When it comes to gifts for art lovers, wrapping original art is the ultimate power move. But here’s the catch: collectors pour their hearts—and usually their bank accounts—into curating deeply personal collections. If you know your giftee very, very well, a piece of art can be a very, very good gift. You could also treat the collector in your life to a gallery outing or surprise them with a session with an art advisor. But if adding to their collection feels too ambitious, there are plenty of artsy presents for everyone on your list, from the absolute obsessive to the casually cultured. Whether you’re working with a shoestring budget or aiming for extravagance, there’s no shortage of options that are thoughtful, stylish and primed to impress. Enjoy our guide to the gifts guaranteed to thrill any art enthusiast.
Salon Art + Design’s 14th edition runs through Monday, November 10, 2025. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com
Beautifully curated and seamlessly uniting art and design, Salon Art + Design 2025 unfolded once again within the grand setting of the Park Avenue Armory, offering a natural elegance few fairs achieve. It’s an event that never feels forced or overly eclectic; here, 50 global exhibitors assembled a calibrated and elegant mix celebrating craftsmanship at the crossroads of tradition and innovation. The fair maintains the thrill of discovery, offering rare and exquisite objects that require no connoisseur’s credentials to appreciate—especially when the Upper East Side crowd begins shipping champagne. As former director now Chairwoman Jill Bokor told Observer “The atmosphere of the Park Avenue Armory is perfect for an event like Salon, because it, in itself, is a curated work of design.”
At opening night on November 6, that atmosphere—along with the fair’s hallmark elegance—was palpable in every corner, from the Art Deco treasures at Bernard Goldberg Fine Art radiating the charm of the Belle Époque across continents (several of which sold by the opening night) to the ancient South Arabian and Byzantine pieces at Ariadne, which extended the fair’s reach far beyond the 20th Century into the timeless spirituality of the ancient world.
Although design and furniture have been among the collectible categories most affected by Trump’s tariffs—some of which are set to rise to 50 percent in January 2026—dealers at Salon are still presenting an impressive array of modern and contemporary design from across geographies. Several gallerists admitted that their participation was possible only because their pieces had already been imported, noting that the U.S. market is likely to feel the full impact of the new duties in the coming months. Under the executive order signed by Trump on September 29, a 25 percent tariff applies to wood imports and derivative products—including upholstered furniture and kitchen cabinets—effective starting October 14. Imports of softwood timber and lumber face a 10 percent rate, while upholstered wooden products incur a 25 percent duty. Kitchen cabinets and their components are likewise taxed at 25 percent per order, with rates set to climb in January 2026 to 30 percent for upholstered furniture and 50 percent for cabinetry and related parts. This comes at a moment of remarkable strength for the market for collectible design and decorative arts: according to ArtTactic, the category grew 20.4 percent in 2025 to reach $172 million, up from $143 million the previous year.
Salon Art + Design showcases the pinnacle of design, presenting the world’s finest vintage, modern and contemporary pieces alongside blue-chip 20th-century artworks. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com
In one of the first rows, Converso Modern’s booth paired Alexander Calder’s vibrant tapestries—crafted in Guatemala and Nicaragua—with a tribute to Pennsylvania’s New Hope Modern Craft Movement, the 1960s community that bridged traditional craftsmanship with modern design. Highlights included sculptural metal and carved wood pieces by Phillip Lloyd Powell and Paul Evans, shown alongside the elemental modernism of George Nakashima.
Awarded this year’s Best Booth, the London-based Crosta Smith Gallery presented a moody, cinematic homage to 1930s Art Deco—refined, atmospheric and irresistibly elegant. Marking the centenary of the 1925 Exposition Internationale des Arts Décoratifs et Industriels Modernes, the defining event of the Art Deco era, the gallery presented a selection of impeccably preserved works in wood, lacquer and galuchat celebrating a century of decorative mastery. Each piece reflected the sophistication of the 1920s and 1930s, including exquisite creations by Émile-Jacques Ruhlmann, Katsu Hamanaka and Clément Rousseau. Particularly striking was a pair of lacquer panels by Hamanaka depicting Adam and Eve dancing in nature with quintessential Deco elegance—the sinuous lines and subtle symbolism balanced by the sensual tension of intertwined snakes. Equally rare was Ruhlmann’s méridienne in amboyna burl wood, gilt bronze and silk bourrette upholstery—a unique variant of the Marozeau model commissioned by the Borderie family, epitomizing his sculptural refinement. Founded in 2018 by Marine Edith Crosta and Daniel Smith after collecting Art Deco while furnishing their home in the south of France, the gallery is now participating in all leading design fairs, including PAD London.
Crosta Smith Gallery at Salon Art + Design 2025. Crosta Smith Gallery
Nearby, Downtown-based Bossa Furniture continued to serve as a bridge between the U.S. and Brazil, showcasing the warmth of modernist Brazilian design through an intergenerational dialogue between Joaquim Tenreiro—one of the founders of modern Brazilian design—and contemporary designer Lucas Recchia, accented with a vintage stool by Lina Bo Bardi. Returning for their second year at the fair and fresh from Design Miami/Paris, Bossa sold a unique chaise by Joaquim Tenreiro during the preview, priced at $90,000, along with two pieces by Recchia.
Many exhibitors adopted a curatorial approach that seamlessly integrated art and design, blurring distinctions between collectible furniture, fine art and historical masterpieces. At Incollect, a captivating juxtaposition paired modernist and contemporary design with an Anish Kapoor reflective sculpture and playful Picasso ceramics, creating a lively dialogue between modern icons.
Elsewhere, Galerie Gabriel skillfully paired modern design with works by Sam Falls, while several booths leaned fully into fine art. Opera Gallery, with its global presence, offered an interior-friendly selection of blue-chip names designed to appeal to Salon’s broad audience. Standouts included a striking George Condo drawing priced around $100,000, a sensuous Picasso work on paper and sculptures by Manolo Valdés—among them a wooden reinterpretation of his Menina series inspired by Velázquez. Another highlight was Carlos Cruz-Diez’s optically mesmerizing Physichromie Panam 112, shown alongside pieces by Juan Genovés, Thomas Dillon, Keith Haring, Cho Sung-Hee, Jae Ko and André Lanskoy.
The 60-year-old Galerie Gmurzynska, specializing in 20th-century modern and contemporary classics, impressed with a monumental Louise Nevelson work, City Series (1974), spanning an entire wall and exemplifying her mature phase of assemblage sculpture. The booth also included three mixed-media collages by Nevelson, a rare early wood panel by Robert Indiana from his Coenties Slip period and Yves Klein’s F 48 (1961), a luminous piece from his Monochrome und Feuer exhibition. A rare surviving box construction by Dan Basen from the 1960s New York avant-garde rounded out the presentation. “We love taking part in Salon Art + Design. The blend of art, design and jewelry is truly exceptional, a great experience. The opening was extremely well attended, and we have sold one work so far,” said gallery director Isabelle Bscher, who represents the third generation of the Swiss-born Gmurzynska family at Salon Art + Design 2025.
New York-based Onishi Gallery, known for championing contemporary Japanese art and design, presented “Clay, Iron, and Fire: The Bizen and Setouchi Heritage,” a striking tribute to Japan’s enduring craft traditions. The exhibition celebrated the intertwined legacies of Bizen ceramics—born 900 years ago from the region’s iron-rich clay and revered by tea masters for their organic textures—and Osafune swordmaking, famed for its refined curvature, subtle grain and balance. With works ranging from a $2,900 sword to ceramic masterpieces priced between $30,000 and $50,000, the booth embodied Japan’s devotion to transforming natural materials into lasting beauty, infused with the timeless aesthetics of wabi-sabi and ichi-go ichi-e.
Similarly devoted to the Japanese spirit of craftsmanship, the minimalist, clean booth of Ippodo Gallery explored the meeting point between Eastern sensibility and Western material practice, featuring Ymer & Malta’s pioneering resin light sculptures (Paris), Akira Hara’s intricate Murrine glass works (Venice) and Andoche Praudel’s tactile ceramics (Loubignac). Examining materiality as a universal language, their works dissolved the boundary between art and function, finding beauty in tactile intelligence. By the close of opening day at 9 p.m., the gallery had sold more than $60,000 worth of art. “The preview event drew a large number of enthusiastic visitors, and it’s clear that the fair has grown and evolved since last year,” Churou Wang, the gallery’s associate director, told Observer. “We’re looking forward to seeing how the coming days unfold.”
Ippodo Gallery. Courtesy Ippodo Gallery
On the contemporary design front, London’s Gallery FUMI stood out with a presentation celebrating its new representation of San Francisco-based artist and designer Jesse Schlesinger, coinciding with his first-ever design exhibition, Pacific, at the gallery’s London flagship. Ahead of a dedicated presentation at FOG Design + Art in San Francisco, FUMI showcased Schlesinger’s sculptural furniture—works merging nature, philosophy and material consciousness. A second-generation carpenter deeply rooted in the Bay Area, Schlesinger crafts with locally salvaged wood, blending ceramics, bronze, glass and wood into meditations on texture, surface and function.
London’s Charles Burnand Gallery, which specializes in collectible design and lighting, presented a captivating booth that reflected the growing shift in taste toward design rooted in organic sensitivity and material depth. Its curated presentation, “Liminal Monuments: The Edge of Becoming,” unfolded as an elegant choreography of designers across geographies, exploring form in a state of becoming—continuous growth, evolution and transformation. Every object in the booth felt interconnected and evocative of natural structures, from plant life to geology, offering a contemporary design language that draws inspiration from nature to rediscover the soul of materials and humanity’s relationship with them.
