Dear Lucy.

A huge part of my life for the last six years has been the writing, selling and editing of my debut novel, Dear Lucy (out this week!).

A huge part of my life for the last nine years has been waiting tables at Edward’s in Tribeca, where I started working when I was 20 years old, testing the big-city waters during the summer of my junior year.

An American bistro with cramped wooden tables, cheap wine and a menu that never changes, Edward’s has long been a haven for aspiring artists. It is owned by Edward Youkilis (the uncle of Yankees slugger Kevin Youkilis), an artist who moved to Tribeca in the 1970s and used to run with the likes of Andy Warhol and Helen Frankenthaler. Mr. Youkilis has been in our shoes. He doesn’t kid himself about the reasons his employees are waiting tables. He respects and supports our aspirations. And every Tuesday night we have Starving Artist Night at Edward’s, when we offer $5 wine and hamburgers. This is about as perfect as any New York restaurant job is going to get.

But there are downsides to any job—to any career—and the downsides of working in a restaurant are intense, especially in the entitled and demanding climate of New York City. There are customers who refuse to make eye contact with you. There are the wavers and finger-snappers (yes, it’s true). Others try to convince you to let their dogs sit on their laps (without the proper companion-animal documentation, mind you). And of course there are those who are perpetually unsatisfied.

But hardest for me to make peace with is a type of customer who seems harmless enough at first, but has the power to leave me feeling more deflated than all the rest combined. It begins with the customer asking a simple question: “So what else do you do, when you’re not waiting tables?”

I have no problem with this question. In New York, chances are your waiter is also an actress, writer, musician, comic or student. Those aspirations are probably the reason she is living in the city.

What follows usually goes something like this:

Me: “I’m a writer.”

Customer: “What do you write?”

Me: “I wrote a novel.”

Customer: “Are you going to try and publish it?”

Me: “Yes! Actually, it is being published by Simon & Schuster.”

Customer (trying unsuccessfully not to look horrified): “Oh, then what are you doing here?”

I smile and excuse myself.

What offends me about this question is that while the customer has recognized that there was a chance that I, the server, might be pursuing other interests, the customer couldn’t also anticipate that I, the server, might also have any degree of success at that pursuit. Does my working in a restaurant necessarily mean that I couldn’t sell a book, or that my co-workers couldn’t land a role on Broadway, a record deal or a teaching job in their field? Is success inconceivable for the likes of us? Would the customer feel better if waitressing was equated only with failure? Would the customer feel cozier being served by someone with only broken dreams?

The answer that I don’t give the customer is this: I’m working at one of my jobs. Writing a novel takes a really long time, and before you sell it, it is unpaid work. Serving has been my paid work through college, graduate school, writing and revising my manuscript, finding an agent, selling the book and editing the book all over again. Waiting tables might not be a childhood dream, but the opportunities it has afforded me are blessings. I have a flexible schedule, I make a good hourly rate and there is little intellectual or artistic drain. I have a supportive boss and work with interesting, talented, driven people, people who are so passionate about what they do that they make all kinds of sacrifices to be able to stay in New York and give themselves the best possible chance at success.

But the important question is not why my writing and waitressing make the customer so uncomfortable. Instead, it is why the customer’s reaction makes me so uncomfortable. By acting like my dignity has been wounded, which it usually has, I am subscribing to the same classism, snobbery and criticism as the customer. Being offended suggests there is merit to the customer’s disapproval.

I vow, the next time a customer asks the dreaded question, “What are you doing here?” I will relish the opportunity to reply, “Living the dream.”

Because isn’t that what New York is all about?

Looking for a change of scene: Mr. Pearlstein and Ms. Cantor have sold their house. (Patrick McMullen)

When painter Philip Pearlstein moved to Manhattan in 1949, he and his college pal Andy Warhol subletted an dingy eighth-floor walk-up on St. Marks Place and Avenue A.

"The bathtub was in the kitchen and it was usually full of roaches, incredible roaches," Mr. Pearlstein once said of the apartment. Nor did their lot improve when they relocated to a West 23rd Street loft a few months later. Andy Warhol was said to have sent out address-change cards in glitter-filled envelopes announcing, "I've moved from one roach-ridden apartment to another."

