THE NEW PORTRAIT.(The Talk of the Town)(the new society portrait is a short animated film, like that made by Jeffrey Scher of NYC attorney and socialite Susan Shin)

Those who bemoan the navel-gazing tendencies of contemporary art will be relieved to know that in some precincts the forces that shaped Velazquez, Gainsborough, and Sargent--patronage and vanity--still drive innovations in the market. Several months ago, Harry Stendhal, who with his sister owns Maya Stendhal Gallery, in Chelsea, commissioned a painter and filmmaker named Jeffrey Scher to do a portrait of his friend Susan Shin, whom Stendhal described on a Web site that he set up for her as "an icon of the times." Shin, who works as an intellectual-property lawyer by day (Goodwin Procter) and as a committeewoman by night (The Young Friends of Save Venice, the Central Park Conservancy, New Yorkers for Children), is, Stendhal wrote, "generous with her resources--and, believe me, she has endless resources for the good of many charitable causes." She is, furthermore, "glamorous and much sought after in New York, London, Paris, you name it." In other words, she seemed to him the perfect candidate to inaugurate what he sees as the new age of society portraiture: the short animated film.

Scher's two-minute film, which Stendhal gave Shin as a gift, shows a flatteringly cartooned shoulders-up Shin doing very little as her luxurious black hair strobes from tangerine to lilac to rainbow and eventually back to black, and a small smile flickers across her bright-red lips. A jaunty nineteen-forties guitar-and-accordion piece plays in the background. "It's become too boring to look at a regular photo of any kind," said Stendhal, who has the portrait on display in his gallery. "This is an art version that's idealized. It hides away any imperfections, of course."

To make the portrait, Scher filmed Shin in kind light; projected the film frame by frame through a rotoscope onto paper; and painted hundreds of six-by-seven-inch editions of her in watercolor, gouache, marker, pencil, and crayon, each one different. Then he loaded the pictures onto an animation stand and filmed them individually, before converting the whole thing to digital video. The process is about "distillation," Scher notes. "What you don't paint is as important as what you do."

An astute ...