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FRIDAY

A healthy appetite for deals brokered with sex and sealed with cat fights compelled me to weekly Monday-night vigils in front of the now-deceased Melrose Place. The same puerile longings attract me to the antics of the Young British Artists, a select cadre of the lithe, well-dressed, and—if their art is any indication—horny. Aaron Spelling couldn’t manufacture a trashier art movement: Titillation trumps wisdom in Tracey Emin’s kiss-and-tell Everyone I Have Ever Slept With (1963-1995); and who needs dildos when the Chapman Brothers turn out prepubescent mannequins with dicks for noses? From his desk in the eye of this art hurricane, critic and Courtauld Institute Professor Julian Stallabrass has dispatched High Art Lite: British Art in the 1990s, a suitably acerbic chronicle of the rise of the Brit pack. Revel in the backstabbing when Stallabrass calls the brood’s output “art that looks like but is not quite art” at 6 p.m. at Vertigo Books, 1337 Connecticut Ave. NW. Free. (202) 429-9272. (Jessica Dawson)