Particularly outstanding among the booth’s luminous creations was Midnight Tulip by Ian Milnes—a meditation on the transience of beauty, capturing a fleeting moment suspended between bloom and disintegration. Inspired by the 16th-century phenomenon of “broken tulips” and crafted from sycamore, walnut, cherry and resin, its marquetry petals appeared to drift outward in slow motion, their blackened, watercolor-like surfaces evoking both bloom and decay—embodying a space where fragility and radiance coexist. Equally striking were the organically graceful, cocoon-like wire-crochet lamps by Korean designer Kyeok Kim, floating in the corner like luminous cellular formations that connected the micro- and macrocosmos through shared patterns and order. Handcrafted from fine metal mesh, these sculptural lights existed in a liminal space—both soft and metallic, airy yet architectural—expressing fragility and endurance in perfect balance.
Alexander the Great as Apollo, 1st century B.C.-1st century A.D, presented by Phoenix Ancient Art. Gilded bronze, obsidian and gypsum alabaster eyes. Photo: Elisa Carollo
And as always, Salon Art + Design offered museum-quality treasures at the top tier of the market. A standout among them was Alexander the Great, presented by Phoenix Ancient Art—a gilded bronze Roman sculpture from the 1st Century with obsidian and alabaster eyes that radiated the aura of a rediscovered world. Believed to be one of only two known portraits of Alexander—the other housed in Herculaneum—the work was a rare masterpiece of ancient craftsmanship.
Todd Merrill Studio’s booth also bridged designers across geographies, uniting leading artists from North America, Europe and South Korea, reaffirming the gallery’s reputation for material innovation and sculptural form. Highlights included Amsterdam-based Maarten Vrolijk’s Sakura Pendant Lighting—a luminous evolution of his Sakura Vessels—and German artist Markus Haase’s new bronze and onyx works, including a monumental chandelier and reimagined Circlet series pieces that merged sculpture and illumination through exceptional craftsmanship.
While some of the biggest names in collectible design—Carpenters Workshop, Friedman Benda, Salon 94 and Nilufar—were absent this year, likely due to the proximity of the Paris and Miami fairs, their absence was hardly felt. Instead, Salon Art + Design 2025 unfolded with a rare sense of cohesion and restraint, offering a stage where eras and disciplines engaged in a fluid dialogue that held at its center a timeless sense of beauty born from the convergence of material awareness, craftsmanship and innovation—qualities that defined the fair’s most striking functional yet evocative objects.
Todd Merrill Studio at Salon Art + Design 2025. Miguel McSongwe/BFA.com
Last week, Brussels Art Week’s inaugural full-city edition, RendezVous, animated the Belgian capital with exhibitions, performances, screenings and talks across more than 65 venues. Founded by curators Laure Decock and Evelyn Simons, the initiative transformed the city into a walkable constellation of art spaces spanning downtown, uptown and midtown neighborhoods. The week pulsed with ambition and wit, balancing international names with local voices and institutional heft with grassroots initiatives. And while many of the art week exhibitions remain open through October, the concentrated energy of the opening days set the tone for the city’s autumn art season, shaking off the summer lull.
Decock and Simons’ manifesto captures the ethos behind the project: “For us and for many, Brussels is a unique place. Conveniently central, discreetly humble—surrounded by big sisters such as London and Paris, but brimming with a creative energy that is ferocious… A city defined by an enriching diversity, a charming chaos, an avant-garde that has been going steady for over 100 years and where new trends inscribe themselves onto a canvas of strong art historical traditions.”
At the heart of the 2025 programming was The Tip Inn, a temporary salon conceived by Zoe Williams as artwork and gathering point. Equal parts dive bar, nightclub and installation, the venue had candlelit tables, satin curtains and an atmosphere pitched between decadence and parody. A monumental print of Jan Sanders van Hemessen’s Prodigal Son (1536) presided over the room, while sausages hung like garlands and a video loop showed a girl casually relieving herself among glasses of champagne. Visitors ordered the artist’s signature whiskey-Montenegro cocktail, pocketed lighters inscribed with “Can I show you my portfolio?” and drifted between conversations, poetry readings, screenings and DJ sets.
The Tip Inn, a salon-style installation by Zoe Williams. Courtesy the artist
Williams, a Marseille-based British artist, has long explored the performative dimension of hospitality. By staging a bar, she foregrounded the dynamics of service, consumption and rebellion, while The Tip Inn itself captured Brussels humor and irreverence, reminding everyone that art weeks need not be confined to white cubes.
RendezVous unfolded across three main zones. Downtown, centered around the city center and Molenbeek, there was a strong mix of historical reflection and contemporary experimentation. At Harlan Levey Projects, Amélie Bouvier’s exhibition “Stars, don’t fail me now!” (on through December 13) examined humanity’s enduring fascination with the cosmos. Working with archival solar images from the Observatoire de Paris-Meudon, the Brussels-based artist transformed deteriorating glass plate negatives into meticulously drawn “photodessinographies.” Graphite and ink captured both celestial forms and the fragile material traces of scratches and fingerprints. Hanging textiles such as Astronomical Garden #1 and #2 extended this investigation into fictionalized landscapes, oscillating between scientific observation and poetic imagination.
Nearby, Galerie Christophe Gaillard opened “Le Contenu Pictural,” Hélène Delprat’s first solo show in Belgium (on through October 31). Borrowing its title from René Magritte’s irreverent ‘période vache,’ the exhibition highlighted Delprat’s own commitment to risk-taking and play. Alongside new works, rarely seen gouaches from the late 1990s testified to a two-decade hiatus in her practice, their intensity sharpened by that rupture. The presentation follows her major retrospective at Fondation Maeght and precedes a forthcoming exhibition at Centre Pompidou-Metz in 2027.
Grège Gallery offered a different model altogether. Founded in 2021 by Marie de Brouwer, the initiative bridges art, design and architecture, and twice annually it hosts site-specific exhibitions in extraordinary locations—from medieval farmhouses to brutalist landmarks—while its Brussels space functions as a showroom and meeting point. For RendezVous, the gallery highlighted this nomadic, cross-disciplinary ethos, underscoring how entrepreneurial visions are reshaping Brussels’ cultural landscape.
Galerie Greta Meert revisited the late career of Sol LeWitt with “Bands, Curves and Brushstrokes” (through October 25). The works on paper from the 1990s and 2000s charted his shift from rigorous geometry to more fluid gestures, balancing spontaneity with systematic logic. Upstairs, the gallery previewed an online viewing room devoted to British artist James White. His forthcoming series “Indoor Nature” features photorealist paintings on aluminum, presented in plexiglass boxes, capturing domestic interiors where plants introduce subtle tension between artifice and vitality.
Kenny Scharf, JUNGLENIGHTZ, 2025. Oil, acrylic & silkscreen ink on linen with powder-coated aluminum frame, 213.4 x 243.8 x 7.6 cm. Courtesy of the artist and Almine Rech. Photo: Hugard & Vanoverschelde photography
Ixelles, the heart of uptown Brussels, was buzzing. At Almine Rech, Kenny Scharf’s “Jungle jungle jungle” (on through October 25) presented the artist’s unmistakable universe of cartoonish ecologies and consumerist critique. Scharf, a veteran of the New York Downtown Scene that saw Keith Haring and Jean-Michel Basquiat rise to fame, continues to expand his cosmic pop language. Works such as JUNGLENIGHTZ (2025) exemplified his lush, frenetic engagement with nature, nightlife and dystopian exuberance.
Johanna Mirabel’s “I Wish,” at Galerie Nathalie Obadia through October 25, highlights the tradition of ex-voto painting. Drawing on both European and Latin American precedents, the French artist of Guyanese descent wove together sacred motifs and secular imagery. Scenes of disaster and recovery conveyed gratitude, anchoring her first Brussels solo exhibition in a rich cross-cultural lineage.
Bernier/Eliades Gallery showcased Martina Quesada with “If This Is a Space” (through October 25). Her geometric wall sculptures and pigment-on-paper works established rhythmic systems of variation and resonance. Pieces like The verge was always there (2025) interacted with shifting sunlight in the gallery, blurring distinctions between material presence and atmospheric suggestion.
At Xavier Hufkens, Charline Von Heyl’s debut exhibition in Brussels affirmed her reputation as one of the most inventive painters working today. The canvases danced between exuberance and rigor, improvisation and discipline. Rather than resolving into answers, they insisted on painting as an open-ended inquiry—a dialogue as mischievous as it is profound.
Moving toward midtown neighborhoods like Sablon, Forest and Saint-Gilles, Gladstone Gallery presented “In the Absence of Paradise,” Nicholas Bierk’s contemplative still lifes and portraits. Drawn from personal photographs, the Canadian artist’s oil paintings addressed grief, transformation and memory with understated intensity.
At Mendes Wood DM, Julien Creuzet unveiled “Nos diables rouges, nos dérives commotions,” his first Brussels solo show, on through October 25. Anchored by the figure of the Red Devil from Martinican carnival, the immersive installation combined films, wallpapers, sculptures and sound. Creuzet reimagined the masked body as a fluid, untamed entity traversing mythologies and diasporic histories. Rice, tridents and fragmented limbs recurred as potent symbols, layering ancestral spirituality with contemporary politics. His cosmology was unsettling yet emancipatory, opening unexpected pathways of imagination.
