(Illustration by Brett Affrunti.)

It’s possible that the Upper East Side changed the night last September when the fire department broke up the disco party at 980 Madison. The building houses, among other businesses, a luxury spa and Gagosian Gallery. Soon it will have a Gagosian-owned “neighborhood restaurant,” as Larry Gagosian described it in a recent interview with Peter Brant. There will be chili. And waffles.

On the third floor of 980 Madison is Venus Over Manhattan, an art space opened last year by Adam Lindemann, a contributor to this paper and the disco party’s host. The crowd had gathered to celebrate a show by the artist Peter Coffin. Young women carried trays of tequila shots. Around 8 p.m., the festivities moved down the hall to a room dimly lit with red lights. From the street, you could hear DJ Harvey playing records. Professional roller skaters skated around on glowing LED wheels. A cluster of young men and women nonchalantly smoked near the entrance.

When the fire trucks came, part of the crowd decamped across Madison Avenue to Bemelmans Bar at the Carlyle, where a pianist played selections from the Great American Songbook and the martinis cost $21.

“We knew the fire marshal was going to show up,” Mr. Coffin told me. “In that neighborhood, if the noise is too loud, you don’t call your local police department. You call your Congressman.”

In the arc of art-world history, the Upper East Side started out as the neighborhood with the most groundbreaking shows. Leo Castelli was up there showing Warhol, Rauschenberg and de Kooning. As the art world expanded, dealers moved to Soho, and then Chelsea. Uptown gained a reputation for stodginess. But when the most recent recession hit in 2008 and Madison Avenue was laced with empty storefronts, things started to change.

In 2010, the Chelsea dealer Marianne Boesky rented a townhouse on 64th Street—“a five year laboratory” is how she described it in an e-mail message—and gave the space over to young curators and artists like the Italian art collective Lucie Fontaine, whose members lived in the house while organizing a show there. Alex Zachary opened a gallery inside a grimy duplex and showed work by, among others, the greatest of all lost feminist artists, Judith Bernstein (charcoal drawings of enormous penises), and Lutz Bacher (she filled the duplex with sand). Dominique Lévy, formerly of 78th Street’s L&M gallery, is moving to an old bank building on Madison in the spring and giving the radically contemporary Paris dealer Emmanuel Perrotin the ground floor. Lower East Side galleries are heading uptown. Los Angeles’s Blum & Poe has an Upper East Side broker and is, according to sources, “actively looking” to open in the neighborhood. Is it possible that the Upper East Side is cool again?

“If you look at the neighborhood, it’s a different spirit,” said Ms. Lévy. “I went to an opening [at Venus Over Manhattan] and looked at the crowds coming out of the elevator. I joked to Adam, ‘Did you hire these people to come here?’”

More than any other neighborhood in New York, the Upper East Side projects its mythology onto people. It conjures images of wealth and status, prep schools, women in fur coats with diamonds and converted carriage houses off Park Avenue. The neighborhood has tropes that can be played with, more than, say, Chelsea does.

“In January 2010 when we started the gallery the art market had more or less bottomed out,” Alex Zachary wrote in an e-mail message. “So opening a dingy gallery on 77th Street seemed a succinct way of framing the problem, though maybe too cute by half.”

Mr. Zachary announced earlier this year that he and his business partner Peter Currie would move their gallery to Harlem. He finds the Upper East Side to be “closer to its old self,” in the sense that when money returned and the storefronts on Madison started being bought up, having a gallery there became “somehow less cute.” But most dealers I interviewed brought up Mr. Zachary when talking about how the neighborhood has changed, saying that he made a certain kind of gallery seem possible there.

“People said no one would come,” Mr. Zachary said, “which turned out to be wrong, but more to the point, it made no difference either way. At this stage in the art world, you can have a gallery in Harlem or on the Upper East Side or in Bermondsey or on the moon—I truly believe our physical location is meaningless; we’re not a dry cleaner. And amazingly, people still say to me, ‘Oh honey, don’t move to Harlem, no one will come.’”

The city is legendary for its rigid line dividing uptown and downtown. In the art world, at least, such divisions are becoming more fluid as the market continues to expand.

“It’s not any more that it’s only Chelsea, and then the trendy Lower East Side and the posh Upper East Side,” said Marc Payot, vice president of Hauser & Wirth, which runs a gallery on 69th Street off Madison and just opened the city’s largest commercial gallery on West 18th Street in Chelsea. “It’s all one big thing. Today, the whole art world is like that. It allows a mix of all kinds of things. It’s not a world that divides, it’s a world that includes.”

“One time, we got a very silly review of Aaron Curry’s exhibition,” said Gordon Veneklasen, director of the Michael Werner Gallery, which opened a contemporary program on the Upper East Side in 1990 in the same space that once housed Castelli. The reviewer “found it odd that this artist was showing in this area. Leo Castelli opened in ’55. The Warhol pillows were shown there in ’66. The Upper East Side at that time was probably more formal then than it is now. I think the idea of saying that certain artists have to show in certain areas is almost provincial at this point. Is Chelsea really cutting-edge? I don’t think so at all. It’s silly. It’s like saying New York is one thing and L.A. has no ideas. We all know that that’s bullshit at this point.”

It depends on who you ask. Ms. Boesky, whose flagship gallery is on West 24th Street, said Chelsea “may be the best zone of free culture in the world.” In Chelsea, you can get hundreds of visitors a day, which is good and bad. Amalia Dayan, of the Upper East Side gallery Luxembourg & Dayan—which recently filled its space with a “surrealist garage sale” by Norwegian artist Bjarne Melgaard complete with S&M tableaux—opened uptown in 2009 after co-running a gallery in Chelsea.

Chelsea, Ms. Dayan recalled, “was very saturated. I did not enjoy sitting there on Saturday and having a million people coming and going, and maybe having one person be very interested in what we were doing.” Uptown, she’s shown Marcel Duchamp, but also photographs of Jeff Koons having intercourse with his former wife, a porn star.

“You can do anything on the Upper East Side today,” she said. “Historical, contemporary, very young or very old. And the collectors live up here.”

Still, spaces in Chelsea are easier to come by, and they’re larger, if you’re into that sort of thing.

“If you have an artist who wants to park two buses in the space, that’s tough,” said Mr. Veneklasen. “But I don’t want to work with those kinds of artists anyway.”

