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SoHo: The World's Premier Marketplace for Contemporary Art
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14830 |
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Section : |
THE ARTS
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| Issue
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10 / 1988 |
3,091 Words |
| Author
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Jason Edward Kaufman
Jason Edward Kaufman is an art historian and critic based in
New York. |
If the modern art world has a single headquarters, it is probably West Broadway below Houston Street in lower Manhattan. SoHo is the world's premier marketplace for contemporary art. Nowhere else is there a greater concentration of galleries whose business is solely contemporary art. In the twenty square blocks extending south ("So") from Houston ("Ho") Street between West Broadway and Broadway, there are nearly two hundred modern art galleries. Some buildings house five, ten, or even more--like department is Modern Art. Each gallery represents up to around twenty artists, exhibiting their work on a rotating basis and retaining a hefty portion of sales revenues. Collectors, critics, artists, and the more casually interested flock to SoHo to take advantage of the convenience of having so much art within walking distance. Like a year-round trade fair, SoHo acts as an ever-changing showroom for contemporary art. To tour the galleries of SoHo is to see firsthand the current state of modern art.
American Mainstream
SoHo hosts all kinds of new work, from established names to first-show artists, from run-of-the-mill to way-out, from cheap to outrageous. There are painting and sculpture galleries, poster and graphics galleries, galleries that feature photography, galleries that sell pottery. An ocean of art has resulted from modern art's having moved into the American mainstream, a phenomenon that has transpired over the past twenty years and that has exactly paralleled the development of SoHo.
Since the Pop Artists (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, et al.) began incorporating comic strips, American flags, newspaper photos, advertisements, ovens, fighter planes, and other media-borne images into their work, there has occurred a gradual erosion of the exclusionary "high art"-"low art" dividing line. A new modern art market has opened up with an ever-growing number of active collectors, both private and corporate.
In the past two decades, the number of artists and galleries has risen to meet this demand, and continues to expand exponentially. When Paula Cooper opened SoHo's first gallery in 1968, it seemed doomed to fail. Within a few years, however, other dealers were attracted to the roomy, inexpensive lofts that afforded ample storage space and easily accommodated the large-scale paintings of the Pop Artists and their contemporaries. The studios of a number of artists were already situated in the SoHo district, and dealers soon recognized the benefits of moving from upper Madison
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