The latest Dior campaign featuring Jennifer Lawrence, Greta Lee, Taylor Russell, and Drew Starkey is filled with art easter eggs (h/t to ). The campaign was shot at the newly opened Geffen Galleries at LACMA (eagle-eyed readers will know this based on the color of the walls, which I previously wrote about here).

In the first image of the campaign (above), Monet’s water lilies behind the three ladies echo Creative Director Jonathan Anderson’s March show at the Jardin des Tuileries, where he created an ode to Monet’s work.

Ruisdael’s clouds (behind Russell and Lee above) feel like a connection to the mist rolling over his latest runway in Paris last month.

And Coorte’s strawberries (behind Lawrence) recall the Chardin painting at his men’s debut last summer.

Anderson is a MASTER world-builder, and these connections are part of what makes his work so interesting to follow.

That got me thinking about three other shows from Fashion Week last month that brought art and fashion together just as thoughtfully. There were some spectacles, but to be included on this list, I had to love the fashion too.

1. Kallmeyer × How to Wrap Five Eggs

Danielle Kallmeyer has been an under-the-radar fashion favorite for years and is getting harder to miss. Her clothes are like works of art that are nuanced, considered, and filled with details that you have to take the time to notice.

Her Spring/Summer 2027 collection, shown last month, was inspired by a cult-classic Japanese design book, How to Wrap Five Eggs, which features the resourcefulness of Japanese packaging before mass production. Made from mostly natural, readily available materials, such as bamboo, rice straw, hemp twine, paper, and leaves, that packaging could carry and protect almost anything. Kallmeyer took this as inspiration and considered the ways bodies could be wrapped, clothed, and draped, mixing silhouettes, materials, textures, and proportions to create something equally ingenious and simple.

She, of course, included not one but two homages to the egg carriers. She also took the theme down to the smallest details. Even the hair, styled by Mara Roszak, founder of Rōz, was wrapped, tied, and sewn, inspired by how twine was used to bundle and carry small fish.

I love how the inspiration came to life across the clothes and styling. It’s the rare collection where the inspiration isn’t on the surface. It’s in how everything is made.

2. Rachel Comey × Rosalyn Drexler

I love Rachel Comey’s clothes because they feel believable and still aspirational. For her 25-year anniversary show, Comey chose to highlight Rosalyn Drexler, the Bronx-born pop artist, novelist, playwright, and pro wrestler (as Rosa Carlo). Comey shared, “I thought she was a perfect diversion from reflecting on 25 years… and at the same time, a nice focal point: a woman that you know had this interesting life.”

Drexler’s work is currently on view in her first posthumous exhibition, “My Life Has a Life of Its Own,” at Garth Greenan Gallery in New York (through October 24). Comey sent looks down the runway inspired by the bright, saturated colors of Drexler’s art. Drexler’s colors feel as right for the moment as they did when she painted them.

What I love about this dress is that something so beautiful and summery has such a dark source. Comey nods to that in the styling, layering it over leather shorts. The print is the couch from Night Visitors, which Drexler painted from the crime-scene photo of mobster Bugsy Siegel, shot dead on a floral sofa.

Comey takes Drexler’s passions, values, and artistry and filters them through her own eye, creating clothes for a modern-day Renaissance woman.

3. Simone Rocha × Caravaggio

This collection is built around the incredible 1990 rediscovery of Caravaggio’s The Taking of Christ. Caravaggio painted the work in 1602 for the Roman nobleman Ciriaco Mattei. Somehow it lost its connection to the artist, was wrongly attributed to the Dutch painter Gerard van Honthorst, and spent more than a century in a Scottish collection before landing in the 1920s with an Irish pediatrician, Dr. Marie Lea-Wilson. In the early 1930s, she gave it to the Jesuits in Dublin, where it hung in their dining room for nearly 60 years until Sergio Benedetti, a senior conservator at the National Gallery of Ireland, realized it was the “lost” Caravaggio.

Rocha, who was born in Dublin, showed the collection at the Old Bailey, London’s criminal court, a fitting venue for a collection inspired by a painting of an arrest. Rocha took this extraordinary story and pulled many of the threads that make it so sensational into her work. Caravaggio is best known for his use of chiaroscuro (Italian for “light-dark”), and the show’s color palette borrowed heavily from his rich reds, black, and petrol blue set against bright whites. Velvet, tulle, and lace gave it the same depth.

