ART/ARCHITECTURE; A New Chelsea and the Evanescence of Chic

THE other day, an artist who will remain nameless for obvious reasons told me she was worried about her forthcoming show, not because the work was causing her more than the usual anxiety but because her gallery happens not to be in Chelsea.

Unfortunately, I knew what she meant. At last count, around 60 galleries had colonized the area roughly between 17th Street and 27th Street on the far West Side of Manhattan. Dealers there are ecstatic, and why not? Foot traffic is booming. For these 15 minutes, at least, it's the new epicenter.

I spent a couple of days recently making the rounds of the neighborhood. I liked Chelsea very much when it first started to develop as the un-SoHo, but now, though I still want to like it, I'm not so sure.

Why? It's not the art. The art is simply what it is, location notwithstanding, and this time around, for instance, I got a kick out of Nayland Blake's gingerbread house at Matthew Marks and James Welling's photographs at Leslie Tonkonow. There were also Sue Williams's new paintings at 303 Gallery to see, and Louise Fishman's at Cheim & Reid. (Do you remember, by the way, a decade ago, long before the Chelsea boomlet, when that space was Larry Gagosian's gallery? Too far ahead of the curve, it didn't last long.)

I stopped at a few galleries I hadn't visited before, which always reduces my guilt level, although making the rounds is like changing light bulbs in the Empire State Building: by the time you finish one cycle you're behind in the next. Guilt is built in.

It was just three years ago that only a handful of galleries existed among Chelsea's taxi garages. When you went to see them, or to see the Dia Center for the Arts, which was already there and a kind of magnet to the area, you were probably making a minor pilgrimage because Chelsea is out of the way for most people. This was part of its attraction: people went there specifically to look at art, as was no longer the case in SoHo, and moreover they were going to a place that seemed to evoke something of SoHo's former character because it was largely industrial. (It triggered the art world's Pavlovian response to la vie de boheme.)

Actually the resemblance to SoHo was superficial. I happened to grow up next to SoHo and vaguely remember as a child thinking -- the way we all think when we have a stake in the past, which blinds us to the future -- that the old neighborhood had been taken over by outsiders after the first galleries opened. In fact, SoHo's virtue was that its growth was organic and bottom up. It was an architecture of airy cast-iron lofts. Artists moved in because the spaces were cheap and practical. Then galleries followed. The archetypal gallery was Leo Castelli's, at 420 West Broadway, which resembled an artist's loft. In SoHo, dealers were mostly in plain sight, and the ambient aim, even if it increasingly wasn't achieved, was to be informal and accessible.

In Chelsea the evolution has roughly been reversed. It is an architecture of storage facilities and garages, less easily adaptable to art. There are artist studios in the area, but it is not, nor was it ever, where many artists lived. The new galleries arrived pretty much ex nihilo, the first ones mostly belonging to high-enders like Matthew Marks, Barbara Gladstone, Paula Cooper and Metro Pictures. Mr. Marks's gallery on 22d Street, in a converted single-story garage with skylights, turned out to be a spare and handsome place with a big window on the street that makes the art inside visible from outside, a friendly arrangement roughly mimicked by the new Postmasters, with a glass storefront on 18th Street.

But most Chelsea galleries are chilly and turn inward. The spaces feel antiseptic, awkward. They tend to speak of money. Dealers too often opt to be out of sight, with offices on a separate floor. Sometimes the architecture is grand -- Paula Cooper's gallery is stunning to look at -- but so grand that the architecture can overwhelm the art. Andrea Rosen's gallery on 24th Street exemplifies the problem. It's like a mausoleum, tall and windowless, with a hallway to an office in the back, the office blocked from view by a giant file cabinet so that, like a child, anyone with a question about what's on view must stand on tiptoes to talk to the 20-somethings who work there.

A few scrappy galleries have found quarters more or less in the interstices of the neighborhood. Team, for instance, is in a basement on 26th Street, and Kenny Schacter/Rove uses an unfinished warehouse, noble but grim.

As for the big new mall buildings (529 West 20th Street, for example), let's just say that once the elevators arrive and you make your way inside some of the galleries, the views of the Hudson aren't bad. An excellent dealer like Bill Maynes told me he has 10 times as much space in the building for twice the price of what his gallery in SoHo cost, but the old gallery, where he specialized in small works, was distinctive and matched the art he showed. Everything is a trade-off.

New York is not Los Angeles, yet Chelsea's rapid rise is a phenomenon perhaps more typical in Los Angeles than in New York, which may explain its rootless ethos. In L.A., a car culture, galleries will cluster in one place, then pick up and move somewhere else a few years later. Moving around fits the character of the place, where a multigallery development like, say, Bergamot Station, is a matter of real estate prices combined with collective bargaining, a temporary arrangement subject to the whims of fashion.

And it is the arc of fashion that a thing becomes chic, then passe, then maybe it achieves retrochic. With Manhattan neighborhoods these days, the evolution seems rapid. SoHo is passe. Chelsea, having become chic, has already been diluted by a number of SoHo's schlock galleries. It is now closer in character to 57th Street than to SoHo as a center for the business of art; though, contrary to the old assumptions about uptown galleries versus downtown galleries, many of the galleries on 57th Street actually feel less pretentious. Who knows? SoHo may soon seem retrochic.

If you wonder how long it will be before the arrival in Chelsea of SoHo's clothing shops, which finally overwhelmed the neighborhood and turned it into a retail mall, count to one: I was told last week that the Con Edison trucks on 22d Street, outside 303 Gallery, were there for the new Comme des Garcons shop.

Then I stopped in to see Leslie Tonkonow at 601 West 26th Street, and she told me that she had heard that the owners of her building were asking new renters three times what they were charging when she arrived two years ago. An old industrial facility long known as the Starrett-Lehigh building, 601 West 26th has housed a typical fringe New York mix: box manufacturers, printers, hospital storage rooms and a cheesecake company, along with a few artists' studios. Now it's placing advertisements in The New York Times calling itself the Starrett-Lehigh Center for Creative Arts, Media and Technology.

Well, there goes the neighborhood.