Sorry, but there are galleries in New York than ever? So it seemed last week, when the fall art season got underway with nearly sixty openings in Chelsea and the Lower East Side. It was only a prelude to next week, when at least forty more galleries will enter the brawl Uptown and down, and I did not even counting what the museums in the store. What a reward! Art should be a lot of soothing the savage toad in the hole. How else to explain the surfeit when economies around the world are stuttering? "Somehow everything keeps going," dealer Andrew Kreps observed at one point."And we have to keep going with it."

So I went. Wednesday belonged to the LES, where the curator Dan Cameron is a little monopoly, having organized group shows and SVA grads in eight different galleries. As if not enough was done to him, he also put together a show combining the art of New Orleans and Turkey on the C24, a multi-level gallery that Turkish investors are opening in Chelsea. While in the neighborhood, I stopped at Alexander Gray formerly of Jack Whitten, septuagenarian who is ahead of the curve for so long that it is taken 'til now to get back around him."These applications are for Obama," Whitten said, pointing to the canvas with a blue-tiled pool area and quartzlike accessories that show on your desktop IPAD. "All you need to know is there.

Is it ambitious new book on the history of sexual difference, published as a companion volume to the Smithsonian exhibition of the same title, but offer a powerful standalone visual part of scholarship to draw the hidden impact of gay and lesbian artists of art history and portraiture, and how they explored the fluidity of gender and sexuality.

The book explores the presence and evolution of same-sex desire in contemporary portraiture through more than 140 full-color illustrations, and photos of prominent American artists, from Georgia O'Keeffe and Andy Warhol Jasper Johns. (Including a remarkable silver print of Susan Sontag, whom we’re obsessed with.