Chelsea Gallerista

Raise you to $2M for the Cindy Sherman ... (in one's dreams) A few more photos on ChelseaGallerista Facebook page Today, I discovered yet another "best thing in Manhattan life you can do for free" - go to a contemporary art auction. Truly, it's like going to "the game." "Amazing photos, we gotta go!" texted my fellow School of Visual Arts cohort Lisa, who'd downloaded the iPhone app of über-chic auction house Phillips de Pury .  The app allows you to browse the "lots" - auction-speak for artwork - and seemingly, do everything short of bid on your phone. 'Cos you wouldn't want to wave it around and accidentally swipe an extra 5 grand onto your cellphone bill, now would you? Lisa's favorite: RICHARD AVEDON, Sunny Harnett, model. Dress by Grès. Casino, Le Touquet, Paris, August, 1954. Estimate $15,000-20,000, Sold at $27,500 Our small SVA class has become so enthused about art we have continued to mee

Portrait 5 (Stephens) sold for $27K at the Phillips d Pury March 2011 Auction. All proceeds went to DonorsChoose.org.   See what it was up against  and my "review" below. I've just completed my 6-week SVA Trends in Photography and Contemporary Art  : What's Happening Now mini-course. It's an indulgent immersion in the art world - feasting your eyeballs on everything from priceless icons of the modern art world to the proverbial "my 6 year old could do that." (Ah, but your 6-year old, my friend, is not named"Warhol").  We got to see the galleries of Chelsea, the Upper East Side and the Lower East Side, plus attend a Phillips de Pury "mid season" auction preview and a couple of Armory Arts Week shows.  Some of us were budding collectors. "The Confess Project": The gang check out artist Margot Lovejoy's confessions on the surreal "receivers" at  Stephan Stoyanov Gallery,  29 Orchard St -  &quo

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

Vernita  N'cognita lets fly in a hyper-controlled butoh fashion In the spirit of "you learn something new every day as long as you refrain from saying  meh, " I learned a new word today:  butoh . Butoh is a kind of mute performance so eloquently defined in Wikipedia, I've copy-pasted the definition here:  Butoh   ( 舞踏  Butō ? )  is the collective name for a diverse range of activities, techniques and motivations for  dance , performance, or movement inspired by the  Ankoku-Butoh   ( 暗黒 舞踏 ankoku butō ? )  movement. It typically involves playful and grotesque imagery, taboo topics, extreme or absurd environments, and is traditionally performed in white body makeup with slow hyper-controlled motion, with or without an audience. There is no set style, and it may be purely conceptual with no movement at all. Its origins have been attributed to Japanese dance legends Tatsumi Hijikata  and  Kazuo Ohno I love the part "with or without an audience,&

Replicas of "Horse and Rider" - the full sized bronze original is at The Texas Tech University in Lubbock.   I am utterly beside myself ... I'm now the proud owner of not one, but two Tom Otterness sculptures, entitled "Horse and Rider." Now before commuters familiar with the Brooklyn artist's quirky little figurines strewn around Manhattan's subway stations accuse me of grand theft with a hacksaw (um, make that a chainsaw), these are cast resin  replicas. The read deal (and other objects of my profound desire) are being exhibited Feb 23 at the artist's outlet of choice,  Marlborough Gallery , and will probably set you back at least $7K, last I looked. I came face to nose with the real deal at the Armory Show, NYC, 2011 The "Horse and Rider" full-size bronze currently graces the campus of the Texas Tech University in Lubbock. The subject itself is a  loose interpretation of the Texas Tech Uni's mascot, ‘The Masked Ride

Cookbooks in Bed with Lover Sleeping on the Side 9" X 6" Giclee Print, Edition of 25, $375 View series I've just started a 6-week Trends in Photography and Contemporary Art course at the School of Visual Arts, taught by New York art critic and consultant Brian Appel . The class has a number of working artists, blossoming artists, art appreciators, and "I can't draw for the life of me but I can just see it" arteests like me. Yup, I figured it was about time I expanded on my art knowledge from the "P" volume of the World Book Encyclopedia.  I confess that one of the most popular, dare I say, cliche paintings of all time, Henri Rousseau's Sleeping Gypsy, still sends a little buzz down my prefrontal cortex : Like a lucid dream: Henri Rousseau's The Sleeping Gypsy It's those toes on the footprintless sand ... the 3-D stripes of the robe ...  the beady eye of the lion ... the warped guitar strings ... brrrr! But I digr

Snap frozen Osaka: "Each person ... seems to convey his or her own personal life story even though they appear frozen in their action." Continuing on my photography-ogling odyssey , I chanced upon this wonderful shot in Ceres Gallery , a non-profit artspace for women artists. It's part of a show called "Recollections: From New York to Tokyo" by Osaka transplant Masayo Nishimura , who was manning the desk when I stumbled in on a rainy, icy Manhattan Saturday. The show features largely subway shots from both countries, with a handful of above-ground moments. Let me rant at length as to why I love this image. First, it's Japan. As of 2009, when  I visited Japan for the first time under the auspices of my job as a bicycle evangelist, I'm a hopeless Japanophile. Yes I have a Maneki Neko cat (2!) and a nabe pot  lugged from Kyoto. Yes I pedaled through its delirious, labyrinth-like cities, scarfed brilliant bento at train stations, surged with cr