Boers-Li Gallery's booth, with 'Fondle' (2009–13) by Yang Xinguangon on the ground. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)

“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.

Technically, this fair has been taking place annually at the convention center for the past six years, bearing the name Art HK. But two years ago it was purchased by MCH Group, owner of the 43-year-old Art Basel, the world’s most prominent modern and contemporary art fair, and that fair’s wildly successful, 11-year-old sister event, Art Basel Miami Beach. This year's edition, which runs through May 26, is the first under its new Swiss management, and although the morning of the opening on Wednesday brought torrential rains, the weather cleared up by the afternoon and collectors, sometimes accompanied by art advisors in stiletto heels, streamed in to tour the booths of 245 dealers.

Works by Andy Warhol at the booth of Dominique Lévy Gallery. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)

Certain improvements could be immediately felt, such as the floor plan, which is more open and spacious, and gives the lion’s share of space to blue-chip international dealers and major players from Japan, Korea and mainland China. There are also sections, called “Discoveries” and “Insights,” devoted to more recently established Asian galleries showing younger artists. The new management promised a boost in European and American collectors at the fair, and though a few could be spotted in the crowd on the VIP preview day, including Miami's Debra and Dennis Scholl as well as the London-based Roman Abramovich and Dasha Zhukova, the heavy hitters at this fair are collectors of Chinese contemporary art like Baron Guy Ullens and Uli Sigg, as well as Asian collectors, like the Indonesian-Chinese businessman Budi Tek, who is building a museum for international contemporary art in Shanghai.

For dealers from the West, a working knowledge of the market in the region comes in handy here. Building on its Asian client base and cultivation of Chinese artists, Pace brought “what we know appeals to Asian collectors,”  as Mr. Glimcher put it, and that strategy met with success early in the day. Pace’s booth was consistently crowded with visitors clamoring for million-dollar examples of work by Chinese artists like Zhang Xiaogang,  Zhang Huan and Li Songsong, whose works have seen soaring sums in the auction houses.  Gagosian Gallery,  whose two-year-old Hong Kong branch had opened a Jean-Michel Basquiat exhibition the evening before (it’s the first major Basquiat exhibition in Hong Kong), was also busy at the fair. Too busy to talk to a reporter, said gallery director Nick Simunovic as he pointed out details of a Damien Hirst piece to a group of Asian collectors.

Works by Basquiat, Hirstt and Calder at Van de Weghe Fine Art's booth. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)

But most New York dealers come to this fair with low expectations. “If I was doing this amount of business anywhere else, I’d shoot myself,”  said Sean Kelly,  who has scored a major coup recently in selling an archive of work by Taiwanese performance artist Tehching Hsieh to Hong Kong’s mega-museum project M+, which isn’t scheduled to open until 2017 but is already spending its sizable acquisition budget.

“This fair you can’t judge in four hours,”  Mr. Kelly continued.  “It’s a much slower affair than that.  People come, they look, they ask questions, they return. So it’s a different rhythm.”

By contrast with other major contemporary art fairs, like New York’s Armory Show and Frieze New York, Frieze in London or Art Basel Miami Beach, Art Basel Hong Kong doesn’t have a collector feeding frenzy on opening day. Here buyers from throughout Asia were much more laid back, taking their time to familiarize themselves with European or American artists whose names were new to them.  One artist every Chinese collector I’ve spoken with has told me that they want is Gerhard Richter—not so surprising, as his market is surging internationally at the moment—and the artist’s agent, Marian Goodman Gallery, which has branches in New York and Paris, managed to sell a photograph on six panels to an Asian collector in the opening hours of the fair.

Works by Kara Walker at Sikkema Jenkins Co.'s booth. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)

Other New York galleries brought more challenging material. Brent Sikkema spread across two walls of his booth a series of silhouette pieces by Kara Walker, whose work deals specifically with African-American imagery, much of it deriving from the era of Reconstruction after the Civil War. But Mr. Sikkema said he’d found that a surprising number of visitors to his booth were already familiar with Ms. Walker’s work.  (As a kind of insurance, there were also the European visitors that the fair’s organizers had promised him would be on hand.) Like most New York dealers at Art Basel Hong Kong, Mr. Sikkema signed on to the fair with the understanding that patience will be required—it will take some more time before Hong Kong becomes an international art hub along the lines of Basel or Miami.

Hong Kong has, however, come a long way. Six years ago, the city was a sleepy backwater, art-wise, with only a handful of galleries and no major contemporary art museum in the works. At that time it appeared that Beijing—with its 100,000-plus artists and 400 galleries—would be the art capital of Asia, with Shanghai, which had its own burgeoning art fair and gallery district, in second place. But the mainland market faced two major obstacles. First, sales of art in mainland China incur a whopping 34 percent value added tax (VAT), making it almost impossible for foreign dealers to make a profit at mainland art fairs. Another hindrance was government censorship—the Ministry of Culture regularly plucked works out of booths. And hence, the rise of Hong Kong. In no small part due to the success of Art HK,  the Hong Kong government started putting substantial muscle into the local art scene, first and foremost into the massive West Kowloon Cultural District with its $2.8 billion budget and planned M+ museum. That infusion of money and interest attracted Western dealers like White Cube, Gagosian, Emmanuel Perrotin and Lehmann Maupin, all of whom have opened galleries here in the past two years. Meanwhile, Christie’s and Sotheby’s have been holding auctions here since the late-1980s, more aggressively in recent years, and Hong Kong is now the third-largest auction market in the world.

Works by Yayoi Kusama, shown by Victoria Miro, and Ota Fine Arts. (Jessica Hromas/Getty Images)

The question for Hong Kong going forward is whether it will function more as a kind of post-colonialist art enterprise, importing Western art into Asia, or as a gateway for Asian buyers to have an impact on the global art dialogue. Ideally, it will do both. The Art Basel organizers have said that they will maintain a 50-50 split between Asian and international galleries—mainland Chinese galleries like Shanghart, Boers-Li, Pekin Fine Arts and Long March Space make a strong showing at this year’s fair—a sign that the fair will continue to have local character. Meanwhile, most galleries from New York and Europe, especially those that do not have a regular presence in the region, are still learning how to tailor their approach to Asian preferences, and to take things slow. “This is about us showing up, showing face, answering questions and taking inquiries seriously,”  said Sean Kelly.  “But it is equally about us learning from their culture. It’s a two-way street.”

Correction: May 26, 2013: An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that Marian Goodman sold a major Gerhard Richter painting on 16 panels to an Asian collector in the opening hours of the fair. Marian Goodman sold a Gerhard Richter photograph on six panels to an Asian collector in the opening hours of the fair.

Video still from 'Street' (2011) by James Nares. (Courtesy the Metropolitan Museum of Art / ©James Nares)

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.