They couple enjoyed painting canvasses. Not the walls.

Over the years, the living conditions of both artists changed radically as their careers took off, with Warhol landing in an Upper East Side townhouse and Mr. Pearlstein settling in an Upper West Side one with his wife, artist Dorothy Cantor.

But now Mr. Pearlstein is moving on, hopefully to yet more pest-free quarters, having just sold his brownstone for $3.4 million, according to city records. The buyers are Alan and Alexandra Murray.

The four-story house at 165 West 88th Street came on the market 11 months ago and went into contract May, when it was asking $3.995 million. Photos on Streeteasy show an abundance of white walls and hardwood floors—just the kind of stark place we might imagine for a man known for dispassionate paintings of nudes described by some as possessing a clinical clarity. The light, of course, is wonderful.

Mr. Pearlstein appears to have purchased the house in 1976, although city records do not list an address for a deed that was transferred to his name that year. When The Observer called him at his studio on West 36th Street, we were told that he was painting at the moment and could not come to the phone.

kvelsey@observer.com

Hipsters love high/low, right? (angela n., flickr)

It’s not like Melanie Malkin ever pictured herself living on the Upper East Side, a neighborhood that has, over the past 50 years, all but disappeared from the dreams of the young and the hip.

“I mean, when I first moved up here, I didn’t want to move up here. Never, never, never,” Ms. Malkin said, who grudgingly took a cheap sublet in the neighborhood seven years ago when she was 23 years old and working for MoMA. “Nobody wants to move here. When I tell people I live here, they’re, like, eww.”

But loath as Ms. Malkin was to leave her first apartment on 29th Street, she wasn’t making a lot of money working in the museum world and she found a rent-stabilized one-bedroom on 87th Street between Lexington and Third Avenue that cost $775 a month (it’s now $938 a month). In the early days, she kept telling herself that it was convenient and cheap, but then something unexpected happened.

She started to love the Upper East Side.

It’s close to Central Park, a quick walk to some of the city’s best museums, the little side streets are filled with quirky mom-and-pop shops and after some exploring, she found a handful of downtown-style restaurants and bars. She likes the neighborhood so much that she even held her 30th birthday at Carl Schurz Park, the oddly quiet gem on the East River that is home to Gracie Mansion.

“The posh/frat boy stigma of the Upper East Side kind of dominates people’s thoughts, but actually, 29th Street, where I used to live, was really fratty and it was pretty bland. I love where I am now. It’s more of a neighborhood, it’s kept its history and roots, it’s genuine,” said Ms. Malkin. “Maybe people are just lazy, they just want to live someplace that’s already cool, not to have to seek out and explore.”

“I have a friend who teases me that I’m a pioneer, that it’s going to blow up and become the next Williamsburg,” she added. “But I don’t think so. It’s a great place to live, but I can’t even get people to visit me here to prove it to them.”

Williamsburg it is not, but then, neither is Williamsburg anymore. And starving artist aesthetic be damned, the young and hungry would be better advised to find a place near the fat cats of the Upper East Side, where the rents are cheaper, provided you steer clear of the tony avenues near the park. The Upper East Side may well be one of the last outposts of old Manhattan that the young in Manhattan can actually afford. Besides, it’s the neighborhood that everyone who lives in Astoria brags they can see from their rooftops.

Auction house

ON A RECENT warm Saturday night, Second Avenue was filled with the young and old and not many people in between. Prosperous-looking older couples sipped white wine at the outdoor tables, looking tolerantly at the tides of teenagers drifting by, the girls clutching each other in the tipsy, excited way that made drunkenness seem almost sweet, like a kitten tangled in a ball of yarn.

It turned out all the in-betweens were hiding in Auction House, a comfortable bar on 89th Street. Inside, people chatted quietly on plush red velvet Victorian couches, relaxing under the gaze of somewhat naughty old-fashioned oil paintings in gilt frames.

Almost like Brooklyn, but there were no Urban Outfitted-collegiates (talk about exclusive: there’s a 25-and-older policy on Friday and Saturday nights), no taxidermy on the walls (in fact, the owner, a longtime vegetarian, has a no fur policy) and the bartender was refreshingly clean-shaven.

