Lu Magnus is a new space in the LES framed as an art laboratory and salon.

Hosting a variety of events, Lu Magnus goes beyond the traditional notion of gallery as exhibition space towards a participatory environment of the salnons of the past. The diversity of their program brings together a spectrum of genres of art including performance, book readings, fashion, film, dance and food. Check their website for upcoming events.

Nic*Rad’s live performance of his Celebrtiist Manifesto was the perfect complement to the idiom of this space. A brilliantly intelligent and sardonically hilarious culmination of art, conversation, performance and spectacle, he frames James Franco “as the greatest artist of this generation if not all time.” The manifesto is insightful and dramatic and filled with some great anecdotal one-liners that poignantly spins the icon of James Franco around pop celebrity culture to artstar-dom. One of my favorite lines: James Franco who should play Vito Schnabel in a movie about Vito Schnabel directed by Julian Schnabel in which Vito Schnabel plays the young Julian Schnabel… wherein they lounge together and talk about the excesses of the art world and sip port in the Palazzo Chupi.