It seemed appropriate to do so in the pages of The Observer, my lifeline to New York when I found myself stranded in Milan in the 1990s, laboring as editor of the magazine Flash Art. I would sneak off to the café every morning with my precious copy of the paper and sit with the inevitable espresso, sipping with wry regret at the news of all-too-distant Gotham, until my furious boss would burst through the door shouting in his apoplectic and comically accented English, why I was not at work.

The excitement of this city still rings out with the very first announcement of its name at Heathrow, where I was thrilled to hear, among a request for passengers to present themselves to the departure desk, “Mr. Brice Marden, Mr. Marden please.” Reading on the plane of the recent death of Mayor Koch, I realized that many of my favorite friends in the city belong to that last great generation that was already living there when Mr. Koch took over in 1978, the “pre-Koch” posse of urban warriors who knew downtown when it really was “down” in all its now-unimaginable gorgeous poverty.

I stayed with one of them, the fabled artist Jan Frank, in his untouched loft on Bond Street, one of those few remaining absolutely authentic spaces, as far from the real estate agent fantasy of “artist’s loft” as a cupcake is from a crack vial, a place from which to step out and survey the ravages of gentrification on the surrounding block. Jan was busy mounting a group exhibition about the 1970s for the gallery White Box, and his neighbor from across Bond came over the cobbles—the impeccable veteran Minimalist Stephen Rosenthal, with his elegant striped canvases from that era and tales of the artist’s co-op in which he’s lived forever. Joseph Kosuth used to be there way back in the ’60s, and they still have the now-elderly art student once shot by Chris Burden as part of a performance, the sort of celebrity who would hardly past muster at the Herzog & de Meuron condo next door.

Best of all are tales of Doug Ohlson, last of the old-skool boozer abstractionists, who used to be so drunk he would get stuck in the fancy tree installed outside by developers, jammed in the unexpected branches with his bottle, and who came to his end on the pavement outside the latest luxury shoe boutique. This was Carl Andre’s great drinking buddy, the man he is said to have called after Ana Mendieta fell to her death—try telling that to the sippers of “locally sourced milk” at The Smile.

The particular sense of loss and promise that seems uniquely generated by Manhattan is the source of much of its cultural mythology. The long battle between ancient and modern is more acute here than anywhere else, the lust for destruction, for immediate profit, overwhelming heritage. Thus I had to note, with a shock akin to a missing limb, the shuttered door of the Grandaisy Bakery on Sullivan Street and, even more brutal, the transformation of Gino into a shiny emporium selling spotlit gourmet cupcakes, an extreme contrast with the osso buco chiaroscuro and shuffling Sicilian waiters of the good old days. I peered for the faintest trace of that famous zebra wallpaper, any slightest vestige of that historic interior—gone, only its echo at Royal’s townhouse on Archer Avenue remaining now.

Thank the primeval Lords of Unrule that at least the Subway Inn around the corner remains unchanged. There a stiff bourbon mit chaser ushered out any lingering miasma of nostalghia, for how easily at that notoriously sticky beer-stained counter could one become like that perfect elder WASP recently met, now in permanent exile on his Newport estate, who explained to me why he could never return to New York, had not set foot in the place in over 50 years: “You see I knew the city in its very greatest years, in the ’50s and early ’60s, so it would be simply too devastating for me to ever have to see it as it is today.”

In the city’s museums, too, I felt a sense of loss. In the Met’s wondrous new American wing, I was dismayed to discover that the great painting The Quartette by my famous relative William Turner Dannat, an imposing salon piece that used to dominate a wall, had been stripped of its period frame and stuck in open storage, where one can contemplate its fall from grace through glass like some once-proud beast in zoo captivity. I was heartened, though, at the Frick, by an impeccable exhibition of Impressionist prints and drawings from the Clark Art Institute, including some gathered by Robert Sterling Clark himself in Paris after WWI, like works from the Degas studio sale that he attended.

The contrast between the pleasures of the Frick and MoMA down the road could not be more extreme, the latter having seemingly turned into a processing machine for mass tourism with a density of crowds and confusion to rival Toys ‘R’ Us at Christmas, vast packs of wilding youth barely checked by a “security” force more suited to a high-security prison. MoMA makes clear what happens when a museum becomes an obligatory destination for every out-of-town visitor and every grade of schoolchild, a sort of object lesson in the frightening furthest limits of “democracy.” (Admissions figures at MoMA are surely significant, for even if not everyone pays the full $25, the sheer millions of visitors must add up to a pretty serious annual total.) The main activity at MoMA would seem to be texting—every gallery is dense with shoe-gazing teens on their gadgets, tapping out aphorisms to each other, a dense mass of incessant typing through which it is almost impossible to clear a path. Yet among all this horror, the curatorial chops have never been better—there was a cracking small show on genius junkie designer Robert Brownjohn and his Goldfinger title sequence, and some clever soul had at last taken Pavel Tchelitchew’s painting Hide and Seek out of storage and installed it at the top of an escalator, where it gathers as many admiring crowds, and quite rightly, as when it was the museum’s No. 1 attraction.

After battling through tour groups and what appeared to be entire Midwestern football teams enraged on Red Bull, I emerged on the top floor to almost certainly the greatest exhibition ever assembled on the history of nonobjective art, “Inventing Abstraction.”

DESPITE MY PENCHANT for New Yorkers of a certain battered vintage and my regret for the inevitable destruction of so many of my own landmarks (where are you now, Tepper auction house; come back, Spring Street Books), my instinctive suspicion of today’s jeunesse dorée was allayed by an impeccable dinner hosted by my friends Sage Mehta and Michael Robinson. In an Upper West Side penthouse duplex were gathered a fresh intellectual cabal, the editors of The American Reader. Witty, caustic, Ivy League, preposterously over-informed and entirely under 30, I found them utterly impressive, especially as they had never so much as heard of the Manhattan literary magazine Open City, of which I was editor at large for some 20 years and whose demise was so relatively recent.

Yes, some of the table banter was blushingly self-conscious in a manner akin to the Worst of Simon & Garfunkel—“Can analysis be worthwhile? ... is the theater really dead?”—and yes, we did actually start discussing Franny and Zooey at one point, but I liked the retro whiff of such earnestness.

All seemed to be going well until I mentioned my personal time machine for retrieving the real old New York, which included my recent visit to a triple bill of 1933 movies at Film Forum, happily packed with those cinéastes of yesteryear loudly opening their Tupperware boxes of food, rustling wrappers, discussing Nova Pilbeam. I also mentioned the magical underworld of the city bus, now seemingly as antiquated as horse-drawn carriages, which plunges one back into a New York as rough and tough as The Panic in Needle Park, a sort of mobile hospital unit filled with those delicious dregs of the city one used to be able to see on 42nd Street.