“What are some of the advantages specifically of being on the Upper East Side?” I asked him.

“Civilization,” he said evenly.

In New York, some dealers think of Chelsea as a shopping mall, the way Soho was before everyone moved out. Others were rattled by Hurricane Sandy, which set back a number of wealthy galleries for weeks and threatened to destroy smaller businesses altogether. Some dealers characterized the Lower East Side as becoming just another art district.

It makes sense, then, that Bill Powers, owner of Half Gallery on Forsyth Street, who described the old gallery as being “in violation of the Geneva Conventions, it was so small,” is reopening this week in a townhouse on 78th Street. The old gallery was known for openings that spilled out into the street in order to accommodate everyone who showed up to drink mini-cans of beer (and, at one exhibition, have their picture taken with Terry Richardson). The new space will be open by appointment only.

“The reality,” Mr. Powers said, “is that, with the exception of one person, anyone that I sold to lived a hell of a lot closer to our new location than the old space on Forsyth Street. So you do the math on that.”

Uptown now has some of the novelty that the Lower East Side had a few years ago. Fergus McCaffrey, who owns a gallery on 67th Street but recently decided to open a second space on West 26th Street in Chelsea, said he first opened uptown because it was “a way of distancing oneself from other galleries.” He also saw it as a place where artists could be freer to experiment. “You can take risks on the Upper East Side that you can’t afford to take in Chelsea,” he said. “If you look at the succession of younger artists who have had shows at Upper East Side galleries and just blown it, the scales are less intimidating. It’s less a career-ending risk than a 7,000-square-foot space in Chelsea, which, if you fail, your career is over, basically.”

People are opening spaces uptown that a few years ago might have been more likely on Orchard Street. Art adviser Eleanor Cayre and curator Vladimir Roitfeld’s new project space is inside a townhouse on 78th Street, the former home of an Upper East Side old-timer, the dealer Christophe Van de Weghe. Despite the fancy digs, there’s something casual about the whole thing. They’re not advertising, and their names will be kept off the door. Mr. Roitfeld moved in upstairs. There’s no fixed schedule of exhibitions. And that doorman on opening night a few weeks ago—on a Sunday, the same night Lower East Side galleries hold their openings in tandem—wasn’t deliberate; he just kind of came with the place.

“Everyone is in the middle of an identity crisis,” one Lower East Side dealer told me.

He’s been looking into a space at 980 Madison and envisions it as a “showroom,” with art, furniture and anything else that could turn a profit. The money difference is substantial—the asking price is about $100 per square foot, almost double the price of the Lower East Side. Still, the dealer said, the market has changed to such an extent that having a classic kind of gallery downtown, with a small roster of artists you represent and cultivate, just won’t work anymore. In today’s market, the minute artists start making money, they decamp for a larger gallery.

If the Lower East Side has a reputation as the main arbiter of the avant-garde, the dealer said, now that neighborhood “is an establishment in and of itself.” He said there are still interesting galleries there, but “the avant-garde now is about giving people what they want, wearing a $4,000 Prada suit, discovering that guy who’s going to make a ton of money at auction a year from now. Even the artists are market-driven. They see all their friends doing well, buying shit with all the money they make from dripping a little sweat on charcoal. So they end up wanting to take it to the source”—the Upper East Side, where the money is. “The avant-garde,” he said, “is about being with money.”

mmiller@observer.com

His stated influences these days are a little more high brow: Mike Kelley's 13 Seasons and Basquiat's oil stick works. While you can pick up a simple pencil drawing on paper for $2000, Mr. Lang's larger paintings, some run as large as 96 x 72 inches, could set you back $40,000. If you're in town, the opening is sure to be a shit show as we could hardly get through the door at the last opening at Half Gallery (never mind the 'private' back room). If you can't make it in, though, here's a preview of the show.

Exhibition A Flash Gallery at NADA. (Photo by Rozalia Jovanovic)

On the roof of NADA, Exhibition A has set up a “flash gallery” with three wood walls presenting prints by Aurel Schmidt, whose work is on view for the first day of the fair.

Her print is a sketchy rendering of a beer can holding a cluster of yellow wild flowers, presented on a couple of natural wood walls erected for the duration of NADA amidst the crowds bustling up to the perpetually long line in front of the café area.

Tomorrow, Ms. Schmidt’s prints, whether sold-out or not, will be replaced by a new set of prints by street artist and club impresario Andre Saraiva. After his 24 hours are up, they’ll be switched out for prints by Sam Falls.

This is kind of the normal course of business for Exhibition A, on speed. The “members-only” website—co-founded by Ms. Martin along with Half Gallery owner Bill Powers, designer Cynthia Rowley and Gabby Munoz—ordinarily launches one new work per week, each of which is an editioned print by a contemporary artist (both known and emerging) all priced under $1,000.

But they’re speeding up their process and going “flash” as a kind of playful response to the sudden craze that greeted a Richard Prince print back in March.

“This Richard Prince sold out in 12 minutes,” said Ms. Martin holding open a giant portfolio book with the print, entitled What We Lose in Flowers (the name of Mr. Powers's recent novella, by the way), which was visible through a laminated sleeve. It had a black and white pin-up image obscured by collage-work. Mr. Prince's success had coattails.

“The week after Richard, they launched a work by Wes Lang,” she said, “and his sold out in three hours.”

Compare this to the first time they offered Mr. Lang’s work on the site, when it took a whole week to sell out.

While this head-spinning program seems apropos for the fevered art fair environment (it's not uncommon for galleries to cycle in works as others sell), if for some reason these prints don’t sell like hot-cakes, or you can’t make it down to NADA, take heed. “If they don’t sell out,” said Ms. Martin, “they’ll eventually launch on the website.”

Donald Cumming. (Courtesy Rozalia Jovanovic)

“This is like the 1% of the 99%,” a guest said last night at the Top of the Standard, where Audrey Gelman of Downtown for Democracy and Aaron Bondaroff of Ohwow were hosting a party for their new handbook, The Pocket Guide to Politics.

While many of the 99% were out marching for Occupy Wall Street’s May Day protest, in the cushy beige lounge at the Top of the Standard, artists, musicians, DJs, fashion designers and actors were out in droves, swilling Moët and fizzy cocktails, and fraternizing in a frothy comingling of uptown glamor and downtown grit.

