READ MORE: The Happening

If your visual experience on Valentine's day consists of the sight of a passersby, half-heartedly clutching one red thin and faintly blooming red rose, then the exhibition "A Relationship Left for Dead on the Lower East Side", curated by Bill Previdi at Cuchifritos in New York will provide you the medicine you need. This show is a thrilling antidote to what amounts to a 24 hour headache of melancholia and will enliven the sentimentality of the forlorn, lonely, blindly proud or unwillingly celibate. 

READ MORE: Will The Owner of This Album Please Step Forward

80 premier national and international decorative and fine arts dealers presenting all design movements of the 20th Century.

The 9th Annual Palm Springs Modernism Show & Sale is a highlight of Modernism Week featuring 10 days of celebrating everything modern with mid-century design and architecture fans, friends and aficionados from around the world.  Modernism Week events include Palm Springs Art Museum films, lectures and symposium, gallery openings and art events, double-decker bus tours to mid-century architectural classics, tours of Frey House II, vintage car show, and the desert's best retro-themed soirees and martini parties. For detailed information and tickets visit www.modernismweek.com.

Buenos Aires artist Diego Gravinese, also known as Nekomomix, creates large scale photo-realistic paintings that capture intense moments in time and he also explores the juxtaposition of vibrant realistic figurative imagery with a variety of pop elements. These two different themes drive his paintings and his understanding of light and color create such a brilliant atmospheric quality the viewer is left wanting to enter the canvas and explore. His articulation of the world around him and the world he is trying to convey is done with ease and grace. -John Sebelius

READ MORE: Diego Gravinese Gets real

Love is a new British magazine from Conde Nast. It sounds interesting but with magazines being in such dire straits, we ask why. However, we wish them well because "love " as a subject is never out of style and never gets old. -Michael Davis

To Lust: Love

Michael Marcovici has created a series of exciting and puzzling lighting stuctures during his career. We wanted to feature two of these interesting lighting pieces. His first lighting design is constructed of 800 35mm slides evenly blocked together and lit by 50 LED´s. 

To Lust: Woohome

READ MORE: Light It Up

Darkrooms – Homme Made on view at Daneyal Mahmood Gallery in New York is curated by Avi Feldman and includes multimedia work by ten young artists that makes it clear that a presentation and analysis of homoerotic and personal sexual codes in our polymorphous sexual world has not lost its cache or relevance. Not since the Log Cabin exhibition at Artist Space in New York in 2005, has a group show expressed succinctly how young artist today view sexuality through a different type of lens, not simply through a photographic lens but through the bytes and digital hybrids of new technologies such as the internet, webcams, digital cameras and chat rooms, whose usefulness or tragedy, depending on your point-of-view, is their ability to make sexual connections not only more anonymous but also renders quaint and slightly old-fashioned the fetishizing of spaces like the backroom of a sex club or even secluded public restroom, rest stop or park. Two artists in particular emphasize how our new world’s purely voyeuristic sensibility and insatiable need for sexualized imagery and sexual contact is often a lonely exercise yet provides more interesting fodder for creative artmaking.  Dean Sameshima in Figures of Lust Furtively Encountered in the Nights, 2004, shows three appropriated images of faceless men whose pixilated style looks exactly like the type of do-it-yourself pics you could see on any gay dating or hookup sex website. The images are soulless unless you accept the notion that a man’s soul resides in his pecs, abs or in his ass. Amir Fattal’s split-screen video Changed Positions, 2006, presents spellbinding erotic encounters between men, which are an exploration of space where internet encounters happen and the body. The video style and conversation are so deadpan and banal that you will find yourself at once and the same somewhat bored and transfixed. -Wayne Northcross

READ MORE: View to a Thrill

READ MORE: Except for AIDS, Nothing Has Changed

From the 6th of February to the 31st of May, photographer David LaChapelle will present for the first time in France a retrospective at the Hotel de la Monnaie entitled “Auguries of Innocence” . LaChapelle is best-known for his portraits of celebrities that feature surrealistic environments, cult personalities, and the perversity of the world of Hollywood stars. He composes narratives and scenes that deserve a double take and a puzzling look. -John Sebelius

To Lust: Slamxhype

READ MORE: LaChappelle Gets Retro

Curtis William Readel had a show in Brooklyn last week which involved work consisting of bags of shredded money from the US Treasury and recreating exaggerations of printed pieces. Although he is not the first artist to work with currency or recreate historic imagery, his work is intriguing and is definitely worth a second look. Especially some of his print work.

READ MORE: Art Gets Green