Jean-Michel Basquiat, the Brooklyn-born painter who sold a piece for $14.6 million post-mortem started his career as a graffiti artist under the name, “SAMO.” This could be argued as the first modernistic conversion of basic graffiti into pop art, but is there even a significant difference? For more than 25 years, New York has been a hub for graffiti artists, so why is Los Angeles now declaring itself the street art capital of the world and, more importantly, why is no one challenging the claim?

Manhattan has not always been a hotbed for Filipino cuisine, but with the recent spate of Filipino restaurants opening in the city, that may not be the case for long. n recent months, more Filipino restaurants opened in Manhattan, with some foodies heralding it as the renaissance of Filipino cuisine in the city. Dale Talde is one of those restaurateurs.

Steven and William Ladd have not taken the ordinary path to success as artists.  In fact, their crossover from design and couture into the creation of art objects has happened naturally as a kind of logical step in their collaboration.  Their predilection for sewing and beadwork has led them to develop a 10-year partnership that has become an approach to art and design that is firmly rooted in their shared experiences and memories.

A little over a year ago, Mac Premo found himself with a problem.  He needed to move his studio from Boerum Hill, where he had spent the last several years, to a new but smaller location at the Invisible Dog Art Center in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn.  As an artist whose stock-in-trade was working with found materials, Mac had accumulated a fair amount of cultural debris, as it were.  The move meant that a purge would be necessary.  “This is sort of indicative of my problem as a human, or my greatest attribute as a human, I’m not sure which,” says Premo.  “My solution was to make an art project.”

There is, perhaps, no greater venue for illustrating exactly how vast a disparity exists between the haves and have-nots right now than at the sale of million-dollar artworks. Lending support to the gathering of disgruntled art handlers who have been locked out of Sotheby’s auction house in New York since August, Occupy Wall Street protestors have made things very uncomfortable for the auction house and its clients during the two biggest sales weeks of the year.

In another great departure from convention, the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum has mounted the comprehensive retrospective of Italian artist Maurizio Cattelan, rewriting the playbook for how an exhibition of this kind ought to be done. Cattelan has become famous in the art world for his irreverent sense of humor and penchant for artistic high jinks.  He has made a career out of defying expectations.

It doesn't hurt that James Wolcott can write up a storm.  He proves this once again with a gritty and compulsively readable memoir, Lucking Out: My Life Getting Down and Semi-Dirty in Seventies New York.  Not quite a memoir in the conventional sense, rather Wolcott has written five long essays that seek to encapsulate the reckless, head-long world of movies, Punk music, porn and the New York City Ballet during a time when the glittering metropolis was both grimy and resplendent, when the likes of Norman Mailer, Blondie and Balanchine somehow co-existed in an urban fever dream of creativity not seen since.

Seven weeks ago, protesters gathered in Zucotti Park in Manhattan to fight against “the corrosive power of major banks and multinational corporations over the democratic process, and the role of Wall Street in creating an economic collapse that has caused the greatest recession in generations”. The movement  has swelled since then, with as many as 15,000 people involved in an October 5^th  demonstration, in addition to protests occurring in Madrid, Rome, and Berlin. But what do the protests really offer?

As the de facto capital of the contemporary art world, it is perhaps no surprise that New York has become such a hotbed for high-quality public art.  From the increasingly cultural Governors Island to the newly expanded High Line, great art venues abound throughout the city.