My Global Hustle

Jeffrey Deitch, the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art's new director, has been described as someone who lives and breathes art. His phone's email inbox is always full, and he's constantly lifting his trademark horn-

TO describe the retrospective of Richard Hambleton’s art that was recently held at the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries as a zoo doesn’t even take into account the woman who strapped a bug-eyed monkey puppet to her chest. About 2,000 partygoers were crowding two floors at the auction house on Park Avenue, including wealthy Upper East Siders and a parade of models from New York Fashion Week, many sipping from flutes of Champagne.

Ten years ago, a New York real estate developer named Bruce Ratner fell in love with a building site at the corner of Atlantic and Flatbush Avenues in Brooklyn. It was 22 acres, big by New York standards, and within walking distance of four of the most charming, recently gentrified neighborhoods in Brooklyn — Park Slope, Boerum Hill, Clinton Hill, and Fort Greene. A third of the site was above a railway yard, where the commuter trains from Long Island empty into Brooklyn, and that corner also happened to be where the 2, 3, 4, 5, D, N, R, B, Q, A, and C subway lines all magically converge. From Atlantic Yards — as it came to be known — almost all of midtown and downtown Manhattan, not to mention a huge swath of Long Island, was no more than a 20-minute train ride away. Ratner had found one of the choicest pieces of undeveloped real estate in the Northeast.