Auction House dates back to 1992—the year that New York magazine ran a Williamsburg cover story, calling it “The New Bohemia.”

“Back then, having antique furniture was really unique,” said owner Johnny Barounis, who also owns the Back Room on the Lower East Side. “At the time, I thought, ‘The style has been around for 100 years. It’s not going anywhere anytime soon.’”

A little something like the Upper East Side, maybe?

“I think it’s coming back. It’s very cyclical. I’ve been seeing an artsier crowd coming in to the bar. Back in the 1970s, it was a really cool place, there were clubs and it used to be fun to hang out up there,” said Mr. Barounis, who blamed the cabaret laws for killing the area’s nightlife.

Don’t believe it? Remember: Andy Warhol lived in a townhouse on Lexington and 89th between 1959 and 1974 in what is regarded as the first Warhol factory—it’s where he painted his soup cans. (Warhol, apparently unafraid of the negative stereotypes, moved in his mother and had 25 cats named Sam in the house).

This is where Joan Didion, “that consummate bard of cool,” spent much of her 20s living and roaming, drinking early in the mornings and pondering the “monochromatic flatness of Second Avenue, the fire escapes and the grilled storefronts peculiar and empty in their perspective.” Where writers and filmmakers like Woody Allen gathered to see and be seen at the nightly salon that was Elaine’s—a place where, as Jay McInerney told The Guardian, “You’d go to drink, have fights and make out with someone’s girlfriend in the bathroom.”

Mr. Barounis grew up in Queens and started out in the nightlife and entertainment business by working as a “pick and choose guy” at clubs. He’s lived in Manhattan for the past 30 years—he’s seen every variety of cool.  “I always thought cool was an intrinsic quality. I’ve had kids tell me, ‘I don’t hang out above 14th Street,” he laughed. “Hey, you’re from Columbus, Ohio, and you’re telling me about cool? I find that comical.”

And Mr. Barounis is not alone. Among the desirable establishments, new and old, in the neighborhood are breweries like Jones Wood Foundry and City Swiggers, the Lexington Candy Shop luncheonette, JG Melon, and on the upper edges of Lexington and Park, ABV, Earl and the Guthrie Inn. There’s also the 75-year-old butcher shop Schaller & Weber (which is keeping its head above water during subway construction thanks to orders from the beer gardens and artisanal-food-obsessed denizens of Queens and Brooklyn who would never dream of living on the Upper East Side). The newest addition is the Pony Bar, a popular Hell’s Kitchen craft-beer bar that opened its second spot yesterday on First and 75th.

“I think people will say, ‘I’m paying this for Jersey City and I could be paying the same thing for the Upper East Side?’” Mr. Barounis opined. “There’s a value up here if you can get over the stigma.”

Your New Neighbor? (ThomasThomas, flickr)

WITH ITS REPUTATION for stuffiness and snootiness, the Upper East Side may not be the most obvious frontier of affordability, but it is one of the few left in Manhattan (alongside Manhattan Valley and Harlem, Washington Heights and Inwood), and it’s also surprisingly young, with 36.4 percent of its population between 20 and 39.

Between Lexington and the East River, 59th to 99th Streets, the median rent for a studio apartment is $1,900 (median size of 500 square feet), according to data from StreetEasy.com. In Williamsburg, the median studio is going for $2,800 a month, although it will get you a slightly larger space of 602 square feet. (More expensive even than the East Village, where the median studio runs $1,940, with a median size of 452 square feet).

With rents in the city hitting record highs—last month, the average monthly rental for a Manhattan studio was $2,025, a 3 percent increase from the year before, according to Citi Habitats—rental brokers are increasingly advising those without trust funds to consider a place that is seen as the traditional stomping ground of those with trust funds.

“Young people say, ‘I need to live in Union Square for $1,200 a month,’ and that’s just not going to happen,” said Mark Menendez, the director of rentals at Prudential Douglas Elliman. “For a while that alternative neighborhood was Williamsburg, but we’ve actually had transplants back to Manhattan because they’ve been priced out of Williamsburg.