Design also had a strong presence. Spazio Nobile staged a joint exhibition by Kiki van Eijk and Joost van Bleiswijk, curated by Maria Cristina Didero. Celebrating two decades of collaboration, “Thinking Hands” highlighted the duo’s whimsical yet precise approach, rooted in Eindhoven’s design culture. Furniture, lighting and installations demonstrated how their practice resists mass production in favor of intuition and shared invention.
Institutional programming added depth. At WIELS, the group exhibition “Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order” explored ecological precarity through myth and dream. Curated by Sofia Dati, Helena Kritis and Dirk Snauwaert, it assembled more than thirty artists. Highlights included Gaëlle Choisne’s Ego, he goes, a talking fridge filled with decaying goods that critiqued consumer waste while invoking Creole cosmologies. Works by Marisa Merz, Cecilia Vicuña and Jumana Manna reinforced the exhibition’s call for alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.
Amélie Bouvier’s “Stars, don’t fail me now!” at Harlan Levey Projects. Courtesy of the artist & Harlan Levey Projects. Photo credit: Shivadas De Schrijver
Outside, Sharon Van Overmeiren’s The Farewell Hotel transformed the WIELS garden into an inflatable castle open to children and adults alike. Referencing pre-Columbian motifs, museological displays and Pokémon, the installation invited visitors to bounce, explore and reconsider what art can be. Its playful verticality epitomized the week’s spirit of porous boundaries between seriousness and delight.
RendezVous demonstrated how Brussels’ art scene thrives on contrasts—between the polished and the raw, the historical and the experimental, the institutional and the independent. It unfolded not just as a showcase of exhibitions but as a lived experience of the city itself, weaving fluidly through neighborhoods and communities. Far from another entry in the crowded calendar of art weeks, RendezVous affirmed Brussels’ singular position in the cultural landscape: cosmopolitan yet intimate, grounded in tradition yet insistently forward-looking. With this momentum, anticipation for next year’s edition is already mounting.
“Magical Realism: Imagining Natural Dis/order” at WIELS. Photo: Eline Willaert
According to Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, the digital art we make today has a long lineage dating back to the 1950s. Tezos Foundation
As the world becomes increasingly digital and technologically integrated, it is harder than ever to draw clear boundaries between analog and digital experiences. Technology is now deeply woven into how we express, communicate, share and process information and ideas, making it nearly impossible to find contemporary art completely untouched by digital tools or platforms. Artists working in traditional media inevitably engage with the digital realm in some capacity—even if only as a platform for sharing or a source of inspiration for works created in more conventional formats.
For this reason, the term digital art can be confusing. Some interpret it broadly to include any work shaped by technology, while others reserve it for “digital-native” practices created entirely within the digital space.
To explore this evolving landscape, Observer spoke with Aleksandra Artamonovskaja, who has worked in the Web3 art space for nearly a decade and now serves as head of Arts at TriliTech, the team behind the Tezos Art Foundation. Artamonovskaja shared her perspective on the current state of digital art, its market and the broader ways technology and digital platforms are reshaping how art is produced and circulated.
“You have both professionals in the broader creative economy or artists whose works are exhibited in traditional institutions such as museums, falling into this category,” she tells Observer. Still, there are some defining parameters. “To me, digital art is a form that relies fundamentally on digital technology, not just the tools, but the medium itself, as the product or the process. Digital art allows experimentation across various areas, such as lighting, texture, movement and interactivity, that traditional media can’t always convey. It’s not just about using a screen as a canvas, but often reinventing what the idea of a ‘canvas’ even means.”
Tezos began actively engaging with the digital art world in 2021. Artists and collectors on NFT platforms like Hic et Nunc, Objkt, and fx(hash) adopted the blockchain for minting and selling works, quickly making it a hub for digital, generative and experimental art.
Established around the same time, the Tezos Foundation formalized its support for digital art soon after, launching major initiatives between late 2021 and early 2022. Since then, it has evolved into an artist-first hub within the Web3 ecosystem. Through high-profile partnerships with institutions like MoMA and Art Basel, it is positioning itself as a vital conduit for Web3 creativity.
Since Artamonovskaja was appointed head of arts at TriliTech in 2024, she has played a central role in ensuring that the Tezos ecosystem maintains an artist-first framework. Priorities like sustainability, affordability and inclusivity are amplified through programming that raises global awareness of digital art while empowering existing talent with meaningful opportunities for growth.
Sabato Visconti, barbie~world~breakdown, 2024. At the Museum of the Moving Image, as part of its partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou. Courtesy of MoMI
“Marketplaces on Tezos like objkt, along with high-profile partnerships with the Museum of the Moving Image, Serpentine, ArtScience Museum and others, help contextualise digital art within broader cultural landscapes,” Artamonovskaja says. She sees contextualization as fundamental to supporting the appreciation and institutionalization of a newly established field like digital art. “Our current programs also encompass a range of activities, including residencies, publications, and exhibitions, nurturing a creative environment that fosters artists’ career trajectories.” One major upcoming initiative she previewed is Tezos’ second participation at Paris Photo, in partnership with Paris-based Artverse gallery, where curator Grida Jang Hyewon will present a group booth featuring work by six artists who originate from, or are deeply shaped by, Asian cultures.
Fostering awareness of these tools and technologies is another key priority. “The Tezos Foundation has supported several educational projects, including WAC Lab, which taught professionals from cultural institutions about Blockchain best practices, as well as artist onboarding programs, such as Newtro, a program focusing on Latin American artists,” Artamonovskaja says. “Through these ongoing initiatives and upcoming projects, it’s no surprise that the Tezos ecosystem serves some of the most respected voices in the digital art space, including bitforms gallery, the Second Guess curatorial collective and the University of Applied Arts in Vienna.”
Just as importantly, Tezos has helped connect and map a decades-long history of relationships between artists and digital media, beginning with early net art and extending back to Nam June Paik’s pioneering inquiry into media and technology as a form of expression. As Artamonovskaja explains, the history of digital art runs from the algorithmic plotter works of Manfred Mohr and Vera Molnár, to Alan Rath’s kinetic sculptures fusing electronics with movement, to Paik’s groundbreaking video art, and to the browser-based experiments of 1990s net artists like Cory Arcangel and Olia Lialina. “Each era redefined what it meant to create and experience art in dialogue with new technologies, shifting from producing singular digital images to building works that exist natively within global networks. I’ve always been fascinated by how forward-thinking some of the artists were. Seeing Nam June Paik’s Electronic Superhighway in person, its glowing map of America alive with moving images, makes you reflect on how foretelling his vision was to today’s hyperconnected, media-saturated world.”
The “Paintboxed Tezos World Tour” exhibition at Digital Art Mile, Basel, 2025. Courtesy Tezos Foundation
The Paintboxed Tezos World Tour paid tribute to this long history, spotlighting the heritage of the Quantel Paintbox—the legendary 1980s commercial computer designed for artists and famously used by David Hockney and Keith Haring. “The digital art we make today most certainly belongs to a long lineage dating back to the 1950s, with interactive systems, initiatives such as E.A.T. and tools like the Quantel Paintbox,” Artamonovskaja points out.
In the past year, the Paintboxed Tezos World Tour has appeared at major art events in Miami, Paris and New York, culminating in a pivotal exhibition at the Digital Art Mile in Basel. The Basel presentation was accompanied by a catalogue of works produced by early pioneers such as David Hockney and Kim Mannes-Abbott—among the first to experiment with the tool—alongside a younger generation of artists like Simon Denny, Coldie and Gretchen Andrew. “Recognizing these histories enriches our understanding and positions Web3 art not as a fleeting trend but as a continuation of decades of creative innovation,” Artamonovskaja says.
She recalls first encountering Olia Lialina’s work in person at her presentation during Rhizome’s 7×7 conference in 2017, an experience that left a lasting impression. “What struck me most was not only her early, both critical and playful approach to the browser as a canvas, but also the nuanced commentary on the word ‘technology,’” she recalls, noting how the artist was vocal in her criticism of how the term had been overused to the point of losing specificity. “This reminded me how in the 1990s, ‘technology’ in an art context often meant something tangible, visible and experimental. In contrast, today it’s so embedded in our lives that we rarely stop to question it, and by doing so, in a way, we lose our power. The work and reflections of early net art artists often underscore the importance of maintaining that spirit of inquiry.”
Creative freedom and new audiences
For Artamonovskaja, the digital realm opens vast possibilities: dynamic experimentation, global reach and direct control. Over the past decade, she notes, social media has reshaped the artist’s role—shifting it away from reliance on galleries and institutions toward a more direct relationship with audiences. “Some artists have become their own marketers, community builders and storytellers, shaping not only how their work is seen but also how it’s valued,” she says. “This shift didn’t just change the market side of art; it influenced the medium itself. Many artists, including those working in traditional media, have begun creating works either conceived for the screen or engaging with it from a conceptual or critical perspective, responding to its formats, visual rhythms and narratives, while reflecting on how these elements shape our ways of seeing and experiencing art.”
The rise of blockchain and NFTs has taken this further by adding new layers of transaction and interactivity. “Within the Tezos ecosystem, for example, sales platforms like objkt.com have nurtured their own curatorial voices and collector bases,” she explains. “At the same time, through our ongoing initiatives like Tezos Foundation-supported open calls, residency programs and partnerships with leaders such as Art Basel and Musée d’Orsay, we’ve created new success structures for artists.” Fully harnessing this potential means embracing both creative and structural possibilities—whether by experimenting with digital-native forms, exploring interactive or generative elements, or engaging with blockchain-native ecosystems to connect with communities and shape how their work is experienced, owned and valued.
