The non-profit Americans for the Arts held their annual fundraiser on Oct. 5 at Cipriani’s party palace on 42nd Street.

The event raised $625,000 for the organization which is already amply endowed, courtesy of pharmaceutical heiress Ruth Lilly’s 2002 gift of $120 million.

Awards were bestowed on actor Robert Redford, writer Salman Rushdie, artist Ed Ruscha, philanthropist Sidney Harman and Anne Finucane, a president at Bank of America, who received accolades for “corporate citizenship in the arts.”

More pics here on Patrick McMullan’s website.

For the fifth annual Annenberg lecture, video artist Bill Viola chats with Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg. The talk takes place Oct. 27 at 7 pm.

Admission is free, but registration is required. Sign up at www.whitney.org

As a clever marketing tactic, the AXA Art Insurance Corporation touts the Mei Moses Fine Art index as an aid to remaining  “level headed” and “guided by facts” amid an “uncertain time,” according to a company press release.

AXA provides clients with complimentary access to the Mei Moses index which tracks repeat sales of artworks. Mei Moses also offers a new quarterly report on the art market.

In a separate but related note, rumors circulate that Artnet has been developing a proprietary pricing index.

Glenn Ligon, Vito Acconci,  Ryan McGinness and Stephen Shore are among seven male artists featured in J.Crew’s Oct. catalog, lending a bit of aesthetic cred to the brand. Photographer Jason Schmidt shot the artists in their studios.

The portraits are also published in a limited edition $100 book for sale at the SoHo shop.

The museum was quiet yesterday on a balmy Los Angeles afternoon.  Other tourists chose the beach over art.

Here are a few shots of the museum, comprised of a series of buildings, each focused on a different period or school of artworks.

Upper East Side framer and master marketer Eli Wilner has recently built a 7,000 home on 35-acres of ocean front property in Montauk, according to an article in The National, an English-language newspaper based in Abu Dhabi. (Article found here.)

The house “has three storeys, heaps of glass everywhere, Carerra marble floors and a blue-tile Japanese roof,” according to the article.

Wilner otherwise resides in his Manhattan apartment, or one of his five Palm Beach apartments.

This article may entice more aspiring framers to go for it.

Acquavella Galleries presents a show of Jean-Paul Riopelle’s large-scale paintings, dating from the 1950s to the 1970s. The show runs Sept. 17 to Oct. 23.

Riopelle, a Canadian-born painter who moved to Paris in 1946, first achieved fame in the 1950s when he won important international prizes and exhibited in back-to-back Venice Biennales.

More recently he has been out of favor among critics.

The New York Times’ Roberta Smith lumped him among “misguided” artists in a review of a Guggenheim show earlier this year. In 2005, the Times Ken Johnson suggested Riopelle would appear “pretty weak” compared with the best work of his romantic companion, the American Abstract Expressionist Joan Mitchell.

Perhaps the fuller showing at Acquavella will help renew enthusiasm.  Riopelle died in 2002.

During his lifetime he exhibited at the Upper East Side Pierre Matisse Gallery.  William Acquavella teamed up with Sotheby’s to purchase approximately 2,300 artworks in the Matisse inventory in 1990 for $143 million, a year after the dealer died.

A muted, gridded 1957 Jasper Johns painting with a stellar provenance, Gray Numbers, is for sale at Sotheby’s on Nov. 11, tagged $5 million to $7 million.

The painting was exhibited at Johns’ first show at the Leo Castelli Gallery, held in a townhouse on East 77th Street in 1958.

The painting was last acquired at Christie’s in November 2003 for $5.3 million during the sale of artworks from the estate of legendary MoMA curator Dorothy Miller. The estimate was also $5 million to $7 million. (New York magazine article on Miller here).

Miller had paid $325 for her Johns in 1958, and hung it on the wall of her modest Greenwich Village apartment until her death.

Dealer Andrew Fabricant, of Richard Gray Gallery, bought the Johns at Christie’s in 2003 for an unidentified buyer who is now selling.

Real estate developer Aby Rosen’s rotating contemporary art show at the Lever House lobby continues this fall with a powerful installation by Barbara Kruger.

She has enveloped the usually light and airy glass lobby with claustrophobic floor-to-ceiling black and white text, creating a dizzying effect.

Proclamations include “Lust,”  “Forget Everything” and “Plenty Should be Enough.”

The estate of Beverly Sills, the Brooklyn-born opera star, sells at Doyle on October 7. Sills, who was hailed as “America’s Queen of Opera,” appeared on the cover of Newsweek in 1969 and Time in 1971.

After retiring from the stage, Sills served as Director of the New York City Opera, Chairman of Lincoln Center and Chairman of the Metropolitan Opera. She died in 2007.

The sale includes furniture, paintings, jewelry, handbags, photographs, costume design and opera memorabilia. An online catalog is available here.