Half Gallery owner Bill Powers stood by the DJ booth in a plaid shirt and red-tinted glasses as designer Cynthia Rowley hung out on the dance floor in a sharply tailored jacket. Photographer Terry Richardson, Girls creator Lena Dunham and club impresario Andre Saraiva were also amongst the revelers in various states of dancing, lounging and posing for cameras. Artist Nate Lowman DJ’d as Mr. Bondaroff, a k a A-ron the Downtown Don, stood nearby in a red cap and jean jacket, violating his old boast, “I’m so downtown, I don’t go above Delancey,”

“It’s synergistic,” said Ms. Gelman, one of the board members of D4D. A petite brunette wearing a dress made almost entirely of safety pins, Ms. Gelman, is an example of the crossing over. She’s the press secretary for Manhattan borough president Scott Stringer, but also has a featured role on HBO’s Girls and has Terry Richardson as a boyfriend.

Copies of the Pocket Guide, which aims to explain the basics of the political system simply and with images by well-known artists like Terry Richardson, Andrew Kuo and Dan Colen, were piled on a nearby table. Another table offered voter registration.

Midway through the revelry, Ms. Gelman got up on a small stage in front of a brightly lit piano, at which point the loud dance music came to a halt.

“I work in politics, but my friends don’t,” she said amid hoots and hollers, in front of windows that looked out onto the glittering Manhattan cityscape. “They’re constantly asking me, ‘What do you do? No, what do you really do?’” She explained a bit more about D4D, which went on hiatus after the 2004 elections. “D4D is relaunching tonight,” she said. People in the crowd hooted again.

Donald Cumming of the Virgins then got up at the piano and played two songs.

“I love Donald,” said Bill Powers to The Observer, looking over the dance floor. “He wrote those two songs for tonight, at least that last one—‘I Am a Cow.’ It’s not exactly about politics, but it’s political. It’s about his being a vegetarian.”

“Nate Lowman did this collage using scans of bumper stickers," he added, "which read 'vote Obama' riffing off the famous Warhol poster for George McGovern in his race against Nixon." Then told us a story about the time artist Dana Schutz was given the opportunity to live-draw President Obama during a “BET” interview. "After the interview, Mr. Obama asked, ‘Can I see your handy-work,’” he continued, “and all she had drawn was something like an ear and part of his face. She has an opening this week, you should ask her about it.”

Later, we went back for another cocktail, but the open bar had closed. After paying $18 for a vodka soda, we walked over to the registration table and learned that five people had registered to vote.

Mr. Richardson was lounging in a banquette overlooking the dance floor. In the Pocket Guide he smiles for a photo with President Obama. How was it to photograph the president? Mr. Richardson looked up grumpily. “He’s amazing,” he said.

Mr. Bondaroff was in better spirits. He smiled and reminisced about his first meeting with Ms. Gelman. “She worked for me at my first store, aNYthing,” he told us. Asked about his own entry into politics, Mr. Bondaroff smiled. “I’ve been into politics my whole life,” he said. “To live in New York is to be involved in politics.”

The book's cover.

The next book from the Karma bookstore's in-house imprint will be a novella by dealer and art world personality Bill Powers, Gallerist has learned. The artist Richard Prince has provided cover art for the book, titled What We Lose in Flowers..., which incorporates DVD labels, a convention seen at his recent show at Salon 94, and at Guild Hall last summer, in his "Covering Pollock" show.

The novella will the next in a series that has included Hanna Liden, Bjarne Melgaard and Sam Falls.

"There isn't a huge directive on what we publish, it's a pretty wide net," said Karma founder Brendan Dugan. "That's what's exciting—you have one thing that's a truly visual artist's book, one thing that's writing by an artist, like Bjarne's book, and now this fictional book by Bill, someone who's been around the art world for a long time." He added that there's another work by a new author in the offing, that involves some "Hunter S. Thompson-style journalism," about a retreat frequented by gay priests. "I like the idea that the books aren't in one specific kind of genre," Mr. Dugan said.

Mr. Powers's book tells the story of a Peter Beard-Julian Schnabel-esque artist in a deteriorating relationship with a younger woman who used to date his son. The book opens with a epigraph from John Currin, "Culture is for old people. When you're young you have your body, and that's all you need," and is dedicated to the recently deceased John McWhinnie, who introduced Mr. Prince and Mr. Powers. This is actually a second fictional outing from Mr. Powers, a former editor at Blackbook, whose first was a novel titled Tall Island.

The books will retail for $20 with a run of 1,000 copies—500 with the Richard Prince cover and 500 with the book's back cover as its front cover. There will be a release party and signing at Karma, on Downing Street, on March 6.

Detail from Kymia Nawabi's "Not For Long, My Forlorn"

So long, farewell, auf wiedersehen™, adieu. Last night, it was indeed that time again, that tragic hour when the last of the fresh-faced gaggle of not-so-good artists must wave goodbye to the party, that art world soirée to which only the greats are invited. For Wednesday heralded the finale of Bravo’s Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, that solemn, two-season-honored tradition wherein the future of Western culture is determined on reality TV.

In the first nine episodes, our abundantly tressed, and fancily dressed show host, China Chow, shed copious tears over the elimination of eleven contestants, leaving us with just three contenders for the preeminent title in the vast arena of competitive fine-art television programs. Young Sun Han, Kymia Nawabi, and Sara Jimenez would be the lucky artists given the opportunity to spend three months and $7,500 preparing a final gallery exhibit “to blow the art world away,” according to Ms. Chow.

Two months into their labors, super-suave auctioneer and contestant mentor Simon de Pury would swing by — driving hilariously tiny Fiats, “furnished” by the show’s auto-making sponsors — to check on their work. (One can only imagine that his home kingdom issued a special license to him just for the occasion, much like when Prince William motored away from his royal nuptials. Or else the whole driving montage was prepared in front of a green screen, with Ryan Gosling as a backup stuntman/body double.)

Eventually, each member of the trio would hang work in a final gallery show, hosted by Mr. de Pury in the Phillips de Pury & Company galleries. And then, finally, the victor would be wreathed in (non-literal) laurels. He or she would fulfill his/her destiny: To receive a solo show in the “world famous” — lest you forgot since last week how widely its renown reigns — Brooklyn Museum, a cover story in the utterly mysterious and potentially nefarious Blue Canvas magazine, and $100,000 courtesy of Fiat. One work by the winner would be auctioned off at Phillips de Pury, with all the proceeds going to the artist. Basically, if you had taken as a given that there were any stakes at all in this competition, they were as high as they ever would be last night.

