There are lots of openings to attend! If you stuff them in this week, you’ll be ready for the opening dry spell that is approaching due to Thanksgiving and the Miami art fairs.

Tuesday, November 17:
Paola Ferrario, “Imprevisti/Unforeseen,” at Sue Scott Gallery, 6–8pm

Wednesday, November 18:
Volker Hueller at Eleven Rivington, 6–8pm (exhibition concurrently showing at Salon 94)
“Looking Back: The White Columns Annual, selected by Primary Information” at White Columns, 6–8pm

Thursday, November 19:
William J. O’Brien at Marianne Boesky Gallery, 6–8pm
Lynda Benglis at Cheim & Read, 6–8pm
Matthias Dornfeld and Virginia Poundstone at Harris Lieberman, 6–8pm
Norbert Schwontkowski, “Angstrœm,” at Mitchell-Innes & Nash Gallery, 6–8pm

Friday, November 20:
Ulrich Lamsfuss, “Birdie,” at Lombard-Freid Projects, 6-8pm
Su-Mei Tse, “Words and Memories,” at Peter Blum Chelsea, 6–8pm

Saturday, November 21:
Hans Haacke, “Weather, or Not”; “Ecstatic Resistance”; and Artur Zmijewski at X-Initiative, 6–9pm
“Go Get Your Shinebox” at Brooklynite Gallery, 7–10pm
Tracey Snelling, “Woman on the Run,” and Michael Paul Britto, “Society’s Children,” at Smack Mellon, 5–8pm
David Brooks, “Naturae Vulgaris,” at Museum 52, 6–8pm

With the way the weather has been, this might just turn out to be one of the most pleasant weekends for gallery openings this season! So ride your bike, stroll along the High Line, or find some other outdoor-friendly way to get to these openings:

Thursday, November 12:
“Moment as Monument in New Delhi” at Thomas Erben Gallery, 6–8:30pm
Walton Ford at Paul Kasmin Gallery, 6–8pm
Slater Bradley, “if we were immortal,” at Team Gallery, 6–8pm
Michael Wolf, “The Transparent City,” and Barbara Crane, “Private Views,” at Aperture Gallery, 6–8pm

Friday, November 13:
“Besides, With, Against, And Yet: Abstraction and the Ready-Made Gesture” at The Kitchen, 5–8pm
Mustafa Maluka, “A Place So Foreign,” at Tilton Gallery, 6–8pm

Saturday, November 14:
Kuba Bakowski, “Studies in Natural History” at Scaramouche c/o fruit and flower deli, 6–8pm

If you can find the time between your mad dash from Performa event to Performa event, here are some gallery openings to check out this weekend:

Thursday, November 5:
Sean Scully, “Recent Paintings” at Galerie Lelong, 6–8pm
Dan Flavin, “Series and Progressions” at David Zwirner, 6–8pm
Kristin Baker, “Splitting Twilight” at Deitch Projects, 6–9pm
Roger Ballen, “Boarding HouseÆ at Gagosian Gallery (980 Madison Avenue), 6–8pm
“Just what is it that makes today’s painting so different, so appealing?” at Gering & López Gallery, 6–8pm
Tracey Emin, “Only God Knows I’m Good” at Lehmann Maupin, 6–8pm
Kaari Upson at Maccarone, 6–8pm
Robert Bergman, “A Kind of Rapture” at Yossi Milo Gallery, 6–8pm
“The Map as Art” at Christopher Henry Gallery, 6–9pm

Friday, November 6:
Alyssa Phoebus, “To Have, to Hold” at Tracy Williams, Ltd., 6–8pm
Wallace Berman at Nicole Klagsbrun, 6-8pm, with a performance by John Zorn at 8pm
Tom Wesselmann Draws at Haunch of Venison, 6–8pm

Saturday, November 7:
Tomory Dodge, “Works on Paper” at CRG, 6–8pm
Tony Feher, “Blossom,” and Yoshihiro Suda at D’Amelio Terras, 6–8pm
Mike Kelley, “Horizontal Tracking Lines” at Gagosian Gallery (555 W 24th St), 6–8pm
“Cave Painting” at Gresham’s Ghost, 6–9pm
Moyra Davey, “My Necropolis” at Murray Guy, 6–8pm
“One Every Day: A Printeresting Curatorial Project” at Elizabeth Foundation for the Arts, 6–9pm
Liu Ye, “Leave Me in the Dark” at Sperone Westwater, 5:30–7:30pm

