(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

Detail view of a 2012 diorama by Bjarne Melgaard. (Courtesy the artist and Luxembourg & Dayan)

THE UPPER EAST SIDE ART SCENE sure is getting wild. Long the preserve of the staid and genteel (old masters, modern masters and the like), the neighborhood has recently been seeing more adventurous fare. Three gallery shows that exemplify the trend—and a fourth farther uptown—are of work by artists who share elements of the same profile: the bad-boy avant-gardist with machismo to spare, rebelling against aesthetic conventions, social norms or both.

If it were still in any way possible for artists to offend civilized society, the prolific 45-year-old Norwegian Bjarne Melgaard would be the man for the job. He has filled Luxembourg & Dayan’s tony townhouse with installations based loosely on his just-published book, A New Novel (H. Aschehoug, $35), a trippy narrative that follows an unflagging artist (“B”) through gay clubs, prostitution and the art world (which he especially detests), along the way documenting his insatiable appetite for drugs, steroid-enhanced muscles and sex, often of the sadomasochistic variety. Its centerpiece is a sex murder in Belgium that may or may not have occurred.

An entire floor is taken up by large dioramas populated by sinister-looking dolls (one of a man with chiseled musculature resembles Mr. Melgaard). In one, they’re lounging on a sofa in a room strewn with packaging for human growth hormone (used for bodybuilding and to combat AIDS wasting) and sex toys. In another, they’re in a dark dungeon, with one man on a kind of sex swing. A TV monitor displays a stop-motion film that lends a narrative to the latter diorama, and has what may be the most graphic content this writer has ever experienced in an art gallery.

Installation view of the third floor of Melgaard's show at Luxembourg & Dayan. (Courtesy Luxembourg & Dayan)

What prevents all of this from growing shocking-for-the-sake-of-it wearisome is that Mr. Melgaard has an exacting eye, a self-effacing side (the novel’s protagonist is oddly likable: he has a conscience and is looking for love just like the rest of us) and an absurdist sense of humor. A superb painter, he has toiled with a team of assistants to lovingly create terrifying (but also cartoonish) rooms with as much detail as those in Carrie Stettheimer’s prewar dollhouse at the Museum of the City of New York.

Mr. Melgaard has painted the walls of one room a violent orange and hung on them 13 paintings in his trademark high-pitch palette. They show what appear to be disfigured faces melded with rupturing organs, and they’re attached to the wall with hinges. Swing them open to reveal scrawled texts in the same paranoid tone as his novel: there are dark stories lurking behind every image in his restless world.

In his book Mr. Melgaard writes, “Contemporary art is about telling people they are inadequate.” He may be joking—typically, with him, it’s impossible to tell.

Jack Goldstein, 'Untitled (Painting #43),' 1981. (Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

A BLOCK AWAY AT THE VENUS OVER MANHATTAN GALLERY, run by Observer columnist Adam Lindemann, there are 10 haunting photorealistic paintings that are as chilly and deadpan as Mr. Melgaard’s art is violent and sybaritic. Depicting bursts of colorful lightning or hulking World War II planes against starless skies, they are the work of the late Jack Goldstein, an original member of the the Pictures Generation who lost his place in front in the mid-1980s, suffered from drug addiction and killed himself in 2003. Today he’s obscure compared with the group’s stars, like Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine.

The show, which serves as a tasty aperitif to the touring Goldstein retrospective that will hit the Jewish Museum in May, borrows its title from a painting by Rirkrit Tiravanija—“Where is Jack Goldstein?”—and seems primarily concerned with burnishing Goldstein’s myth as a romantic recluse. Patsy Cline songs play on a loop in the darkened gallery—he liked listening to country in his studio—and the paintings are dramatically spotlit.

