Janelle Monae.

FLATT magazine, the art world insider bible, is celebrating its fourth issue (tuxedo-wearing beauty Janelle Monae is on the cover) at the controversial, still-debaucherous LES punk burlesque club The Box. There will be a special—fully clothed—musical performance by Niia Bertino and deejay sets by rock photographer Mick Rock and the Electric Room’s favorite spinner DJ Cash, who loves to Instagram perky models with “I Heart Cash” stickers over their bare boobies, which is very The Box. The crowd will run the gamut from art stars like Ryan McGinness to the cool kids who hang out at The Hole Gallery when it’s not even open for business. And we’d be remiss if we failed to mention our own New York Artists party; that’s certainly where we’ll be.

The Box, 189 Chrystie Street, (212) 982-9301, 8pm-11pm, by invitation only; New York Observer Art Party with ArtNet, The Standard East Village Penthouse, 25 Cooper Square, 6:30pm-9:30pm, by invitation only.

The $3.9 million purchase comes eight months after the couple sold their 7,000-square-foot house in Alpine, N.J., for $58 million.

How does one get into a building like 3 East 77th?

“In my opinion, rub shoulders with the du Ponts or Kennedys,” said the Corcoran Group’s Leah Ozeri-Elias, who listed the apartment with Wendy Sarasohn. “The finest people live there.”

(Incidentally, Mrs. Frick was married to a du Pont before Dr. Frick.)

“It’s a very social, clubby building,” Ms. Sarasohn said, “but in a low-profile way.”

According to her partner, that means a handful of potential buyers “were not board-qualified, socially, to buy the apartment.”

Yet the place is minor compared to the 63-acre New Jersey estate that the Fricks sold this January.

“From what I’ve heard,” said Dennis McCormack, the listing broker, “it was the highest non-waterfront residential sale in the United States.”

Why is the new co-op’s deed in Mrs. Frick’s name only? A source with knowledge of the New York deal said that the octogenarian Dr. Frick had arranged to stay on his old land in Alpine.

Mr. McCormack said he didn’t know the family’s plans, but confirmed that the estate’s buyer, real-estate investor Richard Kurtz, is planning on subdividing the land for individual sales.

Dr. Frick joined the board of the Frick Collection in 1953, and was its president from 1965 until the end of the century. His wife has been a trustee of the museum and of the Old Westbury Gardens on Long Island.

Appropriately, her new apartment has views of the Met and a neighbor’s orchid solarium. According to the listing, the three-bedroom co-op also has a formal dining room, two wood-burning fireplaces, and a windowed kitchen with sumptuous French limestone floors.

The seller is Hanne al Homaizi. Her profession isn’t clear, though Ms. Ozeri-Elias said she is a Danish widow.

Internet photographs show Ms. al Homaizi on safari. “Emily Frick, I know, goes hunting. She’s a real sportswoman,” said Ms. Sarasohn. “Often there’s like-to-like in transferring a property.”

City records don’t list another Manhattan home for Dr. and Mrs. Frick, though the New York Social Register puts their old address at 825 Fifth Avenue. That building and 3 East 77th are two of a handful left in Manhattan with a tenant-only restaurant. The family’s new in-house eatery, called the Georgian Suite, also serves the folks next-door at 960 Fifth Avenue.

“Mrs. Frick said that this was her kind of assisted living,” said Ms. Sarasohn. “Get it? The restaurants assist you with everything.”

Dr. and Mrs. Frick could not be reached for this article. Their broker, Brown Harris Stevens managing director Edith Tuckerman, would not comment.

She Sells Sanctuary

After a long and lonely struggle for cool-kid status, the meatpacking district is finally attracting modish artists: The poppy painter Ryan McGinness has bought a one-bedroom condo at 350 West 14th Street for $814,000.

“I plan to create a calming and warm environment that is going to provide me with the sanctuary I need when I am out of the studio,” Mr. McGinness wrote via e-mail while preparing a solo show in Amsterdam.

Listing broker Phillip Koeber had a different perspective: “It’s just a great apartment in a happening place,” the Prudential Douglas Elliman agent said. “It picks up a meatpacking district vista, definitely. From the bedroom you can see the Soho Club—no, Soho House, Soho something.” (It’s Soho House, the once-happening social club.)

