Massimiliano Gioni has selected a theme for his Biennale exhibition. It will be known as The Encyclopedic Palace, part of the title of a 136-story Futurist skyscraper imagined for Washington DC's National Mall by Marino Auriti a self-taught Italian-American artist. “It's the crazy dream, bordering between knowledge and madness, image and imagination…reflecting the grand ambition of this international exhibition,” Gioni said in a recent interview. Read more…

Still hailed as one of the founders of performance art, though he broke with the movement 25 years ago, Vito Acconci has been named Designer of the Year by Design Miami, the leading commercial fair in the field. Read more…
Image: Vito Acconci

“We need to see more playfulness in our cities and public spaces,” says Turner Prize-winning artist Jeremy Deller in support of a new award launched in Bristol for an artist “who can devise an artwork that embraces openness, playfulness and technology to engage and surprise audiences.” The £30,000 International Playable City Award, which is an initiative of the cross-artform venue and producer Watershed,  has been co-funded by a cluster of creative and technology companies to champion Bristol as a hub for cutting-edge creativity.
Image: Jeremy Deller on his inflatable Stonehenge work Sacrilege 

Jim Speers’ exhibition Long Days is showing at Shanghai’s Fei Contemporary Art Centre (FCAC) in October/November, timed to coincide with the 9th Shanghai Biennale. Long Days features recent video work by Speers including Night Barges, a new work filmed in Shanghai earlier this year.

Fei Contemporary Art Centre is a not-for-profit space run by artist/curator Li Xiaofei, one of the founders of the Zendai contemporary art museum.
Image: Jim Speer, Night Barges, 2012, three-screen video projection

Curated by Qiu Zhijie, Boris Groys, Tsong-zung Chang and Jens Hoffman, the 9th Shanghai Biennale is currently showing at the city's new Power Station of Art. The new art museum, which will host post-1980 contemporary art, mainly from China, was formerly the Pavilion of the Future during the city's World Expo in 2010. You can see images of works in the Biennale on the ArtAsiaPacific blog.
Image: Shanghai's new Power Station of Art, the venue for the 9th Shanghai Biennale

Hobart has been christened a funky cultural hub by travel bible Lonely Planet, which has named the city one of the 10 best in the world to visit in 2013. So why was Hobart the only Australian city to make the list? Lonely Planet's Chris Zeiher said: “The Tasmanian capital's $180 million Museum of Old and New Art (MONA) has proved a beacon for international attention and is largely the reason for the listing in seventh place.”
Image: Museum of Old and New Art, Hobart

Seung Yul Oh's exhibition Huggong opens tomorrow and runs to 17 November.
Image: Seung Yul Oh, Huggong (2012), installation view

Former employees of the Witte de With are making biennale news. Last week the institution's former curator, Juan A Gaitan, was selected to curate the 8th Berlin Biennale. Now the Witt de With's former director, Nicolaus Schafhausen, has been selected to curate the 2014 Bucharest Biennale.
Image: Nicolaus Schafhausen

Image: Marcel Duchamp's Bicycle Wheel

The KW Institute for Contemporary Art  has selected independent curator/writer Juan A Gaitan to curate the 2014 Berlin Biennale. Gaitan, who has been curating at the Witte de With Centre for Contemporary Art,  follows in the footsteps of high-profile curators such as Klaus Biesenbach, Massimiliano Gioni, Hans Ulrich Obrist and Nancy Spector.
Image: Juan A Gaitan

This year marks 50 years of the Billy Apple® brand and as part of the celebrations Apple has worked with Waiheke winemakers to produce Billy Apple®: Official Selection; premium red wines from the classic 2010 vintage in a limited edition case. The wines are from Kennedy Point, Man O'War, Miro, Obsidian, Peacock Sky and Poderi Crisci.

Presented initially at Artsonje in Seoul, the second iteration of City Within th City opens tonight at Gertrude Contemporary, Melbourne with new installation works by three of the artists, including Alicia Frankovich's Volution and Choreography I.

Shanghai opens two huge art museums today, both repurposed from structures built for the city's World Expo in 2010. The China Art Museum, showing Chinese Modern art from the late Qing dynasty to 1980, occupies the Expo's scarlet-hued China Pavilion, and extends to 160,000 square meters, while the Power Station of Art will host post-1980 contemporary art, mainly from China, in over 41,000 square meters of space in the former factory-shaped Pavilion of the Future. The opening programme in the China Art Museum includes Meridian Lines: Contemporary Art from the Museum of New Zealand, an exhibition from the collections of the Museum of New Zealand Te Papa Tongarewa curated by Sarrah Farrar.
Image: The China Art Museum

Jae Hoon Lee's Antarctic Fever continues this week at Starkwhite.
Image: Jae Hoon Lee, Waiting for your call (2012), video still

Open Air is new interactive light experience created by Rafael Lozano-Hemmer “to open up a new public space for Philadelphians to express themselves in.” Using a free mobile app developed by Lozano-Hemmer's studio, participants are invited to record and submit messages of up to 30 seconds in shout-outs, poems, songs, rants dedications and proposals. In response 24 powerful robotic searchlights stationed along a half-mile section of Benjamin Franklin Parkway create a dynamic light formation in the sky. The lights respond in brightness and position to the GPS location of participants and the frequency and amplitude of their voice recordings. All participants receive a personalised webpage created automatically with their message and images of the light sculpture that their voice created.
Image: Rafael Lozano-Hemmers' Open Air, staged with the Association for Art in Philadelphia