Goldstein made most of these paintings in the ‘80s, a time when he was ceasing to make what had become his trademark artworks—short, looping films like the sublime 1975 Shane, depicting a German shepherd barking, which is on view in a side gallery. These paintings were crafted almost exclusively by assistants; the careful touch of artist Ashley Bickerton, as well as a group of Puerto Rican custom auto-body painters, assured their mind-blowingly pristine, flat finish. They are liable to overshadow just about anything hanging beside them.

Richard Prince, 'The Soft Parade,' 1994. (Courtesy the artist and Skarstedt)

UP ON 79TH STREET, Skarstedt is showing 10 large paintings by Richard Prince, a Goldstein contemporary whose early work fits the Pictures mold. Mr. Prince recently published a bizarre, though sort of funny, rant on his blog about me, apparently responding to something I wrote two years ago about how he's been running on empty his sexy “Nurse” paintings of the early 2000s. Though his recent rubber band pieces and copyright-tweaking antics have been fun, it's still true.

Thankfully, the series at Skarstedt, “The White Paintings,” dates from around the first half of the 1990s. The works are appealing confections that combine tasteless jokes (these came after his first joke paintings) and silk screens of cartoons (and other images) into hazy collages. The jokes are predictably middlebrow numbers on gender, religion and modern life. Intermixing them with the visuals—drawings of well-appointed apartments and martini glasses, a photo of a woman who appears to be a stripper—produces an easy upper-management charm in place of the undisguised condescension Mr. Prince usually employs when mining certain cultural forms. This is not redeeming art, but it is perfectly pitched to the indulgences of its target class, and is as satisfying, albeit unsavory, as a night spent dropping good money around town.

Installation view of 'Joe Bradley & Dan Colen: Epiphany' at Gavin Brown's Enterprise, Lenox Avenue. (Courtesy the artists and Gavin Brown's Enterprise)

STILL FARTHER UPTOWN, at Gavin Brown’s Harlem outpost, is bro art (as an artist friend terms the work made by Mr. Prince and his progeny) from a younger set. There are just two works, one by Dan Colen and the other by Joe Bradley, and they are both huge—a key characteristic of the bro genre. The show is titled “Epiphany.” Mr. Bradley has painted a huge canvas with the word “jazz” in big white jazzy letters on a black background. Those already converted to his bracingly simplistic painting will swoon; skeptics will remain skeptical. In this case, when he’s clearly relishing a great time—a “jazz” painting in Harlem!—Mr. Bradley’s charisma is irresistible.

Mr. Colen presents a massive jumble of metal, roughly 10 feet tall, made of barbed wire, a fence, a gate and more. There is a basketball hoop in there too, as well as a large plastic Bart Simpson figure, a shredded T-shirt (“You’re not the boss of me,” it reads), a microwave and a garden hose. It looks like the remains of a neighborhood pummeled by Sandy, and you half expect to spot a body amid the tangle. But then you hear the birds chirping, live yellow ones that are part of the piece and feast on scattered feed, and it becomes a kind of sacred, if uncomfortably literal, shrine.

arusseth@observer.com

Still of Goldstein's 1975 'Shane' film.

It's about 7 p.m. in New York, and though you may not know it, you have an important choice to make. You can head back home, maybe have a quiet evening at your apartment—have some dinner, read a book, that sort of thing. Or you can head up to the Venus Over Manhattan gallery at 980 Madison (that's between East 76th and 77th Street), which tonight is playing host to a relatively rare performance of Jack Goldstein's Two Fencers (1976) piece. (Full disclosure: VoM is owned by Adam Lindemann, who contributes to The Observer.)

The piece is going to take place late—10 p.m.—so you do have some time to think about it. It's being staged as part of the gallery's latest show, "Where Is Jack Goldstein?" The exhibition takes a look at the hyperrealistic paintings that the late Pictures Generation artist made from 1976 to 1986, but it also features some of his other work. With a traveling Goldstein retrospective set to hit the Jewish Museum next year, there couldn't be a better time for a very fine Goldstein aperitif. (By the way, the show's peculiar title comes from a painting by Rirkrit Tiravanija.)