YOUNG SUN HAN
“When you come back into town, don’t bring the PC parade with you,” lofty-haired gallerist/judge Bill Powers cautioned Mr. Han before the contestant headed off to Chicago, Illinois to prepare for his final showing. And he doesn’t: After nixing a project featuring some kind of road-tripping South Korean security booth — which Mr. de Pury quite rightly deemed “boring” — Mr. Han brings a funeral procession to the gallery.

He decks his allotted space with strung-up shirts belonging to his late father, to which Mr. Han affixes photographs of his father wasting away in a hospital. He also puts together a morbid shrine displaying the contents of his father’s pockets at the time of his death. Also, Mr. Han tosses in some projected photos of his mother, who is battling cancer, as well as random portraits of his hunky stock-analyst boyfriend.

“It’s about family, losing someone, and the full circle of going through life and death,” he explains. “I’m really hoping that the show puts people through the gauntlet of emotions.”

KYMIA NAWABI
Ms. Nawabi doesn’t even have to leave the borough to get to work on her final pieces: She lives in Manhattan with her boyfriend, a photographer and bartender with whom she worked at a Turkish restaurant, and his parents. And when Mr. de Pury comes calling, she whips out a photo album featuring pictures of her mom (a total babe) and her dad, who, you might recall, died in a tragic jet-skiing accident. And here’s where it gets weird: in the photos, her family is jet skiing. This makes Mr. Han’s death-candy totem look tame.

Anyway, Ms. Nawabi has, at the time of Mr. de Pury’s visit, vaguely settled on ghosts and religion and stuff as the subject of her final body of work. She shows the aristocratic auctioneer some horrible, kitschy sculptures — imagine a Cabbage Patch doll of a dead kid with diamonds balanced on its eyeballs — which Mr. de Pury calls “horrendous” as Ms. Nawabi weeps. “It’s the last thing I would ever want to own,” he adds, winning our best slur of the season award.

Handily enough, when the final show rolls around, Ms. Nawabi has completed a series of well-crafted drawings portraying strange scenes of ghosts and mythological beasts and nightmare creatures. Details from these drawings have also been recreated as 3D forms in the center of the room, but these sculptures really can’t stand up to the beautifully executed works on the walls.

SARA JIMENEZ
Back in Brooklyn, Ms. Jimenez lives with some gross futons and her boyfriend, who seems wary about the whole relationship. (When Mr. de Pury inquires as to how long they’ve been dating, the cagey gentleman quickly responds “less than two years.”) But her studio is filled with a promising array of work: She’s executed a performance piece on the street, for which she dressed up as a bobble-headed, white-clad monster who solicited confessions from strangers, writing down their weightiest problems. If she approached us, we’d probably run screaming from the giant mosquito/bird/cult-leader — you know, if you see something say something — but she seems to actually have gotten people to collaborate, chronicling their lust, addictions, and desperation, which is impressive.

She ditches some of her lame early paintings and sculptures, creating a final array of works, relating to the confessions she collected, in every medium — there’s a bird cage from which 1,000 paper cranes burst, a haunting dead-skin-cell self-portrait, a mattress filled with hypodermic needles, lingerie made of human hair, and a hot-glue cobweb. It’s all kind of Tim Hawkinson meets Kiki Smith, and if I got to choose right here and now, she would win.

THE FINAL FINAL CRITIQUE
The whole gang of judges and contestants of seasons past and present has gathered for the gallery show. Everybody’s favorite former slimeball contestant the Sucklord even shows up with a gift for art critic/judge Jerry Saltz, who only recently eviscerated him on TV: a glow-in-the-dark action figure of a certain “bald Jewish art critic,” the traditional present for the second night of Hanukkah.

The exhibit, primarily, is a testament to the fact that when artists have three months instead of three hours to make work, they do a better job. But that’s not what Mr. Powers, Ms. Chow, stony-faced Mr. Saltz, and guest judge/contemporary artist KAWS (who is soft-spoken and newt-like) have gathered to discuss. Across the board, Mr. Saltz seems to applaud contestants for working outside their usual mediums, while Bill Powers — who is incidentally more tan than any other person in the history of the world, excepting Oompa Loompas — likes the more single-message, limited-medium displays.

Mr. Han’s “Bool-sa-jo” (Korean for phoenix, his mother’s nickname for his dying father) elicits the comments of “sympathetic magic” and “really brave” from Mr. Powers, but irks Mr. Saltz with its straightforward, relentless drive toward meaning. “In some ways you don’t leave a gap for mystery, and that can shut out a viewer,” Mr. Saltz insightfully comments. But of course, the piece makes Ms. Chow cry. (Mr. Han’s mother, meanwhile, offers a perfect mom-comment, with her tear-free “you did a nice job.”)

“Not for Long, My Forlorn,” is the title of Ms. Nawabi’s expertly executed exploration of a mystical afterlife, over which Misters Powers and Saltz bicker again, but the general consensus is that the works are lovely, especially the one that (ick) depicts a boat and is an ode to her father — who, let us recall once again, died jet skiing.

Ms. Jimenez’s “Anonymous Contemplations,” makes den mother Ms. Chow effuse that she’s “so proud,” and Mr. Saltz admit that the showing represents “the most life I’ve seen in your work.” Alas, Mr. Powers thinks the eclectic arrangement “felt like it was kind of a collection of short stories… a little scattershot,” and so — drum roll, please — it is not Ms. Jimenez (the second runner up), nor Mr. Han (the first runner up) who ascends to a plane of art-world greatness.

Rather, it is Kymia Nawabi who is now, officially, according to the Powers That Be (at Bravo) the Next Great Artist. To which we can only respond in Ms. Nawabi’s own words: “Not for Long, My Forlorn.” For forlorn she shall be, when season three rolls around, and the next Next Great Artist takes her place.