But Mr. McGinness is less excited about the district. “I honestly don’t know much about the new area. I do know that it is loud on the weekends.”

Plus it’s far away from his old digs: Since 2002, Mr. McGinness has lived in an apartment around the corner from his studio on Centre Street. So the new 725-square-foot place is much less convenient.

“He may be living there for a while,” said his broker, Trish Goodwin. “But eventually it should just be an investment property, and a place where family can stay.”

Speaking of family, Ms. Goodwin is Mr. McGinness’ wife. (They’ve been married for nine years, and she’s been a broker since last November). How was their working relationship? “Very easy. He’s not a stereotypically disorganized, scattered artist,” she said. “Very Germanic, very Swiss—he knows what he wants. He saw the apartment, and that was it.”

What had the artist been looking for? “A place to hide, relax and be with friends,” he wrote.

Despite that domestic connection, the apartment won’t be graced with Mr. McGinness’ bright, ornate work. “Even in our apartment, I had to beg to have one piece of his,” Ms. Goodwin sighed. “He’d rather live with other people’s art.”

As for the layout, the one-bedroom condo has an open kitchen, plus a long entrance hall. “And that’s important for Ryan,” his wife disclosed. “He’s a no-shoes kind of guy.”

The Elliman broker, Mr. Koeber, said that the apartment’s seller, Brandon Conovitz, imports bags and cosmetics from China. Mr. McGinness would be proud: His art has a punky obsession with mainstream iconography, though his unicorns are usually double-headed and his voice bubbles are postmodernly empty.

Turnaround is Fair Play

It’s been more than two years since Andrew Heiberger sold his mammoth rental brokerage firm for $49 million, but his avid instincts for Manhattan real estate haven’t dulled.

Last month, the former proprietor of Citi Habitats flipped his condo at the Devon for $1,699,000—after the apartment had slipped from two Habitats brokers.

“It was great,” Mr. Heiberger said. “I sold for $450,000 more than I paid.”

He bought the place in April 2004, rented it out for two years and then gutted it.

The sale wasn’t smooth, though. Last December, the listing for the three-bedroom place went to Dina Cohen and Meta Wechsler at Citi Habitats, the firm Mr. Heiberger founded in 1994.

They wouldn’t comment on working with their brokerage’s creator, even though he stepped down from the presidency early last year. (He happily receded to his new $8.1 million house on East 63rd.)

Despite its double-sized living room, three marble bathrooms and what Mr. Heiberger called his “suburban-style country kitchen,” his Devon apartment still hadn’t sold by May.

“I was in a political quandary,” he said. “I couldn’t switch to another broker inside Citi Habitats, because that would be an insult; I couldn’t switch to a broker at Corcoran, because that would be an insult.”

So after the first exclusive expired, he gave the listing to a small group named Core Group Marketing.

“Shaun Osher was assisting me on a downtown building in the hopes of getting hired,” said Mr. Heiberger, speaking about Core’s C.E.O. “And when I made a decision not to hire him, I gave [his firm] the listing as a gratuity.”

“In all fairness to the initial broker,” he said later, meaning Ms. Cohen, “she had to sit and wait the thing out when I was reducing $100,000 every month. These people got it fresh off at $1.699.”

“That’s real estate,” said Meta Wechsler, who had shared the listing with Ms. Cohen.

Core Group broker Fredrik Eklund was gratified.

“I sold it one week, with three backups,” he said. “I was very happy about that deal …. The more experienced the seller, the easier it is; the quicker they get what they’re selling. If I want to spend $500 on flowers on an open house, I don’t have to explain why.”

Mr. Heiberger was so impressed with the turn-around that he gave Core the listing for his apartment at the Orion Condominium near Times Square. But the Habitats curse seemed to have lifted.

“He couldn’t sell it in three months, and he had it at $719,000. I turned it over to the same team at Citi Habitats, and they sold it at 729,000!”