What exactly is involved in Two Fencers? Google it. I don't want to ruin it here. (Or just come to the performance tonight!) It was first staged in 1976 in Geneva, and again two years later at the Kitchen in New York. It's been recreated a few times since then. Here's a little preview, courtesy of Douglas Crimp in his classic 1993 book On the Museum's Ruins, in a section where he talks about the piece along with Robert Longo's Surrender performance:

These performances were little else than presences, performed tableaux that were there in the spectator's space but that appeared ethereal, absent. They had the odd quality of holograms, very vivid and detailed and present and at the same time ghostly, absent.

Sound great, right? Hope to see you there.

Darren Bader's bulletin board. (Courtesy the artist and Venus Over Manhattan)

The second show at the new Upper East Side gallery Venus Over Manhattan is filled with bulletin boards. (Disclosure: Venus Over Manhattan is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.) The West Village alternative space White Columns, which has been home to a bulletin-board exhibition space for a number of years, gave bulletin boards to more than 20 artists and art types and asked them to present something with it.

The conceit could have produced one-liners, but there are quite a few strong pieces. Daniel Turner scrapped down and disfigured his cork board, leaving it empty except for some deep scars. B. Wurtz elegantly hung four socks on a stretch of canvas painted with the words "know thyself." Gavin Brown took photographs of the inside of a refrigerator and presented them inside one board's windows. And Bjarne Melgaard stuffed his with crumpled drawings, mail and at least one hypodermic needle—a bulletin board overflowing with information and harkening back to the creepy murderer-obsessed installation he staged in the bathroom of Luxembourg & Dayan a few months ago.

But our favorite board belongs to Darren Bader, who took perhaps the most resolutely minimal approach, offering a bulletin board in its most pure form. He hung just a single item with a pin, an odd little painting of something not quite safe for work happening in a bedroom. There's a caption in Spanish underneath it. Click the image to see it a bit closer and head to the show before Aug. 24 to see it.

Every Friday, Don’t Miss It! looks at a single artwork on view in New York.

(Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

After its dark, moody debut exhibition "À Rebours," which channeled the feel of a late-19th-century aristocrat's private chambers, the Venus Over Manhattan gallery is going in a comparatively contemporary and light-hearted direction for its sophomore effort. This outing is titled "Bulletin Boards," and it's being organized by West Village alternative space White Columns. (Full disclosure: VoM is owned by Observer contributor Adam Lindemann.)

For the show, Matthew Higgs, the director and chief curator of White Columns, has asked more than 20 artists and art types, including Rita Ackermann, Darren Bader, Gavin Brown, Margaret Lee and Michele Abeles, Bjarne Melgaard, Virginia Overton, Daniel Turner and B. Wurtz, to present work using a bulletin board. The show opens July 19.

"They range between a very literal take on the bulletin board to somebody who, as of right now, is going to turn one into a fish tank," a gallery representative told us by phone, adding, "It's nice to be bringing White Columns uptown." Proceeds from sales will benefit White Columns.

Since 2004, Mr. Higgs himself has operated a bulletin board as an exhibition space in the lobby of White Columns, and prior to arriving at the institution used one as a project space at the California College of the Arts, according to the gallery's release. For this affair, 20 participants will have 4-foot-by-3-foot boards and four people will have 6-foot-by-4-foot boards.

This announcement underscores what has been a strong season for bulletin board-related art. The very pleasurable Liam Gillick retrospective at CCS Bard's Hessel Museum of Art, in Annandale-on-Hudson, N.Y., is filled with bulletin boards, whose contents have been selected by a variety of students and luminaries (one whole gallery is lined with them and bears a Boetti map), and Pati Hertling has been hosting occasional events under the name Bulletin Board.

The Paris of 1895 to 1905 seems an unlikely era to obsess the always au courant New York art vanguard of 2012. Why so much interest in contemporary circles in what has been, up to now, a particularly unhip era?

