The cameo occurs at minute 26, and you can watch it on the CW website, which doesn't seem to be working very well, or on this pirate one.

To give you the back story, which we do not have in its entirety: a character (let's call him MAN) is upset because someone else (his EX-WIFE?) somehow scheduled an APF gala the same night as his gallery opening. You'd think he could just reschedule the opening, but it turns out it's a problem more easily solved by buying a Richard Phillips painting for $1.1 million at a charity auction.

Here's a transcript of the cameo, at the gala:

DOREEN REMEN [to MAN]: I like that your artists reflect the same socially relevant projects we commission at Art Production Fund.

MAN: And I like that you can see the street art influence. I'm not talking about the '80s, but the '40s. Dubuffet, Pollock, Ray Johnson.

RICHARD PHILLIPS: ...when artists were the stars of New York. Instead of celebutantes.

EX-WIFE? [to MAN]: Excuse me, may I speak to you for a moment?

If you follow Mr. Phillips's work, or Gossip Girl, you know that he has a close relationship with the show. His work first appeared on it in 2008 and he painted a few of the stars for his "Most Wanted" teen icon series.

For the issue, a small box which comes replete with a stereoscope (designed and built by aruliden, a NYC-based multidisciplinary design studio) and 3-D art slides, Mr. Cattelan and Mr. Ferrari have photographed the transgender model Lea T, who was born male and now identifies as female, and is the daughter of a well-known former Brazilian football player. Painter Richard Phillips breaks new ground by photographing a sexy woman in a bathing suit, Victoria Secret model Adriana Lima on the Copacabana sidewalk.

In addition to the art component, there will also be all the usual fashion fanfare, like images by fashion designer Karl Lagerfeld as well as photos of Brazilian supermodel Gisele Bundchen, nude in 3-D, naturally.

Richard Phillips, 2012. (Courtesy Leandro Justen/PatrickMcMullan.com)

With his new Lindsay Lohan film, First Point, having recently premiered at Art Basel, we were particularly interested in Opening Ceremony's recent post, "House Calls with Richard Phillips in Chelsea," in which the artist and man-about-town is paid a visit in his studio. But the artist—sporting a zip-pocket Mugler pantsuit—looks less equipped for diving into the messy business of paint and brushes than he is to slipping into his "red Puma fireproof racing shoes," and taking off in either his Lotus or his Porsche.

Check out the interview to find out about his lucky charm, the best advice he's gotten and what his summer plans are.

"Work of Art." (Bravo)

“Come for a day, stay for a week,” reads the tourism website of Cold Spring, New York. That's a fine slogan, but it did not, alas, apply to our intrepid contestants on Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist this week, who were destined to hop a train from Grand Central for a brief, nervous jaunt up and down the town's Main Street, during which time they marveled at how picturesque (read: creepy) everything was and how weird the locals were, before fleeing back to the (much less weird and creepy) world of reality television.

“The name makes it sound like it has something to do with spa treatments,” contestant Young Sun Han murmured rapturously, as if he’d just discovered a Shangri-La for TV’s gay stereotypes. (Look, there’s village councilman Sean Hayes!)

“The further we get away from the city the more it looks like home to me,” Dusty meanwhile drawled sweetly. We've ridden Metro North’s Hudson Line, and the back lots of New England mini malls do not particularly resemble Arkansas’s amber waves of grain, in our humble opinion.

“Welcome to the quaint town of Cold Spring, New York,” says show hostess/rich person China Chow, looking like a Strangers on a Train murderess in a big trench coat. Two people were going to get the boot, we learned. But, “If you survive this challenge you will be competing for the grand prize,” Ms. Chow threatened. Survive this challenge? Is that what they’ve been doing with the eliminated contestants? The challenge, if you’re interested, was to take $200 and find a way to create a portrait of a verifiable, salt of the Thornton Wilder-ian earth Cold Spring resident.

KYMIA NAWABI
“I have laryngitis today,” rasps the first quaint resident that Ms. Nawabi hassled. But fear not, for Bob and Barbara, owners of some kind of haunted tchochke shop, rise to the occasion, proving themselves to be part charming Stars Hollow, part “all work and no play.” In Ms. Nawabi’s terms, they’re a solid blend of “weirdness and also sweetness.” The couple, we learn, has “always loved dolls.” So Ms. Nawabi makes a kind of dark, demonic Norman Rockwell painting of the duo, portraying them as ice skaters in front of scary antique miscellany—they skated on their first date. “The only non-conventional thing is that they’re going to have several arms,” artist mentor/auctioneer Simon de Pury frets of Ms. Nawabi’s painting. Which is funny, because when he gesticulates, he looks like a stop-motion photograph of a pitcher. “Get some weirdness in it,” he cautions.