Maybe it was my description of one fellow crosstown rider as a “monster” that occasioned a sudden explosion of fury from the previously engaging young editress at my side. Hence I was roundly denounced for being “privileged” in my assumptions, not only as a white male but as a wealthy heterosexual member of a dominant class, though how she deduced this from my mere presence remained a mystery. My passing reference to my own personal cowardice as my being a “pussy” was also roundly condemned, indeed was brought to a sort of kangaroo court as my assailant announced, “There are four women around this table and none of them will allow your use of such a term,” a condemnation of which the others seemed less certain. In the end, somewhat shell-shocked, I came to realize that this was just another sort of induction into another sort of élite, the latest equivalent of frat hazing, and that I too could now imagine what it would be like to have just graduated in semiotics at Brown or gender studies at Wellesley, a rather thrilling sense of almost cross-dressing, the decades falling away from me to reveal the eager intellectual neophyte I secretly still remain.

Inspired, exhausted, practically physically transformed into an entirely righteous 22-year-old radical bluestocking, I staggered back to Newark Airport from a week in surely still the greatest city in the world, swinging my complimentary tote bag from designer Stefan Sagmeister’s show at the Jewish Museum, on which he’d emblazoned, NOW IS BETTER.

editorial@observer.com

An imperial green jade 'wufu wudai tang guxi bao' seal, Qing Dynasty, est. $1 million to $1.5 million at Sotheby's. (Courtesy Sotheby's)

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.

There are a full 43 exhibitions in this year’s edition, which kicked off on March 15 and runs through March 23. The dealer count is up 25 percent from last year, Henry Howard-Sneyd, chairman of Asia Week New York (and Sotheby’s vice-chairman of Asian art, Americas) was more than happy to tell us. There are dealer participants from Australia, Belgium, England, France, Germany, Italy, Japan, Switzerland and, of course, the U.S. And then there are the auctions—15 of them, at Sotheby’s, Christie’s, Doyle New York, Bonham’s and iGavel—which are pegged to rope in over $100 million. The 2012 edition of Asia Week New York rang up a hefty $160 million at auction, with Christie’s taking in the lion’s share at $70 million.

An 18th-century Korean white porcelain jar, estimated at $1 million at Christie's. (Courtesy Christie's)

What’s on offer this time around? Top of the heap at Sotheby’s is an Imperial jade seal, which is expected to fetch $1.5 million. And, on the newer side, an untitled work by Tyeb Mehta for $800,000. Giving dealers a run for their money, Sotheby’s has mounted a selling exhibition of cutting-edge contemporary Chinese ink paintings with Liu Ban’s rocky landscape Whispering Pines priced at over $1 million. Christie’s plans to haul in $2.5 million for a 9th-century gilt bronze Bodhisatta, and there’s a massive Korean white porcelain jar for $1 million plus. There are also examples for novices like a 16-century Chinese blue and white porcelain jar with a $3,500 estimate. Like Sotheby’s, Christie’s has a selling exhibition of Chinese ceramics and snuff bottles.

Stoking the Asian art boom are jet loads of Asia’s newly rich looking to stock a rash of museums. As Asia Society director Melissa Chiu will tell you, there are some 1,000 new museums in the works in China alone over the next decade. According to the Hunan rich list, which has been keeping tabs on the ultra rich in China, there were 271 billionaires in 2011, up from 130 in 2009.

“They’re aiming to buy back their patrimony,” says Chinese art specialist Michael Hughes who this week is showing, at Mark Murray Gallery, a 19th-century Chinese calligraphy scroll for $18,000.

To gauge the explosion in Asian art, consider that back in 2003 Christie’s had only four auctions of the material and hammered down a paltry $16,744,806. Last year, Christie’s hauled in $104,198,000 for Asian art in New York alone. Globally, they rang up $664,250,000. “That means Asian art is the third-highest selling category right after Impressionism and modern along with contemporary art,” Dr. Hugo Weihe, Christie’s international director of Asian art, told The Observer.

In 2012, Sotheby’s roped in a skyrocketing $61,800,000, though it only expected to fetch $41,300,000.

“Now the Asian market is akin to a tripod anchored by three feet set in Hong Kong, London and New York,” said Mr. Howard-Sneyd.

But the audience for Asia Week is also more diverse than ever. Suneet Kapoor, who runs the Upper East Side’s Kapoor Galleries Inc., points to “clients from India, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan and even Brunei as well as all across Europe.” And he has what that audience wants. For instance, a 14th-century gilt bronze Buddha from Nepal, priced at $550,000. “The Chinese have been holding conferences on Himalayan art,” he pointed out.

A pair of polychrome wood Buddhist attendants from the 18th or 19th century in Korea. (Courtesy Koo New York)

“Koreans come too,” said Jiyang Koo, who's showing at Mark Murray Gallery. She’s hoping the National Museum of Korea will acquire an 18th-century painting, Buddhist Messenger Guardians, for $60,000.

The Chinese are a tad different from their Western counterparts, said a few dealers. There are stories of collectors arriving with backpacks and valises packed with $100 bills. “When it comes to clinching a deal, the Chinese bring translators,” said Mr. Hughes.

“They’re aiming to park their cash at a more appealing spot than the sometimes-shaking U.S. dollar,” said Lark Mason (no relation to this reporter), who heads up iGavel, the online as well as bricks and mortar establishment based in Harlem. He spent over a decade at Sotheby’s being in charge of Chinese works of art.

One dealer aiming for Chinese buyers is Brooklyn–based Nicholas Grindley, who is showcasing his wares at Hazlitt Gooden & Fox. Among other gems, he has a 17th-century tiered picnic box for $95,000. He also has a Ming dining table for $185,000. “It’s too high for homes here,” Mr. Grindley said, “so the Chinese will probably take it.”

Nancy Wiener, who is showing at the Jack Tilton Gallery, is witnessing another new shift. “Indians are moving away from modern and contemporary art to earlier material,” she said. Ms. Wiener has the ultimate treasure: a racy 18th-century Indian miniature, Krishna and Radha in a Lover’s Tryst. That sexy image will run you $650,000. She has also put on display a 1st-century A.D. red sandstone Buddha priced at nearly $2 million.

One of the major changes to Asia Week in the past few years is the absence of Brian and Anna Haughton’s long-running International Asian Art Fair, which used to take place at the Park Avenue Armory. The fair shuttered in 2008, after the defection, according to dealers, of high-profile exhibitors like Giuseppe and Johnny Eskenazi and Gisele Croes, who preferred to show their wares in a gallery setting. (The Art Asia Pacific fair is also off.) “Clients like the privacy of the gallery setting,” said Japanese art dealer Carole Davenport, who is showing at Leigh Morse Fine Arts and said that her total take from Asia Week accounts for three quarters of her annual sales. This week she is showing, among other things, two 17th-century theatrical masks, one of the Japanese devil figure, Tsurimanko, with a $14,000 price tag.

