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If you take stock of all the art up in New York City this fall, my Lord\u2014it\u2019s kind of an embarrassment of riches. The museums just rolled out the big shows, which means the highly anticipated \u201cFlight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt\u201d opens at The Met this weekend, and the fabulous Orphism show is up at the Guggenheim, with bold-colored abstract gems dotting the spiral ramp up the rotunda. Christian Marclay<\/strong>\u2019s 24-hour tick-tocking masterwork The Clock<\/em> is now on view at MoMA, and the Alvin Ailey show at the Whitney is a showstopper. One could spend a whole day crawling through the big shops at Chelsea, or checking out what\u2019s up Tribeca, where dozens of galleries have opened up shop in the blocks between Broadway and Church in the last five years. It\u2019s a lot.<\/p>\n But low-key: The best place to see art for this specific moment in New York isn\u2019t the museums or the galleries, it\u2019s the auction houses\u2014which are open to the general public (and totally free!)\u2014showing off the billions of dollars of art that they expect to sell next week. And if you don\u2019t go now, all this art is gone forever, shipped off to the ports of call and homes of their new owners.<\/p>\n I\u2019ll be on the ground to take in all the gavel action\u2014and to see if the election of Donald Trump<\/strong> and the surging stock market have any impact on the depth of bidding<\/a>\u2014but before then, let\u2019s take a quick spin through some of the goods on the block next week, shall we?<\/p>\n Christie\u2019s is selling off the estate of Mica Ertegun, the consummate Manhattan doyenne, who counted among her close confidants everyone from Jackie O to Mick Jagger<\/strong> to Henry Kissinger to Bette Midler<\/strong> to the Southampton-based Orthodox priest Father Alexander Karloutsos.<\/strong> She died last year, three years shy of being a centenarian. Until Tuesday, New Yorkers can swing by Rockefeller Center and walk through the aisles to gawk at the elegant objects that filled the life of Mica and her husband, the incredibly influential music executive Ahmet Ertegun, who died in 2006 after a fall at Bill Clinton<\/strong>\u2019s 60th birthday party at the Beacon Theater, while the Rolling Stones performed\u2014one of the great lives lived by anyone, it\u2019s been argued<\/a>.<\/p>\n