Recap: Where Art Meets Fashion Meets Celebrity Meets Hype , Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Paula Court PERFORMA 07 Cate Blanchett, seated, in a Pirandello play reading staged by Francesco Vezzoli.

According to Guy Trebay of the New York Times, sometimes art, meets, celebrity, meets hype...."Slumped in a rolling chair behind the information desk at the Guggenheim Museum, clutching about him a vast fringed leather coat from Prada, André Leon Talley, the Vogue editor at large, emitted a theatrical moan. “Where, where, where is Cate Blanchett?” said Mr. Talley, elongating the actress’s name, not altogether sotto voce, until it became a trans-European bleat, a cry of pain.

Ms. Blanchett, as it happened, was off in the wings, wherever they are, of the great museum, being kitted out in a John Galliano couture dress and trench coat for a star turn that, when it actually occurred, registered as a blur for many of the 800 people who’d already endured several hours of waiting.

By the time Ms. Blanchett appeared, her head swathed in tulle veils, amid flashes of theatrical lightning, not a few people were desperate to follow Mr. Talley, who rose at line three of her monologue and bolted for the door.

This all took place near midnight Saturday, as elsewhere in Manhattan Halloween revelers from foreign lands (well, New Jersey) gaily and drunkenly disported themselves while dressed as prostitutes and clowns. In the museum’s rotunda, a group of eminent actors began an earnest reading of Luigi Pirandello’s “Right You Are (If You Think You Are),” the play, in this case, not exactly utilized as such but as a prop text in a performance piece orchestrated and staged by Francesco Vezzoli, the artist and social gadfly and “bad boy” of Italian art, a person New York magazine recently said “exists at the center of the art-celebrity-fashion nexus that is, controversially, defining the art world today,” whatever that means.

Ostensibly a commentary on the nature of celebrity, the evening featured some of the celebrities Mr. Vezzoli collects, and whom he has cast in performance works like the 2005 “Trailer for a Remake of Gore Vidal’s ‘Caligula’” (Helen Mirren, Benicio Del Toro, Courtney Love), and this year’s “Democrazy” (Bernard-Henri Lévy and Sharon Stone as a presidential candidate and her spouse).

Saturday was the inaugural event of Performa 07, a performance-art biennial organized by the art historian RoseLee Goldberg. At a dinner held before the event at the Upper East Side town house belonging to the art dealer and socialite Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn, Ms. Goldberg said that her personal litmus test for successful performance art is that it makes people weep. “That’s my measure,” she said. “If you cry.”

By that standard “Right You Are (If You Think You Are)” was a galloping success, since people had shed tears to get in, and also battled with flacks and politicked with gallery owners and bartered with friends and pleaded, of course. There were waiting lists for waiting lists. This is because the evening was to feature movie folks like Ms. Blanchett, and Ellen Burstyn and Natalie Portman (in a Prada suit and a glue-on mustache) and Peter Sarsgaard (in a real mustache) and Dianne Wiest and also, let us not forget, the 76-year-old Anita Ekberg, whose “special appearance” amounted to her perching on the pillowy lips of Salvador Dalí’s Mae West sofa, looking as remote (her nickname in 1950s Hollywood was “The Iceberg”) and disgruntled as a Pekingese.

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