Read some excerpts from recent New York Times stories about the Manhattan art scene.
Dana Schutz show (followed by Downtown Show and Beyond White Cube)
New York Times________________________________________
January 15, 2006
Portrait of the Artist as a Paint-Splattered Googler
By MIA FINEMAN
THE only thing I really like is that brain," said the painter Dana Schutz, sitting on a stool in her Brooklyn studio and pointing to her detailed study of a strangely shaped human brain in gangrenous shades of green and gray.
Ms. Schutz, 29, has been widely praised for her ecstatically expressive figurative paintings, recognizable by their thick, lush surfaces and flamboyant palette of hot pinks, leafy greens and eggy yellows. But after churning out a dozen vibrant new works for a fall show in Berlin, she found herself in a restlessly experimental frame of mind, casting about for new ideas.
"When I'm in periods like this, a lot of times I'll respond directly to what I just made," she said. "I wanted to stay away from figures and really saturated colors. So I started making abstract paintings, mostly because I have no idea how to make an abstract painting, and I was interested in that."
Leaning against the studio walls were the results of her experiments: half-finished canvases covered with dull blotches of color, some overlaid with the floating outlines of geometric forms. "I know," she said, grinning apologetically. "They're really bad."
"I think that's just part of how it is with making art," she said. "Sometimes you're just flooded with ideas, and then other times you're questioning all the ideas you ever had before and everything is just ... lame."
Well, maybe not everything. At the far end of the studio was a large, unfinished painting of the artist at her desk in front of her computer. Titled "Self-Portrait Googling," the work is about "the seemingly aimless things that people do when they are generating ideas," she explained later by e-mail. "You feel like time has just slipped away. Like one minute you're looking up tofu, the next minute you're looking up the Situationists."
"Self-Portrait Googling" will be the newest work in her exhibition opening Thursday at the Rose Art Museum at Brandeis University. "Dana Schutz: Works From 2002-2005" is a sort of early-career retrospective, with some two dozen paintings and an illustrated catalog.
Since her highly acclaimed solo debut in 2002, Ms. Schutz has become one of the most sought-after artists of her generation. Within the last two years, she has had one-person shows in New York, Paris, Berlin, Kansas City and Santa Fe. Her work has been included in scores of group exhibitions, including the Prague and Venice Biennales.
Critics love her winsome, absurdist sensibility and confidently freewheeling brushwork. And so do collectors. Lately, the demand for her work has grown so great that her New York dealer, Zach Feuer, has imposed restrictions on sales to private collectors: he will sell her paintings only to people who promise to donate them to museums or other public collections. His aim, he said, is "to encourage people to be patrons rather than collector-dealers."
So far, his strategy seems to be working. Early last year the Hollywood mogul Michael Ovitz purchased Ms. Schutz's mural-sized painting "Presentation," and made it a promised gift to the Museum of Modern Art. The painting, a vaguely gruesome scene depicting two large, prone figures surrounded by a curious but blank-faced crowd, was one of the highlights of last year's "Greater New York" exhibition at P.S. 1 Contemporary Arts Center. It now hangs in the latest installation of contemporary art at the Modern.
Ms. Schutz's swift success has engendered some grumbling among art bloggers, who blame market hype for what they see as an overeager embrace of youthful talent. "Why not let a painter with potential start to make mature work before turning her into a star?" wrote Tyler Green, author of the popular blog Modern Art Notes, on another blogger's message board.
"It's a valid question," said Raphaela Platow, curator of the show at the Rose. "Her work is interesting and she's also a very prolific artist. There are 43 images in the catalog and these are only the very best work - there are a lot more we could have included. Ideas sort of ooze out of her."
Ms. Schutz grew up in Livonia, Mich., a quiet suburb of Detroit, and speaks with the flattened vowels of the upper Midwest. She is funny, nervous and decidedly unpretentious, with a wardrobe that consists mostly of T-shirts, jeans and paint-splattered running shoes.
The first art Ms. Schutz remembers seeing was by her mother, a junior high school art teacher whose Abstract Expressionist paintings of Lake Michigan hung on the walls of their home.
When she was 15, her mother gave her a set of oil paints; from then on, she spent most of her free time turning out what she now describes as "typical high school paintings: angsty, emaciated people, teacups and clocks, skinny androids ... stuff like that."
With a bachelor's degree from the Cleveland Institute of Art, Ms. Schutz moved to New York to attend the graduate program at Columbia University's School of Art. There, she began a series of imaginary portraits for her single friends of what she envisioned as their ideal mates.