Where does one go? “You can still find good value on the Upper East Side,” Mr. Menendez said.

It’s not that the Upper East Side is some vast, empty expanse waiting to be populated (neither is any other place in New York)—Community Board 8 presides over some of the most densely-packed space in the city. But unlike historically industrial neighborhoods like Soho or the Meatpacking District, it has a lot of units in a wide variety of housing types.

The downtown housing stock is simply not as robust, said Citi Habitats president Gary Malin. “People might not want to live on the Upper East Side, they don’t think it’s cool or young or hip. But if you want to live in the West Village, it’s expensive."

It also helps that for years, the far East side was snubbed because of the lack of train lines east of Lexington, a fact that almost seems quaint given the increasingly “acceptable” treks of outer borough residents.

In fact, cost has been driving creative, penurious types to Yorkville for decades. Linda Rizutto, the owner of the very Villagey coffee shop Java Girl on E. 66^th Street, moved to the neighborhood some 30 years ago.

“I would have preferred living in the Village, but it was cheaper to live up here,” said Ms. Rizutto. She turned briefly wistful, musing on what Soho was like before it became like an outdoor shopping mall, then shrugged. “This is my home home now."

And although on average the Upper East Side is among the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city (an average twisted out of proportion by the spectacular wealth of Fifth and Park and Madison Avenues), it’s also more socially and economically-diverse than anyone gives it credit for, and has been for a long time.

Hunter Armstrong, the director of local group Civitas noted that there are hundreds of thousands of people living on the Upper East Side.

“There’s not one prevailing character, it’s so diverse,” said Mr. Armstrong. “There’s every kind of person.”

Still, it can be a hard sell.

Citi Habitats broker Morgan Turkewitz persuaded two clients, who happened to be friends, to consider moving Uptown. “If that was the first apartment that we went into and they liked it, I knew they’d say, ‘O.K., but what about Downtown?’” said Ms. Turkewitz. “So, I waited until they saw Downtown and got frustrated with it, then I took them to the Upper East Side.” They wound up in a two-bedroom apartment on 60th Street between First and Second Avenues for just under $2,000.

Ms. Turkewitz's client Kathleen Clark, who graduated from the University of Delaware in 2009, admits that she didn’t look at the Upper East Side and think Oh, that’s my ideal neighborhood. But the other apartments she saw just couldn’t compare to the small, but charming and newly-renovated two-bedroom in a fourth-floor walkup with stainless steel fixtures and granite countertops.

“I love some places in the West Village and Gramercy, but that’s sort of a dream,” said Ms. Clark, who works as a designer at Levi’s. “As much as you want to be hip and live on the Lower East Side, you can’t afford it on a base salary.”

Asked if she had considered Brooklyn, Ms. Clark said that she was sure she would love the vintage shopping and the beer gardens if she lived there, but it wasn’t great for her commute.“And that’s why I came here—for my work.”

Not that she’s been able to convince any of her friends to take up residence.

“Once people are set on not wanting to live on the Upper East Side, they do pretty much all they can to try to find an apartment somewhere else,” she said. “It has kind of a bad rap. I think it might be the most uncool neighborhood in Manhattan.”

Nor are all of its residents converts.

“Young people don’t want to live here, but they end up getting funneled in,” said Matthew Smith, a Yale law student who looked at more than 30 apartments before settling on his current place, a spacious one-bedroom with exposed brick on 93rd Street between First and Second Avenues that costs $1,500 a month.

“I would rather be in Hell’s Kitchen, there’s a lot more going on,” Mr. Smith admitted, noting that Yorkville could be kind of “frat-tastic.” But while his friends’ Hell’s Kitchen rent had gone up by $400 last year, his had gone up just by the price of inflation.

Even though he’d seen more young people moving Uptown, he didn’t think that the neighborhood would be transformed by waves of hipsters desperate to remain in Manhattan. Not that Greenpoint or Bushwick are all that cheap anymore, but the next place, wherever it was, would be.