Stressed about figuring out your costume for the weekend? Well, go where the walls are dressed up instead of the people (though there aren’t cobwebs and skeletons). Here are some of the many art openings happening this week:

Thursday, October 29:
R.M. Fischer at KS Art, 6–8pm
Peter Fischli & David Weiss at Matthew Marks Gallery (all three locations), 6–8pm
Olaf Breuning at Metro Pictures, 6–8pm

Friday, October 30:
“Untreated Strangeness: George Porcari, Jorge Pardo, Naomi Fisher” organized by Chris Kraus at Momenta Art, 7–9pm
“Barb Choit, Nagel Fades” at Rachel Uffner Gallery, 6–8pm
Dan Fischer at Derek Eller Gallery, 6–8pm
Nicole Eisenman at Leo Koenig Inc., 6–8pm
Carroll Dunham at Gladstone Gallery, 6–8pm
Daniel Buren, “To Cut Out: Situated Words 1969–2009″ at Bortolami Gallery, 6-8pm
Ivin Ballen, “Sleepless in Seattle at Winkleman Concert Hall” at Winkleman Gallery, 6–8pm

Saturday, October 31:
Eric Baudelaire, “Anabases” at Elizabeth Dee Gallery, 6–8pm

Sunday, November 1:
Tommy Hartung, “The Ascent of Man” at On Stellar Rays, 4–6pm

Photographs by Taylor Derwin

The East Village’s fashionably divey The Hose was the scene of some especially creative fund-raising last night: a soirée for the upcoming “Cold Water” exhibition at La MaMa Galleria, cocurated by the epicentral downtown performer Justin Bond and the New Yorker theater critic Hilton Als. The exhibition will feature work by performers who also do visual art (including Rufus Wainwright, Thurston Moore and Tilda Swinton). “We decided to have an art party as a fund-raiser,” said Bond. “So we have live nude models, and all these amazing people sitting around and drawing them, and we’re auctioning off the drawings.” Among those doing the drawing, auctioning, posing, gawking and buying: Bond, Lady Rizo, Rob Roth, Nicholas Gorham, VGL Gay Boys Jeffery Self and Cole Escola, Gayletter bloggers Abi and Tom, and even our own photographer for the night, who unexpectedly bared all on a red-velvet couch with only a naked woman and a stuffed white tiger for company. Anything for art!

Tonight:
Rashaad Newsome: Standards, at Ramis Barquet, 6–8pm
Michael Joo at Anton Kern Gallery, 6–8pm
Teresita Fernandez at Lehmann Maupin, 6–8pm
Paul Chan: Sade for Sade’s Sake at Greene Naftali, 6–8pm
Joshua Smith at Art Production Fund, 7–9

Friday, October 23:
Nick Mauss at 303 Gallery, 6–8pm
Bill Viola: Bodies of Light at James Cohan Gallery, 6–8pm
Stephen Irwin at Invisible Exports, 6–8pm
Laura Owens at GBE (Gavin Brown’s Enterprise), 6–8pm
Matthew Ritchie: Line Shot at Andrea Rosen Gallery, 6–9pm

Saturday, October 24:
William Cordova at Sikkema Jenkins & Co., 6–8pm
Spencer Finch: The Brain Is Wider than the Sky at Postmasters, 6–8pm

Tuesday, October 27:
Richard Serra: Blind Spot & Open Ended at Gagosian, 6–8pm

If you ever catch yourself pondering just how many sperm there are in an ejaculation, then we’ve got the show for you. Head down to Alphabet City gallery The Phatory, and check out Sperm Count, the latest installation by Swedish artist Lennart Grebelius. With sperm wallpaper, books, posters and a video, this place has got quite the sperm count. And for you budget jism-lovers, there are unsigned sperm posters for as little as $15! Pick up a sperm picture book, or if you’re really dedicated, a cool $10,000 will buy you the show’s central piece, “One Ejaculation,” which is basically three shelves’ worth of these books.

