NEW YORK STATE legalized recreational marijuana on March 31, 2021. Soon after, taco-truck-style weed vendors began turning up on street corners around Manhattan. Soon after that, brick-and-mortar dispensaries began popping up everywhere in the city. Some openly branded themselves with spiky green seven-leaved rosettes; others attempted to be discreet, since, in the event you desired to be a stickler about it, their business was illegal. One shop near my house went to the difficulty of calling itself a “concierge club” and adopted a streamlined aesthetic between high-end sneaker shop and Apple Store. Inside several months, THC products gave the impression to be available in every smoke shop, alongside candy, cigarettes, kratom, and in fact glass pipes.
Essentially the most significant thing about these stores shouldn’t be their contribution to decreasing sperm counts across the tristate area. Relatively, it’s their gleeful lack of professionalism. At this stage of the local cannabis market’s evolution, when product selection is haphazard and wares are procured from seemingly every state within the union, chitchatting continues to be a crucial a part of shopping. Thus many retailers appear to double as venues for a fast hang, customers leaning on the counter in a haze of vape smoke. I visited one which sports a miniature putting green. Sometimes the attendant has a suggestion that seems to be highly informed; other times—horrors!—they sell you indica once you ask for sativa. Some stores line their counters with esoteric cannabis derivatives but keep their actual THC products out of sight behind the counter, making a pantomime of revelation as ludicrous as the concept an undercover cop has to let you know they’re one in the event you ask them directly.
Coincidentally or otherwise, the gallery O’Flaherty’s also got off the bottom in 2021; likewise, its charm hinges on abandoning ideas of what it means to be skilled. Positioned within the East Village, O’Flaherty’s is run by Billy Grant, Jamian Juliano-Villani, and Ruby Zarsky. Juliano-Villani is an completed painter whose name chances are you’ll recognize; Grant is her longtime right hand/collaborator and an artist in his own right, notably having been a member of the Dearraindrop collective within the early ’00s. Zarsky, a musician, goes back with Juliano-Villani so far as highschool. In a single 12 months of operation, O’Flaherty’s has held exhibitions of the late Ashley Bickerton, Kim Dingle, Anthea Hamilton, and Bobo: three respected/cult artists and one obscure collective that is generally a music group. For six weeks, the gallery became an “exotic”-snacks store, imitating one other recent retail phenomenon, a cousin of the weed shop that tends to be baroquely decorated in wet-dream street style, all Day-Glo and swag, black-light murals of electrical fields and eyeballs—except that within the O’Flaherty’s version, perversely, not one of the Korean potato chips or limited-edition Faygos were on the market. For its summer 2022 show, flippantly titled “The Patriot,” the gallery burnished its lack of pretense by holding a real open call, which resulted in an eleven-hundred-work visual polyphony with the psychic density of a hoarder’s apartment. Perhaps the bombshell art movement we’ve all been waiting for will crawl out of its clutter and switch the exhibition into 2022’s equivalent of the “Ninth Street Show.”
Given its modest size, O’Flaherty’s has received a remarkable amount of press (including, obviously, this very essay). “The Patriot” garnered a dewy full-page review by a Recent York Times critic in addition to a glowing full-page Style-section piece published the identical day; an Artist’s Artist mention in Artforum; the excellence of being the primary gallery cited within the Recent Yorker’s 2021 year-in-art roundup; exhibition reviews there and in Art in America; and a Warholian spate of trend pieces in venues like Recent York magazine’s the Cut and Cultured magazine.
O’Flaherty’s is various things: a boon to the next-seeking editors of lifestyle pages; a social space; a little bit of a lightning rod; and, thus far, a spot to see unfamiliar, stimulating art. Most crucially, it’s a industrial entity: a business.
While the art world has modified vastly because the early Sixties, the notion that spotlight is the Most worthy currency of all has not.
THERE’S SOMETHING STRANGE about artists running art galleries, aberrant even. They dabble in it after they’re young, but those that get implicated almost invariably abandon their practices before too long. It’s a time-honored trajectory, actually—the BFA-to-gallerist pipeline. To cite just just a few examples from Recent York: Gavin Brown was an artist before he opened his Enterprise in 1994. Janice Guy, who from 2004 to 2017 led the (sorely missed) Murray Guy gallery, began as a photographer; her late-Nineteen Seventies self-portraiture has earned a surge of attention prior to now decade. Canada gallery, formed collectively by a bunch of artists in 1999, has endured and ultimately prospered. John Kelsey and Emily Sundblad of Reena Spaulings Advantageous Art have seen their artistic careers flourish since they opened up shop in 2004.
