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With art fair upon art fair sweeping the city (Frieze opens on Friday), and New York magazine’s art world-centric cover story from last week still percolating through the spring air, the timing was right for Bomb Magazine’s 31st-anniversary gala and silent auction last night at the Beaux-Arts-style Capitale, on Bowery and Grand.

Cindy Sherman, Marina Abramović, Dorothy Lichtenstein and many other art-world luminaries assembled in the lobby for cocktails and to peruse auction offerings by the likes of Laurie Anderson, Lisa Yuskavage and Richard Artschwager. Patti Smith arrived wearing a white tuxedo shirt, long beads and a black blazer, her hair in two loose braids, accompanied by her friend Rosemary Carroll, an entertainment lawyer; they quickly huddled in a corner with Michael Stipe, who was carrying an oversize Goyard envelope pouchette. Skittering through the crowd, 8-year-old Clara Blue Cantor, granddaughter of the Bomb board member Paul Cantor, evaluated the art for sale with a precociously gimlet eye. She finally placed a bid on a pink Daniel Wiener watercolor. (Her grandfather said she bids every year: “We’ve been taking her around to galleries. She’s very aware of art.”)

Later, guests moved to the gilded main space lit by masses of votive candles for a dinner of yellowfin tuna sashimi and stuffed leg of lamb. On stage, Patti Smith, the writer Theresa Rebeck and the art critic Hal Foster toasted MoMA’s Klaus Biesenbach, the playwright Marsha Norman and the artist Richard Serra — the night’s three honorees — and presented each with a pink grenade. The toasts ranged from funny (Smith on Biesenbach: “He also packs a very light suitcase, which is commendable”); to touching (Rebeck on Norman: “I’m not the first person who will tell you that Marsha Norman changed my life, and I won’t be the last”); to serious (Foster on Serra: “His work is profoundly American”). During dessert in the lobby, the room buzzed with the rumor that James Franco might be on his way; he finally rolled up in an S.U.V. around 10 o’clock.

While partygoers sipped on cocktails, T asked them to consider the question that New York magazine attempted to answer last week: How does one make it in the art world?

Betsy Sussler, co-founder and editor in chief, Bomb Magazine
“We’re not about that at all. We’re about how one makes art. What we are about is the quality of the work itself.”

Dorothy Lichtenstein, co-chair of the gala
“Back in the day all one had to do was be serious about their work — stay in the studio and paint a lot. These days it’s a mystery to me.”

Klaus Biesenbach, director of MoMA PS1
“I think it takes incredible curiosity, incredible generosity and then the courage to make a decision to narrow it down.”

Hal Foster, art critic
“I’m the last person to ask. I get to be apart from the making and the not making, because I’m an art historian. I have the luxury of the academy. When people think about contemporary art, they think about the market — and the right questions are never asked. It’s not about making it: it’s about making work.”

Ellen Harvey, artist
“With your eyes shut.”

Terence Gower, artist
“There are devious ways and honest ways. They’re probably rewarded equally.”