A muck house: pretty gritty (Hobo Matt, flickr)

SAFE. QUIET. CONVENIENT. AFFORDABLE. The descriptions came up again and again in conversations with younger residents, who were always eager to point out these excellent, but oddly parental praises. Then, they would let something slip. Actually, they loved that the Met was open until 9 p.m. on Friday and Saturdays and was admission by donation. It was one of the most democratic institutions in the city, when they thought about it. (Why trudge out to some gallery in Bushwick for mediocre art when you can see the best in the world in your own neighborhood?). Or they really liked Cascabel Tacos, the place that serves street-food style Mexican on Second Avenue, or reading the paper at a coffee ship like Little Brown, or a great piano bar that their friend always took them to with the weirdest mix of people, or the inventive programming at the Museum of the City of New York.

And at least the Upper East Side used to be a place people dreamed of moving. Does anyone dream of moving to Queens, Hoboken or Jersey City?

Perhaps the best argument for the Upper East Side’s rise is that its inevitable fall is already looming on the horizon in the specter of the Second Avenue subway, sure to drive up property values. Besides, for the time being, for those obsessed with the old, gritty New York, what’s grittier than displaced rats and muck houses?

Why not get in while the getting is good—especially if you moved to New York to get out in the first place?

“Who comes to New York to just hang out in one neighborhood anyway?” asked Tiffany Sakato, who lives in a one-bedroom on 86th and Second Avenue (rent is about $1,600). Spending all your time eating, sleeping, socializing and working in one place? Wasn’t that the kind of provincialism people came to New York to escape?

Ms. Sakato liked her apartment she assured us, the neighborhood, the price, but really, in the end, “it’s just a place where you can put your head down and get ready for the next day.”

“I really like exploring the city,” she explained. “Most of the time, you’re out and about, not sitting at home. That’s why you move to New York.”

kvelsey@observer.com

Nile Rodgers.

Talk about a bad trip! In Le Freak: An Upside Down Story of Family, Disco, and Destiny, the new memoir from Nile Rodgers out this October, there's a acid-addled anecdote involving a certain downtown art superstar, a story that's perhaps never seen the light of day. It involves a party in Little Italy gone wrong, where someone slipped something in Mr. Rodgers' drink. It turned out to be the stuff the kids now call DOM. Hell of a drug!

We all down the wrong hallucinogenic concoction every once in a while, but this time there's a surprise celebrity appearance: Andy Warhol, and he's been shot! Take it away, Le Freak.

I don't remember how long I was tripping that day, because I was fading in and out of reality. At a police call box near the corner of Second Avenue and Houston Street, I phoned the cops. I was taken by ambulance to Columbus Hospital, a few short blocks away, panic-stricken and rapidly going mad. Even in my extreme psychotic state, I noticed dawn had just broken. I looked down at my arms. My skin had the texture and color of a lizard's. So like any self-respecting reptile, I spread my fingers wide and tried to catch flies with my tongue.

The atmosphere in the ER was almost festive. The doctors and nurse seemed to be having the time of their lives. There were few if any patients. Hours passed in the blink of an eye, and it was now in the afternoon. Suddenly, apropos of nothing, I was whisked out of the way as a gurney smashed open the ER doors; it was bearing the body of a bloody Andy Warhol, by now one of the most recognizable and important figures in the Village scene. A crowd of people surrounded him and I became irrelevant. Though my head was still a little twisted, my heart told me Andy needed help more than me. I later read that Andy actually died on the operating table, but emergency surgery brought him back.

Crazy trip, Nile! There are plenty more tales to be told in Le Freak, and if you want to hear them first hand, the book party is tonight. Gayle King will be there, too, but we doubt she's got the war stories like Mr. Rodgers does. But who knows.

Spot the difference.

Big Monday news in books and television:

The Man Booker Prize longlist of nominees, deciphered.

The common language of literature, charted.

Children's books illustrated by Andy Warhol.

Terry Gilliam is adapting Paul Auster's Mr. Vertigo.

A mega-preview of Downton Abbey's second season.

The painting was repayment for Mr. Colacello’s brokering a portrait commission for Warhol, which was a standard practice at Interview. As you might imagine, it was bittersweet to sell the painting but, Mr. Colacello says in the video, prices being what they are “it seemed like a really good time to cash in, quite frankly.”

