Shala Monroque, a fashionista blessed with perfect bone structure and sartorial flare, attended Art Basel Miami Beach with art dealer boyfriend Larry Gagosian.

Luckily for us, she posted some excellent pics on her blog, including a Dec. 5 section titled “What Happens in Miami Does Not Stay in Miami.”

Shala captures dealer Tony Shafrazi faux-strangling hedge fund manager Steve Cohen, as an amused Gagosian and billionaire Eli Broad –eye-brows raised–look on. Shala’s witty caption reads “The art dealer Tony Shafrazi making a sale.”

Shala also gives us a table dancing Aby Rosen, collector and developer of the new marble clad W Hotel in South Beach.

The blog is presented under the auspices of Pop magazine, Russian collector Dasha Zhukova’s fashion magazine.

Interview by Lindsay Pollock

Nov. 18 (Bloomberg) — Shaquille O’Neal, the 7’1” all-star center with the National Basketball Association’s Cleveland Cavaliers, has discovered that art is no slam dunk.

Moonlighting for the first time as a curator, O’Neal is overseeing “Size DOES Matter,’’ an exhibition on the theme of scale in contemporary art coming in February to New York’s nonprofit Flag Art Foundation.

“New York is the art capital, so I’m pleased to be starting at the top,’’ O’Neal, 37, said in an e-mail interview. “It was a little harder than I thought it would be. When you think about what each of the artists put into their work, what they are expressing and want to share with the world, you feel bad about having to narrow it down. He said he chose pieces he “can relate to.”

The show is expected to include 30 artists and 52 artworks, five of which are special commissions. Flag was founded by art collector Glenn Fuhrmann, co-managing partner of MSD Capital LP, which serves as money manager for Michael S. Dell, chairman and chief executive officer of Dell…

Art dealer Holly Solomon’s papers, including 220 boxes of materials tracing her involvement with Manhattan’s cultural scene from the 1970s-1990s, have been donated to the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. Solomon died in 2002 at the age of 68.

The trove includes letters between Solomon and artists Gordon Matta-Clark, William Wegman and others. The material is being processed and will be available to researchers and others, with written permission from her sons.

The Solomon collection includes gallery announcements, exhibition catalogs and audio visual materials, according to Jason Stieber, the Archive’s collection specialist.

The Archives of American Art is a repository for items associated with the history of American art, and includes papers from dealers Leo Castelli, Andre Emmerich, Edith Halpert and others.

Before working as a dealer, Solomon was an early Pop art collector. Her 1966 nine-panel portrait by Warhol fetched $2.1m at Christie’s in 2001, the year before she died.

Solomon and her wealthy husband Horace opened an alternative space, the 98 Greene Street Loft, in 1969. They launched the Holly Solomon Gallery in 1975 at 392 West Broadway, representing Nam June Paik and…

By Lindsay Pollock

Nov. 10 (Bloomberg) — Udo Fritz-Hermann Brandhorst, an heir to Germany’s Henkel AG & Co. fortune and a major art collector, avoided a public court case in New York by settling a lawsuit filed by his former mistress involving two Damien Hirst sculptures and a custody dispute.

The settlement was reached Sunday night according to the woman, Venetia Kapernekas, and Brandhorst’s lawyers.

Kapernekas, a 49-year-old New York art dealer filed a suit in federal court in Manhattan claiming an interest in the two Hirsts, which have been valued at an estimated $47.6 million, court documents show. The custody suit, involving their 8-year- old daughter, was being heard in New York County Family Court.

Kapernekas has agreed to drop the federal suit and claims on the Hirsts in exchange for: custody of their daughter (Brandhorst gets visitation and vacation rights); a one-time payment of $100,000; a $500,000 trust for the daughter’s education; a loft on Wooster Street in Manhattan’s…

The Rubells’ cheekily titled show is presumably not a commentary on art collecting in a recession.

