An ode to our Hopey President-elect from a recent Folsom Street Fair in San Francisco; pic by anthonysanfrancisco via SFist.

The most precious (and probably sticky) art relationship of our generation is over! Matthew Barney is no longer listed as in a relationship (according to a Facebook page that might be his).

Some people just make us hate art and Nylon mag, even though we usually like them for their downtown oh-so-cool fashion cred. What do we learn about Art Basel through Kennedy's eyes? Well, we go to Walgreens, see a band, get bored, and begin to question the existence and point of Internet video content. Is it really worth it?

Neckface is a famous street artist—not quite Banksy famous, but almost. And like Banksy, Neckface has always kept his face hidden, even though he's been profiled in the New Yorker and he has a shoe deal with VANS that includes billboards across NYC and is generally superfamous in the cool parts of the art world. Well now a fashion blogger has posted a picture of Neckface unmasked, at some party at Art Basel in Miami. Click through only if you want to see him, okay:

Art Basel Miami Beach, the super-chic Swiss-imported Important Art fair, still teeters along, the ruined economy denting its sales but not its woozy party atmosphere. ''All the sellers think it's 2007, and all the buyers think it's Miami Beach real estate," a dealer told the Miami Herald. So... even though nothing's actually getting sold (Herald reports that over half of the vendors have seen sales declines from last year), everyone is still pretending that artsy optimism is de rigeur. And they're getting some big help from mushy celebrities like Mary-Kate Olsen and the mostly-forgotten Pamela Anderson!

Wow, this beats even the douchey memos or subject-only e-mail missives we're used to receiving. Larry Gagosian, probably the richest gallerist in the world, sent this message to send to his staff in November: "If you would like to continue working for Gagosian I suggest you start to sell some art." The memo originally appeared on Flash Art Online, but now we can't find it—maybe because Gagosian is a big advertiser on that site?—and was also picked up by More Intelligent Life. The rest of the threatening memo—"If you are not willing to make that kind of commitment please let me know"—after the jump.

Gallerist Larry Gagosian may have to turn to the heavens above to help him sell overpriced art, since it appears his staff isn't getting the job done, at least judging by the memo he sent out to Gagosian Gallery employees in recent weeks. "If you would like to continue working for Gagosian I suggest you start to sell some art... The luxury of carrying under-performing employees is now a thing of the past." [Intelligent Life via Gawker]

Perhaps the imploding real estate market is getting under the skin of Julian Schnabel, the artist turned film director turned high-end condo developer. The auteur's movies are widely admired and his smashed-plate paintings were at least big in the 1980s, but his hot pink ("Pompeii red") Palazzo Chupi has turned into a controversial icon for angry neighbors, gauche celebrity speculators and tumbling prices. And though Chupi didn't come up during Schnabel's 60 Minutes interview, the thin-skinned artist didn't take this blessing to heart, instead lashing out at Morley Shafer for daring to ask about art critic Robert Hughes, one of his most prominent detractors.

In lieu of next week's (we're guessing) inevitable headline "Everybody Everywhere Laid Off," we'll continue to bring the grim news piecemeal, as it terribly unfolds. Today it's art! The market for fancy paintings and stuff has been crap lately, as, really, the arts are always the first thing to go when everyone's broke. Sotheby's and Christie's, our premierest and poshest auction houses, both announced today that layoffs and salary cuts are imminent.

As we noticed yesterday, certain quarters of the media seem to be under the impression that if, like a child covering his ears and shouting "lalalalala," they pretend that the scene down at the Miami Art Basel is as glitzy and cash-soaked as ever, people will believe it. "Recession schmession," crows Blackbook. "From the rumor that UBS would not tone down their annual dinner and gala—even amid scandal speculation—to the abundance of caviar on hors d'ouvre [sic] trays, it all smells like decadence to me." Well, it might smell like it, but to the dealers and artists actually trying to make money, "it's all about markdowns and modest expectations," reports New York's Alexandra Peers in a dispatch entitled "Kmart Special Time at Art Basel Miami."

