Some other pieces that are just going to fly out of Art Now are the quirky dolls made (or amended, more accurately) by Stephanie Jaffe Werner, who is being shown here by Miami’s own Swenson Gallery. She often re-dresses the store-bought dolls in candy wrappers and a twist of decidedly adult humor. Mary Jane is $4,500 and I wish I could take her home with me.

Across the road at Red Dot, New York’s Nancy Hoffman has a particularly striking room. I have written about a number of her artists before, but not Hung Liu, whose work stood out today. She’s a Chinese artist who suffered the very worst of her country’s Cultural Revolution, working as a forced laborer on a corn plantation. This history gives pieces like Captives (at $20,000) a particular urgency.

Also from New York, Littlejohn has a number of William Smith’s exquisite little oil paintings on antique book pages, such as Of the Division of Time 363 (at $2,800). These really are gems: Constable-like landscape studies that enter into a delightful alchemy with the philosophical and scientific texts over which they are painted.

And at San Francisco’s Shooting Gallery, another rarity: a working artist on hand with paints and easel and making precisely the sort of art that is on the walls for you to buy. He is heavily tattooed Shawn Barber, who specializes in portraits of other tattooed artists. Given the artist and sitters you wouldn’t expect anything polite, and that’s just as well. I particularly liked Portrait of the Artist Genevive in her bathtub full of blood, but somebody had already bought it for $10,000. Shooting Gallery is obviously getting something right: By midday today they’d sold ten pieces at a total price of $78,000, including several pieces by Barber and some by Ron English, whose latest work apes the manners of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century academic painting, except that its characters are made up like the members of Kiss.