Living in a city with more billionaires than some countries is a special kind of privilege. Here, art stops being a rarity locked behind museum walls and becomes part of everyday life. What we’re used to seeing under perfect lighting, against sterile white walls, watched over by a quiet museum attendant — in New York, you might stumble upon it… on a neighbor’s balcony.
“One day we were walking through Soho with friends from Fragment Gallery, and they noticed an Alex Katz painting hanging casually on the wall of a second-floor apartment. I remember being surprised — just the day before, I had seen his solo show at the Guggenheim Museum.” — recalls Waso
A Sculpture Instead of a Bicycle
Here’s a more recent example: from the terrace of Carpenters Workshop Gallery, you can spot a neighboring balcony where a Zhan Wang sculpture from his famous “Artificial Rocks” series proudly stands.
Zhan Wang is one of China’s most renowned conceptual sculptors, a representative of Cynical Realism and postmodernism. His “rocks” have become symbols of contemporary Chinese art at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries.
The cost of one such piece ranges from $150,000 to $300,000. Typically, you’d find them only in major museums — MoMA, The Met, M+, or The British Museum. But this is New York. Here, your neighbor might keep not a bicycle or a drying rack on the balcony, but a piece of contemporary art worth a few hundred thousand dollars.
📍 Balcony location: 685 5th Ave