Rodell Warner, World Is Turning, 2024. At the Museum of the Moving Image, New York, as part of its partnership with the Tezos Foundation. Photo: Thanassi Karageorgiou. Courtesy of MoMI
The importance of context in curating digital art
Context, Artamonovskaja stresses, is just as important for digital art as for any other medium when it comes to establishing value and recognition. Digital art curation—including art on the blockchain—has evolved rapidly over the past several years, she notes. Having worked in the digital art space for nearly a decade, longer than many of her contemporaries, she has witnessed these shifts firsthand. “It may not seem like a significant amount of time in the grand scheme of things, but in the Web3 world, everything is accelerated,” she observes. “The COVID-19 pandemic forced the traditional art world to embrace virtual environments en masse. In blockchain and digitally-native art, these technological advancements that reshape how the audience interacts and experiences the work happen every few months.”
For this reason, curating digital art already extends far beyond simply displaying work—it is about building trust and transparency with both artists and viewers. “Given the size of the digital art market and its novelty, the curator’s role is often also that of an art dealer helping artists position their work, connecting them with the right collectors and helping them navigate the commercial and technical aspects of selling digital art in a rapidly evolving environment,” she clarifies.
“In many ways, the Web3 market functions as an accelerated mirror to the traditional art world—compressing the cycles of creation, curation, sales and audience engagement into days or weeks instead of months or years,” she continues, noting that this might not apply to every project but that, over time, it makes the discovery of emerging talent more accessible. “The same dynamics of representation and influence exist, but blockchain-enabled provenance, global marketplaces and always-on communities make the process faster, more transparent and oftentimes more efficient.”
Aleksandra Artamonovskaja with a work by Jenni Pasanen. Courtesy Tezos Foundation
Artamonovskaja acknowledges that whether this acceleration is good or bad for artists and the market is still open to debate, but she sees one undeniable advantage: the ability to engage new audiences.
Challenges in collecting and preserving digital art
In May 2022, the Tezos Foundation unveiled its Permanent Art Collection (PAC), curated by Misan Harriman, as its first official high-profile program dedicated to celebrating and elevating digital art created within its ecosystem. This marked the beginning of an ongoing commitment to showcase and acquire works by diverse, emerging artists.
Artamonovskaja has been collecting digital art and NFTs for years. When asked about her criteria for identifying a significant work worth collecting, she says it often comes down to whether the piece moves her or signals that the artist is bringing a fresh perspective to her areas of interest. “Factors such as strong artistic vision, thoughtful use of technology and meaningful cultural context are also incredibly important,” she explains. “Novelty—both conceptual and visual—plays a significant role.” This is a defining feature on sales platforms like objkt, which frequently highlight advanced interactive pieces ranging from minimalist HTML sketches to fully immersive browser-based games and on-chain data experiments. Other platforms, such as EditArt or InfiniteInk, enable interactive co-creation and dynamic experiences.
“As someone who collects the art they love, I find that the resonance within the wider ecosystem often plays a big role,” Artamonovskaja says. “Given that the market was born under the premise that there are no more gatekeepers and each artist can represent themselves, an artist’s approach to self-representation can be as important as how a gallery typically represents its artists.” Today, a community of artists exists with varied definitions of success, some prioritizing reach and community growth over traditional markers of recognition. “Perhaps this is where comparing art on the blockchain to traditional markets is a fallacy.”
Collecting digital art also raises new questions around preservation and conservation, as these works often depend entirely on the technologies through which they are created, circulated, displayed and stored. Preservation begins with recognizing that it’s not just about maintaining the still or moving image as we see it on a platform or as we right-click save it. “If we care about the work’s association with a blockchain, we need to maintain a relationship between the smart contract and the output,” she explains. “We need to care about whether the work has an archival file, a higher resolution exhibition copy, or just the web copy we see in front of us. We also want to safeguard the metadata and the environments in which the work is intended to reside.”
She notes that ensuring a worthwhile chain of documented provenance for blockchain-registered art requires active collaboration between artists, technologists, archivists and node operators. For a work to remain tied to a chain, archival advocates and conservation specialists may need to preserve not only the piece but also its operational context.
Across blockchains, one of the most significant risks in recent years has been the shutdown of marketplaces. “In such instances, it was either the core team’s efforts or the community that preserved the works, ensuring they remained accessible as intended,” Artamonovskaja points out, emphasizing that this was possible only thanks to open-source access and the benefits of decentralization.
On Tezos, for example, every artwork collected on objkt is stored on IPFS, a decentralized network designed for long-term preservation. The team ensures that each asset is pinned and remains accessible, with safeguards in place so that even if the platform were to go offline, the art would remain secure. “Tezos provides a reliable and future-proof foundation for building digital art collections,” Artamonovskaja emphasizes.
Another advantage of NFTs on Tezos is that its self-amending blockchain and formal on-chain governance make contentious hard forks far less likely than on other chains, reducing the risk of the same NFT appearing on two separate blockchains. “Because protocol upgrades are proposed, voted on and activated within the blockchain itself, NFTs remain recorded on a single chain that all participants continue to use.”
When it comes to conversations about technology, the biggest elephant in the room is the A.I. revolution, which is reshaping nearly every aspect of our lives—and, in turn, how artists approach their work and creative process. Increasingly, artists admit to using A.I. not only to refine work but also to brainstorm or seek feedback. This has sparked ongoing debate about the role of A.I. in the creative process—as a tool, an assistant or even a collaborator.
Asked about the opportunities A.I. presents for the art world and the risks it poses, particularly for digital art, Artamonovskaja is convinced that if it is approached as an instrument, it can help extend an artist’s vision. Its value, she argues, depends on how intentionally it is applied—whether to streamline workflow, unlock new aesthetic possibilities, or enable experiments that would be impossible through traditional means.
“Artists like Dr. Elgammal have even credited A.I. as their creative partner. Ultimately, art is subjective, so the idea of improving it is hard to define,” Artamonovskaja considers. “For some creators, A.I. is integrated on a deeper technical level—artists like Ivona Tau or Mario Klingemann write their own systems, shaping the algorithm as much as they shape the final product. Other artists, such as Trevor Paglen or Kevin Abosch, engage with A.I. from a critical standpoint, using it to question the technology’s politics, biases and social implications.”
At the same time, she warns of potential risks: diluting authorship, amplifying biases embedded in training data or reducing the artist’s role to that of a passive editor rather than an active creator. In 2021, she collaborated with Mike Tyka to release his renowned Portraits of Imaginary People on the blockchain, a project that delved directly into these themes. By training GANs on thousands of Flickr images, Tyka generated faces of people who do not exist, exposing how A.I. systems can reproduce and amplify identity biases. “His approach challenged notions of authenticity and sparked dialogue about technology’s influence on representation and trust,” she notes.
With the arrival of more sophisticated tools in recent years, Artamonovskaja observes that the market is still struggling to understand and value generative artistic practices. “For me, the most compelling A.I. art is not simply about the image produced, but about the relationship between human intention and machine capability, and the conceptual story that emerges from that relationship,” she reflects, emphasizing again that it is not about the medium itself but the critical and creative approach to it—the inquiry into its potential—that transforms a work of art into a tool for better understanding, or even anticipating, the broader sociological, anthropological and political implications of these new technologies in our existence.
“Everyone kind of started out on the street, and then certain people became very successful and very hierarchical, and Edward just wasn’t having it,” painter Frank Holliday tells filmmaker Brian Vincent in the documentary Make Me Famous. The story Holliday sketches in that one sentence portrays 1980s East Village neo-expressionist Edward Brezinski as a quintessential starving artist—a painter of integrity whose refusal to sell out precluded his own stardom.
Vincent doesn’t argue with Holliday, and his film at least entertains this mythic version of Brezinski, who is compared in passing to Van Gogh. As the title Make Me Famous indicates, the documentary also acknowledges Brezinski’s ambition and his dreams of getting off the street and grasping some of that success for himself. In the end, the story Vincent tells is not really about an overlooked genius. Instead, it’s about how our insistence on framing genius as a yes or no question reliably and efficiently destroys the human beings who make art.
Brezinski (born Brzezinski in 1954) grew up in Michigan. His father was probably an alcoholic, his mother was distant and support for gay children in that time and place was minimal. He studied at the San Francisco Institute of Art and then moved to Manhattan’s Lower East Side, where he lived across from a men’s homeless shelter and became part of the growing arts scene.
Brezinski’s moment of greatest notoriety came in 1989, when he attended a solo exhibit for Robert Gober at Paula Cooper Gallery. One of the pieces on display was an exact replica of a bag of donuts; Brezinski reached inside and ate one. Gober had treated the donuts with a toxic preservative, and Brezinski had to be rushed to the hospital. Afterward, he contacted the press, and the story became an art world legend.
The incident, in the context of the documentary, neatly encapsulates the combination of fierce commitment, shallow envy, failure and substance abuse that characterized Brezinski’s career. A passionate painter in surprisingly traditional modes (he is perhaps best known for his portraits and his crucifixion scenes), he was enraged to see the success of Gober’s pop art/Dada-inspired work. Probably drunk, he ate the donut as a kind of protest; he claimed, tongue-in-cheek, that he couldn’t tell them from the refreshments. Effectively, Brezinski participated in Gober’s commercial pop art spectacle; the only way he could become known was to appropriate someone else’s concept, turning his back on his own talent and work in an alcohol-fueled fugue of arch disavowal and despair.