YOUNG SUN HAN
Mr. Han makes a beeline to the nearest bed and breakfast, to inquire about spa treatments and also “town secrets,” because he’s clearly been watching The Witches of Eastwick, and believes the two go hand in hand. While he gets a guided tour of the inn’s nine rooms, variously furnished with Jacuzzis and wood-burning fireplaces he is left scrambling, at the very last moment, for a subject. Luckily, he pinpoints the next great artist of Cold Spring at the Terence Donovan gallery—namely, jolly Mr. Donovan himself, whom Mr. Han pays $200 for a 20-minute portrait. And guess what? Terence’s portrait is really nice—it’s got a little Karen Kilimnik, or even Elizabeth Peyton in its saucy yet tender broad-stroked depiction of its young male subject. (“You have kind of Justin Bieber-ish hair,” Terence says, which is totally something we can imagine Ms. Peyton saying to any of her sweetly puckish subjects.) In the gallery, Mr. Han leans Terence’s painting against a wall, behind wooden planks plastered with extreme-close-up photographs of Terence that he took of the artist while he worked.

LOLA THOMPSON
Having been soundly rejected by the town motorcycle guy, Ms. Thompson seeks out the men who are next on the list of people most likely to succumb to her witchy ways and nymphette wiles. Dennis and Tommy, rare-coin-collecting gentlemen, succumb to her flirtation, handing over a 1928 five-dollar bill to her. Ms. Thompson then prepares a multi-faceted, mostly non-figurative portrait/tribute to the two collectors, featuring a letter she wrote to them, which begins, “Dear Dennis and Tommy, You are the secret historians of Cold Spring” (or maybe not so secret…). There’s also some tinfoil, and a pyramid of blown-up images of historic bills, and some other things on a shelf.

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell shyly settles on a little girl as his subject. She likes candy—“all kinds!”— and reminds the contestant of his daughter Cora, whom he abandoned in her infancy to go off to (an art-reality-TV) battle, and who, when this episode was filmed, had just turned one the previous day. Mr. Mitchell decides to make a mosaic of his young subject’s face from M&Ms. Mr. de Pury—who, in his most hilarious joke of season two, says he wants to “come to AR-Kansas”—briefly convinces Mr. Mitchell to work on a portrait made from folded-paper fortune-tellers, before the contestant runs out of time and returns to his candy idea. By that point, however, it’s too late for the glue to dry, so M&Ms keep falling off it. Mr. Mitchell hopes that everyone will find this decomposition “interesting.”

SARA JIMENEZ
Because she always seems wryly uninterested in everything around her, Ms. Jimenez drives away her first potential subject, before finding friends among the local firemen. One older firefighter, Jackie, is of particular interest to Ms. Jimenez. He’s battled blazes for 58 years, thereby inspiring a quite charming backlit portrait made from aluminum (which weirdly kind of resembles Mao) paired with an uninspiring dangly sculpture of aluminum and charcoal nameplates, one for every year Jackie served.

THE CRITIQUE
This week’s guest judge is pop-star portraitist Richard Phillips, who, for the record, is much taller than critic/judge Jerry Saltz and Ms. Chow, even in her crazy-tall heels, but maybe not taller than gallerist/judge Bill Powers’ hair. The local portrait subjects show up for the gallery showing, and luckily enough, none of them are perceptibly offended by their variously unflattering, candy-coated, epistolary and so forth depictions.

WINNER
Kymia Nawabi wins the first slot on the final episode for her cartoonish portrait because, as Ms. Chow says of Bob and Barbara, “I met them and they’re cartoons!” That’s not very nice, we think, and neither is Mr. Phillips’ comment on the piece: “At first I was throwing up inside.” But apparently none of that matters when you’re in the final trio of possible next great artists.

ALSO HEADED TO THE FINALE
Young Sun Han, who we think should probably be facing an intellectual-property/copyright suit from Terence right about now, slinks by, even though the judges point out that he should have just shown Terence’s painting. (Weird how the next great artist is not even a contestant on this show… Team Terence!) Sara Jimenez, meanwhile, also will compete in the final episode, mostly because Mr. Saltz is so proud that his little charge worked outside of her “comfort zone.” Personally, we’re freaked out that she referred to her portrait of Jackie (who’s alive and thriving) as a “memorial.”

