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“The Art of Participation,” installation view at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art; photo: Ian Reeves, courtesy SFMOMA

Museums, as we’ve discussed, are eager to engage with their public in ways that move beyond handing out headphones. It’s all about interactivity and live art, from the Whitney’s mostly unsuccessful foray into participatory art during the last biennial (You can hear my radio spot on that here) to the Guggenheim’s current relational aesthetics show, “theanyspacewhatever.”

Now, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art has upped the ante with “The Art of Participation,” a survey of interactive art that spans almost six decades. It’s the art world’s answer to Choose Your Own Adventure books:

Download Video Videographer: Tammy Fortin, courtesy SFMOMA

I spoke with the museum’s curator of media arts, Rudolf Frieling, about the new exhibit, including the pitfalls and possibilities of participatory art:

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Every Friday should have a little Ralph Lemon:

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Photo by Peter Foley

At the New York Public Library this week, a dialogue about culinary ephemera. Listen to food critics Corby Kummer, Harold McGee, and the main course, Ferran Adrià, the so-called Salvador Dalí of the kitchen. Listen to this discussion of science-driven cooking and a unique philosophy of food.

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Performance is all the rage right now in that high fashion world sometimes called the New York visual art scene. And museums strongly want in on the action. They just don’t always know quite what to do with themselves when they get some.

Colin Gee in “Dakota.” Photos by Ethan Levitas.

Meet Colin Gee, a former principal clown with Cirque du Soleil who will be performing at the Whitney as part of the new exhibit “Alexander Calder: The Paris Years.”

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Jason Somma thought the call from Rolex was a prank. You know, like those emails you get from wealthy Nigerian businessmen: best ignored.

He had just woken up from his night shift at Yaffa Cafe, where he was working after having walked away from a highly coveted position dancing in the Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company in order to concentrate on his choreography.

He had moments of panic, wondering what on earth he’d done. But Somma has a history of taking risks, including passing on a visual arts education at Cooper Union to start all over again as a dancer. That decision worked out just fine, and so did leaving Jones, who had encouraged him to focus on his own work.

As it turns out, that call was no prank, and he wouldn’t be on his own for long.

Somma busts a move. Photo: Marc Vanappelghem.

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(You can hear my chat with the fabulous Soterios Johnson here)

Last week it was the opening of the Crossing the Line festival, this week it’s Prelude ‘08, the contemporary theater and performance festival, which began its three-day smorgasbord last night with a discussion entitled “Between White Cubes and Black Boxes: Performance, Place & Context.” Then everyone headed to a nearby karaoke joint to get sloshed:

If only all panels ended this happily (All Photos: Rachel Roberts)

The line of the night? This gem from artist Raul Vincent Enriquez: “I rarely have an intellectual take on things - I want them to be exciting.”

He was talking about his approach to making work (check out his moving feast, “A Burrito Truck,” this Saturday as part of Prelude), but, really, isn’t it the hope of every audience member upon settling in to see a show, whether it’s in a black box, white cube, empty lot or grand pavilion? As the art historian RoseLee Goldberg, another panelist, put it, “As much as we talk about how we should all move into these different realms, we have to remember the particular pleasures that drive us.”

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1. Heading to the Kitchen to see “ANGER/NATION,” the newest ribald Radiohole spectacle. It starts with the usual drunken shenanigans and ends with a brilliant send up of post-performance discussions, by way of an interview between John Cage and Glenn Branca from the 1980s. I know, I know, your parties usually take the opposite arc. Trust me on this one.

And consider taking notes, for comparison’s sake: Next week, the Kitchen will host Ann Liv Young, a post shock-art performance artist who is typically more associated with the dance world, though she occupies much the same theatrical territory as Radiohole. In “ANGER/NATION,” the Brooklyn collective conjures a far more sophisticated and layered world than anything Young has come up with yet. But give Young time; she’s still, er, young (just 27 or so) and she just had a child, which might well send her anarchic energy hurtling in surprising new directions. Interestingly, Young’s last performance at the Kitchen featured her naked and pregnant, much like Maggie Hoffman in “ANGER/NATION.”

2. Checking out the September issue of Artforum, some of which can be found here. Why? Because it’s the first Artforum, I am told, to EVER feature a dancer on the cover, and it’s pretty fascinating to see how ballet’s would-be bad boy, the Scottish choreographer Michael Clark, looks through the lens of visual art criticism. For me, the view is pretty fuzzy and ahistorical, and offers further proof that art critics can have a hard time dealing with the body. But the first-person accounts, such as this one with the filmmaker Charles Atlas, offer some terrific context.

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Jean de Brunhoff’s Babar maquette

Babar is a global character. Children all over the world are familiar with the elephant in the green suit created by father and son Jean and Laurent de Brunhoff. The Morgan library has a new exhibit that puts the creative process behind this iconic character on display. The story began like many stories do as a bed-time tale told by a mother to her two sons. Jean de Brunhoff then took the story and created Historie de Babar, le petit elephant (The Story of Babar, the Little Elephant, 1931). On display are sketches, watercolors and manuscript pages that precede the finished book. Jean de Brunhoff worked like a cartoonist, the images and the words are inseparable, and both evolve as he moves from draft to finished work. Jean de Brunhoff tragically died at the age of 37 after completing 7 books. After the war his son Laurent decided to continue the story with the book Babar et ce coquin d’Arthur (Babar’s Cousin: That Rascal Arthur, 1946).

In the video below, Laurent de Brunhoff talks about picking up where his father left off and how his interest in abstract painting influenced his work.

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On a Tuesday night at 8pm there isn’t much to do around the intersection of 33rd street and 3rd Avenue in Brooklyn. There’s a gas station, a porn shop, and a Dunkin’ Donuts down the street, but the main activity in this post-industrial corner of the Sunset Park neighborhood is the steady rush of cars and trucks overhead on the Gawanus Expressway.

photo: Alicia Kachmar

Face west toward the waterfront, however, and you’re likely to see a scattering of young, Brooklyn-boho types heading into a dark, canyon-like gap between two of the vast buildings that comprise the 90-acre site known as Industry City.

A few of them might be among the artists who now rent several thousand of the six million square feet of space in this post-industrial enclave, which is in the early stages of being partially rezoned for cultural production under the watchful eye of Lise Soskolne, an artist who maintains her own studio here.

But most of these Tuesday night visitors will be heading to a 3rd floor space for an evening at Light Industry, a weekly screening series that has emerged as one of New York City’s most vital and eclectic avant-garde venues.

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The Museum of Comic and Cartoon Art (MoCCA) is is hosting a retrospective of work by underground cartoonist and graphic novelist Kim Deitch. The exhibit opened Friday and runs through December 5th, 2008. A few years ago I had the privilege of spending an afternoon with Kim Deitch in his uptown studio. I never got to use the audio as the piece got killed. But Deitch has always been one of my favorite artists so I never got rid of the audio, I knew I would use it someday, in fact I have had a longstanding challenge with Boing Boing’s Mark Frauenfelder over this audio (he has tape sitting on his shelf from an interview with Kim’s father Gene Deitch).

On thing that fascinates me about Deitch is that his story completely intertwines with the story of alternative comics. He was on the scene drawing for the East Village Other in 1969 when underground comix became a national phenomenon, he was also there when Art Spiegelman was putting Raw on magazine racks, and he is also part of the current renaissance, Pantheon has published both his Boulevard of Broken Dreams, and Alias the Kat. In the first clip Kim Deitch reflects on his relationship with the ever evolving genre of alternative comics. In the second clip he talks about what has always remained a constant.