It’s a great first-hand look at what it’s like to take something of personal value to auction. We won’t give away the ending but everything ties together rather nicely. This web video’s got it all!

Los Angeles Times

Mr. Knight argues that the soup inspiration came from Abstract Expressionist painter Willem de Kooning, who was known to call his and everyone else's art "soup." Mr. Knight writes:

Soup was essential studio slang, the conversational lingo among New York School painters when they talked about their work.

Specifically, soup was the metaphor used by Willem de Kooning — the most successful artist of the era — to characterize his robust Abstract Expressionism. If soup worked for him, why not for Warhol?

Later in the article, Mr. Knight quotes Mr. De Kooning, from the 1960 film "Sketchbook No. 1: Three Americans":

"Everything is already in art," the painter gently demurs. "Like a big bowl of soup. Everything is in there already, and you stick your hand in and you find something for you."

What if we started calling art soup? What would this mean for Rirkrit Tiravanija?

The Observer is fond of the idea of replacing all references to "art" with "soup," and enjoys pondering what would result. A documentary about legendary Metropolitan Museum of Art (aka Metropolitan Museum of Soup) curator Henry Geldzahler is called "Who Gets to Call It Art?" We think "Who Gets To Call It Soup?" is infinitely more appealing.

The Observer, in a previous incarnation, wrote an article called "The Art of the Deal." Here's to "The Soup of the Deal." Yum.

Mao (1973) by Andy Warhol.

Charles Saatchi is the most influential collector of the past 25 years, and one of the most controversial. Notorious for never appearing at his own openings and for not granting interviews, the British former advertising magnate remains a mysterious figure who wields his influence through his Saatchi Gallery shows and the subsequent sale of the artworks in them; to this day he continues to influence the market for contemporary art in his Gatsbyesque style. I’ve met him only once, at a London restaurant with our mutual friend Jean Pigozzi; Mr. Saatchi picked up the tab, which was generous of him since he was on a diet and ate almost nothing.

A new edition of The History of the Saatchi Gallery (Booth-Clibborn, 1,008 pages, $85.00) has just been released. It’s a reprint of the same title done in a monster-size “OPUS” edition in 2009. Now that it’s available in a manageable size, it’s time to buy it and study it. I scored my signed copy at Sotheby’s in London during last month’s auction previews. This tome is essential for serious art collectors because it shows us the amazing breadth of what Mr. Saatchi has bought, exhibited and sold between 1985 and 2009, following a collecting model I’ve dubbed the “show and sell.” There are many questions surrounding the underlying meaning of his collecting activity, and the morality of his method; just about everything about Mr. Saatchi interests me, in fact, because there’s a lot of Saatchi-ness in today’s art market.

What motivated Mr. Saatchi to produce the oversize book two years ago and to republish it today in a smaller but still jumbo size is no doubt both his ongoing need for recognition and his desire to donate his gallery with its sundry art leftovers to the British government, presumably so that he won’t have to continue underwriting it himself. He tried to get out from under it last July (see my article from Nov. 3, 2010) but that deal fell apart over the gallery’s plan to fund itself through future purchases and sales, a practice that violates museum bylaws in Britain and everywhere else. But buying and selling is what Mr. Saatchi has done for years, and it has worked amazingly well for him it seems, at least until fairly recently.

Flipping through the book, I couldn’t help but marvel at the amazing Warhols he owned, the Judds and the Mardens, the Freuds and the Serras, though sadly for him he owned no Lichtensteins, Bacons or Basquiats. I couldn’t stop myself from adding up what these artworks would be worth today, forgetting Mr. Saatchi’s recent shows and sticking only to the really good stuff he had up until the end of the mid-’90s: I easily came up with $1.5 billion. Even this past decade he proved he still had the eye when he bought, exhibited and then sold great painters like Marlene Dumas, John Currin and Peter Doig and even a few emerging artists, like the then-up-and-coming Mark Grotjahn, who have since garnered blue-chip status. He also had great sculptors like Charlie Ray and Thomas Schutte, but over time his hit ratio has been going down, the proof of this being the book’s inclusion of some horrid and unforgivable chazerai—junk food—that you couldn’t pay me to hang in my house.