"I would think about who would be the right person for them," she said. "My friend Susan, for example, would probably like someone older than her, with reddish hair. Maybe she met him at a bar, but he likes to stay home and cook a lot, and maybe he's balding a little bit."
As the paintings progressed, Ms. Schutz's imaginary characters began to feel like distinct individuals. "That's when I feel really excited about a painting," she said. "When it starts to feel real, when it feels like it has a personality." Unfortunately, her single friends didn't always share her views on their potential mates. "Susan was really creeped out by the guy I made for her," Ms. Schutz conceded.
Her first major body of work, "Frank From Observation," centers on another invented character, Frank - a gentle, balding hippie who happens to be the last man on earth. Alone in a pictorial universe pulsating with tropical hues, Frank suns himself on a rock, stares out into a starry night, and at one point takes on the features of a proboscis monkey surrounded by jungle foliage. "I was interested in how art would function without an audience," she said. "If civilization came to an end, what would be art's purpose?"
In her next series, presented in 2004, she invented a race of "self-eaters" - sexless creatures with the strange ability to devour themselves and to create new body parts out of the digested material. These striking images of figures stuffing their own hands, eyeballs and limbs into their gaping mouths are often interpreted as allegories of painting itself.
As the curator Ms. Platow explained, "The self-eaters is a brilliant way of relating to painting as this self-absorbing, self-recycling discourse that is constantly trying to reinvent itself."
Although Ms. Schutz says she is not particularly interested in making art about art, and tries to avoid overt references to art history, her paintings act like magnets for stylistic comparisons. Among the many artists invoked by critics in relation to her work are Gauguin and van Gogh; the Belgian eccentric James Ensor; midcentury painters like Francis Bacon and Philip Guston; and the contemporary artists Cecily Brown and Barnaby Furnas.
Within the last year or so, Ms. Schutz has increasingly turned to politics and current events as springboards for her painterly imagination. Inspired by the spectacle of Michael Jackson's criminal trial, she painted the pop star into an imaginary autopsy scene.
"Poisoned Man" (2005), a portrait of a puffy-faced, jaundiced-looking figure, was prompted by the poisoning of President Viktor Yushchenko of Ukraine. In "Men's Retreat" (2005), she imagines a forest gathering in which corporate powers like Bill Gates and the former Tyco chairman Dennis Kozlowski wear blindfolds, play bongo drums and give one another piggy-back rides.
"Party" (2004), painted shortly before the last presidential elections, depicts several members of the Bush White House together on a beach. Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice bear the bloated body of former Attorney General John Ashcroft, in a sort of secular Descent From the Cross. Trailing behind them are electrical cords and a pointed brown hood, which recall the images of torture at Abu Ghraib.
Although the palette is cheery, this new work has a sharp satirical edge that cuts to the core of the pervasive, surreal quality of American political life.
"The distinction between reality and fiction in America seems like it is becoming really blurry," Ms. Schutz told the artist Maurizio Cattelan, in an interview in Flash Art. "With its religious fanaticism, reality TV programs and fake news broadcasts being aired by the government, the States feel like they are entering the Dark Ages.
"I think of America right now like a hormone-injected, very bronzed turkey," she concluded, invoking an image that could have been pulled directly from one of her own paintings.
2) Downtown Show
New York Times
January 13, 2006
Art Review | 'The Downtown Show'
The Downtown Scene, When It Was Still Dirty
By GRACE GLUECK
Remember Downtown? No, no, not the sanitized, respectable SoHo and Chelsea of today, but the real down-and-dirty Downtown, when the East Village was an art scene, punk and new wave rock assailed the ears, graffiti spread like kudzu, and heroin and extreme style were the rage. While Downtown lasted, the AIDS plague peaked, police raided illegal lofts, and artists attacked Establishment institutions. It was an explosive era of Super-8 films; "no wave" cinema; street art and performances; oral poetry; political engagement; feminist, gay and lesbian activism; clubs and alternative spaces.
Though its denizens often boasted that they never ventured north of 14th Street, Downtown had porous borders. Geographically, it rambled as far uptown as the South Bronx, but it existed as much in the free-floating minds of its participants as in the confines of grungy streets and lofts.
