It was the kind of scene teenagers dream about experiencing one day, after they’ve gone to college and moved to the Big City. A rambunctious, casually hip crowd spilled onto the sidewalk last night at 190 Orchard Street, on New York’s Lower East Side, where the Rooster Gallery was celebrating its inaugural opening.

I was there because the two founders happen to be former students of mine, Alex Slonevsky, a gregarious graphic designer, and Andre Escarameia, a transplant from Lisbon and a talented art writer. They met as art business students at the Sotheby’s Institute two years ago. Now here they were, opening their own gallery.

Rooster, like many of its L.E.S. peers, is a narrow storefront, surrounded by bars, Chinese massage parlors, funky boutiques, antique shops, espresso places, and the like. It has a tiny black spiral staircase in the rear leading down to a basement space that might have stored sweet pickles, buttons, or ladies gloves at one time. Now, thanks to a lot of sweat equity, the shop has been reborn as a classic white box. It is handsomely lighted and installed, with smart graphics in the front window and a tightly edited show of six attention-worthy Portugese artists. The gallery comes into this world fully formed. It has a program of future exhibitions, a slick website, a Facebook page, professional press releases, a cool logo, and even a philanthropic sponsor for the first show. A color photo next to the door struck me as a kind of good luck charm for the undertaking. It depicts a stack of coins rising, like a miniature skyscraper, from a hardscrabble vista of dirt and glass shards.

I mention this opening not just to plug two young dealers, but more importantly, because it is yet another sign that something is stirring in the New York art world. Quite predictably, as happened in the seventies, and after the early-eighties crash, and again after the early nineties crash, a new crop of creative entrepreneurs are entering the scene. Where others have seen trouble, they see opportunity. They are showing work on a realistic scale, at realistic prices, by artists who may have gone unnoticed at the full-throttle peak of the boom. Read More »

My barometer keeps jumping. One minute it’s backs-to-the-walls time, the next it’s all lavish parties and third venue vernissages. It has seemed like a growing, healthy trend for performative, lively and cheap art would be neatly distilled in the line-up for this year’s Frieze Art Fair Projects, curated for the first time by Sarah McCrory, formerly of south London’s small curatorial hotbed, Studio Voltaire. McCrory has commissioned Spartacus Chetwynd (née Lali Chetwynd) and her travelling troupe of players to create daily spectacles in the fair on the obscure subject of tax havens (of course, much inter-fair art revolves around the necessarily thorny question of the perceived evils of the surrounding arena of commerce). A wandering group of ‘Ten Embarrassed Men’, by Swedish-born artist Annika Ström, will prowl the fair looking shamefaced – the emasculation of artists or bankers, maybe? There will also be judiciously placed charity boxes (designed by artists, of course) to tempt collector’s monies elsewhere, as well as lots of free-to-air fun in the surrounding park.

Who are they all kidding? Hauser & Wirth are opening their third or fourth space in London (I have genuinely lost count, but it’s definitely the biggest) with a retrospective of fabric works by Louise Bourgeois. Sadie Coles upscales next-door, the Blain-Southern dealership duo split from their Christie’s holding pen, Haunch of Venison, to open a new gallery as well. Then there are Russian squillionaires galore putting on one-week one-offs including pricey Picassos, New York galleries dipping their toes here… I could go on, ad infinitum. My magazine lists some 200 shows on, or opening, in the now designated ‘Frieze week’ frenzy, most of them seemingly launching on Tuesday with a brunch, lunch, press view, rooftop after-party or oyster-laden dinner. Who’s right and who’s wrong? Is art in some kind of reactionary, recessionary funk? The more it gets hit, the harder it fights back? Or are the commercials slowly moving back into easy street, while the public sector prepares for a governmental pounding at the hands of David Cameron’s October 20 spending review/slash-fest? It could be a fall bounce or just the preamble to another, bigger fall.