Fashionable Art
DISCH, THOMAS M.
Fashionable Art The tide has flowed from the Village to SoHo to Chelsea. BY THOMAS M. DISCH The transforming flow of money through New York has accelerated over time. Thirty years ago the SoHo...
...at second glance, he offers a faunish wink, a Peter Panish way of telling us that he can fly, that painting is a way of doing that, that it lifts one to his mid-tree height from which all the valley below is spread out like a map...
...If you like Ryman's favorite color, don't miss the show at the Fischbach, located on 11th Avenue between 24th and 25th, featuring an entire immaculately depopulated seacoast of upscale mansions rendered on canvas with photo-realist detail by Alice Dalton Brown...
...Livingston's mentors are Edward Hopper (for his Sunday-hushed urban street scenes) and Richard Diebenkorn (for his bright but subdued California color schemes), but he too believes that painters can fly, and his way of suggesting it is in paintings of seaside amusement park rides like Tilt-a-Whirl and ferris wheels in parks like Playland...
...Small wonder—the paintings were going for $3,000 to $9,000, the price of five square inches of a Robert-Ryman-white-washed fence...
...Indeed, every good landscapist makes his mark, so to speak, by finding a signature solution to the problem of rendering foliage...
...Heading to another stretch of West 25th Street one can celebrate that part of Chelsea's diversity that I think is the genuine article, a painter Cezanne himself would have paused to admire: Peter Dickison is showing his landscape drawings and oils at the Prince Street Gallery...
...Charles Burchfield was another American painter who painted this way, conveying not just the appearance of a particular scene but the vibration in the ground...
...There is now enough gallery-certified contemporary art being produced to fill the 188 venues featured on the "Chelsea Art" map...
...To see all these artworks with their pricetags still attached lends a frisson of forbidden pleasure not unlike that of topless dancing...
...I came upon the Livingston show by chance, passing by the gallery and seeing his four-foot-square Golden Fagade in the front window...
...The same lesson, but from another palette, could be learned at a venue still in the old SoHo, Arcadia Gallery, where the urban landscapes of Francis Livingston were recently on view...
...That growth did not abate even after SoHo had become a neighborhood priced beyond the means of all but the Thomas M. Disch is the author, most recently, of The Castle of Perseverance: Job Opportunities in Contemporary Poetry...
...In this case my money would be put into real estate ventures like Dickison, Livingston, or even Alice Dalton Brown...
...It would be nice if there were an art-world equivalent to the race track's OTB betting shops, where one might place dollar bets on one's favorite painters...
...Perhaps a new auction house might institute betting windows by way of democratizing the excitement...
...Already a good many had been sold, and by the time the show was over it had sold out...
...Dickison's most telling figure in this regard is the young man halfway up a tree in one of his smaller oils, The Baron in the Tree (named after the tale by Italo Calvino...
...In some ways Brown's vision of whiteness is as droll as Jeff Koons's deliriously self-aggrandizing marble self-portrait on view at Phillips, but with Brown any humor would seem inadvertent...
...How is it that every wall in the country has not already been covered with contemporary art...
...Ryman is an esthetic Enron, all hype and no substance, but other tipsters think quite the opposite and consider him a blue-chip investment...
...Dickison—who has been a protege of Nell Blaine, and who still is visibly in fealty to Cezanne, painting the same hilltown vistas and scraggy pines—has that kind of bell-ringing presence...
...At that point the art scene crept into adjacent neighborhoods, then leapfrogged to its new epicenter in Chelsea, along the Hudson River between West 27th and West 14th streets...
...Not after the precedents set by Duchamp, Warhol, and Koons in our postmodern era...
...The human presences in Dickison's landscapes, both clothed and nude, are emblematic of the way we are to inhabit nature, of how the "ego" is to be fit into "Et in Arcadia ego...
...In their most recent selection, the Phillips showed prime works by de Kooning and Koons, Twombly, Warhol, and Basquiat, for which the auction house was expecting bids in excess of a million each...
...a mirror, in fact, of the world...