GOING HOME
Dusty Mitchell is at last taking that long covered-wagon ride back to Arkansas, mostly because too many of his artworks were literally paint-by-numbers pieces. And Lola Thompson will hop Al Pacino’s jet back to Los Angeles because Ms. Chow doesn’t understand why the currency pyramid counts as a portrait (odd, since Ms. Chow resembles money). Also, it’s too scattered in its abstraction for the rest of the judges. And there is much crying.

Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, James Frey (Photo courtesy Terry's Diary)

The line for the Terry Richardson show “MOM DAD” at Half Gallery on Friday was a clamoring, clustering thing, attractive people waving and desperate to squeeze into a space that, true to its name, isn’t very big. It was a bit like the opening of a nightclub, with everyone trying to be aloof and desperate at the same time, though there was very little order to it. Half Gallery owner Bill Powers came to the front from time to time and poked his pink sunglasses glasses around the door frame to point to people who were cool (e.g. “James!”—James Frey, of course).

Mr. Richardson’s parents are the subjects of the show and they are treated in much the same way as everyone else he photographs. His mother is topless giving a double thumbs up, his father has his arm around Mr. Richardson, who is in turn trying to look embarrassed. Near the back, large speakers played a series of voicemails from Mr. Richardson’s father Bob, a fashion photographer, who tells Terry that he's proud of him. On the floor of the gallery were crumpled school portraits, presumably of Mr. Richardson.

Mr. Richardson stood at the back of the room, his thumbs receiving a workout. Everyone wanted a photo with Terry. He had to take a break at one point to duck into the back. A short woman in flannel whined, “Oh man! It’s like when you’re waiting to take a picture on Santa’s lap and when you finally get to the front of the line he has to go to the bathroom.”

A theory: a photograph with Terry Richardson as your social media profile picture signifies countless sentiments about the man, nearly all of them positive. It could mean that you slept with him (he’s now taken! By the way), that you could have slept with him but at the time were too cool or famous to sleep with him. It could mean that you read Vice in its heyday, or even better, lived Vice in its heyday. It could mean that you “get” Terry Richardson, but are “over” him.

Why did you want a photo of him, girl in a fur vest angling her Blackberry?

“Oh,” she responded. “I work for Refinery 29.”

So that means you like Terry Richardson?

“No,” she said. “I have to tweet out a photo to prove to my boss that I came to this.”

A plebeian! Though the semiotics are admittedly complex. She asked where we worked and we told her.

“You should link out to us more.”

Even after you’d had a chance to see the show you had to stick around to watch the familiar faces standing in the street. There was Cynthia Rowley, Richard Prince, China Chow and Waris Ahluwalia. At one point the crowd parted so that Richard Phillips could drive by in his white Porsche, a racing model that sent rumbles down the block. We’d missed the dinner at Acme, but photos reveal that Ke$ha was there.

“The Terry images of his dad Bob remind me of the photographic study Richard Avedon made of his dying father,” Mr. Powers said after the show. “In fifty years, Terry Richardson will be remembered on the same level as a Helmut Newton, Irving Penn or Richard Avedon. It's hard for some people to recognize their contemporaries' importance in real time.”

"Rainbow City" by Friends With You.

Last Wednesday artists and techies crammed the main hall of General Assembly, one of Silicon Alley’s group workspaces, for a panel called “Art Outside the Gallery.” The discussion included entertaining takes on how people discover new art these days: interior designer and set decorator Christina Tonkin described how one client, an unnamed New York Yankee, wanted the painting that hung in superagent Ari Gold’s office on the HBO show Entourage. (It wasn’t a real painting, so she had it reproduced by the show’s set designer). Also on the panel was the affable painter Richard Phillips, who regaled the audience with anecdotes about texting with Lindsay Lohan.

Before the panel we caught up with Mr. Phillips to ask him if he had any collectors in the tech community.

“I think that it’s quite likely,” said Mr. Phillips, whose film starring Ms. Lohan has been a hit for just about everyone with a Wifi router. “These people are certainly aware of what I do and we’ve made a concerted effort to address this environment.”

With more crossover than ever before between the art world and the tech industry, it may come as no surprise that New York’s tech stars have slowly started collecting art, but the recent mingling of the two booming industries has demonstrated much about the way the two businesses work today.

“Very few real, serious collectors came out of it,” Tim Nye said of the ’90s dot-com bubble. Mr. Nye, a former tech mogul of that era turned art collector and dealer, said his former colleagues were usually after big, glitzy names like Andy Warhol and Damien Hirst. “I think they were obviously so high-profile that all these galleries and advisers targeted them and it became a thing to check off after your fast cars and your palatial house, to have an art collection.”