From left: Houmard, Neidich and Schindler. (Photos courtesy of Patrick McMullan)

Quality restaurant art is nothing new, especially in New York. When it opened in the late ’50s, the Four Seasons Restaurant, in the iconic Seagrams Building, had art by Picasso, Miró and Jackson Pollock on the walls. (The dining room was meant to get a series by Mark Rothko, but he pulled out of the project, and the paintings now hang in three museums.) The food/art nexus may have culminated with the freewheeling 1970s, when Gordon Matta-Clark had his restaurant, Food, in Soho—compared with that, most restaurant offerings seem pretty staid. These days, you can go to Casa Lever, in the architecturally groovy Lever House, and gaze at myriad Warhol prints of celebrities—Hitchcock, Sly Stallone—while you’re eating your $52 “Costata” T-bone steak. And if you’re looking for something a bit more classical, there’s always Maxfield Parrish’s monumental mural, Old King Cole, which hangs elegantly above the bar in the St. Regis Hotel. But a new joint set to open by the end of the year is bringing New York restaurant art to a whole new level of downtown hipness.

ACME, at 9 Great Jones Street, is owned by Jean-Marc Houmard, co-owner of Indochine, Jon Neidich, who used to manage the bar at the Boom Boom Room and Evanly Schindler, the founder of Blackbook and former president of Interview, who is making his entree to the restaurant world with this narrow bistro. Mr. Houmard has also brought in his frequent partner Huy Chi Le. The chef is Mads Refslund, of the acclaimed Noma in Copenhagen. The restaurant’s initial artistic offerings include works by downtown fixtures like Hanna Liden and the Bruce High Quality Foundation, as well as contemporary blue-chip favorites like Peter Doig and Richard Prince, though the owners say this is just the beginning, and plan to cycle in new works once the venue opens.

“Every restaurant does art,” Mr. Schindler said. “Every company tries to work with artists, these days more than ever, so we’re not just trying to do art for the sake of art. But at the same time there is a methodology here, which is riffing on the Dada aesthetic, the anti-art idea that’s irreverent and fun.”

Ms. Liden’s statue, which will be visible through ACME’s front window once it opens, is a take on Marcel Duchamp’s inverted Bicycle Wheel, his first ready-made piece. Instead of a stool, Ms. Liden’s wheel sits on a stack of plastic folding chairs to the right of the foyer. Woven between the spokes in blue neon are the words “HAVE A NICE DAY,” the letters on the final word disintegrating, as if whoever is uttering the phrase can’t keep a straight face. A reference to her obsession with those fake, well-meaning sayings found on bodega bags, it’s a bit like a Tracey Emin neon, though it’s also a bit like that Batman movie where Catwoman smashes a neon sign in her apartment. Once the facade is done, the piece will be visible from the street.

On the wall to the left and just past the entrance there are prints by Mr. Doig, Josephine Meckseper and René Ricard from the Neidich family’s personal collection, clustered with the second brand-new piece, a photo by Olympia Scarry commissioned by Neville Wakefield, the independent curator who worked on the last PS1 “Greater New York” show. Ms. Scarry happens to be Mr. Wakefield’s partner and her photo, like the Liden, also plays with Duchamp, in this case the photograph of the artist in his later years playing chess with a nude Eve Babitz. Ms. Scarry set her photo in the Swiss Alps, and has a nude woman playing chess with a goat. The lighting is low enough that most of these pieces are difficult to see, and the works have nothing in common with each other, or the surrounding decor, which is café society meets casbah—checkered floors and tan walls.

“A lot of time when there’s art in restaurants it’s trophy hunter-status, in your face,” said gallerist Bill Powers, who used to work with Mr. Schindler at Blackbook and commissioned the Liden. “Like Gramercy Park Hotel or Lever House. On the opposite end of the spectrum are the anonymous murals at the Waverly Inn, which are nice but very subtle. Here, the owners thought you can do something that’s relevant and still is a little more integrated.”

You can almost miss the Bruce High Quality Foundation bust that sits behind the bar, amid liquor bottles—though Bruce associate Vito Schnabel didn’t when he arrived on Thursday and sat down at the bar right in front of it. At the end of the bar on a chalkboard is the quote, “Before Adam met Eve, he was gay,” from Warhol pal Taylor Mead’s book On Amphetamines and in Europe, a passage that also features a cameo of the address 9 Great Jones. A series of Richard Prince prints featuring X-ray-like skulls with Playboy bunny ears are tucked at the far back of the main room.

“At the time he got a ‘cease and desist’ from Playboy because he wasn’t the Richard Prince he is today,” Mr. Powers said. “He was probably a little more of a hambone.”

Though still under construction on Thursday, the restaurant’s basement will be a sort of gallery space featuring a hallway of what was referred to as “doors to nowhere.” Artists contribute their takes on the door and patrons are offered the opportunity to peruse—Aneta Bartos, an artist at the tasting, described her door as a slideshow reel of photos that you watch through a peephole and turn with a crank. At Mr. Wakefield’s suggestion, Martynka Wawrzyniak will contribute a video piece. There are also plans to make use of an abandoned elevator shaft as an art space—but as it always is for young restaurants, much is up in the air.

“We could have reached higher, including big, big names, especially through Neville,” Mr. Schindler said. “We wanted to focus on younger artists for the opening. That’s not to say there won’t be a few big names in the future. It’s in flux.”

For ACME—whose name recalls not only a synonym for “apogee,” but also the company that sold defective bird-catching goods to Wile E. Coyote—popularity feels inevitable. It may even be poised to replace places like Indochine and Bottino as the art world’s dining hall of choice. Though Thursday was just for friends and family—and the owners stressed this several times, because the restaurant is not yet open for business and the appearance that it is might cause a headache with the Health Department—it was still packed, and with just the type of people you’d expect. Glenn O’Brien sat at table next to Richard Kern and his wife, Ms. Wawrzyniak. Mr. Powers and his wife, Cynthia Rowley, debated whether they should stick to appetizers, since their baby-sitter for the evening was a semiknown DJ who had to leave soon for a set. Parker Posey left not long after China Chow entered, and artist Tom Sachs was deep in conversation with Visionaire magazine co-founder and former model Cecilia Dean. The owners may have been right to be nervous, but for any journalists who might have been standing around at the bar, it was pretty clear that these really are the owners’ friends and family.

dduray@observer.com

China Chow and Simon de Pury on "Work of Art." (Courtesy Bravo)

The art world is in Miami. The Sucklord has been booted from the rarefied realm of reality television and is lurking somewhere, probably in Miami. So what do we have left, here at home, to be thankful for? Why, the fact that the search for the next great artist continues for us on the Bravo cable television channel, of course. On Wednesday night, there were seven contestants left in the art-critical arena, and yes, they were challenged, as all artists have been since time immemorial, with the task of creating art to please car-manufacturing television sponsors.

