All I Want For Christmas...

THERE SHOULD BE A WORD for that displaced greed that sets in at holiday time-that thing where you see this and this and this and you want to buy all of it for him or her or them. (This isn't a knock; without greed goosing the economy, we'd all be out in the street.) For us NEWSWEEKoids, greed gets displaced one more step: we keep seeing way too much stuff that we can't resist urging you to give them. (Easy for us to urge: we don't get the bill.) And since everything on this comucopious, consumerist wish list is arts-related, we can go vicariously hog-wild and pass off our acquisitiveness as high-mindedness. All is vanity, saith the preacher: we hear that. So from all of us to all of you.

YOUR ARTS DESIRES

AT THIS TIME OF YEAR, YOU'D NEED hiking boots and a warm coat to see the chirping real-fife critters that inspired John James Audubon: The Watercolors for The Birds of America (Villard. $75); why not just pull up a chair? These birds sat for their portraits 150 years ago. Now you can sit and savor Audubon's near-photographic detail. But for just twice the price, you can get reacquainted with a guy who was 20 times the painter. Christian Tumpel's Rembrandt (Abrams. $145) is still hefty enough to make strong coffee tables tremble, even though it accepts the Rembrandt Research Project's deattribution of much of the official oeuvre.

The recently discovered work in The Unknown Modigliani: Drawings from the Collection of Paul Alexandre (Abrams. $75 until Jan. 1, $95 thereafter) plays better in the lap than it did on the wall in a recent show in Venice. But this year you get the most revelations for your art-book buck--more than 1,000 illustrations, many never before published--with Art of Africa by Jacques Kerchache, Jean-Louis Paudrat and Lucien Stephan (Abrams. $175). An impressive book on an essential subject.

Table still holding up? Then top off the stack with Andy Warhol: Portraits (Thames & Hudson. $45), in which his silk screens illuminate various vapid celebrities as if they were stunned bunnies caught in headlights. You probably don't want any riffraff in such company, but American Self-Taught: Paintings and Drawings by Outsider Artists by Frank Maresca and Roger Ricco (Knopf $75), a well-produced collection of inspired crankery, might do for down in the rec room--and be more fun than some of the stiffs upstairs. You may want to banish Harrod Blank's Wild Wheels (Pomegranate, $25) to the garage: these "art cars" with all manner of junk welded, glued and other-wise stuck to them are even outside the outside. La Bolsita, by Rolando Politi (Exit Art, 212-966-7745. $64), is outsider art you can own: swing this jagged, undersize handbag, made from a Cafe Bustelo can, by its itchy rope handles and be queen of the mosh pit. Or make a statement in your office with police barricade tape imprinted with the words BIAS INCIDENT (Exit Art, 212-966-7745. 50 cents a yard). Ain't you got fun! Still feeling subversive? With the Venus refrigerator magnet (Caryco, 206-325-2767. $20), you can dress up Bouguereau's statuesque goddess in any (or none) of 15 pieces of clothing, including a leather suit--complete with AIDS awareness ribbon--and make em green with Venus envy.