In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• • • The Hot Bottom Art and Artifice in the East Village The first time I saw Pat Hearn Gallery I was walking home down Avenue B around midnight. Perhaps that was what made the gleaming, astonishing, almost absurdly out-of-place Light Thing on the corner of 6th Street and Avenue B seem so like an apparition . Like "I have seen the future of Avenue B and it looks like a maximum-security shopping mall." The art world baby boom in this nabe continues to be the story of the season. Twenty-six galleries have opened in the last year bringing the total on my list to thirty-two-although Nine has now closed, I never found the Runners Club, and I stopped adding new names a month ago. Suddenly, it looks like everybody wants a piece of the neighborhood . Amsterdam had a "Best of the East Village" show last fall. Some of the "hot" artists are popping up in Barcelona, Tokyo, Queens.... "In Berlin," Deborah Sharpe of Sharpe Gallery tells me, "they all wanted to know about the East Village." Back home, Gracie Mansion has doubled in size and Civilian Warfare's looking for a building to occupy. The buyers are here-European collectors who use the Whitney Biennial as a shopping list, and upwardly mobiles who are part of an expanding market for art. The highly publicized "energy" of the scene feels something like gold rush fever. "The hot bottom to the art market" is how Jay Gorney characterizes the East Village-a place where collectors come to "drop their change." Gorney, who will curate the "Evolution" show at East 7th Street Gallery in April, was associate director of Hamilton Gallery on 57th Street for seven years. He points out that the top of the market is very active as well, with collectors just itching to plunk down tens of thousands for something like a Salle or a Baselitz, while the middle of the market 52 UNDERGROUND is "closing down." Uptown, "you can get a print by trendy artists like Elizabeth Murray or Jennifer Bartlett for $500-$4,000. In the East Village , you can get an original painting for $600-$800, and most galleries have work in the $150-$200 range." Local artists who now have a repFutura 2000 and David Wojnarowicz, for example-can sell for $6,000 to $8,000 tops but, as the legend goes, you'd pay more for it uptown. The highest figure I'd heard in the neighborhood was $10,000 for a Richard Hambleton, but just the other day I heard $20,000 for a Kenny Scharf. Money and status are the elephants wandering through the art world we're all supposed to pretend we don't see. An unspoken etiquette attends to the clumsy things. One day, I witnessed a beastly blunder at the old Mary Boone gallery, when a rather plain, unfashionably dressed woman approached Boone and bellowed, "How much is that painting?" Boone handled it well, murmuring something like "it's sold." She sells selectively, of course, to the Right People. I can't imagine this scene taking place at an East Village gallery. As Deborah Sharpe put it, "Our spaces are not intimidating." And prices are usually posted on a typewritten sheet at the desk. C.A.S.H. Gallery addressed the issue head-on with a show called "25 cents to $25,000." At Sensory Evolution, dealer Steven Style asks artists to give him work he can sell for $50 or under, $250 or under, and $500 or under. Many of the dealers say they like having cheaper work so artists or young collectors can buy. The sold-out Rodney Alan Greenblat show at Gracie Mansion, favorably reviewed in Art in America, had work starting at $5 (ranging up to $3,500). The Sue Coe show at P.P.O.W., favorably reviewed in ARTFORUM, included prints for sale at $20. I could even afford that, and I began to think how wonderful it was that these were MY galleries in MY neighborhood serving MY needs. Then, later, on a Saturday night, I squeezed into an opening at some ex-bodega where typically half the crowd had to stand out on the sidewalk and a "waiter" in tails twirled by with drinks on a tray, and I saw the same people in tall hair and lizardskin pants who'd been at an opening in Soho just hours ago, everyone dripping attitude and on the make. Maybe...

Share