Champage Bar at Armory Show with view of Ragnar Kjartansson's "Scandinavian Pain."

More than 60,000 people visited the Armory Show last week, according to a wrap-up press release.

Some highlights--"major sales" in the language of art fair wrap-up press releases--were David Zwirner's booth featuring the work of Michael Riedel, which sold out in the first half-hour of the fair; a $480,000 George Condo painting at Berlin's Sprüth Magers; Kehinde Wiley's The Tribute Money II sold for $135,000 at Sean Kelly on opening day.

There were a number of bold names at the fair, and their names are also bolded in the press release. We will simply include all of them here, unbolded and without commentary:

Matt Dillon, Paul Rudd, Michael Stipe, John Waters, Björk, Bill Powers and Cynthia Rowley, Narciso Rodriguez, Tiki Barber, Patty Smyth and John McEnroe, James Franco, David Allen Grier, Mera and Don Rubell, Anita Zabludowicz, Steve Roth, David Mugrabi, Edye and Eli Broad, Donald Marron, Tony Podesta, Adam Lindemann, Chelsea Clinton, Patricia Wettig, Hoda Kotb, Beth Rudin DeWoody, Maria Arena Bell, Glenn Fuhrman, Ruth and Jake Bloom, Don B. Marron, Suzanne Murphy, Susan and Michael Hort, Melva Bucksbaum and Agnes Gund, Maurizio Cattelan, Joseph Kosuth, Kehinde Wiley, Andres Serrano, Michael Riedel, Jota Castro, Neville Wakefield, Ulay, Spencer Tunick, Alice Aycock, Terence Koh, Marilyn Minter, Clifford Owens, Chuck Close, Jayson Musson (better known as his alter ego Hennessy Youngman) Glenn Lowry Kathy Halbreich, Thelma Golden, Adam Weinberg, Lisa Phillips, Massimiliano Gioni Gary Carrion-Murayari Daniel Birnbaum, Hans Ulrich Obrist Alain Seban, Gunnar Kvaran,  Oya Eczacıbaşı, Thierry Raspail, Eric Shiner, Bonnie Clearwater and Hedwig Fijen were all there with about 60,000 nobodies (hi!).

Paul Morris, in a statement, said the feeling in the air at the Armory Show "was one of excited appreciation."

Mr. Pruitt. (Photo by Sarah Douglas)

Last Saturday afternoon, the artist Rob Pruitt, who is known for his glittery paintings of panda bears and his tongue-in-cheek, Golden Globes-style “Art Awards,” was signing books, naked, in the Karma bookstore, in the West Village. He sat at the head of a table arrayed with copies of his 2010 volume Pattern and Degradation, each with a custom cover. One was composed of multiple books of matches. One came with a pair of handcuffs. One was sandwiched between copies of the New York Yellow Pages. As a fig leaf he employed a stuffed animal panda bear.

Just after 3 p.m., halfway into Mr. Pruitt’s engagement, his dealer, Gavin Brown, arrived with his 11-year-old daughter, Tallulah.

A woman asked Mr. Pruitt to sign a package of toilet paper with a panda bear logo.

Another woman arrived, with her young daughter. “Are you shy about that man?” she asked. “You can go say ‘Hi’ to him.” The girl demurred.

“Should I cover up?” Mr. Pruitt asked.

“No, no,” the woman said. “She has to learn about these things sometime, right?”

“Better in a safe environment,” Mr. Brown chimed in.

More people arrived. “Welcome to my book signing,” Mr. Pruitt said, sounding almost excited. The store was getting crowded. People nearly bumped into the Dan Colen “trash” sculptures hanging from the walls. Mr. Brown’s cairn terrier, Dotty, made off with a plastic container from the girl’s stroller.

“That dog’s eating our snacks!” her mother cried out in mock alarm.

Mr. Brown apologized for his dog.

Things were getting a bit chaotic, but not, apparently, as chaotic as they had been earlier.

“We were setting up and running late and there were already 10 people in here, and Rob was naked in the back room,” said Karma’s proprietor Brendan Dugan. “Four women started walking back there, and they must have thought, ‘What the hell is going on?’”

Everyone was talking over everyone else. Someone asked the price of the signed posters on sale for an exhibition by Mr. Pruitt’s boyfriend, Jonathan Horowitz, at Gavin Brown. “They’re 20 bucks,” Mr. Brown called, from the back of the store. “They’re 20 bucks,” Mr. Pruitt passed on. “That’s a ladder!” the little girl cried out in delight at a Dan Colen.

