A quick wit may come naturally to the 42-year-old native New Yorker Nathan Englander, but that doesn't mean he doesn't work hard. 2012 is an object lesson in Englander endurance, when three of his years-in-development writing projects are slated to hit shelves, stages, and Seder dinners (respectively). First comes his latest-short story collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, out this month from Knopf. Then in March, Englander ambitiously teams up with writer Jonathan Safran Foer on a translation of the Haggadah, the ancient Jewish text recited at Passover.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 02/08/12

As a warm-up for next summer's happening, overseen by artistic director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev, dOCUMENTA, together with publisher Hatje Cantz, has created a series of interdisciplinary notebooks, appropriately titled 100 Notes—100 Thoughts.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

It’s hard to think of a young artist whose career has had an upward trajectory as steep as 31-year-old Frenchman Cyprien Gaillard. His early video works of quasi-socialist Western European housing tracts in ruins had all the lyricism of landscape painting and the biting youthful nihilism of street art.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

Of any artist working today, 35-year-old hyper-mixed-media artist Nina Beier is creating some of the boldest examples of the contemporary artwork in crisis mode. This has a lot to do with the unstable, in flux, usually-referencing-something-absent, often-crushed-or-pieced-together, and likely-to-change nature of her sculptural explorations.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

For a show at New York’s PS1, 34-year-old Canadian Jeremy Shaw turned a white-walled room into an immersive video experience that felt to some like being at a rave on drugs.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

With figures gnawed and slashed, blurred and speckled, Adrian Ghenie’s paintings involve the big ideas that transform men into larger-than-life emblems. Ghenie’s recent exhibition at Haunch of Venison in London featured humans wildly distorted and many with monkey features.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

An anonymous man—or group—managed to hijack the airwaves of two different Chicago television stations and broadcast a makeshift version of the pre-CGITV personality and New Coke spokesperson Max Headroom (himself an image of a dystopian media-infiltrated future).  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12

Thirty-year-old Oliver Laric calls himself a “facilitator.” That’s a rather selfless designation to describe the poetry of someone who allows interactions with art to happen by surprise.  ARTICLE PUBLISHED: 01/05/12