More often, artists get entangled in running not-for-profit spaces of assorted sorts; there are all the time more artists than partitions to hold their work on. A vital phase in the event of the artist-run space in Recent York was the postwar era, a time when each American art and contemporary art were just starting to garner audiences. With limited exhibition opportunities, artists took matters into their very own hands. They used differing strategies to maintain the doors open. Hansa Gallery, formed by students of Hans Hofmann, was specifically an artist cooperative. In Greenwich Village, Judson Church donated space to Jim Dine, Marc Ratliff, and Tom Wesselmann to start out Judson Gallery, whose art shows presaged the following breakthroughs in performance and music that took place there. The pioneering Reuben Gallery, run by a small group spearheaded by Allan Kaprow and crucial to the birth of performance art and assemblage, had a more on-the-fly approach, securing contributions from quite a lot of sources: its namesake, Anita Rubin (the spelling was tweaked to be “fancier,” Rubin told Mildred Glimcher); Kaprow and his collaborators; the artists who showed on the gallery, who paid the expenses of putting up their shows and gave a one-third commission to the gallery on any sales; and a fund at Rutgers University, where Kaprow taught and whose dean of arts and sciences he guilt-tripped into helping out: “I shall need $2,000.00 with nothing expected in return. (It would be this fashion for the remaining of my profession, I’m certain.)”
It’s notable that not one of the artists behind Reuben, Hansa, et al. positioned or expected their venues to generate profits. As Melissa Rachleff, writer of Inventing Downtown: Artist-Run Galleries in Recent York City 1952–1965, emphasizes, their motivation was not sales but mere attention: “Their overarching goal was visibility,” she writes within the book’s preface. This was in line with the broader zeitgeist: It was the start of the golden age of promoting, when PR was consolidating and its development accelerating. While the art world has modified vastly because the early Sixties, the notion that spotlight is the Most worthy currency of all has not. The difference today is that spotlight is seen as resulting in money, except that the route is dim, winding, treacherous, and stuffed with dead ends.
O’FLAHERTY’S OCCUPIES a peculiar place within the landscape of up to date art peddling. “Yes, it’s industrial,” Julian-Villani says, “but we frequently set ourselves up to not sell.” At the identical time, she says the place is an element of her practice. The resulting ambiguity puts it in a middle ground; to bastardize Derrida, relatively than all the time already being art, within the legacy of the readymade, O’Flaherty’s all the time may be. Perhaps artists can’t even help it at this point; they only ooze artness onto anything they touch, particularly now that living is so sure up with selling and life subsequently so sure up with product. (And maybe we discover it hard to take any claims at face value because drowning in misinformation tends to provide a generalized impulse to read between the lines, even when there could also be nothing there.) Whatever the explanation, it’s hard to not see O’Flaherty’s as lenticular—a gallery when tilted one direction, a murals when tilted one other. The resulting tension gives the place an mental, almost philosophical charge that its proprietors have leveraged brilliantly during their first 12 months of operation. This frisson is what makes the gallery each fascinating and never quite real, just a little unbelievable.
Essentially the most frame-breaking gallery in recent Recent York history was Colin de Land’s American Advantageous Arts, which opened in 1986 and closed in 2004, one 12 months after de Land’s death. The gallery’s story is well-known, so I won’t detail it here. A famously shambolic surface overlaid its sturdy mental substructure; de Land championed artists with various types of difficult practices, notably a number who practiced institutional critique, including Andrea Fraser and Christian Philipp Müller. While de Land worked with many exceptional artists, AFA revolved around his persona and private charm. The actual business of selling art was haphazard enough to be perceived as blurring the road between running a gallery and fascinating in durational performance. This quality was so well-known that it was cited within the lede of his Recent York Times obituary: His “ambivalence about commercialism was reflected in an art gallery that sometimes resembled an anti–art gallery, if not a piece of Conceptual Art.” De Land’s unique, subversive embrace of the gallery model unfolded within the Nineteen Nineties, similtaneously just a few parallel trends: the experience economy, relational aesthetics, the curator because the talent (to the degree that they at times eclipsed the artist). De Land’s era-specific approach to dealing art suggests an alternation of ingenious self-promotion and an indifference to commerce bordering on self-sabotage. The gallery’s stance perhaps represents the last pressing of a late-bohemian, definitionally Gen X template—a discovery of success in system bucking and failure. You hate the system but it surely type of loves you anyway, or needs you at the least, and so that you turn into just a little unruly inside it.
Like Colin de Land’s American Advantageous Arts before it, O’Flaherty’s moves out and in of the gimmick’s shadow play of capital depending on how the sunshine shifts.
