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Chelsea on the cheap
Victoria Skelly
Chelsea on the cheap:
So many galleries, so little time (or quality)
VICTORIA SKELLY
Tired of the big art museum experience? In Manhattan for a holiday and find the Met and MOMA more like a bovine shuffle rather than a rewarding interlude with art? Do you believe, with Broad Street Review’s critic Robert Zaller, that blockbuster museum shows beget mediocrity? Well then, consider the alternative…. which could be worse.
Yes indeed, Manhattan’s Chelsea section is chock full of small galleries— an art skyscraper included. But if one has only two hours to indulge, where does one go to see the “best”?
Enter Rafael Risemberg, Ph. D., of New York Gallery Tours. Rafael, who holds a doctorate in arts education, hosts tours several Saturdays every month for $25 per head (a $5 discount coupon is available if you contact him in advance at his website). The tours are popular, and on the day I participated last year, accompanied by my sister and daughter, an impressively sized group showed up at his station (526 W. 26th St.), all handing Dr. Risemberg their crisp $20 bills along with some fives.
Dr. R claims to review more than 2,000 art exhibits per year, and then offers to show his tour recipients what he considers the best of the lot. A two-hour march with Rafael will bring you into intimate contact with eight specially chosen exhibits. That works out to 15 minutes per gallery, which may sound a bit rushed. Let me reassure you: Fifteen minutes in any one of these galleries is ample.
A promoter who found his niche
To be sure, one does surrender oneself to Dr. Risemberg’s expert taste for this two-hour gallery hop, but because he offers the whys of his selections so capably, one learns quite a lot. One especially learns about what sort of work grabs gallery space in New York City— mostly of that certain post-Warhol ilk, lacking in craftsmanship, bereft of concern with the aesthetic, and sporting foggy intellectual underpinnings. Dr. Risemberg, it develops, is really more of a promoter and tastemaker than an apt estimator of art. He has found his niche among people who want to be told what their taste ought to be.
Our tour took us past some jewel-encrusted Oprah paintings, a room filled with a massive coiled rope that had been spray-painted black (the fumes from the paint were asphyxiating), elaborate cutworked scenes with devastation as theme, a 15-minute film of two bodies falling into water at slow motion (said to simulate two people falling in love), “spin-art” paintings of many things, including a Boucher-like girl on a swing, and a huge room of wooden “found” objects hung in regimental rows.
Art imitating nature?
One exhibit particularly engaged my group’s curiosity. It featured hanging forms fashioned of wispy thin wire, gossamer brushes and tiny beads. The forms suspended from the ceiling or perched on a base resembled the puffballs of dandelions blowing in the breeze. The gallery actually had a fan blowing to encourage the forms to bend, whirl and twinkle. This was art imitating nature…to some degree. Nothing in nature looks like these did.
Regardless of the twinkling dandelion forms, at about mid-tour I began to feel some fatigue from giving my full attention to Dr. Risemberg’s taste. Suddenly I longed to head off on my own to check out some enticing Alice Neel portraits that I’d noticed in a gallery adjacent to the tour’s starting point. Perhaps Alice Neel wasn’t “cutting edge” to Dr. Risemberg’s mind, for that gallery wasn’t included in his tour. Or perhaps my taste is hopelessly retro.
Or perhaps I’m just waiting to be really amazed by something new.
How I swayed the vote
At the summation of each tour, Dr. Risemberg asks his group to vote on which exhibit they “like” the most. He’s not too subtle about where his enthusiasms lie, so the hapless tourist might be inclined to vote according to the expert’s wishes. Interestingly enough, I found that with some pronounced body language and some faintly audible mutterings under my breath, I was able to influence the outcome of the vote. I had favored the art that was informed by nature… the dandelion wispy sculptures…. and I had sensed that most of our group liked them best, too. I think there was a fear in admitting that what was trendiest was not the most compelling, the most resonant. Some firm support on my part for the wispies was really all that was required to get others to follow along. I felt a bit smug in having swayed enough of the group to form a majority. So much for the objective reviewing skills of art connoisseurs, expert or otherwise.
I’ll probably tour Chelsea again with Dr. Risemberg just to see what he likes. They only make art like this in New York! In the meantime, let’s give thanks for the Met, the Frick, MOMA, the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation….