“I’m naked,” Mr. Pruitt scribbled in one of the books, next to a drawing of a panda. “Please love me.”

“Why do I do these things?” he asked no one in particular.

“Because I’m so insecure,” he answered himself. He turned to Mr. Brown’s daughter. “Tallulah, this is what you call grasping. It’s a neediness. Someone who just wants more attention. Don’t ever be like that.”

sdouglas@observer.com

The Canada gallery booth. (Photo by Rachel Wetzler)

The Comfort Inn on Ludlow, which hosted the 2012 edition of the Dependent Art Fair this past Saturday, seems anomalous not just for the neighborhood, but also when compared to other Comfort Inns. The elevator seemed to take hours between the call and the door opening, and the building sprawls up where the other motels sprawl wide. There are, occasionally, sensuous paintings of women in the tan hallways and the guy behind the front desk might, sotto voce, offer you a somehow-creepy group discount and then give you like 27 cards to distribute to potential guests, as though it wouldn't be sufficient to tell them, "Yeah, it's the Comfort Inn on the Lower East Side."

The irony of this whole situation, though, seemed just fine for the 21 dealers of Dependent, which takes its name from the now-established Independent Art Fair and its format from the original room-to-room Armory Show at the Gramercy Park Hotel, then called the Gramercy International. These galleries, professional L.E.S.-ers and outer borough-ites comfortable with pop-ups, could exist anywhere, the weirder the better, and their clientele packed the hallways, noon to 8 p.m., drinking beer and speaking in soft voices. The afore-referenced sleaziness didn’t hurt either.

"It's a sad, dismal, masturbating-alone-in-your-room kind of vibe," said the artist Ragnar Kjartansson, approvingly, as he twirled a pair of aviators and he drank in the fourth floor.

Some of the better sleaziness could be found at the Ramiken Crucible booth-room on the eighth floor, where 12 tripodal stools cast from Andra Ursuta's bikini-ed behind, in '90s neon resin and complete with labia, balanced on the queen-sized bed.

"This is the artist's ass, those are her goosebumps," Mike Egan, of the gallery, told those who entered. The 12-stool piece actually sold within the first half hour of the fair, for $30,000. Did the collector give any indication as to what he was going to do with it? "I think he said he was having a seder," Mr. Egan said.

On the lower end of items for sale were items like a series of clay-filled flip-phones for $200, found in a bedside drawer of a room shared by Cleopatra's and the Shandaken Project.

"The great thing about them is that they're part of an infinitely continuing series," said the artist, Andrés Laracuente. "As long as capitalism continues its march of planned obsolescence." He's doing his first iPhone next week. That room also featured a video by David Berezin, a relaxing loop of a rippling pond with karaoke-like title text over it, in cursive that read, "Fun for a While."

Cleopatra's co-founder Bridget Finn affected a dazed look behind her big glasses. "After having spent a day with it, I think he's a genius," she said.

There were plenty of bathroom bits. James Fuentes’s booth had an inflatable rat with caution tape in it, a self-portrait of the artist Lizzi Bougatsos, and over at Ramiken, the Michael Krebber Memorial & Graduate Research Center invited patrons to close the door behind them and take in the candlelit bathroom, jazzy iPod music and a pile of pillows stacked in the bathtub. At Callicoon gallery, there was an installation by James Hoff that consisted of a book titled A Study of Splashes placed directly in front of the toilet.

"Well, there's obviously a sight gag to it, said owner Photios Giovanis, craning his neck over the frame as if hesitant to step into the work. "Plus, you know, splashes. You don't think of that as something you study."

In many ways, it was true to the spirit in which the Armory Show started, said the fair’s founder Rose Marcus.

"The interesting thing is that the Gramercy Park Hotel was a crappy hotel when they were there," she said, sprawled on a bed in the room for a booth described as EF III, on the door. She hadn't necessarily wanted to do the fair for a second year, after last year’s premiere at a Sheraton in Chelsea, but the demand for an alternative-alternative fair proved to be so great that she relented, and was glad that she did.

"Cool things happen here,” she said and sat up to gesture at a painting draped over the window, hanging from the pants clips of two hangers wedged above it. “They wouldn't let these people drill holes in the ceiling so they had to improvise.