The show opened with one of my favorite looks, a dark navy trench in a deep Caravaggio blue over a full tulle skirt with a feathered boa hem and sheer lace top. From there, Rocha continued to play with color and texture, blending and pushing the boundaries between masculine and feminine silhouettes as she always does. The rosette collars, some framing deep V-necklines, others on jackets, reminded me of the ruffs in Caravaggio’s era, but reimagined with fierce modernism and often paired with short leather knickers or hardware to create more tension and structure.

Reflecting on the show, Rocha said she wanted to find “the most beautiful thing in an unexpected place.” The inspiration was felt throughout the show, but in a way that made it feel like a discovery, which is exactly what the painting was.

Each of these designers found beauty, joy, and awe in the everyday by remixing art, trends, and their own stories. And taking the time to notice what moves us, why, and how we interpret it is the best part of it all.

I love writing, sourcing, curating, styling, and buying art because of all the rabbit holes you find yourself in. Last week at LA Design Weekend, one of my favorite events was Design in Motion’s curation of short films, clips and ads that design creatives loved and wanted to share.

For 90 minutes, we watched things that were zany, beautiful, silly, and sometimes pure magic. Sitting in a small theater full of fellow design nerds felt like the creative break we all needed.

I’ve been thinking a lot about design in the world of AI. When I worked in marketing, the main ask from exec teams was always, “But can it go viral?” Now it seems to be, “How fast and how cheaply can we make it?” Enough shots on goal, and eventually something will hit.

But at what cost? More content keeps us scrolling, hunting for something that breaks through. Meanwhile making, thinking, experimenting, and following rabbit holes, get treated like something to speed through.

OR. We can do tiny things that make us reconnect and stay part of this big, beautiful world. Read a book. Dig through archives. Touch grass. Sit in a theater and watch a bunch of silly videos with strangers. Be thoughtful about how and why we use AI and keep the fun part of the work for ourselves.

So in today’s roundup of art for $500 and under, I pulled up an old IKEA catalog from 1985 and imagined how these pieces would fit into these spaces.

There’s something lovely about seeing familiar furniture in its earlier life and finding room for something new. Here are five original works from artists around the world that I’d bring into those spaces, and yours.

As usual, if anything catches your eye, reply to this email or send me a note. I can confirm availability and help coordinate next steps.

Nwansa Warna | Senja di sudut kamar, 2025, $285

The title is Indonesian for Dusk in the corner of the room, and Warna writes that the painting is the story of a child growing up without a father’s affection. To them, the forms are broken from the absence and confusion, but they also tell a story of resilience, of making it through regardless of the circumstance. To me, the banana in the top left corner gives that resilience a shape. Bananas are often symbols of prosperity and devotion in Indonesia, and when you look at the work from afar, the banana really feels like the focal point in the chaos of the rest of the work.

Warna’s practice is rooted in the idea that there are many paths to understanding reality and truth, and they offer their fragmented works as an example of how things that may seem disconnected may just be on their way to becoming something whole.

The wood frame picks up the warmth of the shelving, while the fragmented forms hold their own beside the wire furniture. The room feels a little more lived-in.

Four more works after the paywall.

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When I first started working with a recent client, they told me they didn’t know what art they liked. A year later, they were buying art while traveling, at fairs, and on a whim. There was a clear confidence in what moved them, what felt worth it, and what styles they liked.

They didn’t g…

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Last week I shared South Asian fall shows to catch, all of which I would absolutely buy. This week, I widened the aperture. Here are six works on my list, all priced at $10,000 or less (btw, looking for more affordable works? right this way for under $500 picks).

As always, reply here or send me a note if you want to learn more about a gallery, artist, or work. I can get you more detail and confirm availability, etc. Importantly, two of the six are at The Armory Show, which closes Sunday, September 27.

First up are two selections from Feia, an LA gallery that opened its permanent space earlier this year. I’ve loved seeing their presentations on the fair circuit, including at Felix and NADA, and was excited to finally spend time at the gallery and with their co-founder Thomas Pilnik.

Feia means “ugly” in Portuguese, but as the gallery explains, the word can also express “curiosity, intrigue, excitement, novelty, beauty, bemusement, and everything in between”. That range is absolutely reflected in its program. The curatorial point of view is so clear - whimsical and joyful, with art that is serious in practice without feeling overly serious. After walking through the two shows that opened last week, it’s no surprise that my first two picks come from Feia.