The gang was shepherded to some kind of Fiat showroom, filled with automobiles old and new, where they were informed by vaguely aristocratic reality show mentor Simon de Pury, “The automobile has been an inspiration to artists since they were invented.” (Since artists were invented? Or automobiles? Ah, the Fiat and the ovum paradox.) “Fiat understands how important new inspiration is to the creative spirit,” Mr. de Pury explained, for those of us who were still confused. Richard Prince, John Chamberlain and similarly likeminded auto-loving artists were all, we learned, inspired by the auto-art-industrial complex.

The contestants were then tasked with crafting art using Fiat car parts—quite the serious assignment given that the winner was promised $25,000 “furnished” by the Fabbrica Italiana Automobili Torino (Fiat). (Some very preliminary late-night research determines that you might even be able to buy a new Fiat 500 Sport 150 hatchback for slightly less than that amount. Now we’re talking, Bravo!) “Looks like you guys took the whole car,” show host/socialite/couture hound China Chow exclaimed, just like she did in that weird dream we had last night.

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell is a man. He likes wood. He does not, however—and at his own admission—know much about cars. He had an aunt who broke her nose in a crash when he was in the second grade, but that’s hardly impressive to Work of Art viewers after the episode featuring fatal jet-skiing accidents, surely. He briefly goes down the making-a-mold-of-my-own-face (eyebrow-loss-be-damned) route of artmaking well known to all desperate art students, before settling on a satisfying, if not stunning, piece that transforms tires into a rolling stamp that spells out, “going to work going home.”

YOUNG SUN
“I’m worried about this challenge… I’ve never owned a car. My favorite car when I was a kid was a limousine because someone else was driving you,” Mr. Sun confided early in the episode, before discussing making out in cars with boys—the combined revelations fulfilling a weird Judy Garland gay stereotype for much of America. Destroying this stereotype (without making particularly compelling art), Mr. Sun then constructs an Exterminator-style robot, which is limply hung from a canvas.

MICHELLE MATSON
Ms. Matson has almost definitely read J.G. Ballard’s novel Crash. If she hasn’t, she should, because she would love it. But, notwithstanding the fact that she was recently the victim of a grisly hit-and-run accident, she sticks to her hip, wryly cartoonish roots and crafts a semi-creepy, but mostly Disney/Pixar-ish gleaming car hood above a sad-sack car hood (the animation of which should be voiced by the ghost of Paul Newman). She ditches an early, fabulous “fetishist window-licker” balloon piece, as well as a giggle-worthy Titanic-inspired fogged window piece for her lackluster happy-car/sad-car construction. But come on, she’s on reality TV! She has to know that if she doesn’t delve into her gruesome past to create something about her most horrible life experience she’s in trouble. Also, she says, “I like how this challenge is so open; like you could do whatever you want,” which is, officially, in the Book of Revelation, the beginning of the end.

SARA JIMENEZ
According to drunken photos of Ms. Jimenez in her drunken youth, it’s good that she never learned to drive—and thank goodness for the healing power of art-on-television, which has helped her “recover in these areas” of intoxicated, debauched behavior. Anyway, for the challenge, she employs a muffler, from which she constructs an angular sculptural formation of foam. It’s better than her usual bulimia-themed twee drawings, but so is a regular, unembellished car muffler.

LOLA THOMPSON
Ms. Thompson is a witch, as it turns out, if you hadn’t already checked to see if she floats. (And not just in the way that TNT turns the word “bitch” into the word “witch” in their television-version of movies… they know drama.) She’s brewing up mineral solutions and her grandmother was a “witch and a healer” who taught her “witchy ways.” Oh wait, scratch that, now she’s making a drawing about her dad (not Al Pacino), and how they went on a road trip to the Grand Canyon. Also, she may or may not be planning to “do like a Tanya Harding” on Young, meaning she’s going to do a triple axel on his ass.

KYMIA NAWABI
Hey, Judy Garland, check this out—Ms. Nawabi is making “stardust” out of a car key. And gallerygoers are going to watch it glitter in some kind of kaleidoscope box.

SARAH KABOT
This contestant owns a bear skin and a buffalo skin rug: two more kinds of skin rugs than Gallerist has in our collection. This fact, along with her father’s very recent death, has inspired her to affix two “skinned” car seats to white canvases—a pair of Rorschach blots representing herself and her late progenitor.

THE CRITIQUE
Photographer and performance artist Liz Cohen joins the judging panel this week, qualified to weigh in on the challenge because of her series of photographic self-portraits for which she posed semi-nude near automobiles (think: Indy 500 meets Laurel Nakadate). Dusty Mitchell and Young Sun are deemed safe for their fair-to-middling art.

Meanwhile, Sara Jimenez and Sarah Kabot are commended for their top-tier works—Ms. Jimenez, because her piece reminds gallerist/judge Bill Powers of Superman and because, according to critic/judge Jerry Saltz, “It’s like a flower arrangement meets an exploding crystal meets a backfire from a car.” (Now we know, very specifically, what to get Mr. Saltz for Christmas.) Ms. Kabot because… OK we don’t remember; we were distracted by Ms. Chow’s epically gross hair extensions, which have reached religious cult-mandated lengths. Ms. Jimenez wins the cash prize, which she will use to go to grad school and cry more.

The bottom-three contestants, “ended up spinning their wheels,” Mr. Saltz jibbed excruciatingly. Ms. Thompson has too many incoherent ideas, and Ms. Nawabi’s piece is literally broken, but it is Ms. Matson’s piece that, according to Mr. Powers—who has no regard for the fact that Ms. Matson’s was recently mowed down by a reckless driver—is “caught in the headlights,” so she’s kicked off.

Richard Prince, Terry Richardson, James Frey (Photo courtesy Terry's Diary)

The line for the Terry Richardson show “MOM DAD” at Half Gallery on Friday was a clamoring, clustering thing, attractive people waving and desperate to squeeze into a space that, true to its name, isn’t very big. It was a bit like the opening of a nightclub, with everyone trying to be aloof and desperate at the same time, though there was very little order to it. Half Gallery owner Bill Powers came to the front from time to time and poked his pink sunglasses glasses around the door frame to point to people who were cool (e.g. “James!”—James Frey, of course).

