One of the paintings that caught my eye and made me chuckle at this year's Armory show was a a 60-inch-by-90-inch watercolor portrait (see my photo above) of the now notorious Bernie Madoff, a finance genius who confessed to operating a $50 billion Ponzi scheme. Painted by Chinese-born artist Yan Pei-Ming, it remained unsold at $100,000.
Given the economic crash, it was hardly surprising that no one wanted to pay six figures for a portrait of one of the most vilified figures in the world. Writing by e-mail from Paris, Mr. Yan said he had finished the painting in one day, and chose Mr. Madoff because he was “a kind of symbol of the economic crisis, a kind of personalization of the savage speculation, without control.”