The men’s fashion shows that debuted in Milan on January 14, wrapped in Paris on January 22. Here are the highlights of fall/winter 2012, from the good (Burberry Prorsum’s use of classic silhouettes and contemporary colors, Kenzo’s hip comeback) to the bad (Bernard Wilhelm’s bandannas that declared “I <3 Black Cock,” Thom Browne’s bizarre quirky psycho killer aesthetic).

Click on the photo gallery to see highlights from the the fall/winter 2012 men’s shows.

While 2011 has been another blockbuster year for most of the big auction houses, it was not without its hiccups. Collectors were discerning and passed on some star lots that were seen as having overly aggressive estimates. Just like the auction highlights, the flops were concentrated in the latter half of the year, paralleling some of the volatility seen in stock and bond markets over the last six months. Without further ado, ARTINFO brings you the five moments of 2011 the auction houses would most like to forget.

Click above to view a slide show of 2011 biggest auction flops.

Over the arc of “Work of Art,” we watched Young Sun Han and Sarah Jimenez grow as artists, an evolution which was never more apparent than it was in the final show. Super-controlling Young granted himself some release from his anal ways and put himself into his work. Sarah J moved away from morbid watercolors and into other media: morbid sculptures, morbid installations, morbid performance pieces, etc., for one stunning final show. The two came so close to being crowned “next great artist” — but fell just short as the judges passed them over for Kymia Nawabi. We caught up with the two honorable mentions to chat about life after reality TV and what exactly was on China Chow’s head during that finale episode.

So, what did you guys have planned for the finale?

YS: I organized my local gay bar, Big Chicks, and got all my friends together. I’m still recovering.

SJ: I’m in D.C. right now and I just watched it with my family. No big party. They were at the final exhibition, so we just got to watch it over again.

And what did you and your friends think of the final outcome?

YS: All of your loved ones want you to win and everything, but they saw I was very legitimately happy that Kymia won and thought that she deserved it.

SJ: I think Kymia and Young did amazing exhibitions. During the show I thought it would be a toss up between me and Kymia, but I really think all three of us put in a tremendous effort the best that we could, especially Young putting out such a vulnerable part of his life.

It was very brave of you guys to put yourselves on display this way, but you also shared a lot of really intimate details about your families and other people close to you. How did being on this show affect them?

YS: I almost didn’t do the show just because a couple of weeks before we were set to film, my mom almost passed away. There was a lot of drama around that but I’m glad I did the show because she was able to look forward to it every week and I’ve been watching it with her and my grandma. It’s definitely kind of tied our family closer together. It was pretty special.

SJ: I was very nervous about my family and how my mom and dad would perceive the kids challenge [where I talked about their divorce]. I called them before the episode aired and I let them know this piece brought up a lot of feelings for me. I wanted to tell them that I love them, and I know they support me, and I’m not sure how it’s going to air on TV. They were understanding and forgiving about it.

There are clips of Simon de Pury talking about his DJ gigs. Is he actually the coolest person ever?

SJ: If you Google him, he has videos on YouTube where he’s hip-hopping. He has songs about himself being an auctioneer. He’s singing them! And they’re to hip hop beats! He’s amazing. 

YS: Simon has so much life and personality. He’s just so honest and open, and even when the cameras aren’t rolling he’ll be giving you advice or asking about your family. He’s a real, genuine, interesting, puzzling man.

I noticed a lot of the contestants are still waiting tables, nannying, or living with their parents post-show. Was the money your major driving factor here? Is everybody still struggling?

SJ: I knew that if I completely focused on the prize and the money, it would completely interrupt my creative process and I would make work that was inauthentic. For me, the question was, how do I make work that I’m proud of and that pushes myself to new heights, as opposed to focusing on the money — although it was in the back of my mind.

YS: You have to make compromises to make it work for you, whether it’s working crazy hours, living with parents, getting ten roommates. People who want to be artists find a way because they need to. The economic opportunities for artists are different from other professions.

After you won that huge cash prize, Young, did you end up taking your mom to Korea?

YS: I haven’t gotten my money yet! But once I do we’ll be taking a really fantastic trip for sure.

You guys spent a lot of time in front of the cameras, sometimes not while you were at your best. Was there anything that happened during filming you were not looking forward to seeing yourself do? Sarah, for example, you drew a lot of your work from very personal, private experiences you ended up revealing on national TV. 

SJ: When I’m in that state of heightened emotion, I just go to what is true for me, rather than wondered what it’s going to look like on TV, although it was uncomfortable watching it on TV. At the time I didn’t really think about it. I thought about how my experiences aren’t unique. They’re very common to other people, and maybe someone else could identify with them.

