The Burden of Authenticity

Volume Number 1 Issue Number 9 / November 24 -30, 2006

chelsea: arts&lifestyles

The Burden of Authenticity
Chelsea’s art district still scrambling for street cred

Chelsea Now photo by Jefferson Siegel
Art for Sale: Chelsea’s high-end galleries are irksome to some seeking an arts district populated by artists, not commerce.

By Shane McAdams

“Seeing art in Chelsea feels so synthetic and impersonal sometimes. It feels no different than buying kitchen supplies on Bowery. I’d rather see art in Red Hook or East Williamsburg.”

That sentiment, which I recently overhead at an art opening in Chelsea, is something I hear a lot these days. And the more I hear it, the more problematic it sounds.

I grew up in a sprawling Midwest American city laid out on a grid of wide, multi-laned avenues, designed to assist trucks transporting goods to commercial areas dispersed evenly around the city. New York, by contrast, is concentrated and subdivided into districts: the garment and meatpacking districts date back to the turn of the 20th century, and the financial district goes back another half century. There are lighting districts, streets for antiques, for guitars, and of course, “kitchen supply row” on the Bowery.

The commercial art world, however, unlike the meat, garment, or lighting industries, has had an especially strange relationship with those more practical enterprises. Art has been commercial for as long as New York has been a major urban metropolis, but it also carries the burden of having loftier, extra-commercial purposes.

Since what has been generally accepted as the commoditization of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950’s, artists have eschewed almost anything smacking of commerce. Most of the emerging art since has been either an open critique of this commercialization or an indirect challenge to it by example. This has created a unique relationship between the production center of art and its point of sale, which doesn’t exist in any of the other industries that have evolved into districts over the past hundred years.

That’s because there’s a fundamental difference between selling art and selling meat beyond perishability: in the case of flank steak, people want the product as far removed from its point of creation as possible — authenticity is EXACTLY what the average urban sophisticate/carnivore is not looking for. Consumers don’t want to peer into the barnyard to catch a glimpse of their meat developing toward maturity.

With art it’s different; there is a real cachet surrounding the idea of artistic authenticity that originates at the center of production. This, in turn, creates an allure around certain communities — the East Village, Williamsburg, Bushwick, Red Hook, etc. — that attracts a kind of art pilgrim seeking relics of the authentic life. Eventually these pilgrims usher in an attendant commercial culture that begins with dive bars and ends with baby boutiques. Ultimately the artists move on and the cycle starts again.

This is what makes Chelsea as an art center so interesting: it’s become a bona fide, commercial “district” even as places like Long Island City and East Williamsburg vie for artistic street credibility. As evidence of this dichotomy, I hear the ambivalence of gallery goers all the time at Thursday night openings. I listen to their rhetorical apologies daily about seeing art in Chelsea as opposed to Brooklyn or Lower East Side, usually excusing the act as a guilty pleasure the same way they would rationalize eating fast food.

The guilt usually derives from the ethic that supporting the off-the-beaten-path show spaces in Red Hook or the South Bronx are necessary to generate the living culture that Chelsea captures and freezes in vitrines. Guilty pleasure or not, most would agree that Chelsea has turned the corner for the short term. Though a few remaining body shops and warehouses remain on W. 22nd and 21st Streets and The Jehovah’s Witnesses still have a place on W. 20th Street, art seems to be winning out. And, as each parking garage closes and advertises for gallery rental space, the transformation gains momentum.

It seems that for its long, love/hate relationship to the marketplace, the art market is never going to be fully separated from the art world, and, as it coalesces into a unified body on the west side of Manhattan, between 19th and 27th Street, maybe it’s time to accept the commercial aspect as art lovers — and to look on the bright side: Chelsea’s galleries provide us with a free contemporary art museum that is subsidized by the rare few individuals who can afford the art inside.

I grew up in a culturally impoverished city whose attempt at an art center was marked by gas lamp replicas, vinyl banners declaring the significance of the area, and art galleries selling mostly lithographs of mostly dead artists. So it’s possible that I have a little more sympathy for a measured amount of commercialism as a trade-off for an abundance of original contemporary art. Although I appreciate the sentiments of purists and pull for the maintenance of low rents and vital artistic communities, I also know the luxury of 300+ galleries located in a ten-block area visited by thousands of generally savvy viewers.

I see the concentration of art for its vast potential for luring visitors to places like Printed Matter, The Chelsea Art Museum, as well as the dozens of galleries that are run as a labor of love. And, as an artist myself, I place the burden of legitimacy on the artists to continue to produce good work in their studios without regard for the exigencies of the commercial art world. I don’t know how long Chelsea will remain art’s financial epicenter, but I’ll focus on what it has in relation to most of America, rather than get hung up on its commercial dark side.

I can’t even begin to guess how Chelsea’s future will shake out, but if the art world is years behind the meat business — which is already getting priced out of the Meatpacking District — maybe Chelsea’s high-end, frosted glass arts district will soon go the way of Soho. Perhaps in sixty years people from all over the world will come to Chelsea to buy Stella McCartney’s daughter’s chic fashions and drink Belgian beer in a place that once sold the work of venerable postmodern masters, and the art world will go on with business-as-usual in its new capital: Hoboken, New Jersey. I can hear the gallery goers now: “Hoboken is just so much more authentic than Chelsea ever was.”

Shane McAdams is an artist and freelance writer who resides in Brooklyn. He is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail. His most recent solo exhibition, “Unmoved Mover,” was at Denise Bibro Fine Art in Chelsea.