Making things more difficult for Mr. Saatchi today is the fact that the art market has become more efficient, and he’s often priced out of it. Rising art prices have forced him to eschew the four-man shows of famous artists he used to do in favor of broader and broader shows with catchy adman titles like “Painting Today” or “Sculpture Tomorrow,” probably because his buy-show-sell strategy has become riskier and less lucrative; art today is fully valued and looks like it will remain so.

When those drift-net shows dead-ended, he went ethnic, with Indian art, then Chinese art, and I’ve already forgotten what else. It’s all worth studying because he has successfully invented a new way to collect art, though sadly now the overall quality of the work keeps forcibly trending down.

Part of me feels Mr. Saatchi never should have moved beyond the original show of 1985, “Judd, Marden, Twombly, Warhol.” It was so good it could have stayed up permanently. As crazy as this sounds, and though it wouldn’t cause any “sensation,” the quality was outstanding, and it would be worth a helluva lot more money than whatever is left in his collection today. In fact, the number of never-ever-to-be-seen-again-on-the-market works that he has shown and sold over the years is downright depressing.

So what conclusions, if any, am I to draw from all this? I asked a wise veteran, art dealer Arne Glimcher, founder of the Pace Gallery, who has dealt with Mr. Saatchi over the years; his answer: “Charles was always a dealer.”

Many would concur, but I don’t; if you’ve owned all that, even if most of it is long gone, then you are what they call a collector-dealer. And, yes, Mr. Saatchi is the original collector who deals. The very reason why Mr. Saatchi, who should instead be lauded for what he’s done for art, is more often maligned by the “art world” is that he regularly sells anything he can. The art world to this day loves to adhere to its hypocritical views that dealers are permitted to sell for profit but “collectors” should not do the same.

I’ve had to deal with this disingenuous hypocrisy for over a decade, but as archaic and absurd as this may sound, most of the art world still buys into the charade. Though I can’t compare myself to Mr. Saatchi, I too have sold art to buy more art, and I refuse to bow to any false moral judgments that others may cast upon me; nor will I behave like a rich, vacuum-cleaner-style collector. I’ll let others play that role.

It’s a well-known fact that in 2007 I sold a fabulous sculpture by Jeff Koons at auction and it achieved the highest price ever paid for an artwork by a living artist. It was a great work by a great artist and it made a great price, so why should I feel badly about a sale that was good for the market, good for the gallery (prices jumped for new works) and a good market confirmation of the artist’s enormous stature? Instead, I received several dirty looks and was accused of being a profiteer: all sour grapes, I’m afraid.

This brings us to the tired old story of how Charles Saatchi ruined Italian painter Sandro Chia’s market when he dumped a suite of Mr. Chia’s paintings at auction years ago—what rubbish that all is. Mr. Chia is a minor figure today; his paintings just aren’t that interesting. Mr. Saatchi didn’t sell just his Chias; he’s dumped everything for years, including his John Currins and his Peter Doigs, but those works have gone straight up into the millions of dollars. As a matter of fact, a Doig painting made $10 million in London last month and collector demand for work by John Currin has never been stronger.

It’s not the selling of art that hurts the market, it’s the timing of the sale, but no matter, good art finds its level so I don’t believe any collector can singlehandedly “plunge” the market of a good artist. That’s why I take offense at the double standard many dealers apply to collectors: on one side are the great patrons who get lots of respect and on the other are those who are derided as speculators and traders, those eponymous collector-dealers. But I’ve seen many of the so-called golden patrons sell paintings in the market, including respected names like Aggie Gund and Dakis Joannou, so these pseudomoralistic views are absurd. They are quite simply the self-serving attitude of dealers who want their “model clients” to buy and never, ever sell.

I also hate those ridiculous resale agreements some dealers have concocted. Though I graduated from law school a while ago, I don’t think they are legally binding, and, anyway, I prefer the old-fashioned handshake deal.

