In between tailgates, Harvard-Yale “bonding” events and, oh yeah, The Game, Yalies, Cantabs and other visitors may want to take a moment to visit one of Yale’s current art exhibitions. Because there are so many and only so many unoccupied (read: sober) hours in the day this coming weekend, scene recommends our favorites:

Q: Where did you grow up?
A: A town called Sebastopol, California — Like an hour north of San Francisco.

Don’t ask. She won’t tell you what they’re about.
“Tunisia and Libya: What Lies Beyond Scarcity” is the most recent Sudler Fund visual arts exhibition on photography, open to the public on November 5th in the Swing Space Activities Room.

Last February, feet of snow obscured Yale’s walkways. But thousands of miles south, beneath ancient blankets of ice, Professor Thomas Near braved the Antarctic chill in pursuit of rarely-seen sea creatures — dead or alive.

Q: Where are you from, and how did you get here?
A: I am from China. I got here by airplane.

The best things in life are free, like swine flu. And condoms. No need to trek out to Walgreens or DUH; just take a trip down to the bottom of your entryway. Here is your abridged guide to the condom bags of Yale University.

I couldn’t tell you how to get to Beacon, New York. I was asleep for much of the two-hour journey, waking only to find myself driving through the charming town on my way to the Dia Foundation’s warehouse.

First came the blogs, then the magazine features and finally a mention in the International Herald Tribune. You can find a listing for Recession Art’s second show, opening this Saturday, in Time Out New York.

“I love living in ‘The Glidehouse’ for so many reasons,” says Michelle Kaufman from a video screen at the front of the exhibition. Kaufman is both the architect and resident of her sustainable home in Northern California, the so-called “Glidehouse.” She continues, listing the environmentally friendly features of her home: the wood sunshades that can be moved to optimize sunlight and airflow, the photovoltaic panels that provide solar energy, and the natural flooring.

Treading the halls of Sterling Memorial Library this month is a blast from the Whiffenpoofs’ past.

Recession Art be awesome. Recession Art be Brooklyn. Recession Art be 2009.

The first thing you will see upon entering the “Endless Forms” exhibition at the Yale Center for British Art is a painting of the great man himself, scruffy-looking, white-bearded, boring his hawk-like eyes into you.

In the future, plants, water and rocks will all become disco shades of cyan, day-glow yellow and hot pink. We’ll wear these colors all together, all the time, and forget black and white. At least, that would be the case if the artwork of Richard Lytle, painter and teacher, was any sign of the planet’s evolutionary path.

“The ways people talk about art are not as complicated as the way we live our lives,” Jaret Vadera ART ’09 tells me. A neon pink tube curled into the word “poser” in cursive fluoresces pertly above his head. It is the only work of art on a long white gallery wall that faces the path between the recently completed sculpture building and Edgewood Avenue.

The title of the Yale University Art Gallery’s “Picasso and the Allure of Language” has an off-putting 20th-century feel to it.

There’s a gallery opening in New York City. Two thousand people have shown up to walk a miniature red carpet, sip cocktails and eat tiny hors d’oeurves passed around by tuxedoed waiters.

The day after the election, Sam Messer instructed his drawing class to create portraits of President-elect Barack Obama. When the students finished, they posted their art on an empty wall in Green Hall.

The weathered bronze statue strikes the classic Venus de Milo pose — a graceful female figure with rounded breasts and belly, standing in coy contrapposto, covering her genitalia with a casual hand.