Hot-to-trot Downtowners, both performers and audiences of their work, read the SoHo Weekly News and the East Village Eye, made the scene at Max's Kansas City and joined the doings at the Kitchen, the smoking griddle of the Downtown art world. Among the art spectacles were Joseph Beuys confined with a coyote behind a chain-link fence at the René Block Gallery; Gordon Matta-Clark carving up buildings with a chain saw; Andy Warhol making multiples and movies at his Factory; and the graffitist Keith Haring leaving his happy hieroglyphs everywhere.
Oh, the bubbling energy, the barrage of high-decibel sound, the wild and woolly frenzy, the sheer proliferation of it all! It's recaptured now - at least a generous slice of it - in "The Downtown Show: The New York Art Scene, 1974-1984," a humongous time warp of more than 450 paintings, sculptures, drawings, photographs, videos, books, journals, posters and ephemera by artists, writers, performers, musicians and maestros of mixed media, at New York University's Grey Art Gallery and its Fales Library. (The Fales, part of the larger Elmer Holmes Bobst Library, has the world's most extensive collection of materials relating to the Downtown art scene, from 1970 to now.)
The decade covered by the show runs from the enactment in 1974 of the Loft Law, which made it legal for artists to live in the sprawling factory spaces of SoHo, to the re-election of President Ronald Reagan in 1984, confirming the country's sweeping turn to the right. The show's organizers are Lynn Gumpert, the Grey's director, and Marvin Taylor, director of the Fales, with Carlo McCormick, a critic, writer, lecturer and teacher who specializes in pop culture, as guest curator.
Imposing an ingenious kind of order on the scene's inherent chaos, Mr. McCormick has arranged the show in eight sections, among them "Broken Stories," focusing on the imaginative narrative techniques hatched by writers, filmmakers and visual artists during the period; "Body Politics," work dealing with sexuality and identity politics; and "Sublime Time," chronicling breakaways from the reductive Minimalism that preceded the period.
"I knew from the outset that the show couldn't be chronological," Mr. McCormick says in an interview in a brochure accompanying the show. "Instead I came up with these rather vague and totally problematic constructs by which we could put different people of different scenes and from different moments of this arc in the same room and in conversation with each other."
Conversation! With so many clashing ideologies, points of view and attitudes toward art-making, the show generates the buzz and stridency of, say, Canal Street after payday. It's a no-holds-barred hodgepodge that still reflects the vitality of an off-the-wall culture at a time when New York City's fiscal viability was at an ebb, and the shadows of the cold war, Vietnam and Watergate hung over the country.
"It's intense," Ms. Gumpert said of the show. That's putting it mildly, since even with Mr. McCormick's careful arrangements, paintings, drawings, constructions, videos with sound, books, screeds, journals, photographs, designer garments, tchotchkes and whatever still accost you on every side with Downtown fantasies - and realities.
There is the transvestite Candy Darling dying of leukemia - but wearing full makeup - in a hospital photo by Peter Hujar. There is the unforgettable spectacle of Linda Benglis mocking the hypermachismo of Robert Morris by sporting a giant phallus in an Artforum ad for her show. There is Leon Golub's unflattering oil portrait of Henry Kissinger from his series "Portraits of Power." There are the first and second issues of Raw, a magazine showcasing the growing comix community, founded in 1980 by Art Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly. (Mr. Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prizewinning comic books, "Maus I" and "Maus II," were initially serialized in the magazine.) And floating overhead is the gorgeous wispy chiffon and silk costume, loosely inspired by Iranian women's chadors, made by Robert Kushner, a factotum of the Pattern and Decoration movement, for mid-70's performances at the Kitchen and the Holly Solomon Gallery.
A section called "Salon de Refuse" is deliberately kitschy, trashy art that reacted partly to the dictatorial rules imposed by the critic Clement Greenberg for art that conformed to his modernist theories; the Mock Shop is a re-creation of the stores selling low-cost artists' multiples and the like that served as a critique of consumer culture; and De-Signs, at the Fales, presents artists' appropriation of the shorthand signs and strategies of advertising.
"Salon de Refuse" is rife with works of deliberately bad taste that satirize kitsch and flout the serious uptown punditry about what was art and what wasn't. David Hammons, anticipating Chris Ofili by decades, gaily painted elephant dung culled from the Big Apple Circus to make a charming little sculpture; in "Jack the Dripper at Peg's Place," Mike Bidlo created for P.S. 1 a mock installation of Peggy Guggenheim's salon featuring the incident of Jackson Pollock's urinating into her fireplace. (The installation is shown here in photographs by Lisa Kahane.) "Made for TV," by Ann Magnuson and Tom Rubnitz, presents Ms. Magnuson playing a series of feminine stereotypes onscreen.
