Concurrent with the Armory Show was Scope New York, which may be outgrowing their hotel venue -- though the Flatotel on West 52nd Street in Manhattan was the peripatetic fair’s most deluxe digs to date. Scope organizers boast an 8,000-person gate and sales of $2.5 million.

Also noted in early March was Art Rock, a show of 10 solo art projects organized by Clementine Gallery in a custom-built structure in the plaza at Rockefeller Center, and the DiVA Digital and Video Art Fair held at the Embassy Suites Hotel in Battery Park City. Though no figures are available at this writing, buyers were said to have snapped up many of the large set-pieces by young artists at Art Rock, including a comical 3D version of a de Kooning woman done in yellow fiberglass by Ivan Witenstein (sponsored by Derek Eller Gallery) and a “paper airplane” made of a heavy steel dumpster by the apparently super-strong artist Matt Johnson (from Taxter and Spengemann Gallery).

Easily the most talked-about event was Larry Gagosian’s opening for Damien Hirst at the landmark Lever House on Park Avenue, featuring the artist’s Virgin Mother, a 35-foot-tall bronze rendition of Degas’ young dancer, alas, very pregnant.

Among the highlights in New York museums is “Cy Twombly: Fifty Years of Works on Paper,” a show that originated at the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg and that is starting its U.S. tour at the Whitney Museum, where it remains on view till May 8, 2005. The show should heighten the already intense interest in Twombly’s early drawings.

Left Coast openings this month were more toward the klassiche. . . Robert Graham at Ace Gallery and David Hockney at L.A. Louver.

Flavor of the month: Martin Kippenberger, whose work appears at not one, not two, but three New York galleries simultaneously -- Gagosian Gallery uptown, Luhring & Augustine in Chelsea and Nyehaus in the National Arts Club on Gramercy Park.

Ever political, sexual, egocentric and dissolute, Kippenberger produced work in every medium, from posters and drawings on hotel stationary to paintings and major outdoor sculptures. A collector we know said, “The biggest mistake I ever made was not buying a hundred hotel drawings offered by Gisela Capitain [she represents the Kippenberger estate, incidentally] for $50 grand seven years ago. . . . It was an amazing body of work and would be worth $2 million on today’s market.