Levine in his kitchen

There is running water at Marc Levine’s West Chelsea apartment, but a casual visitor could be forgiven for doubting it. After all, the kitchen sink is surrounded by artfully decorated lunch boxes, not dish racks, and the tub in the guest bathroom holds, among others, a Walter Chin photograph of a naked Gisele Bündchen riding a horse. “This is like my installation,” says Levine of his washroom-turned–gallery space. “The nude figures belong in the bathroom, I guess.”Levine has owned a bartending service for six years (hosts can “cast” their own parties from a fleet of models), but he has loved the charity-event circuit for most of his life. The art sales and auctions common in that world were especially appealing; now he attends 50 to 60 events a year, sometimes consulting on auctions or hosting gatherings at his apartment.“I started collecting in my early twenties,” he says. “I was at a charity event and won a sculpture. I kept it for 20 years.” Now his counter is lined with lunch boxes purchased at auctions to benefit the Food Bank and a very real-looking, albeit disappointingly inedible, cake sculpture for a homey flair. There’s more baked-good imagery throughout the apartment. “I have a fake-cake fetish,” Levine admits.But despite the looks, the kitchen remains empty, the refrigerator full of champagne or nothing at all. “Who doesn’t need eight lunch boxes?” he says. “I only have real food when I entertain.” In the living room, furnished in greens and grays, a bar unit Levine designed faces a window full of postcards, collected through the years at Visual AIDS’ annual fund-raiser Postcards from the Edge. He especially enjoys buying art from new or undiscovered artists, adding their pieces to his constantly rotating collection.Levine lowered the ceilings when he came into the new apartment two years ago, and refrained from painting the walls so it would be “all about the art.” His favorite piece, a drawing by Yoshitomo Nara on an envelope, hangs in his bedroom near an angel-themed James De La Vega piece he says “will always hang over my bed; it sums up the New York dream.” But it’s one of his newest acquisitions that arrests visitors upon entry: the massive image of a bloody lamb by Jill Greenberg. “A lot of people talk about it,” he says. “Maybe it’ll make me a vegetarian.”