In the "Broken Stories" section, the show posits that many Downtown artists turned away from the cold monotony of Minimalism and the rule-based rigidity of Conceptual art to take up human subjects and delve into fantasy. In painting, sculpture, filmmaking and writing, the author's voice was projected, though the stories often didn't make linear sense - anticipating, we are told, "central tenets of postmodernism."
In this section, a chilling scene from Cindy Sherman's "Untitled Film Stills" shows a woman on a Gothic staircase looking fearfully toward a shadowy arch that plunges part of the stairs in darkness. Ida Applebroog uses a kind of animation cel technique in "Sure I'm Sure," a strip that shows a man as he takes off his suit jacket while coolly reassuring an anxious woman (about what?) as she lies in bed awaiting him. Lynne Tillman's book "Madame Realism" (1984), with illustrations by Kiki Smith, draws on experimental writing, critical theory and feminism, to help women understand the effects of the media on their lives.
Also at the Fales, the section "Body Politics" is by and large an X-rated presentation that touches on sex, gender, pornography, feminism, AIDS and other matters of psyche and soma that Downtown was adept at exploring. One highlight is a double portrait by Richard Prince of a demure Ms. Sherman and Mr. Prince himself as her twin. Another is "Reduce/Increase," a self-photograph by William Wegman (of later Weimaraner fame) in a beaded, spangled dress and long-hair wig, marked up to show how he could further transgender by reducing the size of his neck and shoulders and increasing the size of his breasts.
More risqué material by the pornographic star Annie Sprinkle, the feminist-minded performers Karen Finley, Carolee Schneeman and Hannah Wilke, and the photographers Robert Mapplethorpe, Jimmy DeSana and Richard Kern adds to the gravitas here.
Granting that much emerging from Downtown was throwaway stuff, too ephemeral and experimental to last, its effects still reverberate. By pushing the limits, its participants opened possibilities for artists who followed them. Moreover, their work confronted social and political concerns. For better or worse, they helped change the definition of what art and artists might be.
A related exhibition, "Anarchy to Affluence: Design in New York, 1974-1984" at Parsons the New School for Design, 66 Fifth Avenue, near 12th Street (through April 2), surveys the interiors, furniture, graphics, fashion and illustration produced in the period.
Also coinciding with "The Downtown Show," "Notes and Itineraries, 1976-2004" at the Ronald Feldman Gallery, 31 Mercer Street, SoHo (through Feb. 4), is an archive of notated gallery cards compiled by the critic Kim Levin to form a partial survey of the era's art scene.
3) Beyond White Cube
New York Times
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January 13, 2006
Critic's Notebook
Who Needs a White Cube These Days?
By ROBERTA SMITH
"WHAT is art?" may be the art world's most relentlessly asked question. But a more pertinent one right now is, "What is an art gallery?"
It is heard often these days, and within it lies another question: do galleries have to run or look the way they do? How inevitable is the repeating cycle of solo and group exhibitions and the steady movement of artworks from galleries to museums, auction houses and collectors' homes? How can you slow, expose or disrupt the delivery mechanism - maybe even avoid it altogether occasionally - to reassert art as a process and a mind-set rather than a product?
With their changing exhibitions and precarious finances, galleries are by definition fluid forms, under constant revision. But lately the gallery model has seemed even more in flux than usual. More young dealers, artists and people who are both (or neither) are thinking outside the white cube. Other galleries are trying to brake their ascent to establishment status by interrupting the flow of monthly shows and finished objects, substituting a monthlong presentation of short exhibitions and even shorter performances.
Some established dealers turn their spaces over not to independent curators but to other dealers. As Mary Boone, queen of the 1980's art scene, explains on Artforum.com, she commissioned Jose Freire, who owns Team Gallery in Chelsea, to organize two group shows in her 57th Street space because she was interested in "giving my old career new life." But the real new life may be coming from further down the food chain, from individuals and groups who often operate in the gap between traditional galleries and alternative spaces. Their vocabulary - "transparency," "modes of attention" and "the rhetoric of display" are often tossed about - suggests a reaction against the art-as-product orientation habitually ascribed to the Chelsea scene. But they also benefit, themselves, from the surplus of disposable income that flows through the gallery system.
There are precedents for the latest round of what might be called deviant or alternative galleries. One is 112 Greene Street, the freewheeling artist-run exhibition space of early SoHo. Another was American Fine Arts, the sometimes anarchic gallery that Colin de Land and his artists oversaw on Wooster Street in SoHo, and then in Chelsea until his death in 2003.
