Centerpoints: The Durer code, funeral trade show, "metadada"

• LA Times critic Christopher Knight excoriates LA MOCA for promoting Christies’ rental of gallery space for an auction over the weekend of items from Liz Taylor’s estate on its website. “The Christie’s deal is just its usual commercial enterprise, with the auction house doing what auction houses do and MOCA doing what art museums don’t do — acting as a shill, publicist and partner for a business.” (LA MOCA gets a cut of admissions — which went for $20-$50 a pop — to the auction.) He zings director Jeffrey Deitch: “He should have held out for a cut on the sale of Liz’s famous 33-carat Burton diamond, expected to ring up between $2.5 and $3.5 million. The only thing worse than selling out is selling out cheap.”

• An exhibition of 43 engravings by Albrecht Dürer (1471-1528) at Gustavus Adolphus College in St. Peter, Minn., tells a curious story: Dürer included what an art collector believes are hidden messages about his background in his work.

• Comic book artist Sara Varon — who designed an identity for the Walker’s Family Programs and a Walker-themed comic book — got top billing in the New York Times‘ Friday preview of New York Comic Con, held over the weekend.

• Photographer Robert Rutöd attended this year’s Devota, a trade show for the funeral industry in Europe, documenting wares from egg-shaped, pastel-colored coffins for fetuses and “precious stones made out of the cremation ash of the deceased” to a hearse manufactured by Maserati.

• Tim Williams — who says he co-created the spoof art movement “metadada” with a friend in 2006 — writes about art hoaxes and frauds, from Duchamp’s Rose Sélavy to the “invented artist” Pietro Psaier.

• A court in New York ruled that artist Andy Golub “is permitted to paint bare breasts any time, anywhere, but the G-strings have to stay on until daylight goes out.”