The Week In Culture, November 17 - November 24

Turkey is freaky, families are terrifying, and Black Friday is a plot. So turn away from the stove, put down the charge card and revel in some requisite art school alienation.

If you can't bear the lines for the final installment of the most chaste vampire franchise in history, you might consider arranging a phone bid for the Christie's Hong Kong six-day auction. It features a pair of 18th century Chinese lantern stands owned by old school Hollywood bloodsucker, Bela Lugosi. Ah, the 20th century, when vamps still stalked the night, and were never, ever pavéd in diamanté.

Or, if you're in the mood for fangless Guignol, Anthony Hopkins is taking his Hitchcock out for a spin. Tales of the most quoted director in cinema are piercing the fourth wall all over the place -- wait, wasn't that one of Hitch's tricks? -- from HBO to Broadway. The film genius died before social media could cannibalize him. So isn't Thanksgiving the perfect time for a feast on the master of quiet perversion. Gobble gobble.

You'll also want to save room to pick at the carcass of Lindsay Lohan on Sunday, in a biopic comeback of astonishing hubris, Liz & Dick. They were both child stars, you see, and LiLo likes diamonds, too.

Firm evidence that street art is inflated came in the form of the Brian Donnelly aka KAWS Companion balloon in the Macy's Thanksgiving Day Parade. Don't hate. Jeff Koons and Takashi Murakami have also had their time in the Upper West Side sun during this annual advert for capitalism. Besides, in this context the crying clown is gutsy.

And finally, MoMA out-Black-Fridayed Macy's with the Martha Rosler Meta-Monumental Garage Sale this week. MoMA is a little too gleefully insistent on the "haggling" component of the work in its online materials to sustain any of the bona fides a heavy weight like Rosler might have accrued over the decades. Everything is negotiable, they seem thrilled to say, even in the temple of taste. So try making an offer on a Franz Kline.

But if you're truly interested in commerce-as-performance, MoMA has shown pretty bad timing. It's kinda hard to top Walmart this weekend.