Raymond Pettibon's "No Title (But the sand...)," made for the auction and expected to sell for between $300,000 and $500,000.

This morning, before the press preview of the 26 works expected to bring in some $10 million in the Artists For Haiti charity auction at Christie’s on Thursday, the assembled press waited in the foyer just beyond the entrance to the auction house. Flipping through the Raymond Pettibon-covered catalog, which includes works by Urs Fischer, Chuck Close, Neo Rauch and Luc Tuymans, the media representatives — mostly photographers — sat on red leather couches before giant videos of G.E. Smith of the Saturday Night Live Band hanging out with Richard Gere and playing his guitars (going to auction on Oct. 11 with 107 lots). Members of a Swedish TV crew stood near the entrance, fiddling with a boom mike with an unrecognizable logo.

“Ben!” said a press person with open arms, as Ben Stiller walked through the front door. Mr. Stiller greeted Chelsea art dealer David Zwirner, and he greeted Amy Cappellazzo, chairman of the Christie’s post-war and contemporary art department. He greeted representatives of charities in Haiti. Though there were only some 20 assembled people in total (there was another preview at the gallery earlier this month), it would be at least two minutes of greeting before he was even able to hand off his sunglasses to a woman trailing him, which he did as the group walked to the gallery off the main staircase.

In his welcoming remarks, Mr. Zwirner spoke of the trip he took to Haiti with Mr. Stiller shortly after the actor came to him with the idea for the auction, and thanked the participating artists and galleries, among them Acquavella, Gagosian and Hauser & Wirth.

“The dealers who represent these artists were equally generous, so I thank my colleagues,” Mr. Zwirner said. “It’s a very competitive field, and it’s a great experience to turn the in-fighting into a joint effort.”

After those welcoming words, Ms. Cappellazzo, Mr. Stiller and Mr. Zwirner took a stroll around the gallery as flashbulbs went off and the boom mike angled.

“By the way, that’s a bikini thong,” Mr. Stiller said, pausing at a crescent-shaped Jeff Koons silkscreen of a sunset. He explained that he’d met Mr. Koons at an event over a year ago and his was the first number he called when he had the idea for the auction. Mr Koons was instantly on board. “When I went to David and I said I got Jeff Koons, that really meant something to him, and I think it really kick-started the whole thing.

“So this thong is really meaningful to me,” he waved his hand over it to wrap up the speech, to laughter.

Mr. Stiller started his flirtation with the art world about a year ago, he told The Observer after the press event, and met Mr. Zwirner through Steve Martin. His interest in the Chelsea life sprang largely from friends like Owen Wilson who have already made their entrees to collecting. (Mr. Wilson apparently collects American contemporary work like Donald Judd). After securing the Koons, Mr. Zwirner made overtures to his artists and others, bringing Mr. Stiller with him on studio visits. The two stopped by Urs Fischer’s workspace in Red Hook together. “It was insane,” Ms Stiller said. “He gave me this crazy print of this he-she female guy I can’t even unroll because my children would freak out.”

“It’s not dirty, it’s just…” he trailed off. “Terrifying. In a fun way.”

Walking into the next room during the tour, Ms. Cappellazzo explained that not just up-and-coming artists were represented in the auction; plenty of the “old guard” was represented too. She led the pack to the Jasper Johns.

“This is a very classic work on Mylar, signature style, with the ink washed throughout the top,” she said. “For anyone who’s a sign-language aficionado, you will see that he spells his own name in sign language.”

“Can I just say something about Jasper Johns?” Mr. Stiller asked the assembled cluster, holding up his hands to stop the crawl. He pointed at the work. “Keep your eye on this guy.”

Mr. Johns is represented by Matthew Marks, who convinced the artist to join the cause.

"We’re just colleagues, Matthew and I," Mr. Zwirner said. "We're not friends. He doesn’t owe me a favor, so it was a very positive experience for him to say yes."

Asked whether it was easier to go through galleries or artists for the auction, Mr. Zwirner said he found the artists to be easier, despite the fact that, unlike galleries, they cannot claim a tax deduction on anything besides the materials used in the work.

