DAILY MAGAZINE
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It was clear that the Moscow openings of the Garage and the Gagosian exhibition at the Red October Chocolate Factory were going to make for a few days that would be heady, even by the credit crunch-defying standards of the Upper Art World. The Garage, a Contemporary art space funded by Dasha Zhukova, the significant other of Roman Abramovich, and Larry Gagosian (below) had their opening dinners on consecutive evenings. And this attracted a pool of art world movers - from museum folk like Robert Storr, Gary Tinterow and Nicholas Serota to artists like Takashi Murakami.

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For her second solo exhibition at Rachmaninoff's Nicola Durvasula shows new drawings and objects, in part inspired by her Indian background and from living there.

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With over 50 paintings, a group of works on paper, and about 130 painted film posters, this exhibition offers a comprehensive overview of Peter Doig's achievements over the last 20 years. One focus of the show is the painted posters Doig produced for his cinema project STUDIOFILMCLUB in Port of Spain, Trinidad. He has also set up a special STUDIOFILMCLUB in Frankfurt, where he will be screening films he has selected.

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Artists create limited editions for Obama fundraiser; big prizes for Mark Dion and Tim Lee; National Portrait Gallery in London hopes to acquire Marc Quinn's Blood Head (below); Catherine David has been appointed director of the Lyon Biennale 2009; and Deutsche Bank has permanently loaned 600 works to Frankfrut's Staedel Museum.

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A new music and art event has launched in London's East End called Concrete and Glass to showcase some of the best talent in music and contemporary art, taking the creative hub of Shoreditch and the East End as its inspiration. Saatchi Online is showing a selection of London-based artists in an exhibition at The Gallery at Beach Blanket Babylon on Bethnal Green Road. The exhibition runs from 2-19 October and all the works are for sale.

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As part of our continuing efforts to promote the work of Saatchi Online artists, Saatchi Online will be presenting a selection of UK-based artists registered on the site at this year's SCOPE art fair in London 16-19 October. All the works will be available for sale on a non-commission basis (all money from sales will go directly to the artists), and here we preview the work of the artists exhibiting on the Saatchi Online stand at the fair.

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Besides the much-anticipated opening of our very own Saatchi Gallery in London, with a major survey of new Chinese art, other (historical) survey shows abound this week, with 'Sympathy for the Devil' exploring art's intersections with rock music since the 1960s in Montreal, while Japanese Manga culture hits Humblebaek, Denmark. Solo shows to watch out for include Tara Donovan in Boston, Rafael Lozano-Hemmer in London, Martha Colburn and Katherine Newbegin in Zurich, and Thomas Eggerer in Los Angeles.

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London- and Madrid-based editor and critic Lupe Nunez Fernandez selects 10 of her current favourite artists registered on Saatchi Online.

Catherine Opie's early '90s breakthrough body of work now hangs on the walls of the Guggenheim, the subjects - tattooed body modification devotees, gender-fucking dykes, and S/M playmates - looking like exotic specimens pinned up in a display case. The photographer, acting as a sort of noble PT Barnum, empowered rather than exploited her cohorts among the Los Angeles and San Francisco Modern Primitives, a crowd that embraced the word "queer" and pierced for pleasure. I'm lucky enough to know many of Opie's sitters personally, and it was a treat last week to see some of these smart, sexy freaks in the museum next to their portraits.

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'The bright tomorrows that never came', part of the 'You are my mirror' programme of cultural exchange between Lithuania and France, references Lithuania's recent social and political history to broach the question of heritage, transmission, memory, commemoration, utopia-and, evidently between the lines, that of monumentality and anti-monumentality - through the encounter and dialogue between two artists representing different generations: Deimantas Narkevicius and Gintaras Didziapetris.

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Aurel Schmidt builds Arcimboldo-esque accumulations from street trash, the darker elements in nature, and researched historical imagery. Drawn with an elegant and sensitive line, she slurries together her brew of beasts and spreads them over the page to form faces, bodies, landscapes, or abstract artworks. In her current show in new York, entitled 'Man Eater', Schmidt munches her way through Modernist masterpieces, transforming them with graphite and colored pencil into seething masses of interwoven debris.

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The week that the world's financial markets went plop, I spent in an art-induced haze, all because of the enormous, vast, gigantic Shanghai Art Week which takes in 1 Biennale, 2 international art fairs, and over 70 museum and gallery openings.

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Brunelli's majestic black and white portraits of animals take on an ordinary subject and turn it nothing short of haunting - a different way of looking at the everyday.

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Congratulations to the winner of the second round of the SHOWDOWN competition, Nikki Willson. Her artwork will compete with other SHOWDOWN finalists to find an overall winner after the 12 rounds of SHOWDOWN have been completed. Voting is now open for the next round of SHOWDOWN and artists can also now load up their work for the next round as well.