Brezinski was very disillusioned by the end of the ‘80s. But even earlier in the decade, the documentary chronicles the push/pull between his hatred of sellouts and his desire to become one. Numerous acquaintances talk about his incessant, pushy, gauche self-promotion; at openings, he would pass out self-made invites to his own gallery shows, and he asked virtually anyone who visited his apartment/studio to buy his paintings. At the same time, he was a perfectionist who would often destroy his own work if he thought it didn’t measure up. Since he was a portrait painter, this often meant asking other artists and art world people—colleagues and potential connections—to sit for him for hours before trashing the paintings without even letting them see them.
No one in the documentary is exactly willing to say that the art Brezinski did finish was groundbreaking or Important with a capital I. Yet many of his efforts are eye-catching and impressive. An expressionist painting of Nancy Reagan, for example, has a striking, Warhol-esque quality with a mocking, evocative edge—Brezinski seems to be celebrating Nancy as a kind of gay icon even as he sneers at her for her and her husband’s callous indifference to gay people and the AIDS crisis. The Nancy painting isn’t remembered as a defining image of the era, but it could have been. “What’s the great difference between a Kenny Scharf painting and an Ed Brezinski painting?” curator Annina Nosei asks.
Maybe the difference is that Brezinski once tossed a glass of wine on Nosei in revenge after she failed to show up for a gallery appointment. Being an asshole can lose you gigs, though Brezinski was hardly the only asshole, or the only drunk, in the East Village. So maybe the difference is just luck and being in the right place at the right time. Fame and fortune are a roll of the dice; get the right number and you’re everybody’s darling. Get the wrong one and you’re nobody.
The film itself chronicles this calculus and occasionally questions it. “These people [with money] went out and exploited these people [artists], and if they could make them pay off, then fine, and if they couldn’t pay off, then they dumped them,” actor and curator Patti Astor comments with cheerful bitterness. When the filmmaker asks her why no one wanted to exploit Brezinski, she laughs.
Perhaps the laugh is because Astor thinks Brezinski wasn’t worth exploiting. Or maybe she laughs because she is aware that Brezinski was, in fact, exploited. An art scene, after all, requires sub-superstars: people who contribute ideas, passion and venues; people who show your work and lend you their work to show; people who argue about what’s good and what isn’t; people who serve as muses and take you for your muse; people who create a community around art and dreams, hope and vision.
Brezinski participated enthusiastically in the scene that launched Keith Haring and Basquiat and his friend David Wojnarowicz to fame. And for his pains, he got little respect, little love and a pauper’s grave in France, where he died penniless and alone in 2007 at the age of 52. The Reagan administration’s callous disregard of AIDS was merely an extension of the administration’s, and the culture’s, indifference to the lives of creators and gay people. We learn late in the film that Brezinski’s money troubles might have been solved by an inheritance had he not been estranged from his family. But of course, queer people are often estranged from their families, which is why queer people are disproportionately poor.
If the U.S., or New York State, or New York City, had a real arts policy and valued all artists rather than the select few who could be turned into investment opportunities, maybe Brezinski would still be alive. Instead, the U.S. has elected a president who hates the arts and LGBT people even more than Reagan did. Rather than cultivating and celebrating creators with talent, drive and dreams, we seem determined to create an endless carousel of Brezinskis, each of whom we are determined to strangle with the entrails of their own dreams.
Make Me Famous is a sad film because Brezinski wanted to be famous and was not. It’s an enraging film because it shows the extent to which we devalue and despise the arts and all the non-famous people who create them.
Keith Haring, Untitled (Breakdancers and Barking Dog), 1985. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
As the November marquee auction season approaches and the major auction houses start to build momentum by revealing their top lots, the search for who has consigned what and why begins. Provenance, as we know, can play a big part in establishing and validating an artwork’s value, whether by sparking renewed interest, providing reassurance to buyers or adding art historical context. Sotheby’s, for its part, just announced that a group of thirty-one rare Keith Haring subway drawings will star in the Contemporary Day Sale on November 21 with a combined estimate of between $6.3 and $9 million. This is a very exciting moment for Haring’s collectors as none of these works have ever been offered at auction before, and it’s very difficult to find the originals in such well-preserved condition.
Haring came from a family of modest means in Pennsylvania. His father was an amateur cartoonist who, from his early years, encouraged Keith to invent his own characters. Haring’s talent for drawing led to his receiving a scholarship to attend the School of Visual Arts in New York City, where he studied semiotics, but it was his contact with the copious street art that was everywhere in 1980s New York that inspired him most.
Haring started drawing in the subway just as a hobby while en route to work: noticing that the MTA covered unpaid advertisements with black matte paper, he began scrawling his inventive visual language on them in white chalk. In short order, his unique and highly recognizable style attracted his first fans. Nonetheless, Haring continued his drawings in front of the crowds and the NYPD, who ticketed and even arrested him for vandalism over the next five years. Describing them in an essay published for Art in Transit: Subway Drawings, published in 1984, he said felt that his work was “more of a responsibility than a hobby,” a way to leave a critical trace as an individual presence in a cannibalizing metropolis dominated by corporate interests and unstoppable real estate speculation and gentrification. Even when Haring’s career skyrocketed and he established himself as a leading figure in the downtown art scene, he said the subway was still his “favorite place to draw.”
During his subway project, he appropriated thousands of black panels for energetic mark-making to build an inventory of iconic images, such as his nuclear dogs, angels, flying saucers, babies, smiley faces, etc.—the motifs mostly engineered at his seminal creative haunt, Club 57. “I think the origin of the subway drawings was part of how they came about in a sense, where it was part of Keith’s DNA,” Gil Vazquez, executive director of the Keith Haring Foundation, said in a statement. “There’s a significant component of generosity. When I think of the subway drawings, I think of them as one of Keith’s first acts of activism.”
Given the nature of urban guerrilla art, most of the subway drawings have been lost or destroyed, making the ones coming to auction a true rarity for fans and institutions looking to add to their collections. Because of their importance and rarity, the works have also been included in prominent exhibitions, including the Brooklyn Museum’s 2012 critically acclaimed exhibition of Haring’s career titled “Keith Haring: 1978-1982,” which marked the last occasion the group exhibited together. Most of the works coming to auction have a long exhibition history, like Untitled (Still Alive in ’85), which is one of the final subway drawings and has been featured in many prominent exhibitions at MoMA, the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania, Musee d’Art moderne de la Ville in Paris, de Young Museum in San Francisco and the Kunsthalle der Hypo-Kulturstiftung in Rotterdam.
Behind their extraordinary survival is a passionate art collector, Larry Warsh, who has taken on stewardship of these thirty-one works for nearly 40 years, building the most exceptional and extensive assemblage of Haring’s subway drawings in private hands. Observer spoke with Wash to understand how those gems came into his collection, the importance of preserving these drawings and, more generally, what’s in his art collection today.
“I’ve been collecting Keith Haring since the mid-’80s, and collecting all kinds of artwork all along, drawings, subway drawings, even a car, anything to do with Keith that was very compulsive at the time,” Warsh told Observer. Arguably, the collector was one of the first supporters of Keith Haring, despite the fact that he doesn’t see himself as a patron in traditional terms. “I was a patron for him in supporting his creative self, what he stood for and what he did. I was not a traditional patron; I just gave money or attended all the gallery functions. I was more pure in the sense of seeing his creativity and what he was doing then. It was a different time.”
Warsh is also an art historian, having published three books about Keith Haring. When asked how he spotted Haring’s talent so early and realized that his work would have historical relevance, he demures. “First of all, it was him, as a creative being and a person. Wherever he drew as artwork, his energy and translation of symbols and signs were unique, and most people would feel comfortable looking at his art. It was art for everyone. He made art for everybody, and he was a generous person and cared about people; he cared about causes; he cared about kids.”
Those subway drawings were part of his tridimensional works—Warsh is currently writing a book on this—and link him to the notion of the Duchampian ready-made, bringing it to a more democratic and public level by appropriating elements in urban spaces. “He was a student of the immediate art act in drawing and painting on objects like Duchamp, so these are considered like found objects.”
While he sometimes tried to get them directly from the subway, Warsh admitted that peeling them out proved difficult, so he just started to find and buy them compulsively. “I basically hunted them down and tried to accumulate them as a body of work,” he said. “It was not about commerciality. It’s about historical importance. My feeling was that these were historically important.” For the same reason, he also started buying Basquiat’s notebooks, being one of the first to acknowledge the historical importance of those texts. Today, he also has the most extensive collection of them. “It’s not the commercial goal that propelled me into collecting. It was the manic, compulsive accumulation personality that I had for many, many years.”
Perhaps unsurprisingly, Warsh started collecting very early in his life, having been introduced to art by an uncle who was a collector of German art. However, he really got into it when he moved to downtown New York City, immersing himself fully in the art scene and the collective energy that shaped an entire community, creating the fertile ground for this entire moment of art history to happen. “I was interested in the energy of the time,” Warsh explained. “My good friend Renee Ricard used to visit me at all night hours with all kinds of things. So I learned with my eyes, and I felt with my emotions, and I had to look into the future and feel what I was collecting in the present would have value. Not just commercial value, but historical value.”
