It's the Thought That Counts
With Easy Money Hard to Come by, Glitz Gives Way to a Deeper Variety of Art in Chelsea

by Blake Gopnik

NEW YORK -- "If you can't sell, you can't sell out." Could that be why the winter season that opened last weekend in Chelsea, the gallery-stuffed downtown neighborhood beside the Hudson River, seemed more substantial than it has in years? During recent boom times, the new collectors' easy money, and their need to show it off, led to a huge demand for superficial, easy-to-buy glitz. That encouraged artists and dealers to supply it. Now, with the economy tanking and buyers on the run, an unprecedented number of this season's shows feature thorny, un-market-friendly works produced by some of the major figures of the past two or three decades. Many of them even discard the idea of the unique, collectible object. It's going too far to call the works on display unsellable; it's more that they're most appealing to absolutely dedicated collectors, and committed institutions, who are least likely to jam out when the economy goes south.

Matthew Higgs at Murray Guy

Matthew Higgs, a well-known New York curator who was born in 1964, also makes art. He follows in the grand conceptual tradition of Kawara and McCollum, while seeming to poke fun at the dose of ego in such work. His latest show is called "Art in Crisis -- Pictures in Peril," after the titles of two old books whose covers he had photographed and now presents, matted and framed, as a pair of artworks of his own. The grand calls-to-arms that now and then ring out through the art world become just two more vintage objects taken off somebody's shelf. The other pieces in this show are actual covers, or end papers, or pages, cut from art books and presented as still more matted and framed works by Higgs. Most of them read as pure abstraction, and speak to how the glories of abstract art are most often consumed and encountered: on coffee tables rather than on museum walls. A few of Higgs's pages include a word or short phrase evoking the text-based art of visual poets of the 1970s such as Lawrence Weiner and Joseph Kosuth. I don't think Higgs is merely sending up the art that his X-Actoed pages recall: He's also showing how that kind of art is out there everywhere, once we set our eyes to looking for it. And, of course, we couldn't do that if the fine art hadn't been there first to show us how.

Through Feb. 21