Malcom Gladwell-like theories of cyclical trends aside, the trend’s ascendency, I suspect, speaks to a growing discontent with the limited aesthetic positions available in New York at the moment. Andy Warhol and infinite post-Warhol imitators have set the dialogue in galleries here for the past decade. A number of these positions came inherited from Marcel Duchamp, currently the patriarch of rampant Lower East Side hipster Neo-Minimalism. A change of some sort was perhaps long overdue.

These fin-de-siècle French figures may feel so fresh because their aesthetic interests come from an age before Duchamp and Warhol set the stage for art-making. By explicitly aligning themselves with the "fuck you" decadence exemplified by J. K. Huysmans’s early novels (in Mr. Lindemann's case), the interest in decorative interiors (Kreps), or radical dandyism (Algus Greenspon), these recent shows are opening up ways outside of Warhol's commercial cool and Duchamp's anti-art object. They let us fall in love with small paintings, muddy palettes, bravado position-taking, aristocratic nerdiness, failed aesthetes and most of all, they let us feel weird again, as if we don't quite know what we're going to see when we leave the house. (Those descriptions could apply to much of the art in this year’s Whitney Biennial.)

As with the best resurrections, there's not much scholarship going into these slapdash approximations. They’re all about dealers going with their guts, arranging quirky consignments and spelling out their plans in freeform press releases. Yet just as Claude Monet tried to recreate Japanese gardens, despite never having seen them in person, and came up with the entirely French Giverny, a new and wonderful environment, it was fascinating to see Lower East Side denizens at the Hole reimagining Monet's gardens in their own image and coming up with something equally new, off and odd. Let's see where this new taste for old art takes us: after all Duchamp said his favorite artist was Redon.

editorial@observer.com

Salvador Dalí, "Cartel des Don Juan Tenorio," 1949. (Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

NBC News is reporting that a small Salvador Dalí work titled Cartel des Don Juan Tenorio, with an estimated value of $150,000, was stolen on Tuesday from Venus Over Manhattan, the Upper East Side gallery recently started at 980 Madison by Adam Lindemann, an art collector and writer who pens a column for The Observer. A gallery rep reached by Gallerist declined to comment.

This is the latest of a number of thefts to hit New York galleries recently. Last year, a $30,000 Steven Parrino drawing was taken from the Marc Jancou gallery in Chelsea, and in March a thief made off with a number of Ellen Harvey paintings from Rivington Street's Dodge Gallery, but was stopped when proprietor Kristen Dodge chased the person down and retrieved the works.

VOM's current show, "À Rebours," is dimly lit, channeling the decadent interior of the Duc des Esseintes, who stars in J. K. Huysman's book of the same name, presumably making a Dodge-style apprehension quite a bit more difficult. 

From the report:

Police sources say surveillance cameras show a man wearing a dark shirt with white polka dots enter the gallery with a black cloth bag. He is later seen on cameras leaving the gallery with the painting, police sources said.

The work had been installed low on a partitioned wall that was not visible from the main gallery space.

The thief certainly seems to have been well-informed: Surrealist art is hot these days. Last night, a prime Magritte made $11.3 million, nearly five times its high estimate, at Christie's Impressionist and modern art auction in London.

A screenshot of Documenta's website.

They're both interested in 19th-century writer J.K. Huysmans!

Mr. Lindemann, whom readers may know as the Observer's longtime art world columnist, recently started a gallery in 980 Madison named Venus Over Manhattan. His debut show is called "À Rebours," and is named for what is probably Huysmans most famous book, which concerns the life of a decadent aesthete-collector type.

But it's not just collector-writer-gallerists taking interest in Huysmans tale. An image of an English edition of the book, published under the name Against the Grain, just appeared on the website for this year's Documenta, the rigorously theoretical exhibition that alights every five years in Kassel, Germany. It's filed in the site's "Panorama" section, where director Carolyn Christov-Bakargiev and her team regularly post items related to their research. Perhaps they have a certain Upper East Side collector on their minds?