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One of the reasons I started LOTA was that I kept thinking about South Asian art. Here was a culture so steeped in craft, artistry, and visual language, and yet it was surprisingly hard to find contemporary versions of it. So it has been incredible to watch the excitement around South Asian art grow, both within…

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I’ve said this many times before, but the frame is a critical part of the art’s story and how it comes to life in your room.

As shared in that post:

This week’s selects were all chosen with framing in mind. And while framing can be expensive, sometimes costing almost as much as the artwork, it isn’t only there to protect it. The frame can sharpen the composition, give a small work more presence, or create the connection that makes the work feel right in a room.

As usual, if anything catches your eye, reply to this email or send me a note. I can confirm availability and help coordinate next steps.

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Before starting my art advisory, I worked at Tala, a microlending startup offering financial access in developing countries. And when I first started I didn’t understand why my credit and risk counterparts wanted MORE FRICTION as our customers turned in their loan applications. Onboarding was meant to be sleek, fast, and easy. Optimize that funnel. More people. More apps. More loans! Why would I make our customers work harder to get the thing we promised them?? Turns out, if we didn’t add friction we would loan money to people who couldn’t easily repay their loans - bad for the customer and bad for business. Oh, well then. Pass me some more friction please!

Today in my world of art and design I am noticing the same thing my risk team warned me about - some really good friction has been removed. There is more conventionally beautiful stuff available than ever. I can open Instagram, Pinterest, Substack, 1stDibs, TRR, etc. etc. and find a perfectly good version of what I’m looking for. A low kid-friendly coffeetable. A sculptural lamp. A purple top. A pair of black bermudas to take into fall (All items on MY literal list).

Part of the reason is access and the other part is as the stylist, , so perfectly put it earlier this week, “everyone is making the SAME SHIT”. More things, but somehow fewer real choices.

When the markers of good taste become instantly searchable, shoppable, and reproducible, they start to lose some of their power. The object can remain beautiful. The room can remain elegant. The clothes can remain exquisitely made. But the choice no longer tells you very much about the person who made it.

Just scroll through the plethora of kinda chic posts that were trending last month.

The boredom of correctness

I started thinking about this more while having a case of the shoppies and looking back at all of my screenshots from fashion shows, Substackers I love, and threads I’m starting to see as we enter Fashion Month. Color is returning after years of beige, black, cream, and quiet luxury in some bold, fun, unexpected color combinations: red & purple, teal & red, orange & light green, moss green & light blue, cobalt blue & red clay. The combinations feel slightly wrong on purpose. They create temperature shifts, a moment of surprise, and of course, visual friction.

Watch a trend cycle for long enough and you’ll see the pendulum swing the other way, but I don’t think the shift here is as simple as minimalism to maximalism or from neutral to brights. There’s something else brewing below the surface that is making its way through culture - everyone is suspicious of anything that feels too optimized, so we pull a little in something undone, weird, and simply exciting.

In her fantastic midyear macrotrend update, shared Aspirational Humanity as the leading macrotrend in the first half of 2026, which she defined as an appetite for imperfection, aging, handwork, realness, and forms of creativity that carry visible evidence of a person. I loved this line from her post: “Perfection becomes less desirable when it is too easily accessible.”

Obviously this has been super charged by AI, but for years, search, social media, recommendation engines, global commerce, flattening of cultures, and highly responsive supply chains have been teaching us what performs, what sells, and what looks right. The system identifies a successful aesthetic, distributes it, copies it, and then feeds its ubiquity back to us as evidence of desirability.

The result is the sleek sameness that starts to feel boring.

An Architectural Digest essay from last week, Good Taste is Getting Weirder, describes a similar shift in interiors. The article highlights replacing beige interiors with something “weirder” - rooms with humor, historical awareness, patina, inherited objects, and combinations that resist immediate recognition of taste.

Optimization has made “kinda chic” taste abundant. What is becoming scarce, and therefore desirable, is evidence of a person’s history, their specific idiosyncrasies, the friction that makes them who they are.

Taste needs human interaction

I loved this recent conversation with Rachel Karten with writer and researcher Ruby Justice Thelot about whether brands can have taste. Thelot talks about how historically taste moved through small networks of people and places. Social media may sound social, but increasingly behaves more like mass media - closer to watching TV (WITH the ads) than a friend showing you something.

Taste is created in the smaller moments - the store you wander into, the album playing at a party, the thing a friend tells you about that you never would have found on your own. It is shaped by friction, randomness, and human interaction.

