“We are really an Asian gallery,” said Pace President Arne Glimcher on Wednesday evening at the opening of the very first edition of Art Basel Hong Kong, at the Hong Kong Convention Centre on Victoria Harbour. Pace may be based in New York, but the gallery has run a Beijing outpost for the past five years, and that counts as a major plus at an art fair like this one, where dealers compete to make an impact in a burgeoning Asian market. Read More

The morning after I arrived in New York last month for a week’s visit—the city had been my longtime home until three years ago, when I moved to Europe—I went to the Metropolitan Museum to see the extraordinary new video Street by James Nares. A set of continual tracking shots of New York life, it was shot from a moving car, using a technique whereby each person captured on camera becomes a sort of extreme slow-motion three-dimensional Everyman—a flicked cigarette is as poetic in its eternal arc as flapping birds. A dazzling hour of audio-visual meditation, it is particularly suited to anyone who’s just disembarked from a plane and wants to plunge immediately into the city. Mr. Nares told me that he wished he had made such a video when he first arrived here, back in the mid-1970s. Seeing Street prompted me to take the city’s pulse, note its shifts, lament what’s been lost in the time since I lived here. Read More

Taking some time off of art after the Armory Show extravaganza? Don’t. If you snooze you lose on the fifth annual Asia Week New York, which is to say, you lose out on prize Ming porcelain, gleaming gilt bronze Buddhas, lavish cloisonné and serene Japanese scrolls. Read More

Click through to read The New York Observer‘s special issue, New York Artists Now:

– The 100-Artist Establishment,
– The 50-Artist Next Generation,
– Anthony Haden-Guest considers the phenomenon of the art star,
– Andrew Russeth imagines 2013 in 2033 and…
– …visits the College Art Association conference to consider the role of criticism today and
– the market weighs in. Read More

The news last week that Christie’s International will close Haunch of Venison, the gallery it bought in 2007, electrified the art world. Christie’s and Sotheby’s are the twin behemoths of the global auction business, and Christie’s acquisition of Haunch six years ago was a galumphing step onto the turf of dealers. The war of the auctioneers and the dealers over their slice of the secondary or resale market had been underway for two decades, but the Haunch move was a move into the primary market, which handles working artists and new art. Read More