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Undone and Art's March Downtown

Work made on the spot, by hand, sounds closer to “action painting” than to cynicism and appropriation. Visitors can watch art in progress on broad tables, placed sometimes in the back room and sometimes in the main space itself. Just one catch: Mir is supervising an eager cluster of art students. Perhaps that, too, begins in a democratic impulse, from an artist who speaks of her work as about kindness, faith, and hope. However, these sheets of paper marked by minions go for ten grand a pop, and that includes a month of rapid popping.

Mir goes for thematic clusters, such as a crime wave and a wildly fluctuating stock market. They could be describing art. New York has changed so much since those days, toward safety, prosperity, and hope, but also toward inequality and the loss of cheap housing—or studio space. So indeed has Chelsea, and I thought, too, of the crash course in capitalism for Mir’s native Poland. Sorting out the change and continuity, the nostalgia and complacency, could keep one busy for a while. By then, the factory will have churned out who knows how many more paper profits, and who knows just who gets a cut?

As an entrepreneur, one could even call her ahead of her time, but only by about a month. Right through Christmas Eve, Paul McCarthy turned his West Village gallery into a chocolate factory—and a fine one at that. A critic can say, because the gallery left out broken pieces as free samples. No doubt the intact Santas, a thousand a day at a hundred bucks a pop, maintain the same exclusive standards, all in time for holiday shopping. Since Maccarone moved to the calm of Greenwich Street to mark itself as a destination for the select, tasting is actually easier than getting on the mailing list. A critic can verify that from experience, too.

Knowing McCarthy, one can expect a certain extravagance. It took quite an investment to set up the operation, and looks counts. As with his gigantic helium balloon Pinocchio, one can expect, too, a certain naughtiness along with childishness and commercialism, and sure enough Santa bears not a Christmas tree but a “butt plug.” McCarthy claims to satirize art’s commercial impulse rather than milk it. After all, this is dark chocolate. Of course, the satire only contributes to the naughtiness, and it amounts to a kind of pandering in itself.

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