In other Documenta website news, we just noticed that there is an entire section about dogs. We're going to repeat that: there is an entire section on Documenta's website about dogs. The most recent entry is from May 23, 2011, and is titled "Resistencia: Art, Dogs, Public."

Jeff Koons, "Violet-Ice (Kama Sutra)," 1991. Colored Murano glass, 13 x 27 1/4 x 16 1/2 in. (Courtesy Venus Over Manhattan)

We stopped by our columnist Adam Lindemann’s new gallery yesterday while he was installing his first exhibition called "À Rebours," an attempt to sort of reimagine the world of the Duke Des Esseintes from the famous 19th-century Huysmans novel of the same name, using pieces by Redon and Moreau (the fictional duke's favorites) as well as contemporary art and a hodgepodge of other things. (n.b.: This is not a review. We stopped by. We checked it out. We edit Adam Lindemann; we don't always agree with him.)

The gallery is on the third floor of 980 Madison. On our way up, the elevator doors opened briefly on the  second floor to reveal signage for something called the Exhale day spa. We almost got out there, reader, we almost got out there.

But we didn’t! Instead we banged on Adam Lindemann’s blacked-out doors until someone let us in. It was dark inside. That is purposeful, as the place is meant to evoke a kind of spotlit palace of decadence. (Similar, it must be pointed out, to dealer and collector Axel Vervoordt's Palazzo Fortuny exhibitions in Venice during the Biennale.) The first thing you see are two candelabra by the French artist Cesar ("who is very out of fashion right now," Mr. Lindemann interjected) flanking a small painting by Moreau ("French Symbolism isn't hot right now," Mr. Lindemann again. "It's very cold").

Turn the corner and you get a sculptural bust of what appears to be an executioner with a long tongue lolling out of his hood by contemporary artist Jonathan Meese ("Someone who’s out of favor right now"--Lindemann)—and then it’s on to the main space where you can see immediately that everything is very raw. Very, very raw. Raw walls, raw ceilings, exposed beams, sheetrock walls, that sort of thing. All that rawness didn't come easy! Remember, this used to be a Vera Wang bridal boutique; it was, apparently, stripped down with great care. (The bridal boutique stripped bare by ...never mind.) Now it has a warehousey feel. It is, you might say, very contemporary. "I like the idea of a space that doesn't have any design," Mr. Lindemann said. "Of course this is a design! It's been done in a very aesthetic way. We had to make it look very tidy. It's a curated rawness." (Hm. "Curated rawness." We’re pretty sure this is the sort of basically oxymoronic thing the 1990s literary magazine Hermenaut meant by “fake authenticity”)

But, anyway, on we go. There’s a show-stopping tribal-looking mask from the 1990s by David Hammons (a Lindemann favorite) with a mirror on its snout. There’s a very weird and kind of frightening new bronze sculpture by Hope Atherton of a ghoulish creature with multiple sets of teats running down its belly. There’s an Andy Warhol “celebrity series” portrait of the American Indian Russell Means—it’s from Robert Rauschenberg’s collection which, remember, was on view in another gallery upstairs from Mr. Lindemann’s called…give us few minutes we’ll remember the name—and Means' mug is hanging above a shrunken head from the Amazon and a set of cannibal daggers from Papua New Guinea. The rear row of daggers is made from wild boar bones. The front row is made from--wait for it--human bones, and come from Mr. Lindemann's collection. (That’s worth repeating. Those daggers made from human bones belong to Adam Lindemann. We are going to be a much nicer editor from now on. Maybe.)

There’s a big new Piotr Uklański textile piece hanging from the ceiling that we said looks like a giant face and Mr. Lindemann said evokes female genitalia--it is, let's say, strategically spotlit. There’s a Dan Colen tar and feather painting. To its credit, it retains some of that freshly-laid-street smell. But the coup de grâce in this room promises to be a letter, on a scroll, from James Lee Byars to the L.A. art dealer Eugenia Butler, who, as Mr. Lindemann told the story, had something of a breakdown that involved her donning a bunny suit with holes cut out of the chest to reveal both of her mastectomy scars.