This week, the Japanese Art Dealers Association has taken over the Ukrainian Institute. Leighton Longhi has some superb gold ground screens. While not an Asia Week New York participant, Spencer Throckmorton, who is tucked next door to Hammacher Schlemmer, has a not-to-be-missed exhibition devoted to Neolithic jades from Outer Mongolia. Some of his jade amulets are a reasonable $3,500.

At the ripe old age of 47, come April, is Art Cologne, the world's oldest fair of 20th- and 21st-century fine art. Art Basel, the market-leading event, turns 43 in June. The youngster, at 38, the European Fine Art Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht, the Netherlands, shows the oldest art but has an ever-increasing presence of contemporary. TEFAF is also the world’s longest-running fair: March 15th-24th—three days more than the norm.

The recently completed Armory Show (b.1994) in New York is hanging on for dear life even as Artinfo.com’s Louise Blouin contemplates (or, negotiates) its purchase, with the New York editions of super-supercilious Frieze Art Fair (b. 2003 in London) chomping at its heels (May will be the second New York iteration of Frieze). Welcome to the international art fair wars.

Back to tiny and geographically isolated Maastricht: From Old Masters to (old) contemporary, TEFAF covers it all in spacious and finely carpeted aisles that are (not kidding) named after the haughtiest streets in Paris, London and New York. The opening last Thursday was, as usual, saturated in enough free-flowing booze to result in a few unintended purchases. As the more traditional fare becomes too rare to get a hold of, contemporary art continues to play a bigger and bigger role.

For instance, why did Larry Gagosian flee TEFAF after doing the 2006 edition, only to give the fair another shot this year? The question arises: can a staid, predominantly Old Master undertaking (previously in need of an undertaker) add sexiness to its fanciness? You can typically mark the success of this fair by the number of private jets on the tarmac, and caviar tins and champagne corks in the trash, but it's not a perfect gauge—as previously mentioned, the place is so remote that private planes are the only alternative to four trains and a commercial flight.

Sure, he’s more associated with Miami, which is on a whole other level of luxury and degradation, but Jeff Koons made an appearance at TEFAF by way of a new shiny, costly sculpture chez Gagosian, entitled Metallic Venus, 2010–12, apparently made on a much shorter lead time than the eight to 10 years it normally takes to fabricate a work. The sculpture is made of high chromium stainless steel with transparent color coating and live flowering plants, with a plinth from plywood substrates with Colorcore Formica. The ticket? At a cool $6 million (and still available at the time of this writing) in an edition of three, it's actually not bad in relation to the €70 million ($90.5 million) brooch in the shape of a peacock at Graff jewelers (they had over $500 million worth of gems, the owner’s son informed me), waiting for a (probably) Russian peacock to spread her feathers and oligarch husband’s cash.

Gagosian also had a gorgeous realistic Rudolf Stingel painting (probably sold just before the fair at just under $1 million), a slightly larger than life-size portrait of Picasso that seduced. (I wanted it. Badly.) And Gogo had a smattering of fabulous actual Picassos, as did many exhibitors—Picasso's the gold standard against which all else is measured in terms of art and commerce.

For entertainment at TEFAF, you can comparison-shop artworks of the same size and style by the same artists at different booths, often booths directly adjacent to one another, as pieces by market-hot artists come out of the woodwork for these types of events: in particular, Jean-Michel Basquiat, Gerhard Richter and Lucio Fontana. What is the next level up from white-hot? That would be Basquiat, represented at TEFAF by a collection of weak and weaker works.

How bad can a bad Basquiat be? Okay, it’s always a gift to experience more than a handful of his works simultaneously, but this is no Basquiat bouquet of beauty as you might see in Basel; more like a hodgepodge of C+ (at best) paintings and drawings with prices from $1 million to nearly $12 million for canvases where those price tags have no rhyme or reason.

Galerie Odermatt-Vedovi is offering Basquiat’s O.M.R.A.V.S. (1984) at $3.8 million—an admittedly minimalist composition—while Christophe van de Weghe is offering a harsh work of a black servant for $4.1 million, but only a stone’s throw away, an all-text Basquiat from 1984 was inexplicably tagged at €9 million ($11.6 million) at Tornabuoni Arte. This type of pricing activity undermines my theory that art has an underlying, objective and inherent value. Oh well, back to the drawing board, and the calculator.

There was a profusion of Fontana slits and Richter hits. The Gerhard guessing game is another fun exercise. There were plenty of occasions to compare and contrast what amounts to commodious commodities of Richter canvases that were nearly same-sized but on offer at wildly differing price points. From approximately €1 million ($1.3 million) from the always affable Ben Brown for a dull, predominantly blue work to $4 million for a muddy brown, also boring composition at Kukje Gallery from Korea (they also had a strange, yellowish landscape for $7 million which seemed somehow palatable if you have the pocket change). Van de Weghe also weighs in with a similarly sized (to Kukje) abstract for $3.1 million, but (remember, these works are resales) it had just recently sold for about $1 million less.

In the same vein, Salis & Verte gallery of Zurich and Salzburg had yet another same-sized Richter for €2.45 million ($3.2 million), but the story with this work was even better. It sold less than a year ago for about £500,000 ($760,000), making the asking price amount to a usurious rate of return even at today’s highway robbery art market levels. The tale went something like: it followed a figurative candle painting of Richter’s at auction that established a record, so the abstract painting went for an unusually low figure due to fatigue after such a stellar result. When you look at the prices of only recently auctioned work you are rudely confronted with a new economic phenomenon: hyper-artflation.

Thank heavens for artnet.com and the accompanying transparency it has foisted upon the art market, rendering art dealers naked as they are now compelled to tell the full story on auction history, especially of the recent past. This only goes to show that there is no purer form of honesty than the forced variety. Salis & Verte had another Richter on its books for half the price—go figure. That’s why you have to love (and hate) the arbitrage opportunities still available in this industry, as compared to most others.

Gagosian is bucking the trend by having three Richters of the realistic variety while nearly all the others on display at the fair were the abstracts, the (current) market leaders. It’s rumored that Gagosian is making a play to work directly with the artist in the face of his aged New York primary dealer, Marian Goodman. But Larry’s Richters suffered from either overexposure on the market (not to mention in previous Gagosian booths in other fairs) or, again, recent auction exposure (or both). None were sold at the time of this writing.

As far as the Lucio Fontana market, I didn’t get into the specifics much, but I was attempting to explain the rationale behind the pricing structure to a novice collector and came up with the following riff on the classic children’s game: one potato, two potato, three potato, four—seven slashes in a Fontana and it costs a whole lot more!

It’s impossible to really gauge sales at fairs, as art is an unusual business where multimillion-dollar deals are communicated by mere whispers. Nothing more need be done to cement a deal. Until the invoice comes, that is. But even then, as far as clients who chose to renege, there is often no recourse and no signed contract involved, hence also unmeasurable is how many people in fact walk from such agreements after the event. (It’s happened to me and, if you are in art, it's happened to you.) Also, dealers sometimes exaggerate, another reason post-fair reports are highly inaccurate at best.