IF COLIN DE LAND blurred the road between art dealing and performance from one direction, O’Flaherty’s does so from the opposite: artists behaving like dealers. In each cases, the situation undermines itself and lends an air of unreality to the proceedings. In each cases, the deviation from the norm creates a whiff of suspicion.
In her recent book Theory of the Gimmick: Aesthetic Judgment and Capitalist Form (2020), cultural theorist and historian Sianne Ngai takes quite a lot of angles on the titular subject, viewing the gimmick as this but in addition that, examining the multiple facets of its diamond-cut, cubic-zirconia surface. The gimmick is annoying but it surely also could also be comic. The gimmick is enigmatic but in addition transparent, suspect but in addition a source of delight. Sometimes gimmicks seem archaic, sometimes goofily futuristic. But all these expressions derive from what lies on the gimmick’s core—the identical inherent contradiction that lies on the core of capitalism. The gimmick has power, says Ngai, since it’s sure up with and exposes the arbitrary relation between the quantity of labor that goes into something and its market value—or as Marx would put it, kind of, it exposes surplus labor. “The gimmick thus names an experience of dissatisfaction—mixed, for all this, with fascination—linked to our perception of an object making untrustworthy claims about . . . the reduction of labor, and the expansion of value,” Ngai summarizes.
Chances are you’ll be unsurprised to learn that in Theory of the Gimmick, Ngai spends an excellent little bit of time talking about contemporary art. It’s, in spite of everything, a genre that traces its beginnings to a urinal taken off the wall, turned on its back, and called a fountain. Following Stanley Cavell, Ngai argues that the concept has taken such a distinguished role in modern creative forms that every one art of today exists within the gimmick’s shadow. Aesthetics happen under “the modernist problematic”: the awakening of a suspicion of the artwork as all the time possibly fraudulent. In an intriguing move, Cavell ascribes this case to not any prankishness within the origin of the readymade and in Conceptual art, to not gimmickiness per se, but relatively to the burgeoning of art discourse and the way in which that it has turn into central to the understanding of art—criticism’s “internalization” to art. The incontrovertible fact that a piece now has the capability to be—or have to be—justified discursively signifies that it’s all the time suspect, not merely potentially hiding behind a curtain of words but relatively being the curtain itself.
IF CITIES CAN BE SAID to be “about” things, Recent York is a city about money. Thus it’s only logical that in 2022, when monetization is like an endemic blood-borne parasite, inside every corpuscle and implicated in every respiration, it takes a gallery to get people each contained in the art world and out of doors it enthusiastic about art. If O’Flaherty’s had posed as a quirked-up little “project space” or a more stentorian “initiative,” I think nobody would care very much in any respect.
Like de Land’s AFA before it, O’Flaherty’s moves out and in of the gimmick’s shadow play of capital depending on how the sunshine shifts. (“Devices can flip into gimmicks at any moment and vice versa as well,” Ngai notes.) Is it a business or is it a joke? And if it’s a joke, who’s it on? In its operations, the gallery does indeed violate some basic capitalist laws. For one thing, its proprietors appear to be having a reasonably good time, and also you’re not allowed to rejoice working—it almost definitionally violates the notion of labor, particularly when your wares call into query the arbitrary nature of the ascription of value. An excellent and curious thing about O’Flaherty’s is that the glint that catches people’s eye is, as with de Land, the flash not of coins being exchanged but of cash being burned. In response to Juliano-Villani, the gallery is losing “tons” of cash; over its first 12 months of business it has made “4 major sales.” You don’t get wealthy showing cult artists and potato chips, and overhead on a Manhattan gallery, even a modest one, is brutal. In a way, O’Flaherty’s evokes one more capitalist phenomenon, a hypercontemporary one: A part of its gimmick could also be to perform the identical devil-may-care attitude toward old-fashioned financial probity as corporations that burn through billions as they plow on at a terminal loss, crucifying investors who consider their gamble will sooner or later repay. However the only people O’Flaherty’s is crucifying are themselves, nailing themselves to the holy Volkswagen of the arbitrary ascription of value.
Success breeds success, failure breeds failure, and nobody desires to be related to a loser. Unexpectedly, then, by virtue of its indifference toward self-immolation, O’Flaherty’s reveals itself to be, like American Advantageous Arts, a type of institutional critique. Juliano-Villani has been heard to say she began the project because she sees the art world as boring, which seems a consensus at this point. We’re waiting for some recent genre, form, or movement to coalesce. But what we should always be searching for—what’s actually desired—is a recent model for art’s circulation and display, one less strangled by notions of business. If you desire to know what that’s, don’t ask me. I only work here.
Domenick Ammirati is a author and editor based in Recent York.