The lesson: “Everyone’s got to remember, it’s not caveat emptor, it’s caveat venditor. Your broker is six feet tall, but the market is a tidal wave.”

He's prolific, too. Over the course of 47 smallish pictures, Mr. Fertig is a remarkably consistent paint-handler, able to sustain pictorial clarity when working with closely valued scumbles of color. His gift for abbreviating form while remaining true to its specifics is stunning. True, some of the paintings do get splotchy; and when he runs a comb through a patch of wet oil, he makes me grit my teeth.

Mr. Fertig transforms influence to singular effect, creating a haunting, uncategorizable art from sources as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein, John Marin, Saul Steinberg, R.B. Kitaj and Gerhard Richter. Tapping into history with uncanny ease, Mr. Fertig shows up painters like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Julie Heffernan for the callow dabblers they are. Like most postmodernists, they can't imagine not pretending. Mr. Fertig, in contrast, loses himself in history's flow, respectful of its authority but refusing to be cowed by it. That's how he manages to put brush to canvas like it's 1809 without straining credulity-it's the place where he lives. And when we're looking at his elusive images, it's a place we don't want to leave.

David Fertig: Paintings is at James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Penitent Joy

A curmudgeon might describe the collages of Janet Malcolm, currently on display at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, as the extracurricular dalliance of a renowned highbrow journalist-and the curmudgeon would be right. Maybe. Ms. Malcolm crafts small abstract collages from sources mundane (old ledgers, tattered letters), mass-produced (vintage magazines) and charged (Nazi insignia). She's content to tread in the byways of precedent. Kurt Schwitters and Kasimir Malevich-both of whom are acknowledged by name-provide the compositional model; Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, the fragile diaristic tone. The ephemeral scraps Ms. Malcolm has collected evoke the troubled culture of early 20th-century Europe. The elegiac tone is unmistakable, as is the gentle knack for suggestive juxtaposition.

Ms. Malcolm takes tempered, almost penitent joy in cutting and pasting. It's as if she were relieved to discover that the optimism inherent in making art, though sorely tried by world events, endures. That's exactly the kind of delicate truth a curmudgeon would miss. The rest of us are free to acknowledge the quiet candor of Ms. Malcolm's accomplishment and give her a hand when occasion merits. Take a close look at the understated beauty of Bible (2003) and Ascension Day (2002) and you'll see occasion merits, and then some.

Janet Malcolm: Collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50 East 78th Street, No. 2-A, until Nov. 26.

Non-Precious

The Ryan McGinness exhibition at Deitch Projects is notable only as an example of a common phenomenon: The young, ambitious artist happy to piss away his talent for the sake of notoriety. Mr. McGinness overlaps absurdist logos-Viking women, businessmen punctured by safety pins, an intestinal tract as blandly anonymous as a deer-crossing sign-against glossy fields of pungent oil color. He has a knack for organizing his free-floating, ornamental arrangements of icons, and he has a knack for screen printing (he ably manipulates the transparency of the process). What he doesn't have is integrity.

Mr. McGinness' pictures replicate the sterile uniformity of assembly-line product-the Warhol thing again. The maze of mirrors, emblazoned with the artist's signature decals, partakes of the funhouse aesthetic typical of trendy mainstream art. He offers a line of custom-designed skateboards and long-sleeved T-shirts. We're told that his approach provides an "antithesis of the traditional art-world concept of the precious original." A picture by Mr. McGinness can set you back $6,500-that's a chunk of change for non-precious merchandise. Never trust an artist who uses theory as camouflage for his careerist hypocrisy.

Ryan McGinness: Worlds Within Worlds is at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, until Nov. 1.

And Makes Its Home in the PastThe first thing you might think upon entering James Graham and Sons' ground-floor space on Madison Avenue is that the gallery has mounted an overview of an unheralded 19th-century painter, something along the lines of the Walter Gay show seen at the same venue last spring. The pictures of castles, duels, naval battles and soldiers on horseback in full military regalia smack of a pageantry whose time has long gone. The smoky post-Impressionist dabbing-as dense as Vuillard, as yielding as Bonnard-has strong period connotations. Compositional strategies hint at a knowledge of Japanese prints, an important resource for painters like Degas and Whistler. Just as you're about to conclude that you've discovered a mysteriously neglected minor French master, you begin to notice how off the pictures are. Suffused with nostalgia and powered by romance, the paintings surrender to neither; the mood is just short of acerbic and decidedly contemporary. Despite the lusciously applied paint, the work is dry, disinterested. The artist, David Fertig, alive and working somewhere in New Jersey, is a conundrum.