“It’s very hard for the artist to say no. One of the jobs of the galleries is to protect the artists,” he said. "Let me put it this way — quite often I got an initial ‘no’ and then asked for a second session where I got the ‘maybe’ and then the third where I got a 'yes.'”

“I was sneaky," he added. "I brought along a lot of photographs that we took down in Haiti.”

“We were way on-board before artists were committed,” Ms. Cappellazzo told The Observer. Christie’s has waved its fees and commissions for hosting the sale. “We were useful in suggesting what kinds of works would be the most commercial, helping to value them. We’re very involved in selling the sale, that is to say, reaching out to a lot of our clients who are interested in things here, who might not be David’s clients or other dealers’ clients. We know, for example, who buys Chris Ofili, who buys Rudi Stingel, because we sell them at auction.”

After the tour of the works and the end of a brief question session, Mr. Zwirner began to wander away, but Ms. Cappellazzo motioned him back with an arm swoop for a group photo in front of one of the works. A photographer poked his head out from behind his camera and recommended that they choose another piece, since the Dan Flavin — a diamond-shaped light installation — was so bright that it would have ruined any photos.

“Oh, not the Flavin — of course!” Mr. Cappellazzo said looking behind her as she waved the group to the right. “It wouldn’t become us!”

The works hit the block on Thursday evening at 7 p.m.

The new Parrish Art Museum under construction

Earlier this month, the Parrish Art Museum in Southampton raised $675,000 at its glitzy annual fund-raising gala—the last to take place in its present building. Meanwhile, a few miles away, in Water Mill, the skeleton of the Parrish’s new home, an elegant, barnlike building designed by Swiss starchitects Herzog & de Meuron that’s as long as a city block, has begun to rise by the side of Montauk Highway, next to Duck Walk Vineyards. Days before the Parrish’s gala, the village of Southampton presented to the public for the first time its future plans for an arts center in the Parrish’s present, soon to be former, building on Jobs Lane.

On the afternoon of the gala, Parrish director Terrie Sultan took The Observer on a tour of the museum’s vault, where its collection of over 2,600 artworks is housed. She rolled back floor-to-ceiling racks to reveal paintings by William Merritt Chase, Willem de Kooning and realist Fairfield Porter, of whom she says the museum has the largest collection in the country. (When Porter died in 1975, his widow donated the contents of his studio to the Parrish.) In the new building, set to open next summer, 7,500 of the 12,300 square feet of exhibition space will be dedicated to shows from this permanent collection.

While it’s been scaled back from the Parrish’s original ambitions—an $80 million project by Herzog & de Meuron that would have mimicked the look of artist residences—the new building, a financially more manageable project that was conceived during the recession in 2009, is widely admired. (It’s still nearly double the size of the current building, and its $26.2 million price is 80 percent paid for, with construction proceeding on schedule.) With its capacity for showcasing the permanent collection, it is also meant to inspire growth in the collection: “It’s very hard to solicit works from collectors if you can’t demonstrate that they will be on view,” Ms. Sultan said, adding that “there’s a wish list.” And so far, it seems to be working. In the vault, Ms. Sultan pointed to a recent acquisition—one of Ross Bleckner’s “Architecture of the Sky” paintings still in the bubble wrap in which it was shipped. It’s the first of that series to enter a public institution (Mr. Bleckner had been saving the piece for himself, but changed his mind). Nearby were some Porter paintings that came as gifts. Ms. Sultan also mentioned a recent gift of a Keith Sonnier sculpture.

Museum supporters are eager to see that permanent collection go on regular view. A recent addition to the board of trustees—he joined in December 2009—Manhattan-based lawyer Peter Haveles characterizes himself as “a modest collector”; his children benefited from summer art-education programs at the Parrish. He said he’s excited to see the museum “operate on all of its cylinders” by doing temporary exhibitions and permanent collection shows at the same time; up to now, it’s been either/or. He described his recent visit to the vault with Ms. Sultan as being “like a 6-year-old in a candy store,” and says the typical patron of the Parrish will be excited about seeing the rotating exhibition of Fairfield Porters.

