Jason Farago

It's almost June. If you worry you have accomplished little in 2011 so far, do not read any of the following, more or less recently published: Reading the OED: One Man, One Year, 21,730 Pages The Year of Living Biblically: One Man's Humble Quest to Follow the Bible as Literally as Possible The Year of Living Like Jesus: My Journey of Discovering What Jesus Would Really Do Living Oprah: My One-Year Experiment to Walk the Walk of the Queen of Talk 365 Nights: A Memoir of Intimacy A Year of Blind Dates: A Single Girl's Search for 'The One' Eat Sleep Sit: My Year at Japan's Most Rigorous Zen Temple

Rudolf Stingel’s show at Gagosian in New York (until Saturday) opens with three large black-and-white self-portraits of the artist as a young man (he was born in northern Italy in 1956). The three untitled canvases are all the same size and based on the same photograph, down to the scratches in the background and small spots from moisture damage. They are not photorealist paintings, however. The daubed black backgrounds testify to the painter’s hand, and a few variations creep in: in the first painting the widow’s peak is a swooping curve, in the second it’s more of a sine wave, and in the third it’s rigid and angular. More important, the repetition suggests that the process of making them is the pictures’ real subject: conceptual paintings in photorealist drag.

Tomorrow morning, at the Sheraton New York Hotel and Towers in Midtown Manhattan (and online at www.txauction.com), the US Marshals are selling off the assets of Bernie and Ruth Madoff. There's a preview today (until 7 p.m.) at a warehouse in the Brooklyn Navy Yard; some items are for ‘visual inspection’ only, but the feds will let you try on the jewellery. Madoff seems to have liked gold Patek Philippe watches, though I preferred a Rolex with a moonphase and a perpetual calendar in less gaudy stainless steel (lot 182, est. $60-70,000). The clothes wouldn’t fit me, though there are handsome ties from Charvet, and if you wear a size 8½ shoe you should pounce on lot 331: 16 pairs of John Lobb loafers with a low estimate of $1500, the price of a single new pair. There are lots of shoes. I counted more than 200 men’s pairs, including dozens unworn, to say nothing of slippers, running shoes and boots.

The Madoffs also had a library that is being sold en bloc,