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All Saatchi Online Artists are invited to a preview of the new Saatchi Gallery before it opens to the public. This special preview of the gallery and the inaugural show, 'The Revolution Continues: New Art from China', will be exclusively for Saatchi Online artists and will take place on 8 October from 10am to 4pm. The gallery opens to the public on Thursday 9 October. Read on to find out more details.

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Heart of Glass, set in the maze of dark hidden basement rooms in Shoreditch Town Hall, had a queue going round the block at the opening of the new Concrete and Glass festival in London's Shoreditch on Thursday night - and for good reason. It is an ideal environment for installation-based shows and this one, showing 33 progressive artists' work, is a must see. Other highlights include a show of Saatchi Online artists at Beach Blanket Babyon on Bethnal Green Road; the opening was buzzing with the likes of Russell Brand (below) mincing around the show and a man with a certain similarity to Russell dressed in a long black robe, white mask and huge black hair.

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The final exhibition in the 'Time & Place' series, which has previously re-contextualized the art and culture of Milano/Torino and Rio de Janeiro in the 20th century, highlights Los Angeles.

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Nedko Solakov's wide-ranging, highly personal work is the subject of a new touring exhibition, currently on show at the Kunstmuseum Bonn.

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In his new landscape-oriented series of large-format photographs, Joel Sternfeld documents weather and atmospheric effects in a field in central Massachusetts over the course of a cycle of seasons.

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Opening this week at Gagosian in London are two concurrent exhibitions of new work by Richard Serra, his first shows in London since 'Weight and Measure' was presented at the Tate in 1992. Three new steel sculptures are on view at the Britannia Street galleries together with a series of "forged drawings" - small, geometric forged steel plates with paint stick applied to the surface - and at Gagosian's Davies Street space you can see new works on paper.

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The great Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges once said that what happens in the present changes what happened in the past - or at least our understanding of it. As a test, take the case of Chinese contemporary art. Until recently, anyone asked to name the seminal exhibition of the late '80s would probably have reached for Damien Hirst's 1988 exhibition 'Freeze'; more adventurous souls might have identified the 1989 Pompidou exhibition, 'magiciens de la terre' where 50 artists from Africa and Asia were exhibited alongside 50 from Europe and the US. But with the current fevered fascination of the world with all things Chinese, it's now perfectly reasonable to argue that the most important exhibition of the late '80s - that watershed in recent global history - was China/Avant-Garde Exhibition, held at the National Art Gallery, Beijing. At a more modest level, this exhibition, which shows the range of Sun Liang's work from the mid-80s to the present, is another straw in the wind and an important show.

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Don't miss a talk by influential art theorist Boris Groys, who will discuss the relationship between art and audience tonight at the Whitechapel.

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Don't miss New York-based artist Martha Colburn's fast-paced, hand-made, 16mm film animation, 'Myth Labs', 2008, which is on view at James Cohan, New York, until 4 October.

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Hoping to highlight the mountains of plastic accumulating around the world, artist Mark McGowan plans to row 250 miles through the streets of London in a raft made out of recycled plastic bottles; Gagosian says Russian buyers account for 50% of its sales over the last 18 months; Tara Donovan (below; photo by Tony Cenicola) wins a MacArthur 'Genius Grant'; the Musee des Arts Decoratifs in Paris announces a Kate Moss retrospective; and the Guggenheim appoints a new director, Richard Armstrong, who wants all the Guggenheim museums, 'and New York maybe foremost, [to] be seen as exemplars of great intellectual enterprise'.

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The Wyer Gallery is a small oasis of throat-grabbing contemporary art in the midst of the ordinary streets of South London. Hung side by side in this exhibition is the work of two stylistically diverse female oil painters. One scandalous, one monumental but feminine.

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The title of Oliver Clegg's new exhibition at the Freud Museum in London comes from Freud's earliest reference to chess in 'Studies on Hysteria' (1893) where he relates the complex, zigzagging, move of the Knight to the twists and turns of the human mind in psychoanalysis. Central to Clegg's show, which opens tomorrow, is his exquisite fabrication of an extraordinary chess set which incorporates exact replicas of Freud's famous desk with its anthropomorphic chair and his favourite antiquities as the chess pieces.

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Named after one of the artist's signature colorful, abstract canvases, Mary Heilmann's 'Some Pretty Colors', currently at Zwirner & Wirth in New York, explores the development of the artist's distinctive painterly style with works that date from 1989 to 2006 - the perfect prelude to this season's Heilmann retrospective at the New Museum, the artist's first major solo show in a New York institution.

