A Smorgasbord of Fine Art, the Strange and the Old.

It is Everything Old Is New Again Week in New York, with antiques fairs and exhibitions popping up all over Manhattan. This weekend, three of the most lavishly expansive are displaying collectibles of almost every conceivable kind, from ancient Egyptian sculpture to midcentury modern decor. Each has a distinctly different appeal. If you can get to only one, it should be the Winter Antiques Show, whose 75 dealers offer the most wide ranging and highest of high-end material. A lesson to be learned here is just how vividly of-the-moment antique objects can appear. The Alaskan tribal masks at Donald Ellis, for example, are thrillingly fierce and wonderfully inventive in their complex, multipart construction. Surrealists like Max Ernst and Yves Tanguy envied the anonymous, hallucinogenically inspired shamans who made them and purchased some for their personal collections. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]