Soft-spoken, reticent-seeming eighties art star David Salle has two speaking engagements in New York this season.  He is the second speaker in the American Federation of Arts 2010/11 series at Christie’s, following Will Cotton who opened the series last month.  The event takes place at the auctioneers’ Rockefeller Center premises at 20 Rockefeller Plaza, at 49th Street between 5th and 6th Avenues, from 6.30-8.00 pm.  Tickets are $15 ($10 students) and reservations are required at arttalks@afaweb.org.  Salle is also a panelist at a discussion about the work of Roy Lichtenstein in conjunction with the show, Roy Lichtenstein Reflections, with the Pop master’s widow Dorothy Lichtenstein and art historian Graham Bader at the Chelsea branch of Mitchell-Innes and Nash, 534 West 26th Street, on Saturday, October 16 at 4pm. This one is free but reservations are requested at alina@miandn.com.

Another historic figure subject to round-table reassesment is dealer Leo Castelli whose legacy is to be discussed at the Jewish Museum in their books in focus series by biographer Annie Cohen-Solal, who recently published Leo and His Circle: The Life of Leo Castelli, who will be joined by scholars Robert Pincus-Witten and Barbara Jakobson, at the museum, on Thursday, October 7 at 6:30 pm.  For tickets, reserve here

The New York Institute for the Humanities and the Gallatin School at NYU are presenting three lectures this October by the 85 year old polymath and cultural commentaror Harry Berger, Jr.  On Tuesday, October 5 his topic is “Collecting Body Parts in Leonardo’s Cve: Vasari and the Erotics of Obscene Connoisseurship,” at 20 Cooper Square, 5th Floor, at 6 pm, with a response from Patricia Rubin, director of New York University’s Insitute of Fine Arts.  The following Tuesday, on October 12 at 6pm. his topic is “Caterpillage,” which delves the topic of 17th-century Dutch floral still lifes.  That talk, with a response from art historian John Walsh, takes place at the Casa Italiana at 24 West 12th Street.  And finally, back at Cooper Square on Wednesday, October 27, at 6pm, Berger addresses his Shakespearean interests in a talk titled “The Mercifixion of Shylock”.  The respondent on that occasion will be Barry Edelstein, director of the Public Theater’s Shakespeare Initiative.  For more information on these three talks, which are free, contact nyih.info@nyu.edu

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The neon sign over the door by Paris-based collective Claire Fontaine suggests a Dante-esque Divine Comedy awaits.

“Part consortium, part collective,” is what Independent art fair called itself, as launched by gallerists Elizabeth Dee (X Initiative, N.Y.) and Darren Flook (Hotel, London). Making use of the former Dia Art Foundation’s handsome West 22nd Street building, the free-of-charge venue offered artist projects, public programs and commercial galleries showing artworks without the defining “walls” of traditional booths.

SMELL A RAT?

Packed in for Thursday’s party-atmosphere opening, viewers were met with a 12-foot-high inflatable rat muttering recorded aphorisms such as: “Only one thing counts in this life/Get them to sign on the line that is dotted.” Responses seemed affable.

RELIGIOUS EXPERIENCE

Murray Moss with Michal Fronek and Jan Nemecek’s, Illuminated Crucifix, 2010, and Thomas Struth’s, Stanze di Raffaelo II, Rome, 1992, behind.

SoHo design store Moss paired with Westreich-Wagner art advisors, in an attempt to create 12 “dialogues” between disparate objects that were “never intended to be together,” in Murray Moss’s words. The results should be “subjective,” he explained, “like the circumstances of our lives.”

CALLING A GHOST TO THE TABLE

DRESSED FOR SUCCESS

“She knits a sweater about political or current event, then wears it around,” explained Nelson Hallonquist, of the Florida gallery. Overheard viewer comment: “It’s like shopping in a mall with small stores.”

SIMPLY RED

THE NEW PAGANISM

DON’T FENCE ME IN

ART CRITICISM FOR SALE

CALLING DR. STRANGELOVE

Known for her motion pictures, Sussman here presents an exact replica of Russian Yuri Gagarin’s office, the first man in space.

BACK TO THE FUTURE

Artists Space promotes its screening of Make It New John, a documentary about carmaker John DeLorean by Glasgow-based filmmaker Duncan Campbell.

AN OFFER YOU CAN’T REFUSE

TILT-A-WHIRL

Move over Olafur Eliasson and Anish Kapoor. Danish artist Hein did more with less, as his optical contraption beguiled audiences with its dislocation of gravitational reality.

FLASH OF HISTORY

One couldn’t help but feel the presence of the Dia Art Foundation and its illustrious exhibition history in the building’s earlier incarnation—before there was such a thing as The Chelsea Gallery District, or, for that matter, a contemporary art world driven so ruthlessly by art fair culture.

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