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More than 80 exhibitions opened in Chelsea on the first big night of the art season, a couple of weeks ago. Most are mediocre, as usual, and this many so-so shows early on makes one suspect that a pattern is forming. But amid mediocrity, the needle does seesaw, and three shows (one good, one bad, one terrible) stood out as I made the rounds. The shockmeister Andres Serrano has opened a new show as well, and it's another doozy (below) - skip it in favour of Neil Campbell's pitch-perfect way of blending architecture, placement on the wall, size and edges, creating retinal and phenomenological power.

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Unique in the firmament of International Biennials, a survey of the brightest stars in the new cosmology, exceptional new works by artists who might burn bright or twinkle for a day - Bloomberg New Contemporaries 2008, selected by Richard Billingham, Ceal Floyer and Ken Lum, is on view in Liverpool until 22 November and travels to London on 6 December. This year is the largest show ever with the work of 57 artists, chosen from over 1400 submissions.

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The iPhone is the new navel. Everybody who's anybody has one, some have the capacity to hold more than others and they accumulate lint like crazy. Judging from his current show at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Rob Pruitt has been gazing at his a lot lately. The entire West Village gallery has been festooned with enlarged images from Pruitt's cell phone camera--inside and out. Images of dinner discussions with artist friends, puppies at art openings, "Brokeback Mountain" stills, rotting pumpkins and magazine advertisements quietly bombard us.

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The Chapman Brothers irreverently painted googley-eyed monsters on Goya's "Disasters of War" etchings; Duchamp butched up the Mona Lisa with a mustache; and Yasumasa Morimura bent the gender of art history's greatest beauties. In contrast to these artistic interlopers who appropriated art history in order to undermine its icons, Oxford-based artist Sam Branton's sassy insertion of his own signature characters into history's archives of decadent art would surely have enthralled and likely aroused his sources. To see more of his work registered on Saatchi Online click here.

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Congratulations to the two finalists of the second round of SHOWDOWN competition, Allan Switzer (top image) and Nikki Wilson (bottom image). They will now go head-to-head until 9am next Monday, during which time you can vote on their two artworks. Click here to vote on these two finalists. Artists also are now able to load up their work for the next round of Showdown.

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Gallery Koyanagi is one of Tokyo's top contemporary art galleries, representing major artists such as Sophie Calle, Marlene Dumas, Olafur Eliasson, Mariko Mori, Rika Noguchi, Hiroshi Sugimoto and Tabaimo. The gallery, a regular exhibitor at Art Basel, Frieze Art Fair, Art Fair Tokyo and CIGE, started out as a contemporary ceramics gallery in 1988 but its founder and director Atsuko Koyanagi reopened the space as a contemporary art gallery in 1995. She talks here to Ashley Rawlings, an art critic based in Tokyo, about the changes in contemporary art in Japan over the last 15 years.

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SCOPE London art fair takes place this October at Lord's Cricket Ground, not far from Regents Park. In addition to presenting 50 international galleries, the fair will feature a special non-selling 'Museum Presents' exhibition focusing on China with works from the Saatchi Gallery.

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"Adopt Lenin" is the first solo exhibition for the Russian-born New York artist Yevgeniy Fiks. Continuing his exploration of the post-Soviet dialogue and the legacy of attitudes about Communism in the West today, Fiks presents a critique of the commodification and fetishization of the Soviet Revolution's imagery including busts of Lenin, small statues and photographs. During the exhibition, visitors can place a reserve on any available object, on a first-come-first-served basis, and then take it away, after the show closes.

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The winner of the September Your Studio competition is Esther Yva from Bonn in Germany. Anthony Haden-Guest, Saatchi Online correspondent, comments: 'Esther Yva's drawings remind me of the works of Egon Schiele. I'm amazed that something so sophisticated can be created online.' The Saatchi Gallery will donate £500 in the artist's name to a hospital of her choice. You can create now your entries for the October Your Studio competition, the winner of which will be announced on Friday 31 October.

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'Appointment with History' is the first solo show in the US of Romanian artists Mona Vatamanu and Florin Tudor. A deep interest in architecture as a repository of both personal and collective memory and as a mark of communist power underlies many of their projects.

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While a large segment of the art world has obsessed over a tiny number of stars and their prices, an aesthetic shift has been occurring. It's not a movement--movements are more sure of themselves. It's a change of mood or expectation, a desire for art to be more than showy effects, big numbers, and gamesmanship. It's a shift from theatricality to actual drama, from art about selling art to an art that's serious and ironic at the same time, eager for audiences but not slick and accessorized. Some of it is really good; some already looks like neo-Romantic dreck.

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Frieze Art Fair has announced the call for entries to The Cartier Award 2009. The Cartier Award is open to artists living outside of the UK, up to five years from graduating from an undergraduate or postgraduate degree or under thirty years of age. The Cartier Award is organised by Frieze Projects, sponsored by Cartier and presented in collaboration with Gasworks.