The gallery’s owner, artist Sally Lelong, tells me she’s tired of “art about art” and puts her efforts into exhibiting art that the viewer can really, um, relate to. Talk about a sense of humor: when I entered the gallery the second time with a friend, she howled, “I see you’ve come again!” In these tough times the world could use a few more dirty punsters. Keep ’em comin’, Sally!–David Levitz

The Phatory, 618 E 9th St between Aves B and C. Sperm Count is open through June 11. Image courtesy Lennart Grebelius and The Phatory, New York.

We just got this sneak peek of Pink Green Caviar, the new video by former TONY cover artist Marilyn Minter. Minter is doing double duty with this piece: This clip is actually a trailer for her upcoming show at Salon 94 Freemans gallery, opening April 28. But a longer version can be seen in Times Square, starting April 1 up on the MTV HD screen as part of Creative Time’s “441/2″ series. She explains the idea behind the trailer in our Q&A.

Sarah Small, like TONY, has tapped into the ancient wisdom that nudity turns heads. Last Saturday, in a Greenpoint studio, the photographer, who snaps group studio shots of visually diverse figures, assembled a bunch of her models and enlisted the sponsorship of a vodka company, throwing a tableau vivant mixer replete with cocktails. This marked the first time I witness performance art tipsy.

After everyone had their drinks, the models strutted out in a line to chanting music and took their poses on stage with resident taxidermies. Most were naked, a few not; bodybuilder Michelle from Connecticut wore her bikini, and another chick sported nothing but heels, topless lingerie and a giant, blond Afro wig.

While the naked folks did really kept my attention going—especially when Small occasionally directed them to make out or shake their fists in anger—what was most interesting about the performance, artistically speaking, was not necessarily the models, but rather the audience. They were going nuts, taking pictures with their iPhones and whispering to each other, “You think they’re gonna fuck?” I happily passed on the tidbit I’d heard from one of Small’s Bulgarian folk-singing buddies that she had given them permission to do just that. Whatever one’s feelings about the project in general, that certainly would have been art.–David Levitz

Photos courtesy David Rosenzweig

Floater-airplanes by Jenna Lucente

When Adam Simon realized in 2005 that there was a surplus of good art and a shortage of good homes for it, he decided to take action. In 2006, with the help of Art in General, Simon launched the Fine Art Adoption Network, an organization that allows artists to give, and ordinary people to adopt, works of art. Yes, these are real artists; most have had solo gallery shows, and one has even been on the cover of Art Forum. And yes, it’s really free. But if you see something you like, you may be competing with other potential adoptive parents, so you should at least ask nicely.

Simon, himself a working artist, took a little time off from the installation of his new show at Pocket Utopia, which opened this past Saturday, to talk to me about the FAAF, which has now had adopters—most of them first-time art owners—from all over the country and all walks of life, including a 12-year-old Bostonian, a policeman from D.C., a judge in Florida, and a small farming town in upstate New York. Watch for an upcoming book on the FAAN published by Art in General.

With the advent of the post-Bush economy, we’ve started to see some changes in the landscape of the art world, both in terms of structural change—like galleries closing—and in terms of a shift in focus. The Swiss Institute, for example, has a show on right now (“Regift”), which focuses on the theme of the gift. Have you received increased interest in the Fine Arts Adoption Network in the past few months?

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How’s this for a pickup line: “So do you think that’s pie, or something of a more…sexual nature?”

Okay, so Jerry Saltz probably wasn’t picking me up. I was just a nonthreatening nobody standing in front of the above painting at David Zwirner, and a stationary target at which the unsuspecting New York mag art critic chose to aim his pornographic pontification. In any case, I took him up on it, and learned the following:

(1) Jerry Saltz doesn’t like the ambiguity of not knowing if it’s pie or not. I, as a woman, am comfortable with that ambiguity. According to Jerry.

(2) Jerry Saltz thinks men don’t care about plot in porn, but women do. He also thinks the background of this painting is all plot, and all “junk.”

(3) Jerry Saltz “can see where your eyes are looking.” Yes, yours. And his are looking there too.