But it’s not just the permanent collection that will be on view once the new building is completed.

“If you’re asking, are we going to be organizing and presenting world-class exhibitions that people will come from all over the world to see, the answer is yes,” Ms. Sultan told The Observer, standing in the museum’s current exhibition of work by Dorothea Rockburne. She added that the museum will be “engaging in an international dialogue on all levels.” She said it’s too early to release information about the opening exhibition, but hinted that it will be of a contemporary artist who has a connection to the East End, and that it will be “the kind of thing where people say, ‘Of course! And why didn’t we think of that?’”

Last September, the museum added a trustee—one of six new board members to join since December 2009—who seemed particularly interested in world-class exhibitions and international dialogue. Adam Sender, who runs the hedge fund Exis Capital Management, has been summering in Sag Harbor, with his family, for the past 15 years. Two weeks before the Parrish gala, he hosted a cocktail party for the museum at his home. Ms. Sultan and Art in America magazine editor Lindsay Pollock, as well as local artists like Michael Halsband and Matthew Satz, toured the spacious house and landscaped grounds, gazing at works by international avant-garde stars, the kinds of pieces you are likely to come across at Art Basel or the Venice Biennale. Mr. Sender is anything but a modest collector. A large white abstract Sol Lewitt sculpture sat on the manicured lawn; a huge Urs Fischer sculpture of a cigarette lighter dominated the living room; across from it hung a giant Damien Hirst butterfly painting; an entire gallery space devoted to pieces made from panty hose and cigarettes by Sarah Lucas was next to the stairwell; light-box photographs by Jeff Wall lit up the dining room; a bright yellow Bruce Nauman neon light tube piece that spells out “Run from fear fun from rear” illuminated an upstairs hallway; there were works by up-and-coming talents like Brendan Fowler, Elad Lassry and Matt Chambers. Mr. Sender employs a personal curator and regularly loans his artworks for exhibitions around the world.

In other words: Fairfield Porter this was not. Alice Aycock, an artist who is known for her earthwork-style sculptures, and who will have a major exhibition of her drawings at the Parrish in 2013, was among the guests at Mr. Sender’s party. “My jaw dropped,” Ms. Aycock told The Observer a week later, describing her reaction to the house, grounds and collection. “I live within walking distance and I had no idea this was there.”

She added, “If people like Adam Sender will get behind the Parrish, then the museum will be cooking with gas.”

“With a building like that, they have the opportunity to do some exciting shows,” said Mr. Sender, referring to the new Herzog & de Meuron structure. He put aside plans to open a private exhibition space for his collection in a disused church in Sag Harbor, joining the Parrish board instead. “Exciting to me means contemporary.”

Mr. Haveles characterized the Parrish’s board, a mixture of full- and part-time residents, as diverse and engaged, but not meddlesome. On the board level, he said, the museum is discussed not as one with aspirations to be a global or national institution, but rather as an important regional one, one that reflects the art of the region and serves the region’s needs, and that will be attractive to people visiting from other parts of the East End, and also to visitors from Manhattan.

Ms. Sultan put the emphasis on the artistic legacy of the East End—ranging from Childe Hassam to Jackson Pollock to Roy Lichtenstein to Chuck Close.  “We are very proud to be a museum in this region,” she said. “It’s one of the only regions like this in the country where the level of contribution from the artists who have an association with this area is as high as it is.”

If the word “regional” comes up often in discussions of the new Parrish, “local” and “pedestrian-oriented” are more likely to be used in descriptions of the village’s plans for its own $20 million project: a hybrid arts complex at the site the Parrish is leaving.

On July 7, the village of Southampton held the first public presentation of plans—four different ones were presented—for the Southampton Center for the Arts. Siamak Samii, chair of the village’s planning commission, told The Observer that part of a master plan for the center of the village is the creation of an arts district, of which the old Parrish site will serve as anchor. It will incorporate visual and performing arts as well as education, and parts of it will be accessible around the clock; the center will be aimed at both summer and year-round residents. (The village’s full time population is 3,000-4,000; in summer it spikes to around 12,000.)

