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NYC Report: Biggest Gallery Night of the Year

I've never been a blogger, in the sense of writing spontaneously. But thanks to ArtBistro, let me play around. Who could resist a report on the big night last night? This draft may change some even when I get it for my own Web site, but don't you wish you were there!

Only a couple of years ago, the first Thursday in September came as a shock. Smaller cities and neighborhoods might coordinate a monthly gallery night, but never Chelsea. Ordinary New Yorkers treat Labor Day as the end of summer, a reminder not of labor movements past but of all that labor to come. But surely not art, just as so many late spring shows run well past Memorial Day. As recently as 2004, I myself wrote about art's Indian summer. How then could so many shows have opened at once, and how could so many people have turned out to see them?

Of course, the invisible hand of the market was behind it. Time is money now, just as earlier and earlier runs for president attempt to manage the political circus. The crowds in Chelsea still know better than to come back on a single evening next month, but they knew before they arrived what others were missing—and they were missing plenty of Rolling Rock and white wine.

By now, shock has given way to awe, far from the spirit of the first Chelsea art walks more than a decade ago. Manhattan does not know from block parties. It knows from pressure.

In 2006, the study in mass entertainment had already given way to sociology and economics. One naturally attended a little less to the openings and a little more to the scene that had learned to follow them. One noticed the people strolling or hurrying from place to place, but also another kind of growth—in big gallery buildings not set to open for another few weeks.

This year, the economics dwarfs at once art and urban studies. I may have rushed through thirty galleries last night, limited only by the approach of 8 P.M.. I also found myself not so much drifting from group to group as fighting for a place.

At Pace, people waited or cut in line to enter, few could easily get near the art, and fewer still seemed to care. It hit me that, just an hour or so before, I had been enjoying my ease in near empty rooms knowing all too well what lay ahead. I got a kick out of finding that, like the September before, Stux was handing out a micro brew, as it usually does not. I got a bigger satisfaction out of seeing a wealthy stalwart like Robert Miller reaching out to anyone—and with particularly coarse wine at that. Pace, Miller, Galerie Lelong next door, James Cohan across the street, and Sean Kelly further north also drove home another new lesson in economics. With the exceptions of a few prestigious galleries like these, market forces have created a new order out of the early fall chaos.

Quite generally, many fancier galleries plan openings on a Friday or Saturday, often by invitation only, to weed out the business of nurturing customers from mere basking in publicity. Others will not open for another week or two to come, and one can no longer blame it on new construction. This Thursday, the north side of West 24th Street stood almost dark.

The entire evening displayed in microcosm the tension right now between art as blockbuster and art as dozens of independent niches—between art as the struggle to stand out from others and art as the struggle just to go one's own way. Can I still mention, then, that I saw some very good work, even without leaving for other neighborhoods? I hope to describe it for you soon.

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