Follow the Money

During the mayoral reign of Rudy Giuliani, Manhattan has been famously focused on quality-of-life issues. Precisely what constitutes those issues and qualities naturally depends on whose life one is talking about. Historically, though, a clear gauge of the city’s quintessence has always been the quality of its offerings in art.

An urban machine, relentless and even grueling, can make daily existence more than just an ordinary hassle. But it’s a hassle worth enduring, if it comes with superabundant possibilities for the profound emotional, intellectual and spiritual sustenance that art at its best can provide.

How, then, to explain the surprising dearth of that sustenance in this incomparably museum-rich city during the fall of 2000? From West 53rd Street to Fifth Avenue and 89th Street, the primary art museums have put together a motley array of mostly flaccid exhibitions. Perhaps it’s an anomaly. Certainly it’s the first time in memory that not a single big fall show will be remembered as being of more than cursory artistic significance.

Patterns are changing in New York, and not just in newly antiseptic Times Square. Emblematic is the exodus of galleries from SoHo and the rise of a powerful gallery district amid the dockside warehouses of Chelsea during the last half-dozen years. Galleries began to open in SoHo 30 years ago, following the lead of working artists, who were transforming vacant and inexpensive industrial buildings into living quarters with abundant studio space. After the 1990 collapse of the art market, galleries began to leave fashionable SoHo because they could subsidize their operations elsewhere by selling or subletting their spaces at spiraling rates to high-end retail stores and restaurants. Galleries didn’t choose Chelsea because artists in search of working space had moved there first, but because suitable exhibition space was cheaper there.

In SoHo, galleries had followed artists. In Chelsea galleries followed economics, leaving out the artist part.

Not much art gets made in Manhattan anymore--at least, nowhere near as much art as once got made. Rising real estate prices put a damper on that. More and more potential studio space is farther out of reach for more and more artists.

Young artists, who might be drawn to New York from other places and whose presence is essential to replenishing the scene, are now at least as likely to gather across the river in neighborhoods of Brooklyn and Queens, rather than in the scruffier margins of Manhattan. The scene is getting suburbanized.

This gallery shift speaks of a larger, more fundamental change in American society, which might also help clarify the lackluster museum season. Galleries followed artists to SoHo because, circa 1970, artists were a gallery’s main constituency. Today the constituency for art has expanded exponentially, to include not just the professional class that makes up the international art world--artists, collectors, curators, critics, consultants--but growing ranks of the general public as well. At Gagosian Gallery’s glamorous new 26,000-square-foot space in Chelsea, which takes up almost half a city block, it’s common right now to see young parents pushing baby strollers and taking pictures of the kids in front of the industrial-size fish-tank sculptures by British bad boy Damien Hirst (through Dec. 16).

Tourism is one of Manhattan’s biggest industries, and cultural tourism is a linchpin to the city’s economy. For art museums, the urge is strong to court a huge and churning general public that’s more willing than ever to sample their offerings. While a single art season does not a watershed make, the fall 2000 season in the four big art museums certainly reflects an unmistakable long-term change. They’ve been aggressive in wooing the crowd.

*

Celebrity, the mass culture staple, is the product on offer at two uptown museums. One show is blatant and pompous; the other tactfully wrapped in revisionist posturing.

Most notorious is “Giorgio Armani” (through Jan. 17), the Guggenheim Museum’s ode to the fashion designer who exploded into mass consciousness on the sexy back of Richard Gere in 1980’s “American Gigolo.” Twenty years on, Armani is an elder statesman of the red carpet at the Academy Awards.

Installed by theatrical designer Robert Wilson amid stretched gauze and taupe rugs on the famous Guggenheim spiral ramp, the Armani exhibition is the first costume show the museum has mounted. It’s a profoundly conservative affair. First, its subject is a clothing brand coveted precisely for its ability to make its wearer disappear into the high-end security blanket of universally admired good taste (we’re not talking Vivienne Westwood here).

Second, borrowing a page from the Reagan playbook of plausible deniability, the museum last year quietly accepted a reported gift of $15 million from the designer’s company, shortly after adding the unprecedented show to its schedule. Museum spokesmen vigorously denied any quid pro quo, but the “coincidence” sets a new benchmark for the appearance of art museum corruption.

“Armani” is not an exercise in high decadence because it’s bad for art or bad for art museums. It’s a bust because it’s bad for fashion. Fashion is artistically valuable for its frivolous, evanescent and mercurial soul. Art museums are valuable because they’re serious, consequential and durable. Fitting one into the other is as difficult as herding cats, and “Armani” gets it exactly wrong.