Regina Rex had two statues by Dave Hardy built on the bed that kissed the ceiling, one with a generator at the bottom, and Canada gallery staged a John-and-Yoko bed-in. At 6 p.m., at the Audio Visual Arts booth, sound artist and lamination advocate Ken Montgomery read a manifesto on lamination, and invited attendees to laminate things using a device he'd placed on an ironing board in the middle of the bed. A wiry man with grey hair, he didn’t look unlike Jack Kevorkian and was accompanied by a belly dancer named Enchantress, who wore glow sticks. Much of the advertised attraction was in hearing the gears of his lamination machine, the sound, he said, of the transition from the ephemeral to the permanent.

"Say you have a letter from an important person, like a bishop," he said. "Or even a letter from an unimportant person. Lamination makes that letter more official." The first volunteer stepped forward and Mr. Montgomery apologized that someone named Larry was late with the headphones. The volunteer would have to use a stethoscope as his paper whatever was laminated.

"It hurts a little in the ears but until Larry comes it's just going to have to do," he said.

Work by Sanja Ivekovic at the booth of espaivisor – Visor Gallery. (Photo by Andrew Russeth)

The Volta Art Fair was bustling on Thursday afternoon when Gallerist paid a visit, and it felt, as it has in past years, like a maze. Those layout issues aside, the conceit of the fair remains wonderfully easy: each dealer is  allowed to bring only the work of a single artist: 80 exhibitors, 80 artists. (Just about the number of artists Gagosian represents.)

The first artworks we saw upon getting off the elevator on the 11th floor of the 7 West 34th Street building were the bright, modestly scaled abstractions of Andrew Masullo, one of the stars of the 2012 Whitney Biennial. Mr. Masullo shows with Feature Inc. in New York (its proprietor, Hudson, had a few of his works in his Independent booth), but he was being presented here by Boston's Steven Zevitas Gallery, which had sold a number of works at prices ranging from $6,000 to $18,000.

Another Boston outfit, Samsøn, was showing the work of painter Matt Rich, who slathered acrylic paint in muted colors on paper that had been cut into geometric shapes or long strips, then pieced together as in a quilt. Some of his smaller sphere compositions had sold for $1,000 each.

New York's Mixed Greens gallery was showing photos by Julianne Swartz, who makes portraits by capturing people's images in droplets of water on her finger. Three of these had sold at $2,800 each.

Deconstructed American flags by Jeremy Dean were on display at the booth of Cynthia Corbett Gallery, who was in town from London. To make his pieces, Mr. Dean unraveled flags and used the thread to reconstruct them line by line, also including text or vintage-styled propaganda photographs of women riding missiles and American icons (Walter Cronkite, John Wayne, Superman). His Hero/Hostage work, which features those words in gold paint, sold for $55,000. Two smaller pieces sold for $10,000 each.

Twenty-two-year-old Howard University student and conceptual artist Wilmer Wilson IV performed during the day at Conner Contemporary's booth, placing “I voted” stickers all over his almost-nude self throughout the day. After covering his entire body, Mr. Wilson peeled off all of the stickers. Mr. Wilson had photographs of himself covered in stickers and seals on sale. Listing price was $2,950 and several had been sold.

New York's Dodge Gallery had works by Sheila Gallagher, who had made assemblages of melted plastic and trash, which resolved themselves from a distance as a landscape, a Klimt-like eastern garden and an Islamic design of vines and flowers. All three of her plastic works had been sold, for $14,000 to 16,000 each.

Parker's Box, of Brooklyn, housed Stefan Sehler's acrylic paint on plexiglass. Though Mr. Sehler had previously worked with foliage and natural subjects, his work at Volta was an abstract composition (which resembled a photograph of the moon), red and white stripes and a trompe l'oeil piece that looked like metallic spray-painted wooden planks. The pieces were priced at $18,000 apiece.

Portland's PDX gallery was showing the work of artist Adam Sorenson, who makes trippy paintings of rock formations, in greys alternated by shots of eerie neon green, reds and blues. Some of his very small works had found buyers at a comfortable $800 price point.

