Chelsea Gallerista

A fast ride up to the bridge to Randall's Island, host to the giant Frieze tent Like a stream of visiting circuses, full of color and wonder, New York's art fairs - Scope, Pulse, Frieze, NADA, and a bunch of outliers - share one frustrating thing in common: they tend to converge on the same long weekend. This makes it tough for the average art nut like me to do them all justice, even with press passes and a fast folding bike. But this year I decided to gal-up and pay the pricey $46 to attend  Frieze New York , a "first tier" art fair, according to my art dealer friend. Now, there are plenty of highbrow rants about this much vaunted art spectacle, dramatically sited "offshore" on Randall's Island. So what follows is a lowbrow account of what caught my eye in both good and bad ways. A tent fit for an  octomom's  wedding!  I had my first flat tire in ages, stalling my grand entrance. You NEVER find glass on the road when  biking i

Developing that photographic eye early - budding photographer snapped by Lynette Chiang in Mike Weiss Gallery It's been an exhausting 4 days - all the art fairs - Armory Show, Pulse, Scope Volta, Independent etc collide in one short, compressed period, causing a stampede from venue to venue. Check out the list of fairs . And it rained moonsoons on the last Sunday. I hope one day They Inc. will make the shows span 2 weeks instead of half a week, somewhat like Restaurant Week.  I only got to see Pulse, Volta, the massive Armory Show.  More about this soon. Then of course, there was the Phillips de Pury auction preview which in many ways, I enjoyed most. PHOTO GALLERY: My favorites at the Under the Influence auction  and here are the results . A few things that caught my eye: PULSE: A Hans Kotter light tube. "Could have sold it several times over," said the gallerist. $12,000 PHILLIPS de PURY: Heliopolis IV  by Dionisio Gonzales - being auctioned by

Shroomie by Scott Scheidly Twenty years ago, when I was a youngish yuppie of sorts, I bought a couple of paintings by Aussie artist Basil Hadley  for about $2500 each. That was the last time I bought a piece of "original" art and they are now gracing the walls of my ex's home in Sydney.  Admittedly they were, shall we say, "decorative" - unchallenging modern landscapes setting off my black leather sofa and seaweed green carpet beautifully. Since then, pursuing a largely traveling life, I've not been able to collect anything so unportable as art, apart from a very unportable print entitled  Sticks and Stones by (Sisters, Oregon) artist Paul Alan Bennett -  currently parked on the wall of a previous beau in Eugene, Oregon! What is this I have with ex's and art I wonder? But just recently, thanks to the affordable "free look" night at   The Affordable Art Fair in NYC , I bought my first piece of original art, a tiny painting called