Keith Haring, Untitled (Boombox Head); est. $400,000-600,000. Courtesy of Sotheby’s
When asked why he wanted to part with them, Warsh said that he wanted to let them circulate and be seen again by giving the opportunity of ownership to another collector or, even better, an institution that will show them. “I think I did my job to accumulate them as the body of works,” he said. “They were shown in museums; we did a book, with one version in Mandarin. I don’t want to own much art anymore in the same way I wanted to. I’m thrilled with what I did, but at this point, it’s time for institutions to have a chance to add these drawings to their collections because they are the most important works by this artist, I believe.”
To further promote the value of this group of works, Sotheby’s is hosting an immersive exhibition of the subway drawings that will help visitors envision these works where they were initially conceived by turning the galleries into a vintage subway station with turnstiles, benches and archival footage. Warsh is excited to see what the auction house and exhibition partner Samsung (SSNLF) are cooking up, as it aligns with his desire to share Haring’s art with as many people as possible, particularly in the city. “I think New Yorkers will want to come and see this because everybody has always heard about them or seen pictures, but very few have had the chance to see these drawings in person,” he said. “Seeing them in person, seeing how fragile they are and how sensitive they are, will leave everyone amazed.” Wash concluded that he hopes the exhibition will further enhance the value of Keith Haring’s work and revive interest in it by showing its relevance as an essential part of a pivotal moment in New York’s cultural history.
Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration at New York’s Penn Station. Photos by David Plakke
Brooklyn-based artist Chitra Ganesh has just unveiled a large-scale public video installation at New York’s Penn Station, part of the “Art at Amtrak” series of rotating exhibitions curated by award-winning public art producer Debra Simon and her team. Known for her distinctive graphic and comic style, Ganesh blends South Asian iconography with science fiction and queer feminist theory. Her work celebrates feminine energies and ancestral symbolism, inspiring a deeper symbiosis between living beings, beginning with a reconnection to the inner self.
For this commission, Ganesh created Regeneration, a highly symbolic video narrative focused on the regenerative power of plants. The immersive video is designed to remind commuters of the vibrant life thriving in nature and reconnect them with, as the artist puts it, elements that transcend humanity’s limitations, encouraging a regeneration of perspective and a reset of both the mental and the physical.
This marks the first time the “Art at Amtrak” series, which previously installed works in the Amtrak Rotunda and 8th Avenue Concourse, has put art in the Hilton Corridor. Observer spoke with Ganesh at the unveiling of the installation, which complements her other video work, Coherence, on view in Moynihan Train Hall through October 14.
Chitra, your video works incorporate many elements of your symbolic and visual language. The flora, along with specific plants and species, seems intentionally symbolic in the narrative you’ve created. For example, the Rose of Jericho and the Welwitschia plant of Southwest Africa symbolize resilience, while others are native to the NYC area. How would you describe the importance of plants in your narrative, and how do they serve as metaphors for broader societal phenomena throughout human history?
I use plants from many regions worldwide to underscore humanity’s consistent recognition and association of plants with healing, regeneration, growth, resilience and remembrance. It seems especially important to remember that we humans are in a symbiotic relationship with plants—as we live through an unprecedented moment of climatic destruction that endangers countless species worldwide to the point of extinction. Plants have forever been at the forefront of human consciousness as a metaphor for life cycles and a scale of life and time in nature that is much larger than we typically think daily.
I was also interested in how specific plant qualities are similarly recognized across cultures, sometimes having multiple and universal resonances. Two examples are the calla lily and the dandelion. Calla lilies originated in South Africa and then migrated around the world. In Greek and Roman symbology, their chalice-like shape represented rebirth and bounty. In Mexican culture, they have been associated with purity and rebirth, often seen in historical paintings depicting Easter. I was also inspired by Diego Rivera’s use of calla lilies in his large-scale murals and paintings, which symbolize rebirth and revolution, as the works between 1920 and 1940 were made during the Mexican revolutions.
Dandelions, to me as a New Yorker, are symbols of resilience, survival and thriving despite the harsh conditions of urban grit such as cement and asphalt. In Scandinavian culture, words in Norwegian and Swedish reference the strength of the dandelion. For example, ”maskrosbarn,” meaning “dandelion child,” refers to someone with a tough childhood and still turns out alright, like a dandelion breaking through asphalt. The Swedes have long spoken of “dandelion” children, namely “normal” or “healthy” children with “resilient” genes who can do pretty well almost anywhere, whether raised in the equivalent of a sidewalk crack or a well-tended garden, as explained in an article by the Atlantic.
As you shared in the press release accompanying this important project, your first encounter with art as a child was in an urbanscape. How do you feel this street language has influenced your artistic style, and how would you describe it today?
There are so many ways in which street art has profoundly impacted my work. My relationship with public transport is long and rich. I started riding the subway to school by myself when I was ten years old, in 5th grade. Before they came to New York, my parents were native residents of Calcutta, India, a vast and bustling city, and lifelong public transport lovers. My mother never got a driver’s license, and my father loved his Senior metro card so much that he continued to ride the Brooklyn buses until his death.
In many ways, street art, such as Keith Haring’s chalk drawings executed on stripped billboards in subway stations and tunnels or the graffiti-covered subway cars that were a hallmark of the 1970s and ’80s, was the very first site-specific art I ever saw. Long before I entered a museum, I was engaging with the vibrancy, maximal color and mark-making energy of such works, which were larger than life scale. They were a massive part of my gateway into incorporating graphic aesthetics and brief presentations of my work.
Public art has a unique and beautiful quality to it that has the potential to offer an even more profound and transcendent experience with visual art than one we might have in institutions such as museums or galleries. Seeing art in a museum or a gallery is more likely (though not always) a one-off experience—you go for a particular exhibition. Experiencing artwork in a place you frequent over and over, perhaps even several times a week or month, is an experience more akin to music. That is, you organically engage work through various moods and mindstates, and depending on your emotional weather, you receive different transmissions from the work and have a deeper relationship with it by being able to look and be with the art repeatedly. It becomes part of both your external and internal landscapes. That is a very profound element of public art that historically was much more aligned with how people experienced religious art in spaces they regularly visited.
As a budding artist in the early 1990s, I was deeply inspired by the works of New York-based artists such as Basquiat, Brazilian artists OSGEMEOS and West Coast artists such as Barry McGee and Margaret Kilgallen, all of whom developed a singular aesthetic that drew from graffiti and freight train hopping culture. I love art in airports, artwork in subways and chalk drawings done by my neighbors’ children on the sidewalks outside my apartment.
Chitra Ganesh’s Coherence at Moynihan Train Hall. Photos by David Plakke.
Most of your work features psychological and spiritual interplay between inner and outer dimensions, between the purely unconscious and a more senatorial world. How do you feel the video allowed you to explore these dimensions further?
Video and animation have been essential media for exploring the interplay between internal and external landscapes in the place where collective and individual or societal and psychic realities converge. Drawing-based animation offers astonishing potential for exploring the intersection of complex worlds. In Coherence, outlined silhouettes of figures are set against a lush landscape, and inside the bodies, we can witness an equally rich and contrasting landscape. In this sense, the bodies themselves become portals into another dimension. Portals have been an essential feature in my work as of late; they are a form that allows the compression of time and space, allowing audiences to traverse vastly different landscapes and temporal zones within the blink of an eye. They also allow us to see how multiple realities, mindstates or universes can coexist simultaneously. This idea of seeing many different landscapes or ways of being simultaneously seems crucial to me at this moment we inhabit—for example, where we are fed information through predetermined algorithms that limit and curate what knowledge we might access and where we are charged with the task of navigating a politically polarized and fraught climate. There are also multidirectional movements within each frame; for example, an expanding cosmos within the body while a unicorn gallops in the background or walking into a forest within the silhouette paired with flora and animals from a painted jungle scene.
The place where those videos are shown is a crossway where so many people from different backgrounds and with many other lives pass by. What narrative and experience did you want to conceive and deliver in this space?
I want to offer harried, preoccupied and anxious travelers a moment of respite that gives them some breathing room from the anxiety-driven process of running from A to B. Unfortunately, that is an ingrained part of the New York City commuters’ lives. Perhaps engaging with some moments of beauty and depictions of natural beauty—in worlds that exist both just outside and far beyond the confines of massive transport hubs like Penn Station—allows some breathing room and a reset that will bring some peace and pleasure into a charged, hectic and challenging space. This is through engaging with moments of respite, such as a figure gazing at hand, offering her a young olive plant, hands reaching for butterflies or a young girl scattering the seeds of a dandelion pod. In coherence, this pause or catching one’s breath becomes more literal as viewers are invited to be in synchronous relation with the figures on the screen.
The installation comprises two different chapters: Coherence and Regeneration. How do those differ or act as a continuation of the narrative?
Both invite the audience to consider a broader arc of time and an environment that can elicit beauty and joy, speaking to the capacity for resilience and survival despite threats of destruction. This feels like a powerful metaphor to access at a time on Earth when there is so much ongoing natural death and actions towards extinction via militarized violence, extractive fossil fuel processes and emissions in places all over the world, as well as right here at home.
Chitra Ganesh’s Regeneration is on viewat New York’s Penn Station as part of the “Art at Amtrak” series curated by Debra Simon.