TEFAF is calm and unhurried with little sense of stress or urgency and certainly no one was tripping over themselves to buy art of any stripe, but the city nevertheless seemed oddly incapacitated by the onset of the fair. Try and get a taxi, and the wait could be paralyzing. When I asked the man behind my hotel’s front desk why it would take 15 minutes to get a cab, he was taken aback.

As with most hotels in most cities during major events, they put a gun to your head and steal your money when you are desperate for last-minute accommodations, the best time to do so. I was forced to pay what amounted to an extortionist rate for the world’s most overpriced dorm room. A shuttle from the hotel to the fair was meant to ferry people back and forth, but the 10-minute wait turned into 40 and when it finally appeared, it quickly devolved into a state of nature, with every man and woman for him- or herself, jostling to get onboard, health and safely be damned. Despite all this, TEFAF is more museum than bazaar.

Even though I tend to travel neurotically, in Woody Allen mode, what’s exciting about an art fair is the freedom to go with the flow, engage in a bit of drifting, like a wandering Jew cursed to walk the earth until the arrival of the messiah (I say this as a member of the tribe) or the next scheduled international art fair or biennial. Forget art, fairs are great places to collect people and sniff out opportunities like a truffle pig. But when you play it from the hip as a solo fair-goer, you need to dinner-juggle or you end up plan-less. And sometimes there is a price to pay for fortuity.

First I tried my favorite art market writers, Scott Reyburn of Bloomberg and the inimitable Judd Tully of artinfo.com and Art + Auction, who seems to carry the entire business on his shoulders. Though I tried to join them with a finance guy and a collector, it didn’t materialize. The journo covering the art market beat from The Telegraph, Colin Gleadell, informed me I’d be better off writing less. So, scratch him.

Finally I found some friends who were throwing a dinner with a famous jeweler and some Old Master collectors, so I jumped at the chance and because I couldn’t find a taxi (of course) I asked them to order for me. My exuberance for all things contemporary seemed to piss one of them off in particular and I ended up mercilessly attacked by a certain bitchy New York Old Master collector who took an immediate dislike to me.

Part of what I love about art is that something like the Karsten Greve Gallery can exist. When a client asked me to ask the price of a Wols painting, said to be on hold for “more then €5 million” (which probably translates into about €4.85 million, or $6.5 million and $6.3 million, respectively), a woman at Greve’s booth said I must query Karsten directly. When I asked where he was, she replied, “Somewhere in the building.” What a service-oriented people business, the art world! How could you not be enthralled with it?

The psychology of collecting is both scintillating and confounding. There was the collector I met through a friend at the fair who wouldn't tell me what or whom he was buying. Oh, the mystery of it all. Hats off to a man who is under the impression that his opinion is so omnipotent to think that he could single-handedly move a market. Admittedly, I only wanted to know more—this is a guy who built an unrivaled collection of Chinese contemporary art early on and whose interests include ancient swords and guns.

A jewelry dealer told me how he picked up some Dutch at TEFAF: just about every time a couple walked into the booth the wife would say “just looking” and the husband would follow up with “and not buying.” TEFAF puts out a closely-looked-at report every year that states the market is presently down 7 percent from last year and this and that about the shifting percentages and trends of Chinese vs. European and American buyers. While the Chinese market was said to be down a whopping 24 percent, the U.S. market expanded 5 percent. So there are offsetting trends that smooth out localized declines. The prices for individual artists seem to be getting higher and higher, but for fewer and fewer of them. But all this conjecture is based on auction results coupled with dealer reports, and as previously stated, we know about the veracity of dealers. So, grain of salt taken.

On my return to London after only around 24 hours in Maastricht, I faced a delay on the plane when the pilot got on the public announcement system and said: “Feel free to visit the cockpit and speak to pilots during the interim of the holdover.” Imagine if they’d announced at the fair, “Why not join Larry and Lawrence to shoot the breeze?” It would have been as though Michael Moore had finally found General Motors CEO Roger Smith, and Roger & Me had a happy ending.

(Images by Kenny Schachter, except where noted.)

-- 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.

Why an Issue About New York Artists?

With New York going into art fair mode—the spring brings the ADAA Art Show, the Armory Show, Frieze New York and dozens of satellite events—we thought it was a perfect time to throw the spotlight on the city’s artists. (The year 2013 is, after all, the centenary of a watershed moment in the history of avant-garde art in New York, when the city first encountered artworks by the likes of Marcel Duchamp in the first Armory Show.) These days, with the heyday of the so-called New York School long gone and the freewheeling Soho of the ‘70s far behind us, the concept of a New York artist seems like an odd, antiquated one—“How do you even define that?” a colleague asked. It’s almost a requirement of making art today that you are prepared to go global—many artists spend the lion’s share of their time shuttling around the world, from festival to exhibition to fair, from Beijing to Basel to Venice to Rio to London to Berlin to Miami to Kassel to Los Angeles.

Then there is the problem of lists. Lists, we are well aware, make people angry. By their very nature, they exclude. Ours (“The Establishment,” “Next Generation,” and the emerging artists discussed in Andrew Russeth's essay “2013 in 2033″) are, needless to say, not definitive; they merely constitute a snapshot of the wealth of artistic talent in New York at the moment. “The Establishment” looks at 100+ artists who have contributed to the New York scene for many years. Most of the 50 artists on “Next Generation” were born in the 1970s; some of them have already had their first major museum exhibition. Russeth writes about less-established, and predominantly younger, New York artists in an article that, riffing on the New Museum’s current “NYC 1993″ exhibition, imagines what would be in a group show called “2013″ taking place in 2033. Anthony Haden-Guest considers what it means today—and what it has meant in the past—to be an art star, and how the art world converged with celebrity culture. In a report on a panel discussion that took place at the College Art Association conference last week, Russeth looks at the current state of what has traditionally been a main avenue by which artists achieve art-world endorsement: art criticism. Michael H. Miller profiles Anthony McCall, a British-born artist on our “Establishment” list who started making his light installations in the 1970s, but has only found a wider audience for them over the course of the past decade. Finally, a graph uses auction results to tell us how the cold eye of the market would determine the “top 10″ artists from our list.

As for our methodology in choosing which artists to include here, we wanted to highlight those who not only live in New York but are, sometimes in ineffable ways, associated with the city. We made the tough decision to leave out some artists who loom large in New York’s art-consciousness but who have long lived elsewhere, like Jasper Johns, who works in studios in Connecticut and St. Martin. And Ellsworth Kelly, who lives and works just south of Albany. And Jenny Holzer, who is in Hoosick Falls, N.Y. And Jim Dine, who has hopscotched among New York, Walla Walla, Paris and Vermont. And James Rosenquist, who mostly works in his studio in Aripeka, Florida. We did, however, include Richard Prince, whose studio is upstate (and who is in many ways very identified with upstate) because we count having a Manhattan bookstore as an artistic activity. We also included Lynda Benglis, who maintains studios outside New York (including in Greece and India) and Francesco Clemente, who has studios in Rome and Madras, India. We had to place some limits, and so found ourselves leaving out artists who have made a major change in their practice, like Vito Acconci, who in recent years has switched mainly to making design objects.

