DAVID ARMSTRONG, 1954-2014

The gnarled and pocked contours of an unearthed animal bone, carefully catalogued shards of attic pottery, the viscosity of a new batch of bone-china slip or heated wax: these are the things that make the artist Melissa Gamwell’s heart beat a little faster. Gamwell uses a sophisticated technical process involving bone china, phosphate dyes, water, and semiprecious metals to create sculptural objects that seductively straddle the line between the fine and applied arts. The result is beautifully disconcerting: fine china and flatware firmly reimagined through the chaotic logic of the natural world.

Frieze Art Fair has become more than just a fair—it is now the center from which spirals a plethora of activity as London institutions and galleries launch their biggest exhibitions of the year. Alongside these are some of the biggest auction sales, designed to catch the attention of the international art community that descends to purchase and absorb the city’s latest offerings.

There are few fashion luminaries whose legacies cast quite as long as a shadow as Yves Saint Laurent’s, which makes it all the more impressive that Hedi Slimane has, in the just two short years as Saint Laurent’s new creative director, managed to leave such a strong mark of his own. He notches another historic milestone this fall, when he becomes the first designer to exhibit at the Fondation Pierre Bergé-Yves Saint Laurent in Paris with a show of his iconic black-and-white studio portraits of musicians produced over the past fifteen years. Slimane, who now works out of his Los Angeles studio rather than the house’s Parisian headquarters, has always had a driving passion for rock-and-roll, especially the vibrant scenes of London and Southern California, are documented in his richly introspective images, which capture both young upstarts and luminaries such as Keith Richards, Amy Winehouse, and Lou Reed, who adorns the poster with an expression both timeworn and timeless. An accompanying video installation, which contrasts Slimane’s British work from 2004 to 2007 with his time on the West Coast since, will bridge the divide between generations, much as the designer does himself in his day job.

“When I said one memory was ‘pencils,’ he had his finger pointed to the ceiling with his eyes and said, ‘Aha! Cedar wood!’ and knew which compounds would achieve this.”

Archie Moore—an Aboriginal, multidisciplinary artist based in Queensland, Australia—is recounting his meetings with Jonathon Midgley of Damask Perfumery, a stranger-turned-collaborator and epicurean of smells. Moore describes Midgley as wizard-like in his olfactory observations, a man who could sniff one’s ‘stuff’ (concepts, memories) and translate them into something fantastically ephemeral: precise and complex aromas that climb up one’s nostrils and move around the brain, somewhere near the limbic system. As the two worked together, Midgley talked like a winemaker: he spoke of base and high notes and detected hints of cherry.

Lines, curves, and reflections; the dissolution of tone over a great distance; the location of the horizon on a misty beach: the artist Jonathan Cramer uses both two- and three-dimensional media in his practice, which might be viewed as an in-depth study of light, natural forms, and the logic of craft. Cramer works in the holy classical triumvirate of drawing, painting, and sculpture, often letting the end product of his explorations in one medium inform a piece rendered in the other. Elongated, silvery contours and arcs that double back onto themselves form the bases for abstract painted compositions whose complex figure-ground relationships recall the heyday of Morris Louis. Meanwhile, the sculptures that inform the paintings, rendered in stainless steel, have a decidedly architectural character. Their long, slender shining arcs sing with the promise of geometry and the rational mind, and every angle reveals a new composition filled with delicate complexity. They dovetail perfectly with Cramer’s drawings, which explode with nervous energy.

For her latest exhibition, the photographer Cara Stricker has enlisted the help of some friends. “Make Love to the World,” which opens tomorrow night at The Hole Gallery in New York, will feature her personal photography alongside collaborations with musical talent such as Roger O’Donnell of the Cure), Blood Orange’s Dev Hynes, and Sebastien Tellier’s keyboardist, John Kirb.

Less glamorous with less money and less crowds, the Venice Architecture Biennale is the ugly stepsister to the Art Biennale’s Cinderella held in alternating years. There were anxious expectations for Rem Koolhaas, author of the seminal Delirious New York and founder of the far reaching and influential office OMA, who was tapped to take the helm and set things right. Critics have applauded his encyclopedic “Fundamentals” exhibition that resides in the Central Pavilion in the Giardini, as well as his autocratic decision to steer all the national pavilions to focus on the rise of modernism over the last hundred years. A commanding commissioner, Koolhaas has organized one of the most cohesive biennales in recent memory. Standouts included the Korean Pavilion, whose attempt to bridge North and South Korea through architecture garnered the Golden Lion, and the clever and funny Russian Pavilion as an international trade fair promoting the modernization efforts of its motherland.

Looking out over the mysterious, sculptural cliffs of RiME’s digital coast, one is caught by the beauty and wild imagination allowed to independent video game developers. “Joaquín Sorolla and the light of the Mediterranean were our main inspirations when creating RiME,” says Raúl Rubio Munárriz, creative director of Tequila Works, the company behind RiME. “Salvador Dalí’s negative space and Giorgio de Chirico’s Surrealist architecture contributed to create an eerie yet believable world.”

Douglas Abraham, founder of the idiosyncratic jewelry and fashion line and Manhattan Wunderkammer Bess, decided if he was going to continue to use Instagram, it would need to serve as a platform for art, viewing the feed as an instrument to “create a story about yourself, to build an identity and share it.” Search his handle @bessnyc4, and it’s evident his identity is unique. Since March, Abraham has been posting a daily trio of aberrant fashion photomontages, evocative images that may at first glance appear to be a menagerie of subculture icons and fetishist imagery debasing beloved campaigns. But after swiping through your tenth, eleventh, or twentieth triptych, it’s apparent he’s seamlessly threading in his own wickedly cool perspective.