1950s. Both were associated with the avant-garde Gutai movement of the era. In their paintings, they subverted a notion that was common among the New York–based Abstract Expressionists: that gestural abstraction was deeply human, that it tapped into raw emotions via the artist’s hand. 

Kanayama’s paintings eliminate the human touch altogether. To craft his dense drizzles, the artist outfitted a toy car with cans of paint that leaked their contents, dispersing webs of black, red, green, and more across his medium-sized canvases. Kanayama steered his little vehicle around and around, left and right; overlaid swirls were the end result. Using this process, he touched the buttons on the remote control more than he did his own canvases. 

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