We’re in a Venice Biennale year (the 55th edition opens in June) and much of the art world has that not-yet-released list on the brain—who will make it into the show? Our list isn’t like that. Suffice to say, we understand what may be your distaste for lists, dear reader. We find them distasteful in many ways, too. The essayist William Hazlitt wrote “On the Pleasure of Hating.” Think of it this way: with our list, we have at the very least given you something new to hate.

I remember 1973 well enough. I had graduated college the year before and moved downtown into a Tribeca loft ($220 a month) and, along with two pals, had started my own art magazine, using after hours the facilities of my day job, which was doing paste-up for The Jewish Week. I earned $6 an hour and had more money than I knew what to do with.

I remember 1983, because that was the time of the East Village, when I lived on Ludlow Street (rent $150), was art editor of the East Village Eye, and showed, at Metro Pictures gallery in Soho, paintings of people kissing.

And I remember 2003, though I don't really have to, since by then Artnet Magazine was up and running; pretty much everything I had going on is archived online.

But 1993, what do I remember from 1993? I can locate myself physically, in a ramshackle loft on Clinton Street ($500 a month or, later, nothing, as the owner had no C of O for the building and therefore couldn't legally collect rent—a typical New York real estate story). I was a single father who took his 11-year-old daughter to school before going to the offices of Art in America on Broadway at Prince Street, where I had a part-time freelance job as a news editor. In 1993, I was poor.

My office was a gray-carpeted windowless cubicle filled with books, magazines, files and all manner of papers. There I opened mail and read the newspaper, or newspapers (The New York Times, the Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times). Occasionally I would find out about things via the telephone, or at dinner parties. It was just-pre-internet; it's hard to understand now how anybody got any news at all.

I enjoyed the occasional company of a small group of freaks, bikers and beatniks—my friends—who would visit the office. Then as now I could count on them for whatever bits of genius might come my way. That's what editors do.

My art dealer pal was Frank Bernarducci, a fearless advocate of fast cars and cool art, whom I first met in 1984, when he had a gallery in the East Village. As an artist and critic with an abiding fascination with art and money, I always think it's a great time to be an art dealer, even during market downturns. Frank was "between galleries," i.e. not working. "The '80s art market boom was over and a lot of Neo-Ex art stars were scrambling,” Frank, who is now a partner in Bernarducci-Meisel Gallery, recalled recently. “Basquiat and Warhol were dead"—you could even say their reputations were flagging, hard as it might be to believe today, thanks to a poorly received show of collaborative paintings at Tony Shafrazi on Mercer Street—"and the YBAs were on the rise, shifting the focus of contemporary art to London, at least somewhat." By '93, the art market was climbing out of the recession, though we didn't necessarily know it. The following year would bring the first Gramercy Art Fair which kicked off our art fair era.

In 1993, "I had time to do some things I'd always wanted to do,” Frank went on, “like write, and some things I didn't, like get married." He was working on a novel, an art-world potboiler about a dealer who ends up accused of murdering his beautiful girlfriend, who is also his most successful artist. Later on, in the early days of Artnet Magazine, which was launched in 1996, we serialized the beginning chapters, though I never got to find out how it ended.

Another occasional visitor to the AiA office was Carlo McCormick, the art critic, curator and sometime nightclub doorman whose long orange hair and funky street fashion gave him the air of an Acid Prince, as High Times once dubbed him on its cover. A downtown bohemian of enduring bona fides—in the '80s I would style myself as his "driver" on our late-night bar rounds—Carlo was even then unprofitably out of step with the mainstream avant-garde, championing such things as Alleged Gallery, whose first significant show, "Minimal Trix," a show of skateboards, opened in 1993.

"My life was pretty much centered on Ludlow Street back then, and Max Fish, which was at its peak," Carlo said. His crew included Kembra Pfahler and her D.I.Y. hair-metal band, the Voluptuous Horror of Karen Black; filmmaker Jim Jarmusch, then at work on Dead Man with Johnny Depp; and Shepard Fairey, who had not yet hit the big time. It was the dawn of "street culture," and despite the fact that, as Carlo put it, some "art people looked at me as if I were a pedophile hitting up the young boys," it was a time when "graf artists and such were turning the tee shirt into a youth culture canvas where new designs and the ironic use of logos turned into this discrete visual language by which kids could signify to one another."

Another member of that same gang was Mike Osterhout, a Bay Area conceptualist who had relocated to the Lower East Side and launched the Church of the Little Green Man, a blasphemous kind of anti-cabaret that required communicants to ceremonially burn a dollar bill upon entry. I remember clearly his invocation when it came time for the sermon, the most dreaded part of the service—"brothers and sisters, there will be no sermon today."

Mike now lives in the sticks outside Rock Hill, N.Y., where he hunts deer and turkey and has an actual 19th century church building, where services continue. This August the congregation gathered to celebrate man's best friend, the dog, an event that opened with an abstract bit of music produced by micing a big bone and giving it to a pit bull to gnaw on.

In 1993, Mike remembered,  "I lived at 7 and C, worked the door at the Fish, lived with my crazy bitch girlfriend and was pretty miserable. Or did you want to know what you were doing? There I can’t help you."

Mike had written something for Interview magazine and had the idea to use this beat-up antique newsstand on the Prince Street side of the building as a kind of mini-museum—a foil to what was then the Guggenheim Soho, around the corner. It didn't work out. "How the rich can hold onto every square inch and beat you down amazes me," Mike said. The owner “wanted to control every aspect of that goddamned newsstand. I finally gave up in the idea." Kenny Scharf did something there, and now it serves muffins.

Probably the most idiotic thing that happened for me personally in 1993 began with a visit from Paul H-O, another Oakland refugee who rode motorcycles and was (and is) an all-around surf guru. Paul dropped by the office one day with a video camera and asked, "Hey, you want to go out to galleries and shoot some tape?"

Paul would be producer, director, editor and co-star of what became Art TV Gallery Beat, a half-hour-long public access cable television show. We'd go to art galleries and make jokes—"what IS that?" was our reprise—and were often asked to leave. Paul put together a compilation of "great ejections." I vividly remember Rob Storr asking me, sotto voce, in the lobby of the Marian Goodman Gallery building, "Aren't you embarrassed?" Watching some of the footage now, I have to wonder why I wasn't—particularly when I catch a glance of myself in a clown-like 555 Soul outfit.

But then, what accomplishments we had! What exhibitions we reviewed!