For all the headlines heralding Groupon as the next Facebook, itself the next Google, Mr. Nye said he’s yet to see that type of collecting from today’s tech community. He believes this may be because we’ve yet to experience the unprecedented I.P.O.’s of the dot-com bubble, and because, to him, art simply doesn’t seem to be a major concern for contemporary start-up jockeys.

“It’s rare that people who come out of that culture have sophisticated tastes,” Mr. Nye said. “They’ve spent their lives in a basement looking at a computer screen.”

But the culture of technology companies has changed since the ’90s. With seemingly endless rounds of funding and more advanced methods of trading private stock, it’s not clear that the big I.P.O. cash-in will necessarily ever come for the companies that make headlines today. The type of technology that’s being developed is also different—it’s social, and creative. If e-commerce was the buzzword of the dot-com bubble, today it’s mobile devices and social networking, which means a different kind of tech mogul.

And you can’t expect today’s tech moguls to collect in the same way that anyone else does, let alone the way their predecessors did. For one thing, they rarely seem to use art advisers. Most advisers contacted for this article said they didn’t have any clients in the start-up world, and BJ Topol of Topol Childs Art Advisory wrote via email that the Silicon Alley clients she does have tend to collect differently. She described one who had come to her starting out with an interest in blue-chip artists who flipped after he met a few emerging artists personally. “Since those first few studio visits, this client has made a conscious decision to support younger artists exclusively,” Ms. Topol wrote via email. “These clients prefer to buy artists whose work is relatively unknown and haven’t yet been taken on by a gallery.”

Joanne Wilson, wife to star venture capitalist Fred Wilson and an investor in her own right, falls into this category. She’s written about her collecting on her blog, and regularly visits galleries herself. She eschews art advisers in favor of a more personal relationship with burgeoning artists, and prefers not to spend more than $20,000 on a piece. Over the years she’s become close with artists whose works she owns, among them Peter Dayton, James Nares and Eric Freeman. She’s enjoyed watching their reputations and prices grow over the years, though not because it’s any kind of endorsement of her own taste.

“The truth is I’m more excited for the artist,” Ms. Wilson said. “Just like I get excited for the entrepreneurs, to watch them grow their companies. ”

Manish Vora, a former Wall Streeter and co-founder of the ARTLOG website, which offers gallery walks and museum events aimed at drawing in new collectors, says that this attitude is common in the Silicon Alley types he’s met.

“I think it makes a lot of sense for venture investors to be interested particularly in young artists,” he said. “You understand that you’re investing in these creative people, who are really businesses, and only two of those 10 pieces that you buy are going have any value, and if you’re comfortable doing that on the business side you’ll be a lot more comfortable investing in art that way.”

The venture capital life bleeds into the subject matter of the art that these people collect as well. Mike Brown of AOL Ventures, the company’s investment arm, is an avid collector who visits Art Basel Miami Beach every December and finds himself drawn to the playful. He collects street artists like Shepard Fairey and Swoon, and owns works by William Powhida, Barry McGee and the tattoo artist Scott Campbell. Prints by the established conceptual artist John Baldessari wouldn’t seem to fit, aesthetically, until you hear Mr. Brown explain it.

“There’s a lot of the whimsical in his approach, which I think is very unique,” he said of Mr. Baldessari. “It feels like he’s having a lot of fun when he makes these pieces.

“For the work I collect, I tend to be an optimist,” he said. “And obviously as a person who takes incredible risk in his professional life, I’m not as big a fan of darker and more underground stuff.”

Mr. Brown’s involvement in the art world extends beyond collecting. Years ago, he became friends with Christina Ray, founder of the Conflux art festival, which blends technology and street art, and Mr. Brown now serves as Conflux’s finance director. Mr. Brown even reached out to Ms. Ray, who runs an eponymous gallery in Soho, when soliciting artists to decorate the offices of AOL, now a fairly prominent sponsor of public works like Friends With You’s sprawling artwork-cum-carnival Rainbow City at the High Line.

In New York, the line between start-ups and other creative endeavors can get blurry. Dennis Crowley, co-founder of Foursquare, was drawn to Conflux when he was in the graduate Interactive Telecommunications Program at N.Y.U.’s Tisch School of the Arts. In 2004, when he started following the festival, Conflux included “Yellow Arrows,” a Lower East Side street-art project that allowed users to slap yellow stickers on personal landmarks with a code that could be sent via S.M.S. for a secret message left there by the sticker-placer. It naturally caught the attention of Mr. Crowley, who was already at work on an early version of Foursquare called Dodgeball, for his I.T.P. thesis.