I’m not saying anything goes. If you buy a great piece fresh from the studio through a gallery you know, and you promise to “have and to hold,” then you should cherish it. If you subsequently sell at auction, thus breaking your vow, well, you’ve lost your relationship with the gallery and the artist, and you deserve to because you didn’t play by the rules.

Mr. Saatchi has never played by the rules; he invented his own, and thus changed collecting forever. He must be happy with the result because he’s done it for decades, and the entire contemporary art world owes him a lot for the awareness he’s created, the artists whose works he’s shown and promoted, and the public excitement and enthusiasm he’s created. I don’t think we’ll ever see another like him, not only because he was visionary but also because the market has changed.

Studying The History of the Saatchi Gallery made me wonder: Is it the experience of collecting that counts or is it the physical possession of powerful art? Is it fulfilling to have once owned masterpieces, or does it count only when “death do us part”?

I need it both ways, meaning that I need the excitement of owning work that can be published and shown, but I’m not willing to part with it all, even at exorbitant prices. When I come home I want to be surrounded by a collection that represents my personal history with art, works that were important to my life experience. Given the chance to be a Saatchi I’d like to think I would have kept much of his great stuff and not have succumbed to the temptation to always cash in and seek out the newest new thing.

There was a time when chasing the art world’s next sensation was a great strategy, and Charles Saatchi was the master pioneer of the “show and sell” technique. Several private contemporary art foundations followed in his footsteps, including Dakis Joannou’s Deste Foundation in Athens, François Pinault’s Palazzo Grassi and Punta della Dogana in Venice, the Rubell Family Collection in Miami and Peter Brant’s Brant Foundation in Greenwich, Conn. Mr. Saatchi invented the model over 25 years ago and has been the leader in finding tomorrow’s art market stars and cashing in on them, but those days are mostly over, because the days of “easy pickings” and low-hanging fruit are gone for good. Today, the mission of seeking out the hottest new thing has become painfully tedious, because really going forward in art often requires reaching backward: too often the old is better than the new. Flipping through Mr. Saatchi’s book, a memorial to masterpieces come and gone, I can’t help but feel that today I’d rather see a major Saatchi Collection retrospective than anything he’s liable to cook up next.

editorial@observer.com

The Best "Jackson Pollock" by Miltos Manetas

The artist Miltos Manetas presents this not-too-shabby app that allows you to drip like a champ, and even creates brush droplets when you lift your finger. We daresay we’re just a fingerprint short of passing this off as an authentic Pollock (Joke! Don’t sue!)

Just Okay/Sorry, What? In Still Life by John Baldessari

John Baldessari created the original In Still Life for a LACMA show in 2011, which invited visitors to rearrange the 38 objects in Abraham van Beyeren's Banquet Still Life. The app was of a similar theme (example to the left courtesy Asuka Hisa), but somewhat underwhelming without the museum context. But it’s also not available anymore, so it has that going for it. What? There are too many apps!

Terrible "Andy Warhol D.I.Y. Pop" by The Andy Warhol Museum

You had this in the bag Andy Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app. This post was about you, and we even used the most Warholian thing on our desk (that Vanity Fair picture of Gwyneth Paltrow from the Post last week) but you still couldn’t seal the deal.

She looks like the Joker. And why is she not repeated at least four times? Why is she not already valuable? In the future everyone will buy the Andy Warhol D.I.Y. Pop app, and delete it after 15 minutes.

So of the two that are still available for purchase, The Observer recommends the Pollock one, sort of.

Mr. Shiner.

Curator Eric Shiner will serve as the new director of The Andy Warhol Museum in Pittsburgh, the museum announced today. Mr. Shiner has served as acting director since January 2011, after the departure of Thomas Sokolowski, who served as director for 14 out of the 17 years the museum has existed, and distinguished himself with scores of successful traveling exhibitions. Mr. Shiner, a specialist in Asian art who has been an adjunct professor at the Cooper Union, said he plans to continue to keep its collections traveling.

“Having started my career in the art world here at The Warhol as an intern 17 years ago, it both humbles and excites me to be given the honor of promoting Andy Warhol and his legacy while doing my part to help The Andy Warhol Museum, Carnegie Museums, and Pittsburgh shine,” Mr. Shiner said in a press release.