One of our first shoots was at Gagosian Gallery, then in spacious garage-like quarters on Wooster Street in SoHo, where Chris Burden had hung an oversized globe like a mammoth beehive, its gnarly surface covered with a network of toy train tracks. At the Dia Art Center, we visited an installation of giant rats by the German artist Katharine Fritsch. There we quoted art critic Roberta Smith, who had ventured in The New York Times that the circle of 16 outward-facing giant black rats, their tails joined into a large knot, were something of a new esthetic experience—a work that makes you feel like you're about to be eaten.

1993 was the year that Anselm Kiefer had his watershed show at Marian Goodman featuring, in the front gallery,  a huge pile of discarded canvases placed in a towering stack along with uprooted sunflowers. In the back was a heap of oversized gray books, purportedly masturbated over for years. It all had something to do with the end of an unhappy marriage.

With an all-too-appropriate sense of noblesse oblige, Gagosian didn't care if we taped in his gallery or not, but for Kiefer the camera was forbidden. Thus Paul's then wife, Barbara Dahl, sneaked the camera into the gallery in her bag, shooting reality-show style through the purse's narrow aperture.

A similar ban on filming was in place at the opening of the 1993 Whitney Biennial, but the museum director's, David Ross, whose practice it was to stand at the entrance to the museum greeting visitors, when asked if video was allowed, just gave us a wink. And thus we caught on tape the inimitable art historian Irving Sandler proclaiming, "the barbarians are at the gate!"

The 1993 biennial was by far the most outstanding in recent memory, an iconographic carnival with multiple metaphors writ large inside and out. Parked at the curb in front of the Breuer Building was a red toy fire truck blown up to life size, properly announcing the esthetic conflagration within, the work of Charles Ray. Inside, the lobby gallery was filled with a self-contained room, practically vibrating with concentrated electrical voltage. It  was Chris Burden's "Fist of Light," a collection of lamps so powerful that the blazing light was blinding, or so the artist said. Admission was forbidden.

Upstairs was the largest-ever puddle of fake plastic vomit, courtesy Sue Williams, and downstairs, in the basement space, the Puerto Rican artists Coco Fusco and Papo Colo had dressed in tribal gear, including war paint, and put themselves on display as natives inside a cage. Visitors could get a souvenir Polaroid of the scene for $1; somewhere I still have a custom photo of Ross himself posing with the two artists.

Now thats what art is all about! Reviewing some of the Gallery Beat tapes with Paul at his Brooklyn studio, one thing about 1993 becomes eminently clear. We may have been stupid, but at least we were thin.

editorial@observer.com

Sotheby's 'Keith Haring: Shine On' selling exhibition at its S2 gallery. (Courtesy S|2)

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.

This doesn’t mean, however, that Christie’s is backing off private sales—quite the opposite. In fact, at both houses, these are strong, and getting stronger. “The proposal is for Haunch of Venison to evolve into Christie’s private sales,” Emilio Steinberger, the gallery’s senior international director, told Bloomberg. Haunch’s New York gallery in Chelsea will be shut down, but its London quarters will become a Christie’s private sales exhibition space. Private sales at Christie’s last year, Bloomberg reported, were $990 million, “up 26 percent from the previous year. They represented 16 percent of business in 2012.” As for Sotheby’s, it told The Observer that during the nine-month period that ended in September 2011, private sales represented 14.2 percent of its consolidated sales, but that the total for the equivalent period last year was 20.4 percent. Both houses expect these growth rates to continue.

Dealers have been getting increasingly antsy about the houses’ incursion onto their territory. Last October, Robert Pincus-Witten, a former director of both Gagosian and L & M galleries, was one of the curators of a show of New York painting from the 1970s that took place around the corner from Christie’s HQ at Rockefeller Center, in a space that was once Haunch of Venison’s New York gallery (before Christie’s moved it to Chelsea) and is now the New York exhibition space for Christie’s private sales. (Sotheby’s also has an in-house private sales gallery, called S2.) Was he being sniped at for going over to the dark side?

“Certainly there’s a lot of bad feeling,” he said. “The auction houses are now usurpers. And to compete with the auction houses, you have to have very deep pockets. Larry [Gagosian] can do it. And Bob Mnuchin can do it. And Acquavella can do it. But very few galleries have that kind of depth of pocket.

“But at the moment, there is no question that the most interesting development is the fact that there are now private dealing spaces in the context of public auction houses. The industry is evolving.”

Not long ago, you could have represented the art world like the diagram of a cow in a butcher’s—everything in its place. “It used to be the dealers were the taste-makers, the museums were for scholarship and the auction houses were house clearance sales,” said the London dealer James Mayor.

In a globalizing art economy, the reach of the Duopoly extends ever deeper into dealers’ byzantine innermost workings. “You sometimes feel the sole intention is to push the dealer out,” Mr. Mayor said. “That they want to become the leaders in the primary and the secondary markets.”

The shift in the art world’s tectonic plates began in slo-mo when Al Taubman, the Detroit shopping mall pioneer, took over a foundering Sotheby Parke-Bernet in 1983. Mr. Taubman, a man with a fine retail brain, divined that ’80s-style collectors might be lured by media attention, and glammed up the night sales.

Thereafter, markers of the auctioneers’ moves onto dealers’ turf would include Sotheby’s joint acquisition with Acquavella Galleries in 1990 of the Pierre Matisse estate. In 1996, Sotheby’s bought the gallery of Andre Emmerich, and it took over Deitch Projects the following year. But according to Alex Rotter, now head of contemporary art at Sotheby’s, “We never followed through. We gave the inventory that we purchased to other galleries to sell or to stick it in auction. We never did any sales.” It closed Emmerich two years later and was bought out by Deitch (who has since closed his gallery and become director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art).

The dealers struck back. Art fairs became an arena for a robust counter-attack. But even as the phenomenon has gathered strength—at tsunami level in Miami this December—the auctioneers were building war engines of their own. Their private sales departments.

Christie’s and Sotheby’s have sold pieces privately from the get-go. In the beginning, it was limited to those that weren’t knocked down during auctions. And they stuck to the secondary, or resale, market. That red line frayed in the early ’80s when art stars slipped work into auctions. In 2006, Sotheby’s began putting work by living sculptors into selling exhibitions at Chatsworth, the Duke of Devonshire’s seat in England. When Lisa Dennison, director of the Guggenheim, resigned in 2007 to join Sotheby’s, she put together a selling exhibition that crisscrossed cultures and historical periods, “as traditional galleries can’t and museums don’t,” said Ms. Dennison, who is now chairman of the house in North and South America.

Around the end of 2008, Alex Rotter, in talks with Sotheby’s CEO William Ruprecht, came up with a business plan for private sales. “It was at the worst point of our market,” he said. “It was a program that used every expert we had. For me, it was important to get the younger generation into the mind-set to think both ways.”