This ties directly to another paper I read, by sociologist Neal Caren, “The End of Friday Nights with Friends.” Using American Time Use Survey data, Caren found that Americans’ weekly in-person time with friends fell from roughly 350 minutes in the early 2000s to 170 minutes in the early 2020s. Friday night, once a distinct social peak, now looks much more like an ordinary weeknight.

This doesn’t feel distinctly new (see the loneliness epidemic), but it documents the decline of in-person social life through which preferences and references have traditionally been created. You still get the album. You just don’t get the party, the conversations and the memories tied to it.

There is joy in friction, there is feeling in friction, and there is taste in friction.

The value of friction

Of course, weirdness will become a template that the algorithm and AI will optimize. “Human” will become a marketing treatment as easily as “minimal.” We are already seeing this in the number of luxury houses using artists for their ads.

So the useful distinction is not tasteful versus weird. It is template versus decision.

The sci-fi author Neal Stephenson believes AI will have a hard time actually replacing forms of art , like writing, fine art, and design, because art lives in the friction, constraints, and conventions that lead a person to make hundreds of micro-decisions. A creator pulls their ideas, experiences, and values into those decisions in a way that is truly one of one. AI is built for scale with one prompt and a sleek output. It is built for the middle, not the exceptional. (Side note: The reality is that the middle will be acceptable to many, but that is a different argument).

A recent Art Newspaper story looked at the growing number of Britain’s historic houses inviting contemporary artists into their rooms and grounds. At Mount Stuart, a white-cube gallery was built for the contemporary program. The artists did not want to show there. They preferred the house itself with its architecture, botanical drawings, layers of decoration, even its ornate drain covers.

The appeal is not simply old architecture making new art look glamorous. The artists are responding to the physical fabric and accumulated history of the buildings. The work has something to push against.

This is ultimately what I want all of my micro-decisions to reveal — in my home, in my clothes, and in how I spend my time. Not that I knew all the “right” things to choose, but that I had reasons for choosing them. That I went down the rabbit hole of why and who and what, and that each choice revealed something about the person who made it, but also something about me. I want my home to make room for function and for the stories that are specific to me and my family. I want my clothes to tell you a little bit about the multitudes inside of me. And I want the artwork on my walls to be there not to certify that I’m kinda chic, but because I felt something in front of it and wanted to keep feeling it.

Art Advisory plug: If you want to do this with a human (!!), that’s what Art Office Hours is. An hour, your room, your budget, and some time spent figuring out what you keep noticing and why. Paid subscribers, your discount code is in your welcome email.

Sources and further reading

• Steven Weill, “Good Taste Is Getting Weirder,” Architectural Digest, August 26, 2026.

• , “2026 Q2/Midyear Macrotrend Update,” What’s Anu, August 26, 2026.

• in conversation with Ruby Justice Thelot, “Can a Brand Have Taste?” Link in Bio, August 27, 2026.

• Neal Caren, “The End of Friday Nights with Friends,” Socius, August 20, 2026.

• Dale Berning Sawa, “Why Britain’s Stately Homes Are Opening Up to Contemporary Art,” The Art Newspaper, August 25, 2026.

• , “Idea Having is Not Art”, Graphomane, September 20, 2024.

• , “SIC: 8.27”, [SIC]: A Digest of Developments, August 27, 2026

Quick note before I jump in to today’s paid post. There was a lot of love for my last What I’d Buy series with pieces under $500, so I’m shifting the Collector’s Circle cadence to include pieces under $500 once a month and higher end pieces once a month.

The goal is to help you see what you love and start your collection with what makes your heart sing, at prices that work for where you are. From looking at a ton of art over the years, I know that great art lives in both of these bands.

Not everything is for everyone. That is not the point of art. But great art will make you think, dream, scream, and feel alive so the more of it you see and feel, the more you’ll discover about what you love.

For this edition, I pulled some of the most-saved rooms from Houzz, a tool people use to find design inspiration from home offices to living rooms and bedrooms, and added artworks to them. The goal wasn’t to match the art to the interior, but to think about what the room can actually take and how art can unlock it.

When designing a space, the old principle of form follows function still holds true. Buying a sofa is expensive, but you know the constraints. You can prioritize comfort, durability, size, material, color. You also know what you need it to do. It is a place to sit, entertain, watch a movie, take a nap. You get the point.

Buying art for your home doesn’t fit as neatly into ideas of form and function. It is subjective, often expensive, and hard to know when you’ve gotten it “right.” So it gets deferred. Or placeholder art goes up until the time feels right to replace it.