One object of the project, Mr. Samii said, is to “bring residential living into the heart of the village.” In neighboring villages like East Hampton, he said, “commerce and retail” have been the engines of growth. “We want culture to be the engine of growth.”

The arts complex will be fueled by partnerships with cultural institutions, such as museums and theater groups, and educational institutions outside the village that will use the facility as an extension. He said the village has so far reached out to 15 institutions, including the Lincoln Center Film Festival, and responses have been positive.

The Parrish’s lease is up in summer 2012; it plans to have next summer’s gala in its completed building, in Water Mill. Between now and that time, Mr. Samii said, the village will set up boards, bring in a director and fund-raise, with the aim of breaking ground in the next two to three years. Manhattan-based arts consultancy Webb Management Services has put the three-year project, which will create 40,000 square feet of facilities at around $20 million, once the operational costs are factored in.

The village does not see its arts complex competing with the Parrish, but rather complementing it—an “amicable relationship” that, as Mr. Samii described it, could even include the Parrish’s doing loan shows there.

“One of the main elements is to engage some of the local artists even more,” said Mr. Samii. “Local artists who don’t feel they are on the radar of the Parrish. And there are a lot of them.” He added that the facility would ideally be a place “where there would be more interaction between the community and its artists.” It is envisioned as “a place of gathering, a piazza for the center of the village.”

The Parrish, as he put it, “is extending itself to a more international high-profile, high-energy art scene. But we think that should not be at the expense of ignoring the local community.”

sdouglas@observer.com

The bear, one of an edition of three in the world, is owned by the art-dealing Mugrabi family (the other two belong to billionaire Steve Cohen and The Observer's own Adam Lindemann, who recently hailed the bear as a masterpiece on Art in America's website). The Transom hears that auctioneer Phillips de Pury had previously attempted to beat Christie's to the Mugrabis's bear with a cool $10M guarantee to sell it. The Mugrabis turned it down, along with an $8M offer on the bear from an unidentified private buyer. Instead, they chose Phillips competitor Christie's--despite no such guarantee--which is putting the massive sculpture on the auction block this Wednesday. Christie's estimate? $4-6M.

What drove the decision? Placement, placement, placement, says Alberto Mugrabi. Not just for the bear's prominent five-month berth at Seagram's Plaza. Mr. Mugrabi also said Christie's will find the bear a good permanent home, which is particularly interesting given that the Mugrabis first purchased the bear from none other than Christie's owner Francois Pinault.

The Mugrabis have placed a heavy wager on a big bear, and Christie's along with it.

At the party, the Transom sidled up to Brett Gorvy, Christie's co-head of contemporary art. Where would he like to see the bear resurface? Sorry, New York: "I'd love to see a major city buy it, in Russia, or Asia, or the Middle East." --Sarah Douglas

The star of the party was Swiss artist Urs Fischer, a favorite of some of the collectors in attendance.  Two days earlier, a Fischer had sold for a record $902,000 at auction. At Mr. Brant's Foundation and Art Study Center, the artist unveiled his enormous and elaborate Oscar the Grouch, a multi-room installation that included a giant indoor excavation site and a witty life-size candle of Mr. Brant lit at the crown. Given the guest list, no museum exhibition could have raised the artist's profile and value more.

"A lot of people think," said art dealer Richard Polsky, who has written books on contemporary art as an investment, "that a few powerful collectors get together and decide who's hot, that it's all a conspiracy. And that's not true." Well, he conceded, "maybe it is a little."

Sometimes in the art world, it's money that matters, and this is one of those times. While the New York auctions raised triple the amount at a similar set of sales six months ago, to some degree the well-choreographed evenings just obscured what was really going on. Sales at the city's 300-plus art galleries are actually still flagging, and a shakeout is going on over which artists matter and who will make it into the art-history books. The shakeout is amplifying the power of the relatively tiny cabal of people who do keep buying at the highest levels, and it's shifting who and what people are paying attention to.

