Perhaps, you thought, after his hedge fund had received a subpoena from the feds, and the FBI had raided the firms of a bunch of his former employees, and an analyst was asked to wear a wire while having conversations with him, all as part of the government’s effort to behead him on live TV, that Steve Cohen would not be in the best of moods. That he would have retreated to the safe room underneath SAC’s headquarters or cryogenically frozen himself inside a Bob’s Big Boy statue and floated in space for 20-30 years, or until this whole thing blew over. Well- think again! He’s in a great mood and he’s out there, getting after it.

At Wednesday’s private opening of the country’s largest and most prestigious art fair, Art Basel Miami Beach, financier Steve Cohen showed no signs of being affected by the subpoena his $12 billion hedge fund, SAC Capital, received last week as part of a sweeping insider-trading investigation…Mr. Cohen, in jovial spirits and eager to chat about his fresh art acquisitions during the fair’s VIP preview, was one of scores of New York collectors who snapped up works in the fair’s initial hours—or, in his case, minutes.

He’s dropping major coin on, among other things, art made out of cans.

Within five minutes of the 11 a.m. opening, Mr. Cohen had dropped into David Zwirner Gallery’s booth, where he spent about $300,000 on Adel Abdessemed’s “Mappemonde,” a large-scale map of the world made from tin cans collected off the streets of Dakar. Within the next hour, he plunked down $180,000 for Tim Hawkinson’s “Bike,” a work of collaged inkjet prints, from Blum & Poe. “It was like boom—immediately,” said Blum & Poe co-owner Jeff Poe.

He’s making jokes (about himself). Continue reading »