The irony is that art is often the thing that takes a room from furnished to finished.

If anything catches your eye, reply to this email or send me a note.

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I get a lot of questions about where to start with art collecting - what to spend, what size to look for, where to even begin. One recent client is a perfect example of how you can start small, make a big impact, and continue to hone your style and taste a…

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Summer group shows are categorically fun. Caught somewhere between the end of the spring solo season and the Fall openings, summer show are looser with galleries bringing together artists who might not otherwise share a room. They test new names, pull out smaller or stranger works, and take chances they may not take in serious buying season.

For someone looking for art, that creates a real opening. Prices are often lower than they would be in a solo show. Smaller works appear by artists who are already well known. Emerging artists get their first serious gallery context. And occasionally an established artist shows something unusual enough to feel like a real find.

Below I break down a few shows that caught my attention and what I’d buy, why, and how it could work in a room. Some of the artists are already in museum collections. Some just finished graduate school. Others are still building the context around the work.

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I have kept some version of a diary since I was in first or second grade. At first, it was mostly lists of my best friends, crushes, favorite movies, and songs. Eventually, it became the way I processed my life. At the beginning of every year and around my birthday, I still find myself writi…

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Access is starting to split.

AI will make it easier to fill a wall, decorate a room, generate a look, or approximate taste. For a certain kind of need, that will be enough.

But collecting is different from filling space. If you want to build something with discernment, context, and relationship, you still need the slower things: people, rooms, questions, and the chance to understand why one object carries weight while another only looks good in a mockup.

The next phase of the art market will not be online versus offline. It will be about what each one is actually good for.

And thoughtful collecting should not only belong to people buying six-figure works in VIP rooms. The more interesting space is lower price, earlier entry, emerging art, with the kind of human attention usually reserved for the top of the market.

That is the larger shift I see underneath Art Basel’s new no-preview initiative. In April, Art Basel announced Basel Exclusive, an opt-in initiative asking main-sector galleries to hold back at least one major work, and in some cases an entire booth, from pre-fair previews, online viewing rooms, and pre-sales activity. The first unveiling is during Preview Days, beginning Tuesday, June 16.

Three galleries told me this week what they are holding back for Basel Exclusive. David Kordansky said they will “unveil extraordinary historic works by Sam Gilliam and Keith Sonnier during the VIP opening.” James Cohan said they are pleased to present “a new work by Tuan Andrew Nguyen, unveiled during the opening of the fair.” P·P·O·W said they will include “the public debut of a work by Hew Locke” in their Basel Exclusive showcase at Booth B10.

As of this week, 193 of 232 main-sector galleries are participating, covering roughly 230 artists. Acquavella, Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, Lévy Gorvy Dayan, Lisson, Pace, David Zwirner, and Sadie Coles HQ are in. The named held artists include Basquiat, Mitchell, Fontana, Bridget Riley, Bourgeois, Frankenthaler, Frieda Toranzo Jaeger, and Maia Ruth Lee.

Vincenzo de Bellis, Art Basel’s Chief Artistic Officer, framed it as a return to first principles. “The overall idea is to restore the value of being present and being present in that moment in Basel, which is our mothership.”

He also said the quiet part out loud. “There is already a practice for galleries to withhold works from their previews but a lot of people don’t know this.”

If you are trying to solve a blank wall, have art but don’t know what to do with it, or need a second set of eyes, I offer a $99 strategy consult: 30 minutes to talk through what you are seeing, what is missing, and what may be worth following.

Book a $99 consult →

Paid subscribers get a discount on consults.

For years, galleries have been figuring out how to make the online art world work, stumbling through how to open up a world that has long been undemocratic. PDFs became storefronts. Viewing rooms became booths. Collectors learned how to make decisions from a screen, or at least how to begin there.

Now the pendulum is swinging back.

In many ways, the online art world made the art market more legible, more global, and more accessible. But as everything becomes easier to preview, forward, screenshot, and pre-sell, physical presence becomes more valuable again.

Being there becomes the scarce thing. The real exclusive.

Where the field still feels open

As with any major anchor fair, Art Basel pulls a constellation of smaller fairs into its orbit. The one I’m watching is Liste.

Founded in 1996 to make room for younger galleries outside Art Basel’s main hall, Liste has long been where the next layer of the market starts to come into focus. Maureen Paley and David Zwirner all showed there in the early years. The 2026 edition is the largest yet, with 106 galleries from 36 countries, including 41 showing for the first time.