All subversive things in our culture must eventually be co-opted by the very things that they subvert. It's the American way. The American Apparel ad spoofer—who had a months-long run of fame for creating super-porny ripoffs of AA ad posters (which eventually turned out to be Photoshop fakes by the people at Stereohell)—has now become the subject of an actual American Apparel ad. In Vice magazine, naturally! Click through for photos of Dov Charney's victory over artistic mockery:

Art Basel Miami, the most talked-about art event of the year, is in full swing and all the usual suspects have turned up. At a party on Tuesday night hosted by the Times' T magazine and hotelier Andre Balazs, faithful scenesters like Calvin Klein, Takashi Murakami, Naomi Campbell, Rachel Zoe, Yvonne Force Villareal, Dasha Zhukova, and Ingrid Sischy all put in appearances. So how is it all going? It sort of depends who you ask! Judging by the breathless coverage on sites like Fashion Week Daily, all seems to be fine and well. It's "bigger than any recession-concerned naysayers could have predicted," reports Adam P. Schneider in a piece titled "The Best of Times." Over at Dasha's table, for example, the "important topic" on everyone's lips wasn't the recession; it was the "internet craze surrounding Shiba Inu puppies." Of course it was! Unfortunately, that cheerfulness escaped New York's Alexandra Peers, who reports that the fair itself had about half as many people as last year, and that everyone is still waiting for the gazillionaire buyers—like, say, Dasha's boyfriend, Roman Abramovich—to show their faces."Everyone is asking, where are the Russians?" Yes, Miami is very much empty at the moment, as we confirmed when we made a few phone calls this afternoon.

So there won't be so many wealthy bankers as usual at the Miami Art Basel this week. But people can at least expect to see lots of top execs and clients of the fair's sponsor, Swiss banking giant UBS, right? Sadly for already-despondent artists and dealers, it looks like a few of them may be well-advised to stay away, too: The FBI is reportedly heading down to Miami to mount a sting operation to ensnare a certain breed of tax-evader: Those for whom art collecting is a convenient method of surreptitiously moving vast sums of cash around, and if you have an anonymous Swiss bank account, even better!

Last year sad old party boy Jay McInerney went to Art Basel Miami Beach, the American version of the fabulous Swiss art fair, and dutifully chronicled the schmoozy, hideous glitz of its high-end billionaire clientele, its so-un-self-aware-it's-almost-hip pretension, its insanely high sales figures. What a horror show it was! A horror show that stands to be repeated this year (December 4th - 7th) except for one tiny problem: ain't but nobody buyin' art in these penurious and precarious times. So what will the champagne and caviar-dribbled festivities look like compared to last year? We'll take some of our favorite McInerney anecdotes from last year and reimagine them for this ruined age after the jump.

This week's Miami Art Basel, the world's most important art fair and normally a scene of champagne-soaked excess as wealthy art lovers convene to outdo each other on spending tens of millions on star artists, has a gloomy cloud over it as the art market experiences a dramatic dive. The hedge funders probably won't be snapping things up—even those who haven't been crushed in recent months are likely to deem big spending unseemly—while buyers from the emerging markets like India, the Middle East and China, who had recently swelled the ranks of serious collectors, won't be making an appearance.

Anonymous subway-based ad remix artist and minor obsession of ours Poster Boy has been caught on film! All we had before to identify him was this photo(shop). Animal NY's vandal-in-chief Bucky Turco spent a nice evening with PB in a Brooklyn subway station, just cold maxing and relaxing and shooting the breeze while carving up ads with an X-acto knife and attacking trains. We now have a definitive description of Poster Boy: a male wearing a hat, doing art. If you see anyone matching that description, call police immediately. (Not really, snitches!). Watch the full clip below:

It's official: The art market has crashed and just like with real estate, expensive artworks are now worth considerably less than their owners paid for them. Shares of Sotheby's, worth $50 a year ago, have fallen to $9, and the auction house is now planning to let staff go—or, as CEO William Ruprecht puts it, "we'll be resizing our organization." Previously white-hot artists are finding that collectors are no longer fighting to pay millions for their pieces, although it's hard to feel too bad for anyone who's ever sold a canvas daubed with paint for seven figures.

This is exactly the kind of thing we're hoping the recession will wipe out: the class of artists like who sell use their personal juices in the art—and sell it for a lot of money! It isn't punk. It isn't Dada. Freud would have a helluva lot to analyze—unless you're just hard-core mercenaries. But! These artists can't do it alone—they need enabling dealer/gallerists like Javier Peres, who's profiled in the New York Observer today. Blame him for Dash Snow's semen/New York Post collage, Terence Koh's Art Basel installation of his own alleged gold-covered poo ($500,000), and a guy who made "super-realist bird droppings." But we're hoping he'll collapse under his own excess:

A collection of all 53 issues of Visionaire—the super-expensive, super-glossy fashion/art mag founded by Stephen Gan—went up for auction last night at Sotheby's in London, but failed to find a buyer. [Unbeige]

The downturn in the economy—not to mention last week's pretty disastrous auctions at Sotheby's and Christie's—appear to be taking a toll at art galleries around town. Pace Wildenstein has slashed 12 percent of its staff in recent days. [AFC]