Chelsea Gallerista

VIDEO: See it at Sotheby's @chelseagallerista UPDATE: Comedian just hammered for $5.2m (plus $1m in fees). +++ IN EXACTLY 5 minutes time, bidding will open at Sotheby’s New York for a slew of contemporary artworks with low estimates ranging from $50k to $12 million (Yu Nishimura's  Pause (2020)  and Stuart Davis'  Contranuities , respectively).  Falling somewhere in between is disrupter Maurizio Cattelan’s much-hyped Comedian (2019) , aka “the duct-taped banana.” It’s the latest contemporary art gambit to dominate your scroll since the shredded Banksy , the AI-robot painter , the NFT cash grab , the  $450m Salvatore Mundi … Originally bodega-priced at $120k, Comedian is estimated to hammer for $1-1.5 million, depending on how many “bites” it gets. The winner receives neither fruit nor roll of duct tape, but instead, a certificate of authenticity signed by the artist. This slip of paper represents little more than an artworld “consensus” that the buyer owns one...

Street/fine artist  Anthony Lister  puts a creepy face on Billy Marks dive Bar   ASK ANYONE who lives (as opposed to absentee-invests) in artsy West Chelsea and they'll tell you it's becoming "artless." All but the bluest of blue chip galleries are fleeing to (slightly) more affordable zip codes, no thanks to rampant "condo-mania."  Three of my favorites - Lori Bookstein Fine Art , Alexander and Bonin and Andrew Edlin , which formed an artsy little men-art a trois on 10th Ave have been swept away by the winds of gentrification. So it I was thrilled to discover that street artists are alive and doodling, pasting, spraying and "throwing up" (in a good way - I'll explain later) in the nabe, on a tour hosted by "recovering street artist," Patrick Waldo. Recovering from what, Patrick? A fall from a ladder at 2am while tagging an Absolut billboard?  "I got caught," said the impossibly tall, millennial-appar...