This season, it wasn't so much who sold well, but which artists, schools and movements surprisingly weren't on the block at all because the auctioneers didn't even know if there was a market for them anymore. Buyers and sellers are so confused about the ultimate art-historical importance of such recently "superhot"movements as the Leipzig School (Germany), Chinese Contemporary Art (Beijing) and the so-called Young British Artists (London) that auction houses offered work from virtually none of them.  A safer bet was to offer works by artists like Mr. Fischer, for example, because of his powerful fans and because he's just a few months away from an well-recieved retrospective at the New Museum.

"There's a lot of confusion. With collectors of 'limited' means, what are they going to start buying? Pop and minimalism are not affordable. So you have buyers following other collectors-and you have a lot of discussion going on, deservedly so, about a lot of artists of a certain age," said Chelsea art dealer Robert Goff.

Indeed, nowhere is the shakeout more ruthless and noticeable than among a certain cohort of living artists, American painters in their late 50s and early 60s. Buzzy and white-hot in their youth, Ross Bleckner. Julian Schnabel. David Salle, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl. Peter Hall and Christopher Wool are just a handful of the artists in that age group who are all recognizable names but not yet household ones. (For multiple reasons, fewer American women artists from the '80s era are still high-profile, Cindy Sherman chief among them, and her legacy is less in dispute given the Museum of Modern Art's wide holdings of her work.) With younger stars like Mr. Fischer (born in 1973) pushing up, only a few of these 50- or 60-something artists will join the pantheon, so to speak, make it into the canon. Which ones will they be? "Because art is so expensive, you see people picking through carefully and ruthlessly," said one art dealer.

"There is this mid-career plateau for artists, and they get sorted out and some end up masters and some, well, disappear. The question is: Are you a star, or a comet?" said Todd Levin of the Levin Art Group.

At the recent auctions, of wthe ork from the 50-somethings, Mark Tansey's Push/Pull was fought over by bidders, and it soared up to $3.2 million, setting a new record for the artist. Similarly, Mr. Wool's Blue Fool sold for $5 million, more than doubling his existing record, although other Wools sold less spectacularly. (The record makes Mr. Wool more expansive than Joseph Cornell.) But one dealer growled, "Flavor of the month."

Missing from these sales almost completely were works by Mr. Halle, Mr. Schnabel (now better known as an Oscar-nominated director) and Mr. Bleckner, once perhaps the single hottest artist in New York. Fluke or shift in taste?

Mr. Levin cautions artists who may seem to be temporarily "out" to just keep their head down and continue to do good work. "In the '70s, Bruce Nauman had a hot hand, and then in the '80s these guys came in-Salle, Bleckner, et cetera-and Leo [Castelli] kept a box of Nauman videos under his desk and you couldn't give them away. You could have had anyone of them for $50,000. Now, Nauman's considered a master and those $50,000 videos are $1 to $2 million-or more."

apeers@observer.com

Massimiliano Gioni knows how to get what he wants. This is a skill that has served him well over the past few months in his capacity as the curator overseeing the artist Urs Fischer’s takeover of the New Museum. Putting together Mr. Fischer’s logistically treacherous installations, which will open as a show called Marguerite de Ponty on Oct. 28, has required Mr. Gioni to field all of the artist’s mad demands, discourage him from insisting on them, and finally convince the museum’s administrators of their feasibility. It has been a delicate dance.

“Urs says, ‘If they built the pyramids with no electricity and no engines, anything can be accomplished. It’s usually just a matter of time and resources,’” the young curator said last week over espresso at a café down the street from the New Museum. “I think it’s a really good point.”

Mr. Gioni’s method of persuasion, he said, involves a gradual, tenacious pushing that eventually causes whoever has been telling him “no” to get excited about the outlandish thing he has asked of them.

“Everybody wants to be convinced,” Mr. Gioni said. “Usually people say no the first time around because they’re bored, or because they don’t want to bother. But when people get signs of excitement, I think they get carried away.”