He's prolific, too. Over the course of 47 smallish pictures, Mr. Fertig is a remarkably consistent paint-handler, able to sustain pictorial clarity when working with closely valued scumbles of color. His gift for abbreviating form while remaining true to its specifics is stunning. True, some of the paintings do get splotchy; and when he runs a comb through a patch of wet oil, he makes me grit my teeth.

Mr. Fertig transforms influence to singular effect, creating a haunting, uncategorizable art from sources as diverse as Sergei Eisenstein, John Marin, Saul Steinberg, R.B. Kitaj and Gerhard Richter. Tapping into history with uncanny ease, Mr. Fertig shows up painters like John Currin, Lisa Yuskavage and Julie Heffernan for the callow dabblers they are. Like most postmodernists, they can't imagine not pretending. Mr. Fertig, in contrast, loses himself in history's flow, respectful of its authority but refusing to be cowed by it. That's how he manages to put brush to canvas like it's 1809 without straining credulity-it's the place where he lives. And when we're looking at his elusive images, it's a place we don't want to leave.

David Fertig: Paintings is at James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Avenue, until Nov. 8.

Penitent Joy

A curmudgeon might describe the collages of Janet Malcolm, currently on display at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, as the extracurricular dalliance of a renowned highbrow journalist-and the curmudgeon would be right. Maybe. Ms. Malcolm crafts small abstract collages from sources mundane (old ledgers, tattered letters), mass-produced (vintage magazines) and charged (Nazi insignia). She's content to tread in the byways of precedent. Kurt Schwitters and Kasimir Malevich-both of whom are acknowledged by name-provide the compositional model; Joseph Cornell and Anne Ryan, the fragile diaristic tone. The ephemeral scraps Ms. Malcolm has collected evoke the troubled culture of early 20th-century Europe. The elegiac tone is unmistakable, as is the gentle knack for suggestive juxtaposition.

Ms. Malcolm takes tempered, almost penitent joy in cutting and pasting. It's as if she were relieved to discover that the optimism inherent in making art, though sorely tried by world events, endures. That's exactly the kind of delicate truth a curmudgeon would miss. The rest of us are free to acknowledge the quiet candor of Ms. Malcolm's accomplishment and give her a hand when occasion merits. Take a close look at the understated beauty of Bible (2003) and Ascension Day (2002) and you'll see occasion merits, and then some.

Janet Malcolm: Collages at Lori Bookstein Fine Art, 50 East 78th Street, No. 2-A, until Nov. 26.

Non-Precious

The Ryan McGinness exhibition at Deitch Projects is notable only as an example of a common phenomenon: The young, ambitious artist happy to piss away his talent for the sake of notoriety. Mr. McGinness overlaps absurdist logos-Viking women, businessmen punctured by safety pins, an intestinal tract as blandly anonymous as a deer-crossing sign-against glossy fields of pungent oil color. He has a knack for organizing his free-floating, ornamental arrangements of icons, and he has a knack for screen printing (he ably manipulates the transparency of the process). What he doesn't have is integrity.

Mr. McGinness' pictures replicate the sterile uniformity of assembly-line product-the Warhol thing again. The maze of mirrors, emblazoned with the artist's signature decals, partakes of the funhouse aesthetic typical of trendy mainstream art. He offers a line of custom-designed skateboards and long-sleeved T-shirts. We're told that his approach provides an "antithesis of the traditional art-world concept of the precious original." A picture by Mr. McGinness can set you back $6,500-that's a chunk of change for non-precious merchandise. Never trust an artist who uses theory as camouflage for his careerist hypocrisy.

Ryan McGinness: Worlds Within Worlds is at Deitch Projects, 76 Grand Street, until Nov. 1.