A more recent precedent is the Wrong Gallery, created by the artist Maurizio Cattelan and the independent curators Ali Subotnick and Massimiliano Gioni. It opened on West 20th Street in 2002, in a one-foot-deep doorway behind a glass door identical to the one leading into the adjacent Andrew Kreps Gallery. Modestly but memorably, Wrong demonstrated that it was possible both to parody a gallery and function as one, giving numerous artists mini-debuts.
The 20th Street doorways (there was briefly a two-feet-deep annex) have closed, but Wrong will participate in this year's Whitney Biennial, and began an extended stay at Tate Modern in London in December. The Wrong Gallery creators are currently in Berlin organizing the Berlin Biennial for March: as part of the show, they have created Gagosian Gallery, Berlin, a real gallery that so far has put on four exhibitions. Any resemblance to the real Gagosian Gallery, or the Guggenheim Berlin, is not coincidental.
One oft-cited precedent is still active in New York: Gavin Brown, who stirred up the gallery form in the mid-1990's by opening a bar called Passerby nearly inside his gallery on West 15th Street. (They shared restrooms.) Two years ago Mr. Brown relocated his main gallery to Greenwich and Leroy Streets, maintaining Passerby (run with a partner) and keeping his old gallery as an intermittent off-site project space. The Leroy Street space is beginning the new year with a series of one-week shows, starting with "Sonic the Warhol," a film by Oliver Payne and Nick Relph that combines video game faces with a visit to the zoo: everyone gets a mask, and the music, by Brian DeGraw, is terrific.
Subversion and Survival
In some ways, Michele Maccarone has strayed furthest from the white cube. The three-story building she opened on the east end of Canal Street in 2001 is barely renovated, and she has allowed it to be regularly torn up, top to bottom, by artists showing there. But Ms. Maccarone is in other ways an old-style gallerist, who seems to have almost single-handedly willed her challenging project into existence while always striving to meet the demands of her artists.
Her current exhibition, the overstocked debut of Nate Lowman, demonstrates the way all galleries fluctuate between subversion and business as usual, if only to survive. In the show, titled "The End and Other American Pastimes," Mr. Lowman continues to develop his down-and-out excursions into collage, graffiti and appropriation. The work feels original in some places - especially a painting technique that suggests velvety silkscreens - and tried-and-Warholian in others, like the series of paintings of blown-up fake bullet holes, which take up a great deal of wall space throughout the building.
In contrast to nearly everything about Maccarone except its funky space, there is Reena Spaulings, a two-year-old gallery, (now on winter hiatus) headed by a nonexistent person, that happened largely by accident. In a small storefront on Grand Street, overseen by Emily Sundblad, a Norwegian artist, and John Kelsey, an American critic, the operation has provided an adamant reminder that a gallery is a social organism - even a kind of family - that combines aspects of living room and studio.
The space, part of the housing complex where Ms. Sundblad lives, was initially rented to create a business address that would beef up her visa application, and grew from there. The Reenas, as they are sometimes called, left in place a delicate pipe scaffolding from the store's days as a dress shop; it now serves as a brilliant device to disrupt the gaze and usually helps pull even the most shambling exhibition together.
The store was initially used, unnamed, as a meeting place, performance space and screening room. The fictional name came later, as did more organized exhibitions, but the unfinished air persists. Eventually, Ms. Sundblad and Mr. Kelsey started making art as Reena Spaulings, and she, as it were, has been invited to the 2006 Whitney Biennial, as has Josh Smith, a Spaulings artist.
Making It Transparent
While the use of a fictive character undermines the myth of the all-powerful art dealer, there is also a certain coyness to it. In contrast, at Orchard, the intellectually inclined new collective gallery that opened on Orchard Street last spring, total transparency is the goal. It is self-evident in a design that involves exposed wall studs and a desk that is actually a picnic table; it is also evident in the decision-making process.
At Orchard everything is hashed out by the collective's 11 members, which also tends to expose the secret emotional life of galleries, where ambition, idealism and vulnerability intersect and conflict. A debate about building storage shelves, which would hide things (diminishing transparency) but make life easier, was fierce. The members are still hashing out whether the gallery should stage solo shows.
Members are the artists Moyra Davey, Andrea Fraser, Gareth James, Christian Philipp-Müller (all formerly of American Fine Arts), Nicolas Guagnini, R. H. Quaytman, Karin Schneider and Jason Simon, as well as Rhea Anastas, an art historian ; Jeff Preiss, a cinematographer and artist; and John Yancy Jr., a computer programmer.