Mera and Don Rubell at the Washington, D.C., campus of the Rubell Museum. Shuran Huang for The Washington Post via Getty Images
Don and Mera Rubell first met in the early 1960s in the library of Brooklyn College. The duo, now aged 83 and 80 respectively, sat at the same table for six months without saying a word to each other. “Then he says, would you marry me?” Mera tells Observer.
When they revisited the library 50 years later, they were astonished to discover that their initial meeting had taken place on the art floor. “We didn’t know at the time, because neither one of us had anything to do with art,” says Mera. She was a psych major at Brooklyn College, while Don was a mathematics graduate from Cornell.
Today, however, art is very much a part of their lives. The Rubells oversee one of the preeminent collections of contemporary art in the U.S., with 7,400 works by more than 1,000 artists, and they have a widely acknowledged and well-earned reputation as spotters of young talent. “We’ve only had one week where we haven’t owed the art world money,” Don tells Observer. What’s less well-known is just how much their relationship is at the heart of their collecting activities. Don and Mera will celebrate 60 years of marriage and 59 years of buying art this year, and they aren’t planning on slowing down anytime soon.
The Rubells’ humble beginnings
They fell into art collecting while living in Chelsea, where the couple walked around the studio-filled neighborhood in between breaks of studying and began building relationships with the artists working and living there. “At some point, they said, ‘Well why don’t you buy something?’” recalls Mera. But with Don attending medical school and Mera working as a teacher on a $100 weekly salary, they didn’t have an art collector’s budget. So they agreed to begin acquiring works in the $50 to $100 range by putting aside funds for modest payment plans.
After relocating to Miami from New York in the 1990s, the couple now sustain their passion for art through real estate. They run Rubell Hotels, which Mera describes as “a day job to pay for the collecting.” And as for the collecting? Masterpieces by the likes of Kehinde Wiley, Yayoi KusamaDamien Hirst and Takashi Murakami can be seen at their Rubell Museum, a private art institution with locations in Miami and Washington, D.C.
The idea to open their collection to the public came from the Rubells’ son Jason, who alongside his artist sister, Jennifer, got the art bug from his parents. As a young teen, Jason acquired his first piece—a painting by the then-rising star George Condo—with a payment plan funded by a tennis racket-stringing business. He went on to study art history at Duke, where his senior project focused on how private collections become public museums. “That was the seed that got us involved,” says Mera. “He was so seduced by the idea of these private collectors becoming public institutions that he encouraged us to do the same.”
In 1993, they opened what was then known as the Rubell Family Collection in a two-story warehouse formerly used for storage by the Drug Enforcement Agency in Miami’s Wynwood area. The area’s transformation from a once-underdeveloped neighborhood into a leading arts district is often credited to the Rubells, who also played a role in convincing Art Basel leaders to bring the fair to Miami Beach. To keep up with their growing collection, Don and Mera moved the renamed Rubell Museum to an expanded space in the Allapattah district of Miami—another neighborhood that has seen a proliferation of arts spaces and increasing gentrification in recent years. In 2022, they opened a Washington, D.C., outpost in a former school once attended by Marvin Gaye.
The Rubell collection is built on consensus
The couple were early collectors of artists like Keith Haring. Robert Gauthier/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images
Despite having been in the art collecting game for more than half a century, the Rubells continue to focus on truly contemporary work. “A lot of collectors fixate on their generation and they stick with that generation,” says Mera. “All of a sudden, 50 years later, you wake up and say, ‘Oh my god, I’m only focused on artists that are dying or dead.’”
They primarily focus on work by young artists and those who haven’t yet received mainstream recognition—the same tactic they applied when becoming early collectors of now-famed artists like Jean-Michel Basquiat, Keith Haring and Cindy Sherman. “The dream and the fantasy is really to find the new Basquiat. And there always is a new Basquiat,” says Mera. The couple pointed to the French-Senegalese Alexandre Diop and Havana-born Alejandro Piñeiro Bello, as well as several young Los Angeles-based artists, as emerging talents to keep an eye on. While the Rubells try not to sell their artwork, they occasionally deaccession pieces to fund the acquisition of new ones.
Don and Mera say they are offered the best works by artists and gallerists who know it will be shared with the public. “They don’t want you to hide it in your basement, they want to show other people,” says Don. The couple is known for their intensive approach to art acquisition, which involves studio visits, in-depth conversations with artists and a rule that Don, Mera and their son Jason must unanimously agree on every purchase. If even one family member vetoes, the acquisition is a no-go. The three bring different strengths to the table, according to Mera, who describes herself as “more impulsive,” while Don focuses on research and Jason brings an art history perspective.
“I would say 50 percent of the time, we agree immediately, and 50 percent of the time, it’s a bloody battle,” says Don. The trio has only broken protocol once, when Don viewed a work he considered “absolutely fantastic” but his wife and son weren’t quite as enthusiastic about. “I bought the work without consulting everybody, and then Mera and Jason made my life so miserable that it was the only time we canceled,” he recalls.
Consensus also shapes how the Rubells operate as a couple. “It’s frightening when someone is out of control passionate about something and has the checkbook to spend it,” says Mera, adding that their process is reflective of how they started their life together. “It could have been his money, my money or our money. And it became our money,” she says. “So if we’re going to collect art, that decision has to be in the ‘we,’ not with an ‘I.’”
Art as a multigenerational affair
The art collectors also seek input from their daughter Jennifer, who chooses not to participate in their collecting activities but still participates in acquisition conversations, and their five grandchildren. “We have the eyes of different generations looking at the work,” says Don. “Ultimately, the history of what this work will be depends on a lot of different eyes, thousands of eyes, looking at a piece of work over time. So this is a very unfair advantage over others.”
Kaari Upson, Rubells, (2014). Courtesy the Rubell Museum
When it comes to the future of the Rubell Museum, both Don and Mera concede that they “won’t live forever.” They’re hopeful that their children and grandchildren will continue as stewards of the collection. Although “we’d be very upset if it became a chore for the next generation, or the generation after that,” adds Don. “They have to have the joy that we have.”
But for now, the Rubells are happy to continue pursuing fresh talent and experimenting with new programs. A recent collaboration with theater company Miami New Drama, for example, saw playwrights stage shows inspired by and performed in front of artwork hanging in the Miami Rubell Museum. One of the dramatic works centered on the 2014 piece Rubells by the late Kaari Upson, who was commissioned to create a portrait of Don and Mera for their 50th anniversary. Instead of photographing the collectors for a traditional painting, she asked for the couple’s shared mattress and cast it in silicone. The Rubells describe the journey their anniversary portrait took from mattress to play as “a way to understand what art does to the brain and imagination.”
It can also be seen as mirroring their own journey in the art world, which has strengthened their marriage instead of strained it. “My story is not about a successful woman with a vision to make something happen,” says Mera. “My story is really about how to make something happen inside of a relationship. And then, by extension, inside of a family.”
New York, New York: the city that never quite got over its ’80s era, its Club 57 or Studio 54, its graffitied subway system, Warhol or his films, St. Mark’s Church-in-the-Bowery, Grace Jones clad only in Keith Haring’s squiggles; a cast of characters sometimes mononymous, always prolific, and too often short-lived.
In Radiant (Harper)—one of several books this spring that take on the glam and tumult of the decade—Brad Gooch traces Haring’s defiant, definitive lines. There’s his entering a 15-foot-by-3-inch fantasia into his Kutztown, Pennsylvania, junior high school student art exhibit (parsing Haring’s youth feels relevant; the image of the radiant baby would become his signature) through his 1978 move to NYC to attend the School of Visual Arts and his finding community amid a band of Lost Boys. In Jennifer Clement’s forthcoming The Promised Party (Canongate), the author of the acclaimed Widow Basquiat describes that downtown Manhattan cohort: “All of us were some sort of runaway.” Of Haring, she writes, “Keith had tenderness in him, the tenderness that one finds in jails and hospitals.” Meanwhile, Cynthia Carr’s Candy Darling (FSG), the first biography of the glamorous queer icon, serves as a temporal prequel to the scene—Darling starred in the Andy Warhol–produced Women in Revolt (1971) and Tennessee Williams’s play Small Craft Warnings (1972) long before Haring enrolled at SVA.
Madonna and Haring in November 1989.COURTESY OF THE KEITH HARING FOUNDATION.
The meek—the castaways, the othered, the artists and lovers—did not inherit the city. (See the well-off transplants who bemoan what little of New York’s original grit lingers in her streets.) Still, their barbed beauty lives on. At last summer’s Blue Note Jazz Festival, 75-year-old Jones beguiled a new generation of New Yorkers in a 50-foot dress that winked to Haring; this April, Madonna closes out her The Celebration Tour. (And Gagosian LA’s “Made on Market Street,” opening this month, reminds us that Jean-Michel Basquiat and his art were bicoastal.) Prescient Darling captured an era of yearning in one of her many diary entries: “I wanted to be beautiful. My friends told me I was beautiful. I lived to be beautiful.”
HarperCollins
‘Radiant: The Life and Line of Keith Haring’ by Brad Gooch
FSG
‘Candy Darling: Dreamer, Icon, Superstar’ by Cynthia Carr
Canongate
‘The Promised Party: Kahlo, Basquiat and Me’ by Jennifer Clement
Anyone who has even the most cursory knowledge of Madonna ought to know by now that her mother, Madonna Fortin Ciccone Sr., died when she was just a child (five, to be exact). It’s been mentioned often over the years as the driving force for why she would seek to become the most famous woman in the world, yearning to fill the emotional void her mother left behind through the adoration of millions of people. It’s textbook psychology. Alas, before Madonna could attempt to secure the love of the masses (in addition to a lot of its hate), she had to do the grunt work first—and that meant an overwhelming loneliness during her first years in New York. That is, until she cultivated a circle of “Downtown friends.” At the center of that circle was Martin Burgoyne, who everyone described, essentially, as a delight. Being that Madonna was less prone to that description because of her “crass,” “rough-hewn” ways, Martin was almost like a social greasing agent for those who would otherwise be intimidated by Madonna.