We forgot to mention the Banks Violette chair on fire. We forgot to mention the Lucas Samaras video, hung low on the wall, offering a prismatic view of the artist deboning a chicken carcass (that’s a good one) positioned next to an erotic sculpture by Jeff Koons from the '80s that shows him poised above porn star La Cicciolina, his then wife, just about to consummate things. (Mr. Lindemann's gallery, it's worth pointing out, is called Venus Over Manhattan, after the allegorical figures on the building's facade. And here we have Koons over Cicciolina. Hm.) It’s made of translucent material and is spotlit from above. (Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art director Jeffrey Deitch paid a visit while we were touring the space, and said he’d never seen this piece displayed better, which means a lot, actually, since he is a Koons expert: the artist reportedly once called him his "best friend.") We also forgot to mention a wall of paintings and works on paper in an intimate gallery-within-a-gallery that includes Redon’s charcoal drawing below which is a vitrine from the late Dash Snow containing the artists’ pill bottles, bones, handcuffs and other detritus from his short but intense life.

There are other things here, but why spoil it? Earlier we skimmed over a chair on fire, by Banks Violette. It only looks like it’s on fire; the chair, a cheap black plastic chair, is toppled on the floor and the flames rise from burners. Nearby is a very small painting by Salvador Dalí of what might happen when a woman’s hair comb mates with a human skull. Around the corner from that is a painting George Condo made specifically for the show, an imagined portrait of Des Esseintes. The duke's nose is flattened here, and he looks a little clownish. Which maybe all decadent figures do. Look a little clownish, that is.

Then we remembered the name of that place upstairs and went there and saw a Picasso show.

Glenn Brown, "Little Death," 2000. (Courtesy VOM)

As we reported two months ago, art and design collector Adam Lindemann, who pens a regular column for The Observer, is opening a 3,200-square-foot gallery space at 980 Madison Avenue, the building owned by developer Aby Rosen's RFR that is also home to Gagosian and other galleries. Today, Mr. Lindemann announced that the space will open in May and provided details about its programming; naturally, we gave him a call.

“A lot of dealers have asked me over the years why I don’t have a space, or why I don't curate shows,” Mr. Lindemann told us. He made the decision to take the plunge last Aug. 3—his birthday, auspiciously enough.

The new gallery—called Venus Over Manhattan, for the allegorical figures on the building's facade—opens May 10 with a show entitled “À Rebours” (“against nature”), inspired by the 1884 book of the same name by Joris-Karl Huysmans, which features the Duc Jean des Esseintes and tales of turn of the century decadence. The show will include some 50 artworks, by artists who range from early modernists, like Odilon Redon, to working contemporary figures, like Glenn Brown. Some works come from Mr. Lindemann's collection, while others are loans "from very generous friends."

Yes, this is a commercial venture. At least in part. A substantial part of the inaugural show will be for sale. Mr. Lindemann wasn't naming prices—even to us! Harumph!  “We have some pretty important things," he said coyly. "And some that are less dear.”

In À Rebours, the Duc Jean des Esseintes has Egyptian sinks, strange perfumes and music. Accordingly, Mr. Lindemann plans to show everything “from flea market art to Symbolists from the late 19th century.” Several artists, he said, have made things specifically for the show.

As to why he's opening on the Upper East Side, Mr. Lindemann explained, “I don’t really think I have that much to contribute to Chelsea or the Lower East Side or Brooklyn for that matter, but within the context of the Upper East Side I think there was an opportunity to come up with an independent voice.” The location is also convenient: he lives in a David Adjaye-designed home only about a block away from 980 Madison.

Mr. Lindemann, a controversial figure in the art world, seemed to acknowledge that he has his detractors out there. “The show," he told us with a laugh, "might not be very well received.”