That’s not the only time you did that, you know. 

YS: No, its not, but during the street art challenge they were very practical as far as getting up on scaffolding and staying cool. But during the sell out challenge it was about… putting your ass out there.

Did anyone else feel that the final crit was a total Jerry and Bill disagreeathon?

SJ: I really felt like Bill played devil’s advocate a lot. That was his style of critiquing. I mean, there were definitely multiple points where the judges disagreed on many things. In the final episode I felt like Jerry and Bill had different opinions about the art, which I think they enjoyed as criticis. They enjoyed that critical banter around artwork.

Can we just end by talking about China’s fashion for a second?

YS: You know, she has a very eclectic style but strong sense of couture sensibility, very avant-garde in a way without being too showy or brassy. It’s kind of like Lady Gaga turned down five notches. She does dress for fashion and for art, not for the attention of men or to look sexy, which would be very easy for her to do. I loved her little acorn tophat she wore. And her googly eyed Chanel dress for the finale and her Bjork braids. Like Bjork meets Swiss milkmaid. 

I happened to be talking to someone who works at one of the cultural institutions due to receive a slice of £10 million of BP’s money over the next five years. She was very pleased at the news, perhaps unsurprisingly, since this is her career and I imagine she’s passionate about it and about art itself. I alluded to the litany of concerns I have at the way BP is doing irreparable damage to the planet on so many levels.

“Well, find us another sponsor, and…”

“We’ll have to work together to make that happen,” I replied, quickly, as she was getting off the bus.

Somehow this brief conversation managed to dishearten me more than the BP deal itself, news of which had filtered out of the British Museum much earlier that day. The British Museum is regarded, it seems, by BP as its private playground, where esteemed allies, possible collaborators, and lucky employees can gather, usually of an evening, to sink a glass or two of something elegant and fizzy, surrounded by treasures (possibly looted, possibly saved) of once mighty empires. This state of affairs is perhaps regarded wearily by some museum employees as an inevitable symptom of the neoliberalisation of culture, one that leaves a once bitter, but soon deadening aftertaste.

I live in a city, a country, a culture whose roots reach deep into exploitation and destruction: the seizing of land, the creation of brutalising empires (once national, now corporate), and the remorseless theft of resources. As so many supporters of oil sponsorship remind those of us who are deeply troubled by it (and by what it allows to continue), we are all compromised by fossil fuels, as well as capitalism itself. We’re likely to use more than our planetary share of fossil fuels, and are quite possibly basing a relatively privileged lifestyle on the suffering of others, perhaps nearby but more commonly on distant continents where the predominant skin colour is not white.

It’s important to be aware of these distressing truths, and even more important to act wherever we can to dismantle whatever privilege we may have, and of course to keep cutting the carbon. But complicity should never be taken as a compelling reason to stay away from the issues, safely cocooned in a hypocrisy-free bubble. If we left the protection of the planet and the struggle for the liberation of everything that lives to carbon-footprintless hermits living in their proverbial cave, the future would be looking far darker than it already does. And it does look dark, dammit.

Harking back to that conversation with the cultural worker, it strikes me that she may have found the Deepwater Horizon disaster as achingly distressing as I did. I made a conscious effort some time ago to turn my gaze away from those oiled seabirds whenever I could, even though images of them are plastered all over the Internet. Just the echo of knowing they were out there was enough motivation to spend at least some of my time doing this work. But I share the same desire as that of so many of my fellow Londoners to turn away from what is troubling, and to seek solace — ah, the irony! — in the arts, particularly the arts that may be politicised but still manage to offer a good escape. Stolen hours hollering with guitar or piano provide a canvas on which to pour out the despair, personal and planetary (I’ve lost the ability to tell the difference!), and sometimes even to alchemise it into something approaching joy.

Where I may differ from my fleeting cultural acquaintance is in a stubborn refusal to completely ditch the belief that not only is collective action necessary, but that it’s distinctly possible. Once, she may have stood on the streets and added her voice to those of so many others opposing war or injustice — but that was what seems like a lifetime ago. Maybe those acts of altruism and possibility were dashed, for myriad oft-delineated reasons, and now perhaps she has good reason to have abandoned belief in anything other than treating her loved ones lovingly, doing her work thoughtfully, and casting a jaundiced glance as little as she can bear at the bleak old world as it whirls onward.

I used to think that the vast and increasing distance between the ecocidal actions of BP et al. and their shiny rhetoric gave us an unparalleled opportunity to expose their psychopathic nature. But now I think most of us already have a strong sense of the deep seam of amorality that runs through such entities. The key is to allow the anger and sometimes unbearable sadness triggered by that knowledge to transform itself into strategic action that is always also from the heart. The alternative seems to be a steady diet of despair and self-medication.