A few of the offerings were particularly impressive, like Rachel Beach's brilliantly colored, Richard Nonas-riffing wooden sculptures at the airy booth of Lower East Side's Blackston gallery, and at Visor Gallery, from Valencia, Spain, large prints--priced in the mid-five-figures--that combine advertisements for luxury goods with typed testimonials from women about domestic abuse, by Croatian artist Sanja Ivekovic, who has a retrospective on at the Museum of Modern Art right now. And then there were Mr. Masullo's paintings, bracing, humble abstractions that are finally winning favor in the museum world--and the market.

The panelists. (Photo by Shaun Mader, courtesy the Armory Show)

Asked to define the state of the art world, and the culture at large, during a panel discussion at the Armory Show on Saturday afternoon, the art advisor Todd Levin looked pained. He took off his glasses and thought for a few moments as he rubbed his eyes.

“I feel very much in a certain way what Mahler must have felt in 1908, embarking on the last movement of the Ninth Symphony,” Mr. Levin said, during his answer. “A feeling of an end of a number of things, not only the end of tonality in the music he was writing, but the end of nature, an end to, sort of, societal manners. They were reaching a breaking point and something was going to happen.” Amid the brisk business reportedly taking place in the fair next door, it was a sobering comment.

The panel was titled “What is art worth NOW?” and moderated by journalist Alexandra Peers, a former Observer editor who recently broke the news that the Qatari royal family snapped up a Cézanne for $250 million. Despite that banner number, the panelists agreed, all is not well in the art market.

“What is taking place now,” the appraiser Victor Weiner said, “is, for lack of a better word, let’s say a schizophrenic manifestation of the art market.” Contemporary art auctions are thriving, but, he said, “We have basically a lot of the market, across the board… not doing terribly well. It’s a very strange moment.” (An aside: Ms. Peers noted that Mr. Weiner had the esteemed honor of weighing in on the worth of Steve Wynn’s $139 million Picasso after he put his elbow through it a few years back, for the insurance company Lloyd’s of London.)

Insurance executive Dorit Straus, of Chubb Group of Insurance Companies, concurred. “There are large segments of the market, where [a collector] bought something in the ‘90s and it’s not keeping its value, and in fact it’s a big struggle to convince people that they should lower values [in their insurance papers]."

The segment of the art market devoted to design has been particularly hard hit, the art collector and Observer columnist Adam Lindemann noted. “Design’s a disaster,” he said. “It’s kind of like a wipeout.” He shifted to a positive note: “Now is the time to buy.”

The design market, Mr. Lindemann argued, is suffering from a glut of material and a lack of strong dealers, the types that can keep prices up by defending artists at auction, as many of the world’s top-flight art dealers do. (Think of David Zwirner showing up to auction to bid on an Alice Neel, whose estate he represents, for instance.)

“Any collectible, whether it’s baseball cards or vintage Ferraris or any kind of art is ultimately resting on the shoulders of the dealer network and the strength of those dealers who are supporting that market,” Mr. Lindemann said. “There’s two ways they support it. One, they’re well capitalized, which is the best way, or two, they’re very charming and great salespeople. You need a combination of those two things.” Sounds a bit like Larry Gagosian.

While noting that some market sectors are “dry,” Mr. Lindemann was perhaps the panelist most optimistic about the art market’s future over the medium to long term. “I really think the art market overall is going to continue to do better than anyone expects,” he said. Interest in contemporary art is spreading, he pointed out, and new collectors are popping up all around the world. He said, “Damien Hirst might be a big name in New York City or London, but there are many parts of the world that have not yet heard of him.” Whether they will want to own his work when they do hear about him is, of course, an open question.

Ms. Peers asked if the art fetching record numbers today will land in the art history books. “Who cares?” Mr. Lindemann answered saucily. “We’ll all be dead."

Image of the bathroom at James Fuentes's room at the Dependent Art Fair. We did not use this bathroom. (Photo by Rozalia Jovanovic)

The deluge of art fairs began at the ADAA Art Show, which we found to be classy and manageable. It is held at the Park Avenue Armory, a masterpiece of late Victorian architecture that takes up an entire city block. At the fair, there is also a full bar, so the bathroom situation was crucial. We should mention here: Our anxiety about public restrooms approaches a George Costanza level of fretfulness. We spent at least as much time thinking about where the nearest john was during Armory Week as we did thinking about art. The bathroom at an art fair is like the art fair in microcosm--a metonym representing the vibe of the event as a whole.