Christie’s purchase of Haunch of Venison played a part in his thinking, “but the idea of buying an existing gallery was not the right way to go for me. It was just a different approach of how to get into the gallery business. Or eventually into the primary market.”

“Private sales are a huge area of growth,” said Amy Cappellazzo, Christie’s chairman of postwar and contemporary art development. “And it’s part of our method of strategizing an object. It’s one of the key questions. What are the client’s needs and wishes? Do they need the money very quickly? In which case, a private sale would be quickest. It is an option that we talk about every day.”

The closure of Haunch, a gallery that works with a stable of artists, though, represents a move away from private sales of primary-market art. “It made sense to us, since we’re incredibly active in secondary-market trading, to focus on that,” Ms. Cappellazzo said. She includes artists’ estates in this. Last September, the Warhol Foundation enlisted Christie’s to sell off remaining inventory. “That is definitely something we will be moving into more.”

But what of secondary-market dealers? Might they go the way of local bookstores?

“Years ago, I made a quote to some blogger that you could see how the auction houses are like big-box retailers that can put the moms and pops out of business,” said Ms. Cappellazzo. “Peter [Schjeldahl] cited me twice in The New Yorker, saying my comment isn’t coming true. Well, I think it is.”

Globalism is one of the auctioneers’ strengths. Consider the Russians, the Chinese. “I don’t know any of them,” said veteran dealer Richard Feigen. The auction houses “know where everything is. They will come up with something a client wants that I don’t have. I just think they will do an increasing part of the secondary-market business. The primary market, I don’t think they will be as successful.”

The houses also get buzz.

“When you see a Richter sell for $30 million, that generates a lot of publicity,” said Mr. Feigen. “And people will be inclined to put forward pieces at auction. And that provides a trace base for private sales too.”

How would he advise a young person trying to get into what he was doing?

“I would probably tell them not to do it. I don’t know whether what I am doing is going to exist that long.”

Part of the change can be attributed to artists—particularly those in China. “They have been very adept at establishing links with the artists directly,” Michael Findlay, a director at Acquavella, said of the houses. “And some of the major Chinese artists are very much managers of their own careers.”

In terms of the new buyers from China and other parts of the world where art markets are developing, private sales could, some say, hurt the houses in the long run. “A lot of the new buyers want the security of auction prices,” said Mr. Mayor, the London dealer. “If they channel everything into the private sales, then the quality of the auctions goes down. And the new, uneducated buyer loses his security blanket. It sounds great on paper. But I think, in the end, that will be the end of art sales as we know it.”

Alex Rotter doesn’t think so. He also thinks that, while the dealers’ fears are justified, there is still very much a place for them. “A lot of dealers are worried about how they are going to survive against this machine of Christie’s or Sotheby’s,” he said. “We have more than a thousand people internationally working for us, we have sales rooms in many places, we have offices in even more. From a dealer perspective, they don’t have the reach. We do. So I need to take advantage of it—that’s my business approach.

“My human approach is, we live in a world of Walmart and Costco. But there is still Lobel’s on Madison Avenue ... I am not saying that one is Walmart and the other is the deli around the corner. But I am saying that, as a dealer, you have your own taste and you follow that taste. And you grow a community around you. There are certain people that would always rather deal with one person that has a vision, that knows everything about the artist, rather than the superchain. I think that will always remain.”

editorial@observer.com

A sculpture by Andra Ursuta in Frieze London 2011.

Today the art fair Frieze New York, which will have its second edition on Randall's Island May 10-13, announced the details of its "Projects" series, a group of artworks specially commissioned for the fair.

The five artists chosen by the series' curator Cecilia Alemani this year are Liz Glynn, Maria Loboda, Mateo Tannatt, Andra Ursuta and Marianne Vitale. There will also be a tribute to late artist Gordon Matta-Clark's famous restaurant Food, which the artist created in downtown Manhattan in 1971. And novelist Ben Marcus will write an original text for Frieze.

As with past editions of the fair—in New York, last year, and in its 10-year old London edition—the "Projects" are ambitious. According to a press release, Liz Glynn is creating a 1920s-style bar decorated like an old bank vault that will only be accessible through a secret door. Bartenders will not only serve cocktails, but perform magic tricks. Maria Loboda is transforming a part of Randall's Island Park into a replica of a color plate of a European interior design motif from the 19th century. Mateo Tannatt's sculptures will be accompanied by scripted performances. Andra Ursuta is creating a cemetery for art, complete with marble headstones. Marianne Vitale is bringing stripped-down weather vanes inside the Frieze tent.

Going to Hollywood. (Courtesy PMC)

Yesterday, the Academy announced its nominations for the Oscars. Exciting news for the world of pop culture, less so perhaps for the art world, which is generally more curious about shows of a different kind—those that will be opening in Los Angeles’s galleries on Oscars weekend.

The most-talked-about exhibition tends to be at Gagosian Gallery, in Beverly Hills. Back in 2008, when Julian Schnabel was on the menu, John Waters characterized the event to The Observer as “Hollywood’s chance to wear black and look at art and pretend they’re New Yorkers,” and the opening dinner tends to be a star-studded affair. (And there's even been a kind of synergy with Hollywood: in 2011, Oscars co-host James Franco showed work at Gagosian.) The Observer has learned what’s on offer this year, and it promises not to disappoint: up this time is new work (including new paintings) by Richard Prince, one of Gagosian’s star artists. Mr. Prince’s last solo exhibition at Gagosian’s Beverly Hills space, in 2005, also in the Oscars slot, was his first with the gallery. Like other of Gagosian’s Oscars-timed exhibitions (think Andreas Gursky in 2010), it augured his joining the Gagosian stable, which he did in 2008. That show was also of major new paintings, in that case his “check paintings,” so called because he had pasted canceled checks onto the canvas.

But Mr. Prince, whose show opens on Feb. 21, won’t be the only game in town. On the following evening, in nearby West Hollywood, Ohwow gallery is debuting new pieces by young artist Nick van Woert in his first solo show with the gallery, called “No Man’s Land.” On the 23rd, Prism Gallery opens a show of Mario Testino—he’s been called “fashion’s favorite photographer,” which should ensure a glitzy crowd—and, on that same night, Regen Projects opens an exhibition of a very different photographer, Catherine Opie, who was in the news over the summer as one of the artists to depart the board of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, over curator Paul Schimmel’s departure. Also exhibiting photography is Perry Rubenstein, with a show of Iwan Baan. Meanwhile, L.A.-based artist Henry Taylor, who had a large one-person show at MoMA PS1 last year, will present work at Blum & Poe.

And that’s just a sampling of L.A.’s rich art offerings that week. Sure, as Mr. Waters put it, Angelenos may take art as an opportunity to make like they’re New Yorkers. But as things continue to heat up on the city’s art scene, New Yorkers might want to book their tickets for Los Angeles.