So many galleries, so little time (or quality)
VICTORIA SKELLY
Tired of the big art museum experience? In Manhattan for a holiday and find the Met and MOMA more like a bovine shuffle rather than a rewarding interlude with art? Do you believe, with Broad Street Review’s critic Robert Zaller, that blockbuster museum shows beget mediocrity? Well then, consider the alternative…. which could be worse.
Yes indeed, Manhattan’s Chelsea section is chock full of small galleries— an art skyscraper included. But if one has only two hours to indulge, where does one go to see the “best”?
Enter Rafael Risemberg, Ph. D., of New York Gallery Tours. Rafael, who holds a doctorate in arts education, hosts tours several Saturdays every month for $25 per head (a $5 discount coupon is available if you contact him in advance at his website). The tours are popular, and on the day I participated last year, accompanied by my sister and daughter, an impressively sized group showed up at his station (526 W. 26th St.), all handing Dr. Risemberg their crisp $20 bills along with some fives.
Dr. R claims to review more than 2,000 art exhibits per year, and then offers to show his tour recipients what he considers the best of the lot. A two-hour march with Rafael will bring you into intimate contact with eight specially chosen exhibits. That works out to 15 minutes per gallery, which may sound a bit rushed. Let me reassure you: Fifteen minutes in any one of these galleries is ample.
A promoter who found his niche
To be sure, one does surrender oneself to Dr. Risemberg’s expert taste for this two-hour gallery hop, but because he offers the whys of his selections so capably, one learns quite a lot. One especially learns about what sort of work grabs gallery space in New York City— mostly of that certain post-Warhol ilk, lacking in craftsmanship, bereft of concern with the aesthetic, and sporting foggy intellectual underpinnings. Dr. Risemberg, it develops, is really more of a promoter and tastemaker than an apt estimator of art. He has found his niche among people who want to be told what their taste ought to be.
Our tour took us past some jewel-encrusted Oprah paintings, a room filled with a massive coiled rope that had been spray-painted black (the fumes from the paint were asphyxiating), elaborate cutworked scenes with devastation as theme, a 15-minute film of two bodies falling into water at slow motion (said to simulate two people falling in love), “spin-art” paintings of many things, including a Boucher-like girl on a swing, and a huge room of wooden “found” objects hung in regimental rows.
Art imitating nature?
One exhibit particularly engaged my group’s curiosity. It featured hanging forms fashioned of wispy thin wire, gossamer brushes and tiny beads. The forms suspended from the ceiling or perched on a base resembled the puffballs of dandelions blowing in the breeze. The gallery actually had a fan blowing to encourage the forms to bend, whirl and twinkle. This was art imitating nature…to some degree. Nothing in nature looks like these did.
Regardless of the twinkling dandelion forms, at about mid-tour I began to feel some fatigue from giving my full attention to Dr. Risemberg’s taste. Suddenly I longed to head off on my own to check out some enticing Alice Neel portraits that I’d noticed in a gallery adjacent to the tour’s starting point. Perhaps Alice Neel wasn’t “cutting edge” to Dr. Risemberg’s mind, for that gallery wasn’t included in his tour. Or perhaps my taste is hopelessly retro.
Or perhaps I’m just waiting to be really amazed by something new.
How I swayed the vote
At the summation of each tour, Dr. Risemberg asks his group to vote on which exhibit they “like” the most. He’s not too subtle about where his enthusiasms lie, so the hapless tourist might be inclined to vote according to the expert’s wishes. Interestingly enough, I found that with some pronounced body language and some faintly audible mutterings under my breath, I was able to influence the outcome of the vote. I had favored the art that was informed by nature… the dandelion wispy sculptures…. and I had sensed that most of our group liked them best, too. I think there was a fear in admitting that what was trendiest was not the most compelling, the most resonant. Some firm support on my part for the wispies was really all that was required to get others to follow along. I felt a bit smug in having swayed enough of the group to form a majority. So much for the objective reviewing skills of art connoisseurs, expert or otherwise.
I’ll probably tour Chelsea again with Dr. Risemberg just to see what he likes. They only make art like this in New York! In the meantime, let’s give thanks for the Met, the Frick, MOMA, the National Gallery, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Barnes Foundation….
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