“I always look at it from a tools perspective, but these were people who were doing performance art on maps,” he told The Observer. “It was more like what can happen after the check-in that was our big revelation around that period.

“Conflux was pushing a lot of people to think about those specific issues in different ways, like how can technology change your notion of being in a specific place in a specific time, and the context around that,” he said.

On weekends, Mr. Crowley regularly takes gallery walks with friends, to get a better sense of how people use Foursquare as much as anything else. He favors Soho, and buys infrequently, but the walls of his apartment feature a cut-out by Swoon, prints from Lori Earley and Lyle Owerko, and original pieces by Williamsburg painters Nic*Rad and R. Nicholas Kuszyk, among other works. “I don’t consider myself a collector by any means,” Mr. Crowley said. “But my apartment is full of interesting stuff as opposed to posters that I bought online.”

This isn’t to say that the intersection of art and technology in this city make it easy to enter the art world. John Borthwick, CEO of technology incubator Betaworks, began his flirtation with the art world back in 1994 with a web project called äda ’web that partnered with artists to explore the possibilities of expression online (“Flashing text was exciting back then,” he told The Observer). Their first project was with Jenny Holzer. Mr. Borthwick’s brother Mark is a photographer so his own modest collection includes many photographs, along with artists who worked with äda ’web—among them John Simon and Lawrence Weiner. He’s now on the board of Rhizome, a New Museum project that aims to do much the same thing as äda ’web and that recently partnered artist Ryan Trecartin with Tumblr founder David Karp for a video project.

Despite all this, Mr. Borthwick, who lives in Chelsea, still feels he’s at the very fringes of the art world.

“The New York art scene is a little bit overwhelming at times,” Mr. Borthwick said. “It has a whole culture of its own and what I’m more interested in is the edge of the digital arts, the invasion edge where people are really pushing the boundaries of what’s new, what’s possible.”

If one attempts to think about the art market through the eyes of a start-up entrepreneur, it suddenly becomes obvious why a host of recent start-ups have sought to improve it. Mr. Brown, who frequently probes the secondary market for finds, called the process of calling around to friends in galleries and auction houses—the usual way in which people look for art to buy—“a joke” in terms of efficiency. “That process doesn’t really scale,” he said.

Biotech entrepreneur Aditya Julka, a co-founder of one such art start-up, Paddle 8, which hosts online exhibits and connects users to gallery inventories, said the site came out of his own desire to enter the world of collecting.

“It was driven by very personal reasons,” Mr. Julka said. “I wanted to start collecting, I wanted to keep in touch with what’s happening with Indian art and I also at the same time wanted a way to learn more about contemporary Western art and start collecting contemporary Western art in a way that’s easier.”

Carter Cleveland, founder of art.sy, said at the General Assembly panel that he was motivated by similar reasons, and Laura Martin, founder of Exhibition A, told The Observer she started her prints site because she found herself desperate to buy a certain Rene Ricard painting she had no hope of affording. She pitched the site idea to her former boss Cynthia Rowley, who provided the seed money, and after it launched Ms. Martin snagged a print of the Richard she desired. Then she bought an original Ricard.

“You catch the bug,” Ms. Martin said. “Since then I bought an original Leo Fitzpatrick.”

One element that has yet to establish itself in the start-up world is a strong social model that encourages collecting, which you are likelier to find in the world of finance thanks to ambitious and influential collectors like Steve Cohen (the best offered by the tech world is Eric Schmidt). Zachary Aarons, an angel investor in a handful of mobile-based apps with a focus on travel, says that he rarely finds himself discussing art with colleagues, despite the fact that he’s a Lower East Side gallery regular who collects, among others, Brian DeGraw.

“When I talk socially to people I know in the tech world, it tends to be more about restaurants and things to do,” he said. “Because of the nature of my portfolio, the conversation tends to be about cuisine, travel, events and sports more than about contemporary art.”

The Observer found Josh Abrams, co-founder of the start-up Tutorspree, through his membership in a gallery walks Meetup group and his savvy answers about the art market on the questions forum Quora. Tutorspree boasts around $1 million in funding—a figure that still lands them in “bootstrapping” territory. While Mr. Abrams says he often sees pieces that interest him on his visits to Chelsea, he’s content to buy from the Brooklyn Flea for now.

“I’m just trying to live in the moment right now,” Mr. Abrams told us. “If my goal is to own a Warhol one day, maybe that will happen, but my goal right now is to build a company and not have the external stuff happen until later. It happens when it happens.”

dduray@observer.com