Mr. James has organized the gallery's current exhibition, "Painters Without Paintings and Paintings Without Painters," a feisty but rather beautiful assembly of mostly two-dimensional work that attacks and celebrates painting, or more precisely pictoriality, from all different angles.
The show includes a luminous Mondrianesque wall painting by the Scottish artist Lucy McKenzie; works by J. St. Bernard, a fictive artist who many believe was initiated by Colin de Land as well as Reena Spaulings; and one of Daniel Buren's striped-awninglike paintings, from 1972. History is also recalled in a wonderful homage to Cézanne from the often sardonic Jutta Koether and in works by Simon Bedwell and John Russell, two former members of the art collective Bank, which operated a studio/gallery in London in the 1990's.
Nothing for Sale
The gallery form has almost nothing to do with Scorched Earth, although in some ways it is the most white and boxy of the spaces below Grand Street. Around the corner from Orchard on Ludlow Street, it was cooked up by Mr. James and the artists Cheyney Thompson (who has two works in the Orchard show) and Sam Lewitt. It is a yearlong consideration of drawing in all its permutations, present and historic, and was inspired partly by frustration with the medium's current market popularity.
Its founders call Scorched Earth an editorial office whose chief goal is the publication of a magazine, not exhibitions. With purposeful disregard for usual periodical practice, its first and only 12 issues will be worked on over the next year and then published all at once.
Further liberties are being taken with the gallery form at the Martha Rosler Library, a tiny storefront resembling a used bookstore, where nothing is for sale. Crammed into creaky shelves are about 6,000 books owned by the artist eminence Martha Rosler - on art, architecture, science fiction, poetry, history and beyond - that form a kind of portrait of the artist's mind. Anyone can come in, browse, read and even photocopy a few pages - free.
This functioning bibliographic tribute has been organized by the artists Julieta Aranda and Anton Vidokle, owners of e-Flux, a digital information service whose clients include about 400 art galleries and institutions worldwide. Their first project in the space was a free video rental, 500 videotapes by 250 artists, that ran for six months.
Mr. Vidokle calls the library "a useful resource that doesn't have any commercial motivation" and cites as inspiration the former artist-run SoHo restaurant FOOD, an offshoot of 112 Greene Street, where diners paid what they could.
Easier Said Than Done
It is difficult to be a full-service gallery and maintain a high degree of deviation for long. Friedrich Petzel, who took over the Printed Matter space next to his gallery on West 22nd Street, spoke in September of using it without benefit of a white-box redo or a set schedule. But by December, both were nearly in place, Mr. Petzel said, largely because of pressure from his artists.
When Andrew Kreps lost the lease to his 20th Street space last summer, he moved temporarily to a raw three-floor wedge of a building on 21st Street. While also staging solo shows, he enlisted one artist, Matt Keegan, to organize two excellent group shows, and another, Fia Backstrom, to set up a series of events, "Herd Instinct 360°," on the subject of community (the last of which, a panel, is on Jan. 22). The current exhibitions, of work by Roe Ethridge and Adam Putnam, are well worth visiting, but the space is also notable on its own. As downtown Manhattan and its art world both barrel ahead real estate-wise, it feels a bit like a relic from another time or place.
By March Mr. Kreps should be ensconced on West 22nd Street in the gallery previously occupied by D'Amelio Terras, which is relocating to larger quarters on the block. "I'm tired of roughing it," Mr. Kreps said, noting his current building's iffy heat.
Daniel Reich, another Chelsea dealer, has opened a second space at a place that so far seems inured to gentrification: the Chelsea Hotel. Called Daniel Reich temp., it will reopen in March with a group show organized by Nick Mauss.
But even the folks at Reena Spaulings admit that their artists want big careers and that they were impressed by the activities of deliberate, rather than accidental art dealers while participating in the Liste art fair in Basel, Switzerland, last spring. At Orchard, an invitation from Extra City, a fair starting in Antwerp, Belgium, is under consideration.
Dealers regularly move up the food chain, beyond "starter" galleries; witness the seven who just graduated to sleek ground-floor spaces on far West 27th Street in Chelsea. For those who want to start really small, the Wrong Gallery (in concert with Cerealart Inc.) is issuing a multiple: a 1:6 scale miniature version of its original door and doorway titled "Now Everyone Can Be a Dealer."
