ARTNET NEWS

“I should have been a preacher,” Theaster Gates said to the audience at the celebration of his appointment as the 2012 Armory Show artist commission at Rose Bar on Tuesday.

Now that he’s announced his retirement from art making, is Maurizio Cattelan worried about his legacy? The artist’s upcoming retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum, which apparently features 130 of the his signature works, many dangling from the ceiling, Nov. 4, 2011-Jan. 22, 2012, is meant to mark the end of his career.

The 79-year-old Columbian artist Fernando Botero, who lived in New York in the early 1960s but now makes his home in Pietrasanta, Italy, cut an  elegant figure at the opening of his new exhibition, “Via Crucis: The Passion of Christ,” at Marlborough Gallery on West 57th Street in Manhattan last night.