Hanksy is a street artist who puts Tom Hanks’ face on copies of Banksy’s art. His first show, which just closed at the Krause Gallery on the Lower East Side, and where the menu offered boxes of chocolates and Dr. Pepper, nearly sold out completely, according to the dealer. “I think what made it such a success is the genuine honesty in it,” gallery owner Ben Krause told me. “Hanksy really is a huge Tom Hanks fan and a huge Banksy fan.” READ MORE

This month's painting is all about journeys. READ MORE

“Formulaic.” “Schlocky.” “Tremendously successful.” These are some of the epithets that are routinely directed toward painter Thomas Kinkade by the cultural elitists in the current art and media establishments. But has anybody really taken a deep look at Kinkade’s work? You can dismiss his work as cheesy sentimentalism, but hey—can you name any other fine artist who has so thoroughly dominated the intellectual territory between Lids and Things Remembered? I didn’t think so. In an effort to plumb the complexities of Kinkade's work, each month I'll be discussing a page from his 2012 “Painter of Light” calendar. Let’s start with January, the month that Kinkade—slyly—has chosen to lead off with. READ MORE

Huh, Janet Malcolm has become a collage artist.

Tonight: the photographer Andrew Piccone's "Faces of Occupy Wall Street" show, Frontrunner Gallery, 59 Franklin Street, 6- 8 p.m. That's a fifteen-minute walk from Zuccotti Park, so you can compare and contrast faces!

The last calendar you'll ever buy should be a great one! Cabinet's pretty "The Last Calendar" documents throughout 2012 all the many dates in history when the world was and is proclaimed to end. Just $15! How can you not?

“I grew up in a house that had a whole lot of trouble,” she said. “As much trouble as you could imagine. In the daily paper, there were all these comic strips, and there was one that was a circle. It seemed like things were pretty good on the other side of the circle. No one’s getting hit. No one’s yelling.” READ MORE

You really, really, really want to go see the Carsten Höller exhibition that is opening at the New Museum this Wednesday. We got a sneak peak of the installation and it's bonkers-cakes! Obviously you will want to start on the fourth floor so you can take the chute down through the concrete floor. Also there are like some lights and a bunch of birds (looks like a mobile of bird cages with birds in them) and stuff. (Stuff = "a sensory deprivation pool." Just what the senseless Lower East Side needed.) It's max ridic, as the kids say. HOW MANY HIPSTERS DOES IT TAKE TO JAM UP A SLIDE? Let's find out together.

There’s some great baseball-related abstract art available on eBay, but it’s gonna cost you. Each of these original oil-on-canvas paintings (16-by-20 inches) by the artist Tommervik have a Buy It Now price of $1 million. (Not to mention another $9.99 for standard shipping.) According to his website, the artist “has developed a personal vein of Pop Cubism to produce his very own reading of American iconography. All-American icons are thus deconstructed and rebuilt to emphasize a given attribute.” READ MORE

Here are some thoughts on the consecutive rise of two Ryans. Ryan McGinley is the young superstar photographer who became famous in the early 00s. Ryan Trecartin, four years younger, began getting attention in 2006 and became art-world famous circa 2009. In their ways and work, the Ryans represent two adjacent micro-generations of gays. Christopher Glazek writes: "McGinley helped to elevate a necrophiliac vision of mute youth into the universal condition of downtown existence.... Now the new Ryan has negated McGinley’s negation, superseding the gym bunny-heroin corpse dialectic entrenched since the 1980s." In light of Trecartin's videos—which are girly, brash, multi-ethnic, screechy and hilarious—McGinley's snapshot-stylized pale thin hipster butts running through fields of wheat oddly start to become the images that seem ridiculous and fake and aspirational and advertorial.