Mr. Richardson’s parents are the subjects of the show and they are treated in much the same way as everyone else he photographs. His mother is topless giving a double thumbs up, his father has his arm around Mr. Richardson, who is in turn trying to look embarrassed. Near the back, large speakers played a series of voicemails from Mr. Richardson’s father Bob, a fashion photographer, who tells Terry that he's proud of him. On the floor of the gallery were crumpled school portraits, presumably of Mr. Richardson.

Mr. Richardson stood at the back of the room, his thumbs receiving a workout. Everyone wanted a photo with Terry. He had to take a break at one point to duck into the back. A short woman in flannel whined, “Oh man! It’s like when you’re waiting to take a picture on Santa’s lap and when you finally get to the front of the line he has to go to the bathroom.”

A theory: a photograph with Terry Richardson as your social media profile picture signifies countless sentiments about the man, nearly all of them positive. It could mean that you slept with him (he’s now taken! By the way), that you could have slept with him but at the time were too cool or famous to sleep with him. It could mean that you read Vice in its heyday, or even better, lived Vice in its heyday. It could mean that you “get” Terry Richardson, but are “over” him.

Why did you want a photo of him, girl in a fur vest angling her Blackberry?

“Oh,” she responded. “I work for Refinery 29.”

So that means you like Terry Richardson?

“No,” she said. “I have to tweet out a photo to prove to my boss that I came to this.”

A plebeian! Though the semiotics are admittedly complex. She asked where we worked and we told her.

“You should link out to us more.”

Even after you’d had a chance to see the show you had to stick around to watch the familiar faces standing in the street. There was Cynthia Rowley, Richard Prince, China Chow and Waris Ahluwalia. At one point the crowd parted so that Richard Phillips could drive by in his white Porsche, a racing model that sent rumbles down the block. We’d missed the dinner at Acme, but photos reveal that Ke$ha was there.

“The Terry images of his dad Bob remind me of the photographic study Richard Avedon made of his dying father,” Mr. Powers said after the show. “In fifty years, Terry Richardson will be remembered on the same level as a Helmut Newton, Irving Penn or Richard Avedon. It's hard for some people to recognize their contemporaries' importance in real time.”

Artist Rob Pruitt and critic Jerry Saltz. (Courtesy Bravo)

In this week’s installment of a certain Bravo reality television show, viewers nationwide were confronted with a fatal jet-skiing accident, sexual harassment, a discussion about the appropriate setting in which to consume a Pimm’s No. 1 Cup, and lots of boobs. Surprisingly enough, however, there were no real housewives involved. The television program of which I speak is actually Work of Art: The Next Great Artist, and thankfully a real artist (guest judge Rob Pruitt) dropped by before the hour ended and steered the show in the direction of, you know, ART, albeit for like 12 seconds.

The episode opened with the gaggle of remaining contestants trekking out to auction house Phillips de Pury & Company's hallowed halls, dubbed by would-be great-artist Young Sun Han “Simon’s Place.” (But don’t forget: We’re not talking about Run’s House. That’s a different show. This is a show about ART, not about aging hip-hop icons taking bubble baths.) Upon arriving in the empty exhibition space, the artists decided to follow a trail of tin cans laid out on the floor. Because that seemed logical, and, as the Sucklord put it, someone had to “braze the trail.”

And this turned out to be not such a bad—although highly idiomatically flawed—idea, as the cans led not only to contestant-mentor/auctioneer Simon de Pury and show-host/socialite China Chow (whose hair, by the way, is getting absurdly, creepy middle-school experiment long) but also to ART. Specifically, to what looked like Andy Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Can (Tomato) of 1962, but was in such a crappy frame, we’re betting money that it was a poster that everyone pretended was real.

“Pop is bold. Pop is brave. Pop is sex. Pop is life. Pop is fun. Pop is brash. Pop is political. So make it pop,” Mr. de Pury liltingly recited (inspired, perhaps, by Gagosian's 2007 "Pop Art Is" show), as he assigned the artists the task of creating their own pieces of Pop art. Without a doubt, Mr. de Pury has been boning up on his “Simplest Seuss for Youngest Use”—aka “Hop on Pop”—but he’s allowed, he just had a baby.

Other important things to know about this episode before I get down to mocking the almost entirely abysmal artworks are: 1) This was a double elimination challenge, so two people got booted off. 2) No one received immunity for the next challenge. 3) The winner of the challenge got a two-page spread in Entertainment Weekly, to be viewed by 11 million readers. If you are not aware of Entertainment Weekly, it’s the magazine that has less to do with art than all of the other magazines in the world.

THE SUCKLORD
The Sucklord sucks. His art this week is not as pathetic as everyone else’s: It’s an installation “based on Charlie Sheen’s ramblings” with bottles of tiger blood, jars of warlock dust, and dolls of action goddesses. The central action figure of Mr. Sheen has busted out of his packaging, leaving only the scrawled note, “I quit.” Very funny, Mr. Sucklord. But still, he sucks. Because he’s just another misogynistic asshole on television, not unlike Mr. Sheen himself. The main revelation of this episode is that the Sucklord has a girlfriend, who’s “literally going to cut his balls off” when she sees the show, and with whom he previously “had a lot of sex adventures.” Neither of these facts, however, stop him from repeatedly asking Lola Thompson to take her clothes off, from trying to corner her physically while stating that he’s getting turned on, from commenting to Kymia Nawabi that she has “nice tits,” or from lamenting the fact that it’s not the bustier Sarah Kabot taking off her shirt in the name of art. But of course none of this televised harassment matters, because Mr. de Pury, a collector of the Sucklord’s work, likes the Sheen-ian art.

LOLA THOMPSON
Ms. Thompson, who to the chagrin of all women everywhere, encourages the Sucklord’s advances because she’s “single and lonely,” whips up a sculpture featuring overly large PDA devices displaying text messages along the lines of “Click to unfriend Mubarak.” Because the only thing that excites her more than the slimy advances of the Sucklord is overthrowing dictators.