Strolling the ramp and ogling the gorgeous, utterly random lineup of 500-plus dresses and suits--most of them strangely recent for a 25-year historical survey--you periodically come upon solemn, graduate-student-style wall texts extolling things like Armani’s radical genius for upsetting established gender codes. The revolution supposedly came when he made men’s clothing sensual and body-conscious and put women in their own versions of this new male attire. As if Marlene Dietrich, Katharine Hepburn, legions of anonymous counterculture hippies, the Rolling Stones, Yves Saint-Laurent and assorted others never existed.

Fashion historians can argue the relative importance of Armani to couture and the specific merits of this exhibition better than an art critic can (I recommend Judith Thurman’s insightful demolition in a recent issue of the New Yorker). But I can say this: Whatta lotta shmatte.

Tucked into a couple of the Guggenheim’s small side galleries is a modest show of Russian painting from the teens and ‘20s. Ironically, some of these “Amazons of the Avant Garde” (through Jan. 7) eventually abandoned painting for proletarian design, including extraordinary clothing and fabric patterns. None of that is included, but this small show is about the size Armani might credibly sustain.

*

The second celebrity show is several blocks away, where the Whitney Museum of American Art does a lot of heavy lifting to revive the fallen reputation of deeply conservative society artist Edward Steichen (1879-1973). Condemned by Alfred Stieglitz and other Modernists when he gave up photography as personal expression in 1922 to do fashion, celebrity and advertising work for hire (Conde Nast and J. Walter Thompson), Steichen later became the powerful and influential director of the photography department at the Museum of Modern Art. There, we learn, he “created a new kind of photo exhibition that combined mural-size photographic enlargements with textual narration to marshal the public’s social consciousness.”

Translation: Steichen became a propagandist.

His most famous effort was 1955’s extravagant “The Family of Man.” Extolling global brotherhood, this sentimental survey of 503 pictures by 273 photographers from 68 countries traveled for several years during the fractious Cold War, and it’s represented here (through Feb. 4) by a partial reconstruction. Far edgier and more compelling is the small selection of straightforward propaganda work he did for the U.S. military during World War II. But you can be sure it’s the many forceful glamour shots of Lillian Gish, Greta Garbo and the rest of the Vogue and Vanity Fair crowd that provide the unspoken answer to the questions: Why Steichen? Why now?

Over at the Museum of Modern Art, “MOMA 2000,” the ongoing series of mix-and-match showsfrom the permanent collection, concludes with a cluster of 11 presentations optimistically called “Open Ends” (through Jan. 2). MOMA, gearing up to close down for a massive five-year expansion program, wants it known that the chapter on modern art has not been closed.

But “Open Ends,” which assembles art made since 1960, is just a pale addendum. Grouping work according to safe, dull themes like color (“White Spectrum”) and serial imagery (“One Thing After Another”), these obvious little shows feel slapdash and distracted--more “Loose Ends” than “Open Ends.”

Finally, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has just unveiled “The Still Lifes of Evaristo Baschenis: The Music of Silence,” a modest, first-ever gathering of 18 paintings by the little-known Italian Baroque painter (through March 4). It turns out there’s a reason Baschenis is little known, and you can guess what it is.

The 18 gloomy canvases show him playing tricks with perspective, often by piling elaborately shaped musical instruments--fat lutes, curvy violins, bulbous mandolins--or big copper pots in heaps on tabletops beneath empty expanses of blank brown wall. The awkward compositions are marked by inventive details, such as dust streaked by fingers on the swollen back of a lute, or a symphony of different tones of light-reflective copper. But the effort to be clever never lifts off--never becomes effortless. For an audacious art of bravura display, laboriousness is fatal.

*

The best show in a New York museum right now is also at the Met--a small survey of about 100 masterpieces of Chinese calligraphy, compiled from its own holdings, those of Princeton University (where the show was organized) and several private collections (through Jan. 7). Whether the words written with brush and ink tell the history of a monastery, the story of a river voyage, nature poetry or a carpenter’s biography meant as a moral allegory, the markings convey their own distinctive meanings, accessible--with practice--without translation of the Chinese characters.

Some are monumental. A hanging scroll by Mi Wanzhong (circa 1595-1631) shows how the artist, a scholar-official forced out of power and imprisoned in a palace, used the big field of paper and powerful brush strokes to invent a world where he could still live large.

Others are more diminutive. Huang Tingjian (1045-1105), an aging scholar-amateur in ill health, wrote a hand scroll for his nephew, Zhang Datong, who asked for a calligraphy sample. The thick, quivering, elongated black lines are set down with intense determination, making lively characters that bristle with the artist’s struggle to be commanding.

The highest of all Chinese art forms, calligraphy records the difficult, dynamic, lifelong pursuit of self-cultivation. Someone tell the mayor: This is a show about commitment to enhancing an authentic quality of life, which stands in stark contrast to the institutional stagnation so much in evidence in Manhattan’s mighty art museums right now.