That the two remained close even after she shot to superstardom was a testament to how much the street urchin-turned-pop star really did love him. While others had been cast aside along the way, Martin was an angel-faced charmer Madonna couldn’t possibly ditch. The “meanest” thing she ever did to him was have her A&R man, Michael Rosenblatt, be the one to say that his proposed album artwork for Madonna’s debut wasn’t going to cut it when, in fact, it was Madonna who felt that way because (per Seymour Stein’s account) she believed “it just wasn’t iconic enough.” Which meant Madonna was using “iconic” long before Gen Z started to toss it around to refer to the most mundane of shit. As Madonna went “deeper and deeper” into Hollywoodland after becoming famous, complete with marrying A-list actor Sean Penn, she never strayed too far from Martin or her “New York roots” (by way of Michigan). And yes, Martin and the “Downtown crew” were also invited to her star-studded wedding on August 16, 1985 (also Madonna’s twenty-seventh birthday). Soon after, three of the four key gay male guests—Burgoyne, Keith Haring and Steve Rubell—from the NYC scene would die of AIDS. The fourth guest in question, Andy Warhol, was spared from it by his inherent “asexuality.” Alas, his gallbladder was not.
Although the affair was fraught with drama due to the paparazzi’s infiltration (prompting Penn to famously write in the sand of the private beach near the house where they were to be wed, “FUCK OFF” in large letters so the message to the “chopperazzi” looming overhead would be crystal clear…in case there was somehow any confusion), Warhol of course called it “the most exciting weekend of my life.” What with his tendency to get hard over the presence of top-notch celebrities. He would also note in his diary, “Martin went down to the hairdresser earlier in the day to have his hair done. We rode in a limo out to Malibu and when we saw helicopters in the distance we knew we were at the wedding. Somebody had tipped the reporters off about where the wedding was and about ten helicopters were hovering, it was like Apocalypse Now.” And yes, that phrase could be used to describe the bulk of the 80s for gay men, who were summarily “picked off” by a disease that no one wanted to investigate because of the community it was adversely affecting. The religious right rhetoric that dominated under Ronald Reagan’s reign gave scandalized heteros further license to treat the novel virus as though it was “according punishment” for the gay men “going against God” with their “lifestyle.”
Just a year after Madonna’s wedding to Sean, Burgoyne would die of AIDS on November 30, 1986. It was a particularly somber day, as December 1st was also to mark the twenty-third anniversary of Madonna Sr.’s death. Martin, eerily enough, was twenty-three himself. Nothing more than a baby. His immortalization as a “child” due to dying so young would also crop up in the video for “Open Your Heart,” released in the World AIDS Day month of December, back in 1986. Of course, World AIDS Day wouldn’t officially exist until 1988, after WHO public information officers James W. Bunn and Thomas Netter, working for the Global Programme on AIDS, proposed it. It was a wonder that the day of acknowledgement and awareness actually got the green light “so soon.” But the only reason it did was because of the WHO’s decision to market the focus more on children in “disadvantaged countries” (a euphemism for Africa). Still, at least it was “something” from an official, respected organization. That was more than gay men had gotten out of their governments, especially the U.S. and U.K. ones. It was Bunn who settled on December 1st as a day of observance, because it was after U.S. elections and before the Christmas holiday, which meant the spotlight could briefly be put on something else.
A year before the first World AIDS Day, Madonna held a benefit concert at Madison Square Garden while on her Who’s That Girl Tour outing. It was the first time she would unofficially make “Live To Tell” her AIDS tribute song by dedicating it to the memory of Martin (the show was also a benefit for amFAR [American Foundation for AIDS Research]). And, uncannily enough, Madonna would choose to open the performance with the “Open Your Heart” boy (not the same one from the video itself, but meant to be “the same”) gliding past her on a chair, reaching out to her from the shadows as though to say, “Please help me.” It was an obvious nod to how haunted Madonna felt by being unable to save one of her best friends. The “little boy” that was Martin. The placement of the song after “Where’s The Party” also seemed to be symbolic of how the party quite literally stopped once so many gay men started “disappearing” from the dance floor.
The dark, one-two punch reminder of losing Martin on November 30th and her mother on December 1st was perhaps only slightly mitigated by the “invention” of World AIDS Day. Something that finally addressed an “issue” (to use understatement) that had been ignored and brushed aside by the mainstream for far too long. In what marks both the sixtieth anniversary and the thirty-seventh anniversary of Madonna Sr. and Martin’s deaths, respectively, World AIDS Day undoubtedly holds a continued poignancy in Madonna’s life. And yes, she’s certain to remark upon it in some way or another every December 1st.
With her current tour, The Celebration Tour, landing in Amsterdam during this year’s World AIDS Day, it’s undeniable that her performance of “Live To Tell” (which features numerous hanging screen images of some of the men Madonna knew personally [and many she didn’t] and lost to the disease, Burgoyne included) will take on an especial profundity. It, too, is arranged in the setlist to come after one of Madonna’s signature dance bops, “Holiday,” to drive home the point that a truly somber pall was cast over dance floors across the world when AIDS came to roost and the question, “Where’s The Party” took on a far more existential meaning.
In yet another instance that very much proves Andy Warhol’s aphorism, “Art is what you can get away with,” the shattering of an expectedly expensive “Dog Balloon (Blue)” by Jeff Koons has turned out to be a collector’s wet dream rather than a tragedy. The decimation of the blue chrome sculpture (crafted from French Limoges porcelain) occurred in, where else, Miami. A place where art is not meant to be appreciated, so much as made into as much of a gimmick as possible (see: the banana taped to a wall at Art Basel that sold for $120,000). So maybe it’s to be expected that some “unassuming” observer at the “VIP art opening” for Art Wynwood would be casual and careless enough to bump into the stand displaying the work. Of course, perhaps it was on the gallery representing the piece, Bel-Air Fine Art, for placing so much faith in the supposed human ability to be graceful and delicate. Least of all around art valued at $42,000.
Although Bel-Air Fine Art could have technically furnished the expensive piece with a vitrine encasement to avert such a disaster, “When something is for sale, they take a chance on it because they don’t want to diminish the spectacular appearance of it to somebody who might be there to buy it.” This said by a security consultant named Steven Keller, who also added, “A lot of times [art gets damaged] because people are not careful enough and because they can be incredibly naïve about art.” Understatement of the century. But at least he was polite enough to use the word “naïve” instead of the more candid “philistine.” The hoi polloi plodding through galleries with their camera phones at the ready for the “perfect” shot or selfie has only added to the risk factor of “art assault” over the years.
With humanity also living in a time when it is assumed that everything is “fake” or “staged” for the sake of some larger “virality scheme,” many at the art fair believed it was another stunt in the style of what Banksy did to one of his own paintings, “Girl With Balloon” (there’s just something about art with the word “Balloon” in the title that makes it ripe for ruin, one supposes). Rigging it to self-destruct (a.k.a. shred itself) if it ever went up for auction, the painting did just that at a 2018 Sotheby’s gathering, where onlookers were treated to the simultaneous delight and horror of watching the work get obliterated. Originally bought for the price of 1.4 million dollars, the destroyed version of itself went for the even higher amount of 25.4 million (the same preposterous increase in value might occur for Koons’ shards as well).
Later, Banksy would quote Picasso on the matter with, “The urge to destroy is also a creative urge.” But when that urge isn’t calculated at all, as was the case with this klutz (or possibly just another oblivious being) of a woman at the art fair, it becomes merely another example of how the public is so often ignorant and undeserving of art, despite art’s very audience being (occasionally) intended for such ilk. And yet, there’s a reason art has been shrouded behind the moated world of the affluent for most of its existence: they’re not so damned careless with it. Obviously, if they’re willing to shell out millions in order to possess it. And, once upon a time, they were even willing to offer their patronage in order to secure it (clearly, rich people have evolved into stingier cunts since then).
In contrast, someone like Keith Haring was off-put by the idea of art being “owned” by the rich class, insisting, “Art is for everybody” (with the necessary caveat being, “Art is for everybody who can be around it without destroying it.”) Hence, his preference for the graffiti-oriented medium, scrawling his work in spray-paint on trains, walls and every highly visible surface in between. Jean-Michel Basquiat had a similar philosophy to his contemporary before the art world came knocking and rendered his work “gallery-worthy” with their approval.
Jeff Koons, needless to say, has been “gallery-approved” for decades, setting a record as the only living artist whose art (specifically, “Rabbit”) was able to fetch as high of a number as ninety-one million dollars at an auction. With “Balloon Dog (Blue), Shattered,” he might set another record. Mainly for how absurd the art world can get, in addition to how much “ruins” can be sold for. That the incident has happened at a time when humanity itself is living among the ruins that most companies can still turn a profit out of is perhaps too painfully poetic to acknowledge. We’re all willing to open our purses for the shards, as it were. It’s just that some of us are doing it for basic survival, whereas others are doing it to flex their financial clout on something especially superfluous.