Three days later, Mr. Gioni was at the New Museum, crouching on a wooden dolly amid several giant aluminum sculptures while the museum’s exhibitions manager, Hendrik Gerrits, worked on the opposite side of the room on mounting a subway seat and a magnet-powered floating birthday cake made of polymide onto one of the walls.

“He works every angle to get what he wants, and he’s good at it,” Mr. Gerrits said, while Mr. Gioni posed for some photos. Speaking softly and slowly, he offered a recent example involving a wall that Mr. Fischer and Mr. Gioni wanted installed on the second floor. “Everyone in the museum agreed that it was a bad idea,” Mr. Gerrits said. “Not for aesthetic reasons but for building reasons. And for the past three weeks we’ve been fighting about it.”

“Well, I wouldn’t say fighting,” Mr. Gioni interjected cheerfully. “I’ve been told ‘no’ for three weeks.”

In the end, however, Mr. Gioni appealed to New Museum director Lisa Phillips and her deputy, John Hatfield, and when Mr. Gerrits came into work on Monday morning, the two of them “came down with Massimiliano and decided that that we should start building the wall that very second. So we did.”

Ever since he got his start in the art world as an editor at the influential bimonthly magazine Flash Art in Milan, Mr. Gioni has enjoyed an extraordinarily swift rise as a curator, holding titles that most people his age—35—only fantasize about. By the time the New Museum recruited him in February 2006, he had already worked on the Berlin Biennial for Contemporary Art, Manifesta 5 in Spain, and the 50^th Venice Biennale. Last year he helped curate the New Museum’s Younger Than Jesus show, which showcased artists under the age of 33, and since 2002 he has been the director of the Trussardi Foundation, a non-profit that commissions avant-garde art work and mounts shows in non-traditional exhibition spaces around Milan. (Some of the more outlandish stunts Mr. Gioni has overseen there include sending a 90-foot helium balloon of a naked man flying through the skies, installing a house made of bread by Mr. Fischer in a church, and hanging three puppet children made by the satirical artist Maurizio Cattelan from the oldest tree in Milan.)

In his current capacity at the New Museum, Mr. Gioni says he is devoted to promoting radical art, and to putting on shows that people love even though they can’t understand them.

“There's this brilliant quote by Gilles Deleuze,” he said, “where he says that all the greatest artworks seem to be written in a foreign language.’… For me not getting it is part of the excitement.”

In this way, Mr. Gioni is a sort of populist obscurantist—a guy whose outlook might provide comfort to anyone who has ever stared at a work of contemporary art and not known what to think.

“In a society and a culture in which everything has a message and everything has a meaning and everything has a purpose,” he said, “I think we should cherish things that are obscure, that are directionless, that are useless, that are complicated beyond reasonable levels. That's the greatness of art-- even in New York, where everything has a price.”

He looked around at Mr. Fischer’s towering aluminum sculptures. “I think these are obscure, but they do something to you on a physical level that anybody can understand. I think audiences are much more intelligent than we like to depict them.”

Mr. Gioni’s parents were not interested in art. His father worked at an ink factory, and his mom taught grade school. Though the family visited churches on holidays, he said, it was not because they were enchanted by them on an aesthetic level but because they were Catholic.

Growing up outside Milan in a town he likened to Newark, Mr. Gioni found himself drawn to art precisely because there were no adults talking to him about it. "It didn't belong to the school or the teachers," he said. "It was mine."

When he was 14, he started reading the Futurists and the Dadaists—he can still recite by heart Tristan Tzara’s Manifesto of Mister Antipyrine—and listening to Sonic Youth, Fugazi, and Dinosaur Jr. He also started looking at the pictures in Artforum and Flash Art, and loving what he saw “because it was so strange.”

"I remember how weird looking at all those images and reading that stuff was," he said. "My interest in contemporary art had to do a lot with not understanding it."

Mr. Gioni loved this feeling of bewilderment, and he continued chasing it at the University of Bologna, where he studied art history and semiotics. He liked that the avant garde rewarded strangeness and obscurity. “It was like, 'These guys can say whatever, and it's OK!'”