The Miami-based Rubell Family Collection mount their annual must-see Art Basel Miami Beach-timed show, inspired by Picasso’s quote, “Good artists borrow, great artists steal.”  Beg Borrow and Steal includes 260 artworks by 74 artists owned by the Rubells, and runs Dec. 2-May 29, 2010.

The idea for the show originated in 2005, during conversations between Don and Mera Rubell and artists Kelly Walker and Wade Guyton, who described how they had been influenced by previous generations of artists including Cady Noland, Andy Warhol, Marcel Duchamp and Richard Prince.

“While the question of artistic influence may not be new, what artists choose to beg, to borrow, or steal, and from whom, is distinct in that it becomes a reflection of their own time. Beg Borrow and Steal presents artists’ attempts to build on the legacies of their predecessors as they present their own ideas,” according to the  press release.

Here are the artists:

Ai Weiwei
John Baldessari
Frank Benson
Amy Bessone
Matthew Brannon
Maurizio…

Press previews are usually fairly staid and staged events. Yesterday morning, however, at Sotheby’s London branch on New Bond Street, Russian collector Roman Abramovich made a surprise appearance.

Looking rugged and unshaven, he circulated the contemporary and impressionist preview, studying the Warhols and Basquiats, trailed by a coterie of advisers and acolytes.

The cross-dressing artist Grayson Perry, of the wonderful and weird ceramic vessels,  also attended the preview. He had donated a vase to a benefit auction.

The event provided a sneak peek of highlights –a term loosely applied in these slim pickings days– of material slated for sale in November in New York as well as the London wares to be sold later this week.

Los Angeles collector Eli Broad has purchased a bronze Cy Twombly sculpture from the current show at the Gagosian Gallery in New York.

Broad’s newest acquisition, believed to be Untitled (The Mathematical Dream of Ashurbanipal, 2000-2009, was selected and paid for before the exhibit opened Tuesday night at the gallery’s Madison Avenue branch. The price was not disclosed.

The show, titled “Eight Sculptures” remains on view until Oct. 31. The sculptures are painted with white gesso and evolve from the artist’s sculptures made from found objects.

New paintings by Twombly are on also view at Gagosian’s recently opened Athens gallery.

Guggenheim Museum trustee Amy Phelan snapped up Ellsworth Kelly’s 2007 “Blue Relief” last night at the museum’s International Gala for $1.17 million.

The work, comprised of two panels, was estimated to be worth in excess of $1 million. It had previously hung at the Guggenheim Bilbao and Musee d’Orsay in Paris.

The annual black-tie fundraiser garnered $2.3 million, with 250 guests attending. The event included a preview of the new Kandinsky exhibition.

Kelly had donated the piece to the museum.

Phelan was elected a Guggenheim a trustee in 2007. She is a former Dallas Cowboys cheerleader.

Her husband, John C. Phelan, is co-managing partner of MSD Capital, alongside collector Glenn Fuhrman (recent post about Fuhrman here). Phelan is a trustee of the Whitney Museum and Aspen Art Museum.

Actress Sarah Jessica Parker, author and collector Danielle Ganek, singer Art Garfunkel and Amy Phelan were among chairs of the event.

Intrepid collector and dealer Larry Warsh’s AW Asia has organized a four-part course in Chinese contemporary art aimed at “educating collectors, professionals and art aficionados.”

Sessions run Tuesdays in October and instructors include Melissa Chiu, director of Asia Society & Museum, and Christopher Phillips, Curator at the International Center for Photography.

More info here.

Dasha Zhukova, the girlfriend of art collecting billionaire Roman Abramovich, enlisted Damien Hirst to design two covers for a British fashion magazine, Pop, according to an article in WWD.

The website features Hirst-like Pop logos wafting around the home page.

Zhukova, who owns a Moscow art gallery and a clothing line, is Pop’s editor-in-chief.

Hirst’s butterfly infused covers feature a spry 13-year-old fashion blogger. Ed Ruscha has also designed a limited edition hardback cover.

The New York Post‘s Page Six recently reported that Zhukova is pregnant with Abramovich’s sixth offspring. He has five children with a former wife.