We'll come right out and say it: the Park Avenue Armory is our favorite place to pee in the entire city. The bathrooms are secluded in the basement. The men's room is at the other end of a long corridor from the women's. It has no urinals, just stalls, so there is this wonderful feeling of democratic privacy. If it would have been appropriate--and in no universe that we actually live in would it ever be--we would have just went in there to think, scribble some notes, maybe enjoy a canape in silence.

The Armory Show exists at the end of the line, as it were, on two massive piers on the Hudson River. You have to cross a highway to get to it and it's difficult enough even approaching the structure that when you finally do arrive, it feels more like a mirage in the desert. At a media preview Wednesday morning, we were tucked into one of Pier 94's endless rooms for a press conference that started an hour later than we thought it would. A lot of coffee was consumed. We waited for a time for a bathroom--one that looked like it had been built into the room specifically for the week of fairs (though we weren't sure). It was one of those single-person, pale white, fluorescent light deals and it was occupied. Our waiting ended as Glenn Lowry--the director at the Museum of Modern Art--emerged, wearing a nice suit and a purple scarf. Our journalist instinct displaced our physiological needs and we requested he answer a few questions for The New York Observer. (Again, that was probably entirely inappropriate! A man needs at least two minutes after emerging from the bathroom to center himself and reacquaint with his surroundings.)

"I'm not doing interviews," he said, and left the building entirely. Fair enough!

This seemed like a worthy metaphor. We felt like we were being told "no" a lot. Other metaphors we heard for the Armory Show that we liked were: "Whole Foods," "a bank," "Wal-Mart." Loved the David Zwirner booth, though.

We spent most of Thursday at Independent, housed in the former Dia building in Chelsea. The name "Independent" is obviously in reference to the fact that this is a different kind of fair (in fact, its founders call it a “temporary exhibition forum” instead of a "fair"), but the word could just as easily described the pleasant and liberating feeling one had using the bathroom, even though that was certainly not anyone's intent. In fact, the more we write here, the more we feel a bit like a psychopath. Sorry, art world!

Each of the three floors at Independent had a long row of single-person rooms that were sleek and Minimal, like the Dan Flavin lights that adorn the building's staircase. Even better, they were tucked away behind a wall, so Gavin Brown and Andrew Kreps couldn't see when you had to take care of some business while they were, uh, also conducting their own business (e.g. "selling art"). There was a long sink situated outside of the rooms, which is the only part of the whole bathroom-going experience that we don't mind being public. It's important to wash your hands, people!

Armory Week culminated for us on Saturday, at the Dependent Art Fair at the Comfort Inn on Ludlow. The participants had co-opted the hotel's rooms. The good thing here was that each room had its own place where a person could relieve him or herself--but it was a little too crowded for us to partake. Many of the bathrooms also had art on display, so it didn't seem right.

That didn't stop some people, however. Over at the room of Ramiken Crucible, the bathroom door was closed and a sheet of computer paper was taped to the door. It had the words "Michael Krebber Memorial & Graduate Research Center" written on it. Inside, there was a lit candle and music was playing softly.

"I'm gonna take a wiz," one guest told Blaize Lehane, who runs the gallery with Mike Egan.

"Just don't blow out that candle," Mr. Lehane said. "It's an important wiz."

The 1974 Artforum ad featuring Lynda Benglis.

The gallery and rare bookseller Specific Object had taken over a room at the Comfort Inn on Ludlow as part of the Dependent Art Fair, housed in a cramped hotel like the Armory Show used to be back in the '90s. In one of the best installations we saw during the week the art fairs descended upon the city, Specific Object had filled the room with ephemera from the 1974 Lynda Benglis Artforum ad controversy, which meant that when you got off the elevator, you could see a nude Ms. Benglis from the hallway with her hand wrapped around a double-sided dildo that jutted out of her crotch. It wasn't exactly the most unexpected thing we've ever seen at an inexpensive hotel, but it was up there.

The advertisement in the Nov. 1974 issue of Artforum was for an upcoming show at Paula Cooper Gallery and Ms. Benglis paid for it herself. In it, she wears nothing but a pair of sunglasses and flaunts the (quite large) dildo as much like a trophy as a sex object. She funded it by selling T-shirts with the image from the ad printed on them. One was in the room, laid out on the bed; it was for sale for $7,500. There was also a printing of the competing ad by Robert Morris, the contemporary and one-time lover of Ms. Benglis, dressed in S&M gear with a chain around his neck and dark sunglasses. It hung in the window, kitty-corner to the hotel's own framed photographs of stock images of New York--an innocuous scene of the Statue of Liberty at sunset and a picturesque view of a leafy walkway in Central Park.

