At exactly 6 p.m. on Sept. 7, 2006, what painter Jackie Saccoccio calls the "10-month tour-of-duty in the art world jungle" began when more than 150 New York exhibitions opened simultaneously. The "tour" ends this June in Europe with the once-every-decade harmonic convergence of the Venice Biennale, Documenta XII, Münster Sculpture Project and Art Basel occurring consecutively. Commenting on the crowds in attendance on that warm evening, Public Art Fund director Rochelle Steiner marveled, "It’s like someone turned on a spigot and people poured out." The New York art world is now so big that no one person can see it all. Until it shrinks or goes belly-up no one person may ever see it all again. This makes for euphoria, false positives and negatives, confusion and dissipation. It also makes consensus harder to come by.
Staggering numbers of people now complain about how "big" and "out of control" the art world, especially Chelsea, is. True, 300 galleries in one neighborhood is daunting. Still, it’s absurd to claim, as many do, that a gallery is bad because it’s in Chelsea or better because it’s not. There’s a depressing never-mentioned reason for the bigness of Chelsea. Shockingly, among Manhattan’s big-four museums, only the Met has galleries devoted to the permanent display of the art of the last 20 years. Visitors to MoMA, the Whitney and the Guggenheim only see whatever rotating contemporary shows happen to be up. Works of contemporary art cannot be studied over time.
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