"Nothing will come of nothing," King Lear famously warns his reticent daughter Cordelia in Shakespeare's play. But much can come of NADA, as was proved last night when the New Art Dealer's Alliance threw its first annual fundraiser, the Artist Ball, at the Eventi Hotel in midtown Manhattan.

That it was a Halloween costume ball seemed appropriate — who better than artists, curators, and dealers to assemble costumes ranging from the sublime to the spooky to the downright ridiculous? And, with tickets priced around $100, Nada took in about half of its fundraising goal, director Heather Hubbs said, without citing specific numbers.  

But on to the costumes. I found a plum spot near the dance floor and scoped out costumes with artist and curator Haley Mellin, who is responsible, with co-curator Alex Gartenfeld, for the inaugural exhibition at the New Jersey MoCA that opened in Asbury Park last weekend. Mellin herself was outfitted as what, for lack of a better archetype, you might call a hardscrabble ballerina. Or perhaps a ghetto ballerina? There was the requisite voluminous taffeta tutu, but the daintiness of the getup was counterbalanced by a floppy fluorescent pink wig and a puffy North Face jacket.

Sure, there were the usual ghosts and ghouls and witches and vampires, but there were also some genuinely creative efforts. We spotted a lightning bug (read: a girl in a black dress with wings, antennae, and a green light bulb pinned to her bottom that lit up intermittently), and a Carvel ice cream cake. One man's convoluted costume appeared to be a person doing a headstand. Fake legs jutted from his shoulders and yellow rubber dish-washing gloves sprouted from his shoes. A woman had a spear-like object jutting from her head; it turned out she was the North Pole.

"What's the hot dog in the bra supposed to be?" Mellin wondered aloud, pointing to a woman wearing little more than a bikini, smears of fake blood, and, yes, a hot dog protruding from her bra. It turns out she was depicting Carolee Schneemann's famously chaotic performance artwork "Meat Joy."

There were other, shall we say, art-inspired ensembles. Well, sort of. One woman came outfitted as a Dan Colen painting, complete with particolored bubblegum stuck to a white dress in imitation of the artist's infamous bubblegum paintings just on view to (ahem) mixed reviews at Gagosian Gallery. Then there was downtown dealer Augusto Arbizo, who appeared to just be an ordinary wall, with bricks drawn onto a white jumpsuit and makeup-ed onto his face. But could it be another reference to Colen, whose exhibition also included a large, real brick wall? "I'm just a wall," Arbizo said flatly and shrugged. "Well, I guess I could be a Kelley Walker wall. If you want."

And yet, if this reporter had to pick best costume, it would perhaps be a two-way tie for runner up, with a clear winner. The runners up? A man named David Jameson came as Steven Slater, the Jet Blue flight attendant who quit his job in a dramatic fashion over the summer, telling off passengers, grabbing a beer, and hightailing it out of a plane via its inflatable slide. Former Whitney curator Shamim Momin, who now runs the Los Angeles public art nonprofit LAND, had a cell phone glued to her hair, and fake blood spilling down her forehead. Guessed yet? Temperamental supermodel Naomi Campbell's personal assistant!

But first prize would have to go to the evening's most conceptual costume. Asked, "And you’re meant to be?", Lower East Side dealer Lisa Cooley, who was looking like no one other than herself, replied, without missing a beat, "In Los Angeles." She'd canceled a business trip to La La Land when she appeared to be coming down with a bad flu, but her symptoms miraculously disappeared just in time for the Artist's Ball. "I guess that's my costume," Cooley mused. "I'm Meant-To-Be-In-Los-Angeles."

That's the lesson here, folks. You don't need to slather yourself in makeup or wear a heavy, sweat-inducing outfit or an uncomfortable wig. You can do the Halloween equivalent of what conceptual artist Yves Klein did in Paris in 1958: an exhibition at Iris Clert Gallery of nothing more nor less than, well, nothing. Which is to say, an empty gallery, an artwork he titled "La spécialisation de la sensibilité à l'état matière première en sensibilité picturale stabilisée, Le Vide" (The Specialization of Sensibility in the Raw Material State into Stabilized Pictorial Sensibility, The Void). Which is to say, you can do absolutely nothing for All Hallow's Eve, and you can still call it a costume! Happy Halloween, art world, and long live Le Vide!