Sometimes people afflicted by this overwhelming sense of disappointment, whose dreams seem dry, seek to drain those of others who still carry them. I have no idea if that’s the case from my brief interaction with this one person. At the end of our brief exchange, I tried, clumsily, to touch on the prospect of an alliance between insider and outsider, not having the time to add that “after all, we’re all in this together, breathing the same air,” etc.

Such an alliance needs to comprise those working within these sponsored institutions, and all the people outside them who see them as a barometer of our society, with a move to a “culture beyond oil” allowing societal reappraisal of our relationship to fossil fuels (and corporations themselves). It also means, crucially, the participation of artists themselves. If we can all gather what’s left of our hope, or — more easily? — reach deep and reconnect with our interconnectness to whatever lives, we might build a beautiful alliance that refuses to accept the inevitability of the commodification of art, people, and life itself. From the outside we could provide solidarity for those within these institutions who might be risking their livelihoods by sticking their necks out, and we could do the same for artists who turn away from tainted art prizes out of principle. All of us could insist that public money — of which there is so much, but so much misuse — is directed into essential services, of which art is most certainly one.

These exhortations are of course ambitious to the point of grandiosity, but they remain possible. What stands between them and their realisation is only our incapacity to cultivate a sense deep within us that our fellows care as much as we do, and might be prepared to sink a little time and love into bringing them to pass.

Sam Chase is an inveterate ivory worrier, irregular street hollerer, sometime Occupier, and regular volunteer for the group Art Not Oil.

The mothership of airstream conversions sits on the roof top of Cape Town’s historic Grandy Daddy Hotel, and it is by far the coolest thing we’ve seen in a long while. Each of the seven airstreams strategically placed on this Long Street rooftop is in…

NEW YORK— D’Amelio Terras gallery, the pioneering Chelsea art dealership founded in 1996, has announced that it will soon be closing its doors. The move will see co-owners and founders Christopher D’Amelio and Lucien Terras splitting up their partnership — D’Amelio will open a new gallery in the current 525 West 22nd Street location and Terras will move on to separate ventures, working with artists and institutions.   

“It was a very thoughtful and mature decision after 15 years of partnership to have a change and work independently,” D’Amelio told ARTINFO. Despite the recent high-profile closings of New York’s South Asia-focused Bose Pacia gallery and the 160-year-old blue chip Knoedler gallery (following an ongoing law suit over allegedly forged work) in the last two months, the dealer said that it wasn’t poor sales that precipitated the changes. “It was definitely not an economic decision,” he said.

D’Amelio and Terras began discussing the possible split “at the end of 2008 and 2009, when the economy did present a real challenge, whereas things previously had moved quite smoothly and effortlessly forward,” D’Amelio explained. “That became a time of buckling down and surviving, which we did.” The period of austerity did “make us both think about what it is we exactly want to do,” D’Amelio said.

“I expect a lot more from both of us immediately,” the co-owner added. “We’re not checking out, we’re just changing the form.” With his new gallery, D’Amelio will be taking on staff, working with some of the same artists the gallery currently represents and seeking out new additions as well.

D’Amelio Terras currently represents artists including Dario Robleto, Matt Keegan, and Polly Apfelbaum. The space’s current exhibition is Leslie Hewitt’s “Blue Skies, Warm Sunlight,” an exploration of photography and sculpture. The two co-owners both have extensive backgrounds in contemporary art and worked together at Paula Cooper Gallery from 1992 to 1996, after which they founded the joint gallery.

Even a person hungry for the open road and stricken with wanderlust needs a cozy, comfortable home to return to, said poet Sitok Srengenge of his house outside Yogyakarta. In Sitok’s case, he also wanted something fun, like a residence with a feel almost…

In the future, when your smartphone has replaced books, MP3 players, and human interaction, you won’t find watches on that list of casualties. Why? Because they’ve already long-abandoned their raison-d’être — telling time — and kept on ticking. Nooka’s mind-bogglingly inexplicable Zub Zen-H 20 watch is a prime example. Like an abacus, it reads in rows: the top two tell the hours, the third the minutes, and the fourth the seconds — as if you had the time to count all that. It gets points for its attention-getting design and rainbow of available colors. Its water-resistant polyurethane body serves as a vestigial reminder of an object drowning in its own obsolence. 

One of the most gratifying experiences I have as a wine lover and very, very small time wine collector involves pulling a dusty bottle off the shelf from where it has slumbered for years, and popping it open to find an utterly fantastic wine. I don’t own