Autumn in New York

Every city has its own energy, not least when it comes to galleries and museums. Whereas London alternates between falling in love with the raw and the refined, New York just pushes it in your face. Before you have time to react you're frogmarched off to another show, another event. Resistance is futile - the only way to enjoy it is to change gear.

I've spent the last week in New York and have been lucky enough to see Rudolf Stingel's glorious installation at the Whitney, Frank Stella's sculptures on the roof terrace at the Met (below right) and Richard Prince's new show at the Guggenheim. Above is a photograph of Kate Moss taken by Prince for a 2003 edition of W magazine. She is standing in front of one of his series of paintings of white-uniformed nurses based on the covers of pulp-fiction paperbacks from the '50s and '60s. A keen bibliophile, Prince owns a vast collection of this genre of fiction.

His retrospective at the Guggenheim is impressively curated and features a selection of his "joke" paintings, the "check" paintings (a permutation on this theme) as well as his most recent project: a series of disturbing interactions with the imagery of Abstract Expressionist artist Willem de Kooning.

Not quite an exhibition, but definitely worth a mention is Spiegelworld. This show takes place down on Pier 17 near Brooklyn Bridge, and the whole experience is choreographed in the spirit of a retro big-top freak show. Described as Cirque du Soleil as channeled through the Rocky Horror Picture Show and painted by George Grosz on acid, the evening was fantastic fun and I recommend catching Spiegelworld if they pass through your town on their forthcoming tour.

After debuting last year, the NY Art Book Fair is back in town this weekend. There are over 120 exhibitors, and the books range from coffee-table tomes to exhibition catalogues to hand-made limited editions. There is a survey of 150 publications of by the German artist Martin Kippenberger, and a curated zone of artists and independent publishers. London's very own Marcus Campbell has a stall, as does Book Works, a commissioning organisation for artists' publications, though the real stars are local heroes: Brooklyn's fabulous Spoonbill & Sugartown and a performing band called Soiled Mattress and the Springs. Nice. People definitely have a different approach to reading over here - when I walked into Borders on 5th Avenue the other day, their book of the week was The Sociopath Next Door: 1 in 25 ordinary Americans secretly has no conscience and can do anything at all without feeling guilty. Who is the devil you know?. Dickens it ain't.

Being a Luddite I never really got to grips with my iPod, but if you're into that sort of thing then you might be interested in this: a few alternative museum tours have cropped up in response to the official audio tours available from museums themselves. The professors at Marymount Manhattan College were among the first to provide witty, irreverent and definitely "unofficial" commentaries to MoMA - often full of innuendo. Download them here. Slate Audio Tours, billed as "the commentary they don't want you to hear" provide another comical yet critical accompaniment to the modern art galleries of the Met. Art critic Lee Siegel provides throwaway lines such as "This [Léger's Still Life] my grandmother wouldn't have even bought at Macy's", an irresistibly funny commentary that is a welcome diversion from a world often berated for taking itself too seriously. Check out his ramblings here.