So while the main fair is making presence scarce at the top of the market, Liste is where the field still feels more open.

Read on for a few works I’m excited about at Liste, plus the public projects I can’t wait to see unveiled next week.

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I’ve gotten used to the fair cycle now: the anticipation, the preview PDFs, the over-scheduled days, the list of artists I want to see for myself and the ones I’m already thinking about for clients.

But once you are there, the experience can start to feel like browsing at an impossible scale. Booth to booth, fair to fair, opening to opening. Everything feels urgent until, a few weeks later, most of it falls away.

After LA Art Week, I kept thinking about memory, the hand, and the strange power of the containers art was shown inside, from repurposed 99-cent stores to the hotel rooms of Felix Art Fair. New York left me with a different set of questions.

What does it mean to collect with conviction? How do you understand the breadth of an artist’s practice? And why does work that demands physical presence feel more necessary than ever?

New York Art Week reminded me that buying art well requires a different kind of attention. Less scanning. More conviction. Less “what should I get?” and more “what am I willing to keep looking at, learning from, and living with over time?”

Conviction collecting beats browsing

The clearest antidote to fair browsing was the Hort Family Collection.

Susan and Michael Hort have been collecting for more than 40 years. Their collection now includes over 5,000 works, with a deep focus on emerging artists and new voices.

Susan Hort has described their approach this way:

“When we fall in love with an artist’s work and when we have the opportunity we like to collect their work in depth. [We] do not feel that we ‘collect’ an artist until we have at least five major works.”

Five major works is a wild threshold in a market trained around the language of discovery, access, and getting in early. It is also clarifying. The Horts are not talking about liking something, or buying one piece because it fits a wall, or adding a name to a list. They are talking about committing deeply enough that the artist’s practice has room to unfold inside the collection and to give these early artists what they need to keep going.

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I also lived in New York right after college, briefly enough that I probably talk about it more than I earned the right to, but long enough for the city to imprint itself on me. New York has always held that charge of discovery, chance encounters, and the feeling that something could happen if you just kept walking.

Looking through the previews this week, I felt that same buzz.

Just like LA art week in February, Frieze is the anchor this week with international, blue-chip, museum-level art. The real density is spread across the city: Independent on the Lower East Side, NADA in Chelsea, smaller fair ecosystems like Future Fair and Esther III, plus the auction previews at Sotheby’s.

I spent the last few weeks going through previews across all the fairs to figure out what made me stop and why. Each work I’ve picked here has at least one of three things going for it: a practice that rewards slow looking, a story that gives the work staying power, or a price point that means a real person could actually live with it.

These are my picks going in. I’ll be at the fairs all week and will update this post if anything shifts.

At New York Art Week, here’s what I’d buy.

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Bettina at Ulrik

Frieze Focus, Booth F4 — The Shed

Bettina Grossman
From the Series, Phenomenological New York, 1970s
Silver gelatin print
7 5/8 x 5 in.
$6,000
Ulrik, Frieze Focus, Booth F4

Bettina Grossman, who went by her first name only, was a Conceptual artist whose work refused the idea of a singular fixed art object. She lived at the Chelsea Hotel for the last fifty years of her life and made work the entire time, much of it never shown during her lifetime.

A 1966 fire in her Brooklyn Heights studio destroyed everything she had made up to that point. She went to Europe, wrote “1970-Paris-Reborn,” and started over. Phenomenological New York is one of two major projects she made about the city in the 1970s and 80s, focusing on movement on the street as seen through distorted reflections in glass and metal. She was included in Greater New York at MoMA PS1 in 2021 and has recently been shown at GTA Zurich, the Hessel Museum, and Stedelijk Amsterdam.

Why I love it:
I know it is so cliché, but the Chrysler Building has always been my favorite, and this image had me at hello. The building is one of the most photographed Art Deco icons in the world, but here it is refracted through window panes and adjacent buildings until it bends, warps, and almost dissolves.

It’s less an image of a building than an image of perception itself: the city bending, reflecting, refusing to sit still. Which, honestly, feels like the most New York thing possible.

The rest of the picks are for paid subscribers only - six more works I’d seriously consider, from a concrete wall object about colonial memory to a painting built from the floor plan of a vanished Chicago cabaret, a tiny crying ceramic blob, and a denim landscape that makes decoration the whole point.

Paid subscribers also get $20 off their first 1:1 Art Consult. Details about the subscription here.

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