I met Karolina Gacke on an idyllic Burmese beach a few years ago. She was on holiday from her day job of teaching English in Bangkok and was painting out of a studio literally on the beach in Ngapali, a coastal village on the Indian Ocean in Rakhine State. She spent a couple of months […]

Okay, now I’m angry. Now you’ve got me mad. I was able to live with the absurdity that is the Trump fiasco. I was finding my own ways of coping. I was laughing whenever I could and keeping my cool in the best traditions of my people. But Maureen Dowd put me over the top […]

The paper money in my pocket set off whatever warning alarms are set off by these things. We were going through the security check at JFK prior to our flight to Paris on the night of May 15th. I was with my 31- year- old son. For those of you who don’t know me, I […]

When I first started traveling, that summer of ’69, I carried the guidebook Europe on $5 A Day. And I pretty much lived by it and got through a significant amount of southern Europe on that much and sometimes even less. I slept in very cheap pensions in Spain, shared rooms with fellow travelers in […]

I love New York City. I haven’t always but for at least the last thirty years I have loved living in this city. For some years I had no interest in cities—none. Not Paris or Rome or Barcelona or Istanbul or Delhi. No, there was a time I only wanted to be out of the […]

First of all, I’d like to congratulate the Academy for choosing someone who doesn’t hail from the East—not from the Far, Middle or Near East, not from Southeast Asia or even Eastern Europe. No, they did not choose someone who writes in a language that no one in the Swedish Academy actually has the ability […]

What distinguishes our Art Tours from most of the others you see traipsing through Chelsea and The Lower East Side is that we tend to look at the smaller galleries, the “edgier” art and, often, emerging or not-so well-known-yet artists. We also enlist the artists and the gallery owners and directors in guiding our tours. […]

Reason #2: The Print Galleries Pace Prints, Gemini G.E.L and the International Print Center are all located in Chelsea. For those interested in affordable art created by reknowned artists, for those who collect in the various print media–lithographs, engravings, linocuts, woodcuts, screenprinting, aquatint–and for those looking for the emerging artists in this wonderful artistic field, […]

Reason #1: BIG SPACES Richard Serra at both Chelsea Gagosian Galleries. Where else but in Chelsea could we see exhibitions of work like this?

The most recent excursion through the ever-growing, ever-changing, always interesting Lower East Side launched, not as usual from Orchard and Houston but from Grand and Allen—a good deal further west and south. The Art Scene is moving and I wanted to bring my latest tour group closer to where things seem to be headed. So […]