Parties for the Sake of Art – or Booze?

When Jonathan LeVine throws an opening in one of his galleries, guests can expect a good time and maybe a little something extra. At the opening of “E Pluribus Venom” earlier this summer at his gallery’s second space in DUMBO, Brooklyn, one member of the jeans-wearing, Dewar’sdrinking crowd tried to light off a stink bomb and throw it at the artist’s children.Had this happened at a blue-chip gallery on the Upper East Side, security guards would be frisking the patrons as they step out of their Lincoln Town Cars. But such antics seem somewhat par for the course on the circuit of parties hosted by galleries who cater to fashionably shabby 20- and 30-somethings. These highly educated but not yet highly salaried gallerygoers flit from party to party. But at these clubby openings, especially at ones populated by those barely above (or even below) the drinking age, is the main attraction the booze, the scene, or the art?“I want everyone to come have a good time,” Mr. LeVine said at his DUMBO event, a Dewar’s cocktail in hand. “Not that this is supposed to be a party.”As he answered, an antsy attendee asked him where the bathrooms were. Mr. LeVine directed him to the portable toilets outside.Most trendy gallery openings function to create buzz, not sell art. As Alexander Carver, 23, a recent Cooper Union art school graduate and artist from South Williamsburg, said at an opening at Guild & Greyshkull in SoHo, “Often, the value of a spectacle transcends the value of any specific object in the show.”Regular attendees seemed to be as enthralled with the spectacle and open bar as with the art.“Free alcohol with a DJ and music is always a formula for success,” Peter Kim, a 27-year-old information technology consultant from the East Village, said at Mr. LeVine’s DUMBO event. “Once people get here, it’s an opportunity for them to appreciate what’s ondisplay. Italsohelpsthatthere’s a whole bunch of Dewar’s.”Matthew Hawk, 30, an administrative assistant at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, echoed Mr. Kim’s sentiments. “I just wanted to see what the party was about,” he said. “If Dewar’s wants to provide me with scotch, who am I to say no?”Because of the stink bomb incident, Mr. LeVine increased security and served no alcohol at a show in his main Chelsea space a few days later.“It’s been more focused on the art and not the entertainment aspect,” a publicist for the gallery, Debra Anderson, said of the event. The quieter, low-key vibe came as a welcome surprise to seasoned gallerygoers, although most didn’t mind party scenes.“If you’re truly a lover of art you take time to appreciate it,” Courtney Gamble, 19, a fashion design student from Roosevelt Island, said. “Then afterwards you celebrate it.”A stocks and commodities trader from Hoboken, N.J., Lloyd Hoeltzel, 42, , said, “Openings don’t have to be so serious. It’s just part of the fanfare. Galleries generally serve pretty cheap alcohol, anyhow.”All the cheap alcohol and fanfare lead some to frown upon such events — particularly the budding art school cognoscenti.“It’s a social spectacle,” Mr. Carver said, “a wholly unsatisfactory, extremely predictable experience.”To explain his cynicism, Mr. Carver pointed to the economics and nepotism that drive these openings. “Galleries are businesses, and the art world is a business.”At the opening at the Deitch Projects next door, huge vinyl works by Jim Isermann covered the entire space from floor to ceiling. The enormity of the spectacle and the copious cases of Grolsch lying around pointed to the dizzyingly successful moment that upstart galleries, especially Deitch, have enjoyed in the last decade.But Mr. Carver, citing the failure of Jeffrey Deitch’s failed reality TV show “Artstar,” opined that the art world “is experiencing a bubble. It’s at that moment of indeterminacy as to how much more decadent can it get — how many more emerging artists can be sensationalized — before it collapses.”Networking is often where the social and the economic meet at these shows. Even gallerists such as Jen Bekman who aren’t, as she puts it, “tragically hip,” look to their social network at openings. “They’re always populated with people who I know, who are friends of mine, people who are clients,” Ms. Bekman said at a recent opening at her gallery. Even at “ROFL” (Internet-ese for “Rolling On Floor Laughing”) — an event that felt like half comedy act, half Web-art show — at Joe’s Pub, the artists all seemed to know each other.At the opening of “Art Is Who You Know” at Chashama’s West 37th Street space, artist Christina Massey raised a quiet, symbolic protest of art gallery nepotism by letting strangers finger-paint on canvases and then discarding their work.But at its core, finger painting is just fun, and fun is the overriding feeling that most trendy galleries try to evoke — mostly by serving copious amounts of free alcohol. Since the booze tends to be as big of a draw as the art, gallerygoers seem to have no illusions about the level of cultural enrichment to expect.“When it comes down to it,” Mr. Carver said, “People just want to have a good time, and how much of a good time can you really have looking at static objects? The more you can turn it into a dance party, the more it’s going to enthrall a crowd.”

Parties for the Sake of Art – or Booze?

Parties for the Sake of Art – or Booze?

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