The Armory Show has been open for only a few hours, but Champagne bottles are popping with impressive regularity, red dots denoting sales are appearing next to works, and gargantuan croissants are being snapped up at the outpost of Breads Bakery. The Modern section on Pier 92, which is devoted prima… Read More

Dustin Yellin has always been into books. His collection includes one owned by Robert Frost in which the poet scribbled a verse, and he has the first English translation of Nostradamus from the 17th century. All this is to say nothing of his scores of books published by Olympia Press, home to Lolita… Read More

Some of the worst weather of the winter didn’t keep collectors away from the Seventh Regiment Armory building on Manhattan’s Upper East Side last night for the opening of the ADAA’s annual fair, The Art Show. Raymond Learsy, Martin Margulies, Howard Rachofsky, Agnes Gund, and other top art patro… Read More

One gloomy morning this week at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, I was standing in a snaking, claustrophobic line--the first of many--for the press preview of a retrospective of the Icelandic singer Björk, when a woman with a heavy German accent said humorlessly and without the slightest hi… Read More

I’d been an art dealer in Los Angeles for three years when I decided I’d had enough and got a job working the bar at Hop Louie, a neighborhood establishment in Chinatown. After Sinky, the 72-year-old Chinese bartender, suffered his second hernia, I started working there seven days a week. I char… Read More

Who needs soccer when you’ve got fairs, galleries, and a flood of international collectors animating the country’s art scene? Read More

In George Friedrich Handel’s 1743 opera Semele, which is based on a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a young woman named Semele runs away from a would-be marriage to have an affair with Jupiter. She finds herself in trouble when Juno grows angry because her husband is sleeping with a mortal. Nat… Read More