Whether you are in a buying or a browsing mood, high-end art and antiques fairs are a great way to spend an afternoon learning about innumerable treasures. Here are the details of a few upcoming fairs:

January 15-18
Palm Beach 3 (Contemporary Art)
Palm Beach Convention Center, West Palm Beach, Florida

January 23 – February 1
55th Annual Winter Antiques Show
Park Avenue Armory, New York City

January 30 – February 8
Palm Beach, America’s International Fine Art & Antique Fair
Palm Beach Convention Center, West Palm Beach, Florida

February 13-17
Palm Beach Jewelry, Art & Antiques Show
Palm Beach Convention Center, West Palm Beach, Florida

February 19-23
The Art Show (ADAA)
Park Avenue Armory, New York

March 4-8
SCOPE New York (Contemporary Art)
Scope Pavillion, Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park

March 5-8
The Armory Show (Contemporary Art)
Pier 94, New York

March 5-8
Pulse (Contemporary Art)
Pier 40, New York

March 5-8
Volta (Contemporary Art)
7 West 34th Street, New York

I visited the Museum of Arts & Design (MAD) today and loved the current exhibition, Second Lives: Remixing the Ordinary. This long-running exhibition, on view through April 19, 2009, takes everyday objects like cutlery, coins, grooming products, books and personal accessories and transforms them into sculptures which delight and amaze their audiences. Some of the works are composite pictures, if you will, an overall image which, when examined closely, is actually a clever arrangement of small objects such as hair combs, spools of thread or apparel labels. Other works are more sculptures than pictures, such as Johnny Swing’s recliner seemingly made of quarters or Tara Donovan’s Bluffs, stalagmite-like towers made of clear buttons glued together into a formation of peaks. Other pieces of note are Jill Townsley’s spoon tower, Donald Lipski’s Spilt Milk, a circus wheel-like sculpture with white, substance-filled bottles on the ends, Yuken Teruya’s shopping bags and Paul Villinki’s record collection/butterfly sculpture. There is a lot of fun to be had, and it is actually one of the few exhibitions I enjoy seeing with a crowd as it is such fun of listening to other visitors exclaim about a piece they have just seen or grab their companions by the sleeve to point out something new they have discovered.

The Museum of Arts & Design, 2 Columbus Circle, New York, NY 10019

Live Forever: Elizabeth Peyton will be on view at the New Museum on the Bowery in NYC for only one more week, through January 11, 2009, before heading to Minneapolis, London and Maastricht. A decade and a half of the artist’s production is housed on two floors of the museum’s space with Peyton’s most arresting portraits spread around the corners of the exhibition’s spaces and occasionally tucked into a dead end passage. I began with Kurt Cobain and some historical figures like Napoleon before coming to a self portrait, images of Georgia O’Keeffe and some pets. Then there is the head-on, grisaille image of Frida Kahlo which is an almost newspaper-esque reportage rendering of her as the painting were instead a black and white photograph. The rockers, the rulers and the personal friends of the artist all seem to co-exist in the intensity of their piercing gazes or, alternatively, the suspense of their faces when hidden by shocks of their hair. The works are highly personal, close-up views of their protagonists, as if the viewers were sitting beside them in the next chair or in the same intimate space. Often the sitters are involved in quotidien activities such as sketching, reading, sleeping or walking, while others are such maginfied views that we see only the sitters’ faces, their heads angled in the midst of some unknown activity, capturing a moment in time. What I found most arresting about the works was that, perhaps due to their primarily small scale and often ragged edges, they seem as if they are pages torn from popular magazines or picture postcards collected on vacation, or even Polaroids stuck haphazardly inside a book or photo album. Peyton uses glamorous textures and surfaces and intense color to saturate the viewer with her pictures’ characters. The subject itself could alternatively be the character or the painting process itself, and the combination of the two in such intimately scaled works is fascinating.

New Museum, 235 Bowery, New York, NY 10002

Now at the Met through February 1, 2009 is a celebration of thirty years of Philippe de Montebello’s stewardship at the museum before his departure next year. The exhibition, entitled The Philippe de Montebello Years: Curators Celebrate Three Decades of Acquisitions, displays almost 300 works from 17 curatorial departments at the Metropolitan Museum which were acquired by the museum with de Montebllo as Director, and a few while he was a curator in the 1960s. Each work of art was selected by its departmental curator for the impact it had on the collection and the importance of the object itself from a social, historical or art historical perspective. The rooms are organized according to the years in which the objects entered the museum’s collection, allowing for an interesting mix of cultures and genres in each space.

The first time through the exhibition, armed with my headset to hear anecdotes from the Director and curators about how the objects in question wound up in the collection, I found it rich and wondrous, yet hard to take in all at once as I was trying to learn about each object, absorb it in context with the objects around it and to learn about the manner in which the museum acquired the object (through donation or purchase). The second time through, however, I found a rhythm to the “highlights” type of exhibition and began to appreciate the juxtapositions created by objects, such as a Mexican jadeite sculpture of a face beside Vermeer’s arresting painting of a young woman whose own face beckons from her canvas.

When you go, take the time to absorb this exhibition and to enjoy all the incredible costumes, paintings, sculptures, furniture and decorative arts, photography and drawings. If you leave unable to recall the details of any work, the entire body of artwork is available on-line at the Met’s website.

On view through January 12, 2009 at the Museum of Modern Art is Joan Miro: Painting and Anti-Painting, 1927-1937. The productive decade’s work includes works from 12 different series’, and different they are, from themselves and everything else. There are, of course, the pared down Miros which open the show and consist of exposed, unprimed, bare canvases with minimalist blobs of paint. There are also the highly colorful and iconic Miro images derived Dutch interiors and done in 1928-29. Less obvious Miro series’ from this time period include the large, colorless collages and the large paintings on white grounds from 1929. My favorite pieces in the exhibit, perhaps because they were unexpected, are the Drawing Collages (1933-34) which incorporate popular postcards, illustrations and drawings into the works as well as the the small, colorful paintings on copper and masonite (1956-36). It is amazing to see 12 such different series’ encompass just one decade.