We remember when Ryan McGinley was a Lower East Side kid with a camera, taking snapshots of other kids doing the naughty things kids do. But now that the 25-year-old is officially a rising star—especially since The Kids Are Alright, the exhibition last year that made him the youngest solo artist to show at the Whitney Museum—he's both moving up and moving on. In an exhibition of approximately twenty new photographs at P.S.1, the photographer keeps his eye on his circle of friends. But while he's known for diaristic portrayals of an urban youth culture where sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll verge on the idyllic, McGinley's more recent work takes a romp through nature. In night-time scenes set in the great outdoors, young bucks carouse in the buff, often in compositions that seem as impromptu as they are posed. McGinley's talent, after all, lies in his ability to portray a subculture that's both improvised and constructed, in which free spiritedness is inextricably bound to one's awareness of it.

Nature and artifice battle it out in Moistscape, and artifice wins. Or does it? Created by Freecell, an experimental Brooklyn-based architecture collaborative, Moistscape consists of a steel structure filled with panels of moss and set within a specially-built room at Henry Urbach Architecture. The organic is thus contained in an otherworldly landscape—air-conditioned, humidified and cushioned with a floor of shredded rubber tires—where the synthetic is dressed up as the natural and the natural becomes manmade. But, with moss that requires constant watering and atmospheric regulation, Moistscape is also a high-maintenance installation, where—as with the built environment in general—we're at once empowered and subjugated by the need to control.

By now, you may have heard about Andrea Fraser's latest dalliance. Friedrich Petzel Gallery is the scene of the New York debut of Untitled, a sixty-minute video in which the artist has sex with a collector who paid nearly $20,000 for the videotape and the rendezvous it shows (pictured left). Fraser is a leading figure of institutional critique—art about the art world—and the metaphor here is obvious. However, more than just a cynical artist-as-whore one-liner, Untitled also invokes the vulnerabilities and requisite exhibitionism of art-making. This comes through at the nearby American Fine Arts gallery where, in a video of Fraser's 2001 performance, Official Welcome (pictured right), Fraser lampoons the vapidly self-congratulatory speeches at art world gatherings with an internalized neurosis acted out by the artist stripping nearly naked. Elsewhere in the gallery, a mound of discarded Carnival costumes (also seen in the video's background) looks dishearteningly anticlimactic once the celebratory pretense is shed.

Pascal Rostain and Bruno Mouron do what so many journalists do: they stalk celebrities looking for dirt. For Star Trash, a show at a temporary Soho space of the same name, the two have taken photographs cataloging the household garbage of everyone from Madonna and Pamela Anderson to Mel Gibson and Tom Cruise. Equal parts invasion of privacy, unauthorized product endorsement and twisted personality profile, the photos provide disturbing evidence, for example, that Larry King has a bladder control problem (in one image, now pulled, that includes Depends adult diapers), while Antonio Banderas has his own reasons for throwing out old boxers (pictured). The conclusion: celebrities are indeed full of crap.

After four years making a name for itself in Williamsburg, the Bellwether gallery has moved to Chelsea. And it's making quite an entrance with Hello, Chelsea, an inaugural group show of its roster of artists who, true to the gallery's roots, largely draw from popular and youth culture sensibilities. From Kimberly Hart's outrageously decorated and multifunctional "Catbird Seat" Blind, Stand and Feeder (w/Bait) to Kirsten Hassenfeld's sublime and obsessively crafted paper chandelier (pictured), the show is as richly textured as the works now being imported from across the East River.