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Undone and Art's March Downtown

New York, NY – Every fall comes the same questions. What can sustain the Chelsea money machine, and what is it doing to the state of the art? Now art institutions are entering the mix. Dia has departed the city, but the Whitney vows to take its place in the Meatpacking District. Is that a sad story with a happy ending, or does it only add a major player to a scene with far too many already?

The same questions come up time and time again. Artists like Aleksandra Mir and Paul McCarthy take the job of turning galleries into businesses seriously—or maybe ironically, if anyone can still tell the difference.

Already, however, the story has another chapter or two. The Whitney has to move, even as it calls a group show “Undone”: it is losing its existing satellite branch at Altria as a corporation exits. Perhaps it helps to think of Dumbo—yet another area, like Chelsea or the Lower East Side, that once promised renewal in art and architecture rather than merely coops and condos. In its annual arts festival, another busy neighborhood balances art, urban renewal, and one heck of a good party.

Two factories

With its fall 2007 openings, Chelsea looked less like a gallery district after hours than a shopping mall the weekend before Christmas. Is it now just a glorified cash machine—or even a machine for printing money? Aleksandra Mir does her best to keep it that way.

Mary Boone might have invented the idea a generation ago, back in Soho, and Mir documents just that era. At least she does to the extent that one can seek a documentary record in art—or The New York Post. Mir bases her work on the tabloid’s front pages starting in 1986, and their screaming headlines and tawdry cast still look depressingly familiar. From her stash in the gallery’s back room, she selects fresh (or perhaps stale) items each day. These in turn become sloppily drawn, larger than life replicas on the gallery walls. In black-and-white sketches, even harsh memories go down as easily as child’s play.

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