Mr. Morris's frowning face was positioned in the hotel room in such a way that he appeared to be responding to the image of Ms. Benglis. His ad, it is worth mentioning, did not cause much of a stir.

But in the room were also the letters to the editor from the following month's issue of Artforum. Five associate editors, including art historian Rosalind Krauss, had written to denounce the ad, listing several reasons why it should not have been printed. Among them: "it exists as an object of extreme vulgarity" and it is "a shabby mockery of the aims of the...movement for women's liberation."

It is now art world folklore: those editors left to found the more theoretically-oriented journal October; Ms. Benglis made a portrait of each of them: five bronze dildos. A picture of the work rested in front of the letter.

Displayed on the bed was a fairly thick binder of letters written to Artforum's editor-in-chief at the time, John Coplans, which were given to David Platzker, who runs Specific Object, by Ms. Benglis. Many of these contained only one line, requesting the cancellation of their subscription. Others were more indignant. ("Is Ms. Benglis' double-sided dildo acceptable because it appears in a paid advertisement, or because it isn't real? [It] has been rather obviously retouched--eliminating any trace of penis and testicles.")

There was at least one letter that Coplans responded to. It was from Wesley Schroeder, the principal of Butler Middle School, who stocked their library with Artforum and had to answer some very perplexed questions from their young students when the November 1974 issue came out.

The editor suggested that the principal simply "tear the advertisement out of the magazine."

A work by Martin Soto Climent. (Courtesy the artist and Cleopatra's)

“You get to decide the brand of the beer, and therefore the color palette of the piece,” the SoHo art dealer Michael Clifton said on Monday night at the Cleopatra’s gallery in Greenpoint. He had just walked in the door and was discussing a sculpture by the artist Martin Soto Climent, whom he represents. “You bring your friends together, and Martin is usually present. You all consume the beer, empty the cans, and he delivers a slight crush to the belly and then assembles them into a sculpture.”

“It’s amazing to watch him do it,” Bridget Finn, one of the founders of Cleopatra’s, added. When Mr. Climent created one such work at the X Initiative a few years back, he crushed about a thousand cans during the party.

About a dozen people were drinking from plastic glasses under dim red and blue lighting. The Modern Lovers and Suicide played on a stereo in the back of the long, narrow space. It was a romantic enclave on a cold night, and another founder of Cleopatra’s, Bridget Donahue, was pouring wine, which was going quickly. The gallery was between shows, and so there was no art on view. This was another Climent gathering.

Later in the week, the seven bottles of Charles Shaw were to be made into limited-edition sculptures conceived by Mr. Climent, who was down in Mexico. He had sent along photographs to serve as models for his pieces, and the plan was for the Cleopatra’s curators to build them, and offer them for sale in their hotel room at the one-day Dependent Art Fair on the Lower East Side on Saturday.

“We have these balloons that you build animals out of—pink, blue and white balloons,” Ms. Finn said. “And we’re going to figure out how to recreate them based on his images.” In the photo we saw, one section of a pink balloon is inflated inside the body of the bottle, and another section has bubbled up above the rim. Another thin piece of the balloon stretches the length of the bottle, resting underneath it. It looked like a complicated project.

“He was just so generous about how he insisted on this,” Ms. Finn said. “He’s sort of created the piece and is now handing it off to us.”

Back in 1919, Marcel Duchamp, based at the time in Buenos Aires, did something a bit similar, writing to his sister Suzanne in Paris and asking that she make a sculpture for him by hanging a geometry textbook on the balcony of her apartment. She did, and the artist titled the work Unhappy Readymade.

But there was no such negativity in Greenpoint. “The work really comes together in a moment of celebration," Mr. Clifton said. "Each one is unique, and each one has a different kind of arrangement of balloons and forms. They’re like floral arrangements." After a bit more discussion he excused himself to get a glass of wine.

Dice: 'I love how art can be anything, even this conversation.'

For your viewing pleasure, there's a vertical slide show of Wednesday's MoMA Armory party over at the always terrific Hairpin, assembled by Observer pals Jon Cotner and Claire Hamilton.

The question they posed: what do you like about art?

Previous slide shows in this series have included "Wishes" and "Nicknames."