All through university Mr. Gioni earned money translating Harlequin romance novels from English into Italian, but by graduation he had decided that he wanted a job that would let him engage with artists and allow him, somehow, to participate in their work.

At the time, Mr. Gioni said, he did not know that being a curator was a job one could have, and so he began making his name as a critic. He founded an online magazine about contemporary art with a few friends—still on the Web at trax.it-- and after finishing school went to work in Flash Art’s Milan office. At the age of 25, he was chosen to be the magazine's international editor, a position based in New York that has typically been awarded to young up-and-comers.

He moved to New York in 1999, and made quick work of insinuating himself into the art world. One story people tell about him today concerns a cell-phone bill he received a few months after moving here, which totaled something like nine million liras, or $4,500. Mr. Gioni attributes this sum to the fact that he had a girlfriend in Italy whom he talked to a lot without realizing how expensive it was, but one could be forgiven for citing it as evidence of his industrious networking.

But writing and editing “was just a way to be involved with art," Mr. Gioni explained. “Eventually I started knowing artists more and more, and I realized that there were different ways to be engaged with them, besides writing about their work.”

One of the more unusual ways Mr. Gioni did this was by collaborating with the artist Maurizio Cattelan, whom he served for three years starting around 1998 as a Cyrano de Bergerac-style press guru, pretending to be him while giving interviews and delivering lectures. “People would phone me thinking it was him, and I would give these interviews in his place, and I would make up things," Mr. Gioni said. "It was sort of first a game, but it became a profession. It was a weird way to be with an artist and collaborate with an artist, because I would literally give words to him. But, from his point of view it was a way to get over a problem, and for me it was a way to learn to talk about art.”

Mr. Gioni had already held a few odd curatorial gigs when in 2001 the editors of Flash Art invited him to work on the Tirana Biennale, which they had just founded. In the course of that work, Mr. Gioni made another fateful acquaintance in the curator Francesco Bonami, who befriended the young upstart and began hiring him to do research for his shows.

For a time, Mr. Gioni maintained two parallel careers, one as a writer/editor and one as an organizer of shows. Then, in 2003, Mr. Bonami invited him to curate part of the Venice Biennale he was directing, and the 29-year-old finally decided to formally shift his energies away from writing and towards curatorial work. "That's when I said, 'OK. I need to do this. And that's when it became a profession."

Curating art came more naturally to him than writing about it. “[Curating] is, I think, a form of optimistic criticism,” he said. “You're making things possible instead of saying 'that thing sucks.' …The energy's all in the making, not in the killing.”

Ever since, Mr. Gioni has dedicated himself largely to showcasing the work of young artists, and trying to understand what their generation is up to.

“I think Gerhard Richter and Sigmar Polke spoke of capitalist realism in the 60s, and I think, with this very inflated market, we’ve gone through 10 years of capitalist realism again,” he said. “We have seen a lot of in-your-face work, and I think this younger generation has reacted by adopting a kind of obscurity and complexity. [They] have taken it to a new level of madness.”

“I think Urs Fischer belongs to that kind of discourse,” he added, looking around the room again. “You can’t really say what this is all about.”

He gestured towards Mr. Hendriks and another museum colleague, who were now crouching next to the subway seat and fiddling with the magnetic cake.

“The fact that two people are working to make a cake float for the last hour, that’s…” Mr. Gioni trailed off, plainly delighted by the idea. “I mean, does that thing have a meaning? I don’t know! But that’s what’s exciting about it.”

Just then the cake slipped slightly, prompting Mr. Giano to let out a big “oops!”

But a moment later Mr. Hendrik made it happen.

“Ohhh, yes!” Mr. Giano bellowed, and broke into applause as he bounded over to get a closer look.

“Wow,” he said. “Isn’t that the most amazing thing?”

The installation is described as "[a] 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep," which "extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor."

It took 10 days to "build," as Mr. Saltz reported, costing the gallerist Mr. Brown roughly $250,000.

Wow!

"Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it," quipped Mr. Saltz.

According to PropertyShark.com, the gallery building at 620 Greenwich Street is owned by Patrick La Frieda.