...Those prone to denigrate such work as trivial must take their multicultural cue from the other arts of our time, in which there is no such thing as low taste, ineptitude, or kitsch, but only new aspects of an estimable cultural diversity...
...Or rather, in the air...
...Thirty years ago the SoHo area, which had been the cast-iron district and a no-man's-land of warehouses and small manufacturing, was transformed almost overnight into a casbah of lofts and galleries that formed an immense showcase for graduates of the ever-mushrooming arts-education establishment...
...My own day at Vanity Fair began at the Pace Wildenstein, where Robert Ryman was offering a characteristic array of all-but-all-white paintings in various sizes and at prices ranging from $100,000 to $900,000...
...That is no longer a fair question...
...Those who want to form a sense of the New York art scene need only visit the Chelsea showrooms of the Phillips Auction Gallery for one of its displays of "Contemporary Art," when for one Brigadoon-like week each season it becomes the ultimate Chelsea gallery, with a sampling of almost every name-brand artist alive or lately dead...
...most established artists and galleries...
...After the Phillips showroom one can set out upon a tour of Chelsea prepped for the experience, with shrines at which to worship and middens to deplore and beyond these a midway too vast for any one fair-goer to compass...
...Art lovers on a tighter budget could hope to pick up Tom Friedman's cute three-inch-long caterpillar fashioned from his hair (only $12,000 to $14,000) or a color-coupler print of Vik Muniz's Untitled, which shows a copy of Rodin's The Kiss, quite ably executed in smears of chocolate syrup (estimated at $26,000 to $30,000...
...As to what the show suggests of the zeitgeist, the new millennium has begun on a note of Mardi Gras levity, as the presence of such put-on artists as Koons, Warhol, and Muniz might suggest...
...But is it art...
...That is another, nontranscendental aspect of the New York gallery scene...
...Imagine an Alma Tadema with all nudes driven into exile and every surface spotless...
...There is a certain kind of painter whose every work can stop you in your tracks from across the room...
...Brown's views of idyllic real estate (her porches and gleaming white domestic interiors have been rid not only of people but of all furniture except for the breeze-wafted sheers over the windows) show the afterlife that Martha Stewart might expect as her reward, with every houseplant waxed and polished and a calm ocean luminous all the way to infinity...
...you might ask...
...Alex Katz lately found his distinctive shorthand for greenery, and Dickison has his, no less solidly pondered...
...That Boing...
...To survey Dickison's show is to be reminded that for many painters landscape has always been the surest (if steepest) road to transcendence, the jointure of blue heaven and umber earth...
...which signals a painterly presence went off and reeled me into the gallery, where I got to see the as-yet-unhung show in their basement...
...For it was Burchfield's wont (as it was Cezanne's) to paint the imagined Heraclitian fire all matter is composed of, to which purpose the flickering foliage of trees lends itself admirably, and which an artist's brushwork can best hope to emulate...
...His paintings are landscapes (usually with figures), viewed from a height and executed with the exhilaration imparted by mountain air...
...The show had sold out by its closing day—a testimony, like Moby-Dick, to the power of Whiteness...
...Indeed, to see many of these works without their pricetags is to see them, in a sense, unfinished, for it is the patron-purchaser whose stamp of "paid" is the true varnish on each work, the punch line of each deft joke...
...At first glance you might not even notice him...
...Even when finished in the studio (as some are), Dickison's paintings retain a sense of hovering with helicopterish tension over pastoral vastnesses...
...It is, like the stock market, a sports event at which one can either be a spectator or a speculator...
...Her paintings sell at prices from $4,000 to $100,000 and are so popular that there is a large coffee-table book devoted to them...
...Any painting that can be expected to earn more than $10,000 at auction is art, by definition...
...Without the authenticating touch of big money, what would Duchamp's renowned dada monument be but a workaday urinal...
...That map is polka-dotted with galleries as densely as any Seurat painting, and most of the galleries' shows last no more than three weeks...
Vol. 8 • December 2002 • No. 13