TEWZ
Tewz “grew up on Nintendo,” so he gets pop culture, dig? He recreates a life-size tail end of a “FadEx” truck that he then tags. But what’s really important is his back-story, most notably the time he spent in a maximum-security jail after he was caught spray-painting a highway sign. (So he’s not the stealthiest street artist, sure.) “Art basically saved my ass…. literally,” he says, while laughing nervously and shifting in his seat. If that’s not enough gratuitous, irrelevant information for you, by the end of episode three he’s also revealed that he masturbates with his left hand.

KYMIA NAWABI
“Pop art to me is about art that reels you in and tries to sell you something but has also a message within the piece,” Ms. Nawabi explains. How exactly this definition differs from that of “art” in general, is not clear. Another thing that is not clear is how much nudity you can show on TV. Because Ms. Nawabi photographs her boobs, and while she’s in a state of undress, her bazooms are blurred out. But once they’re printed in their full photographic splendor, it’s just high-resolution nipple all over the place. Her piece of environmental commentary/mammary-art depicts her breasts and a water bottle filled with garbage. It also has something to do with her severe social anxiety disorder, which stems from the moment she failed to seek help after finding her dead father floating in water, the victim of a freak jet-skiing accident. Back to art, though. “It is something that you could see possibly in a subway station so that’s a good thing,” declares Mr. de Pury of the piece. What?

DUSTY MITCHELL
Mr. Mitchell is just a really sad character, least of all because of his blindingly bad haircut. “Fast food’s always a popular culture topic and it’s kind of a personal subject because my father’s had a heart attack more than once,” he reveals, in his down-and-out, Droopy-the-dog manner. For the challenge, he constructs a streamlined white trash can (insert your own white-trash can joke here, I just don’t have the spirit), with the words “How Could You?” emblazoned across the flap. “I don’t think it would look good in Entertainment Weekly,” Mr. de Pury says delicately. The last time that was someone's creative goal was the most recent time that Daniel Radcliffe mulled which button-down to wear out of the house.

LEON LIM
Mr. Lim makes everybody look stupid, per usual, by proving that no one knows anything about the American flag (e.g. distribution of stripes). But then he crafts a kind of Jasper Johns-ian spread of flags, out of which sprout McDonald’s and Facebook and Twitter logos. “I’m not making art just to make the judges happy,” he states early on in the episode, sounding his own death knell.

SARA JIMENEZ
Even though she’s in a committed relationship with a really tall guy and has never been on a dating site, Ms. Jimenez pulls together a piece about online dating, for which she egomaniacally takes MySpace-ian photos of herself mugging and grimacing.

BAYETÉ ROSS SMITH
Having settled on the theme of “identity” once again, Mr. Smith melds the faces of his fellow non-white contestants, Ms. Jimenez (whom he ambiguously dubs “part-Asian”) and Ms. Nawabi, who is Iranian and also part Russian. The resulting photographs look like extreme close-ups of a dark-haired woman with freckles. Very avant-garde.

JAZZ-MINH MOORE
This poor little hippie never even had a TV growing up (gasp… how did she learn about reality?) so she didn’t know “what was on the commercials.” How, then, could she possibly be expected to figure out Pop art? I mean, she got a BFA and then an MFA, but her professors must not have mentioned this piddling, lesser movement of art history. Mr. de Pury is less interested in any of her artistic inclinations than he is in her inner-lip tattoo, which reads, “Bite Me.” I myself don’t know whether to be more interested in the fact that her obviously cruel parents named her white sister Asia, or the fact that Asia was stupid enough to have “Epic as Fuck” tattooed inside her own lip. Ms. Moore’s two self-portrait photographs are really bad, and are supposed to be about Britney Spears. The Sucklord spills paint on one and she doesn’t even bother to reprint it, because she’s a hippie and painting is “about forces that are beyond control” in hippie-land.

MICHELLE MATSON
Ms. Matson re-envisions a Warhol Coke bottle, but it’s on an iPhone, and it’s a can, and it’s Coke Zero, which only Europeans drink, but none of that matters because Mr. de Pury is correct in guessing that everyone thinks it’s “too derivative.”

SARAH KABOT
“Sorry We’re Closed,” reads Ms. Kabot’s delicate and quite lovely hanging text piece. Less lovely is her analysis of the foreclosure crisis. “It’s a huge problem,” she earnestly explains.

YOUNG SUN HAN
Mr. Han builds a well-crafted pink billboard featuring the words “PROP 8,” on the back of which gallerygoers can inscribe their feelings about the contentious California legislation.

THE CRIT
First, and most importantly, gallerist/TV-judge Bill Powers has resurrected his yellow-striped sweater, a staple of season-one critiques, except this time it looks like it actually fits him! Like it grew! Or he shrank! Or like he listened to certain nagging art bloggers (ehem) and had a stern speaking-to with his dry cleaners.

Oh, but, ART. Mr. Pruitt—most recently of The Andy Monument sculpture fame in New York—finally offers a working, and quite eloquent, definition of Pop art: “Good Pop art takes our collective experience and filters it through a personal lens.” He then helps tap this week’s top artists, Young Sun Han and Kymia Nawabi. Young actually wins because, as Ms. Chow self-evidently puts it, Prop 8 “is such a political-social issue right now.” For some reason, judge/art-critic Jerry Saltz deems that Ms. Nawabi’s work is not a “gratuitous piece of nudity.” (It’s a third nipple that would have really thrown it over the edge.)

The worst pieces belong to Dusty Mitchell, Jazz-Minh Moore, Michelle Matson and Leon Lim. Poor ole Mr. Mitchell is bashed by Mr. Powers, who declares that gallerygoers “just walked right by this thing.” (Ten bucks says there was at least one plastic wine glass at the bottom of it by the end of the night—How Could You?) Ms. Moore is schooled by Mr. Pruitt for having created a work that “fails for the viewer because we can’t decipher the meaning” (the meaning being Britney Spears). Everyone berates Ms. Matson for not being creative enough, and her defense is that she’s a “huge fan of wallpaper.”

Hilariously, Mr. Powers tries to explain why he thinks Mr. Lim would be grateful for Facebook, being deaf and all. Then Mr. Saltz lets loose the most searingly mordant barb of the season thus far. “The most startling thing about this piece is how uninteresting it is,” Saltz slings. Obviously, Mr. Lim gets booted off, along with Jazz-Minh Moore. Click to unfriend Jazz-Minh Moore and Leon Lim. Comment: Bite Me.