Art World

Perhaps Hollywood felt that a film like "Basquiat," the Julian Schnabel-directed film about the life, exploitation and addiction of artist Jean-Michel Basquiat, who died of a heroin overdose in 1988, would be a bit too much of a downer to be the focus of a big West Coast shindig. But for the art world, Wednesday night's screening and benefit reception at the Pacific Design Center was something to crow about despite the downbeat nature of the story.

What I Loved A Novel Siri Hustvedt Henry Holt: 368 pp., $25 * Twenty-five years of the New York art world, with all of its hyperkinetic creativity, petty jealousies and dazzling degeneracy, is brought to life by Siri Hustvedt in her third novel, "What I Loved."

Once an unorthodox choice for formal living spaces, black-and-white and color photographs are increasingly given pride of place. "Since the mid-1980s, the number of people buying photography to enhance their decorating has grown significantly," says Robert Persky, founding editor of the Photograph Collector, a monthly newsletter in New York. "There are over 600 galleries in the United States selling photography, compared to a handful 10 years ago."

Peaceful cities around the world -- from Liverpool to Dakar to Shanghai -- stage biennial or triennial exhibitions of contemporary art. But what about embattled places too preoccupied with day-to-day existence to consider hosting art shows? What about Grozny, the capital of Chechnya, for example? "Emergency Biennale: A Suitcase From Paris to Grozny" has come to the rescue.

Walter Gabrielson, an artist, teacher and writer who interpreted human behavior in lusciously colored paintings and poked fun at the art world with vivid wit, has died. He was 73. He died Wednesday night at Santa Barbara Cottage Hospital of complications from a rare form of anemia that he had endured for several years, said his wife, Nancy Goldberg. "Art is my contribution and my experience with life.

January may signal the beginning of a fresh, untried year--and in the present case, a new decade--but in the art world, it is a month like any other. More auspicious on the art world's calendar is September, when the new "season" of shows begins and galleries settle down to business again after the summer lull. Allegiance to an academic calendar that begins in the fall and ends with spring is steadfast among New York galleries, whose clients retreat from the sweating city during July and August.

After being hard hit by several recent recession-forced closures, the art world got a new flash of life this week with the opening Saturday of the Kim Light Gallery, at 126 N. La Brea Ave., in the former Ovsey Gallery space. "I just think it needs to be done--giving a breath of fresh air in L.A. by taking a risk with new artists," said Light, who has brought in Jeffrey Poe (formerly with Robert Berman) to help run the gallery.

A clandestine group of artistic guerrillas from New York say that in the art world, women and minorities have often been denied a seat at the table. An exhibit featuring posters by the female artists who call themselves the Guerrilla Girls, along with a show by Los Angeles artist Margaret Lazzari, opens Saturday at the Laband Art Gallery in the Fritz B. Burns Fine Arts Center at Loyola Marymount University.

Chiaroscuro by Peter Clothier (St. Martin's Press: $14.95) Offering unequaled opportunities for theft, forgery and general chicanery, the art world is perennially alluring to mystery writers, though few bring as much inside knowledge to it as Clothier, a former dean of Otis Art Institute and a frequent contributor to Art in America.

The Truth About Lorin Jones by Alison Lurie (Little, Brown: $18.95; 320 pages) Polly Alter awoke one day a biographer by default and a feminist in spite of herself. The biography of an American woman painter who died in 1969 is the result of a research grant, a publishing contract and six months' leave from her regular curator's job at the Metropolitan Museum; the feminism a concomitant of finding herself unexpectedly divorced at the age of 39.