The Art Set
Charlie Scheips

A Tale of Two Cities

The newest splash this season took place last Friday night at Perry Rubenstein’s new gallery on 23rd Street in Chelsea right off 10th Avenue. Perry has been on the scene for the past two decades starting first as a collector after earning a chunk of change modeling for the likes of the late fashion designer (and insatiable art collector) Gianni Versace. Male models made that kind of money then? Nevertheless, as a famous artist reminded me years ago — all collectors are potential dealers.

Perry opened his first gallery on Prince Street in 1990 when Soho was the contemporary art nexus of the city. He opened just as the booming late 1980’s art market explosion was rapidly about to bust. He closed the gallery three years later but never disappeared from the scene. Instead, as many other dealers did during those fragile years of the art economy, he chose to work privately — and it seems, lucratively — re-selling blue chip post-war art.

Rubenstein’s new gallery is actually two galleries designed by architect James Harb. The main gallery saw the debut of South African born artist Robin Rhode’s installation of photography, video and wall drawings; while around the corner on 24th Street Elaine Sturtevant’s 1990 homage to Andy Warhol’s flower paintings are on view.

Rubenstein is married to art world publicist Sara Fitzmaurice, whose Fitz & Co agency counts both the Art/Basel and Art/Basel/Miami art fairs as clients. Perry’s partner in the gallery is Sylvia Chivaratanond, a former curator at Chicago’s Museum of Contemporary Art and a contributing curator for the Arsenale installation at the last Venice Biennale in 2003. See the big spread on the gallery by Judd Tully in this month's Art & Auction.

Perry Rubenstein, Larry Gagosian, and Steve Martin CAN Resources-designed Lure Fishbar

To celebrate the opening of his gallery, Perry invited a couple hundred friends, artists, curators, collectors, and colleagues to mark the occasion. The dinner was at the spanking new Lure Fishbar underneath the Prada’s Rem Koolhaus-designed store at the corner of Prince and Mercer. Although we thought we’d be the first one’s there, actor and collector Steve Martin and Larry Gagosian were already entertaining a table of friends in the dining room while the rest of us bellied-up to the bar.

After a heavy cocktail hour, we were treated to a delicious three courses that I am told is representative of chef Josh Capon’s cuisine. The location’s previous incarnation was Canteen, whose retro-mod décor did little to disguise the claustrophobia of that basement space. The new restaurant is a remarkable transformation. It is designed in the spirit of an ocean-going yacht with a handsome palette of navy blue, white and teak — and the faux skylights throughout do much to alleviate the sense of entrapment I felt in the room’s previous guise. It was designed by CAN Resource’s Derek Sanders and Serge Becker — and backed by the John McDonald and Josh Pickard — the same team that brought us Lever House last year.

Sabinah Odumosu and Robin Rhode

Featured artist Robin Rhode and his wife Sabinah Odumosu were joined by other artists from the Rubenstein stable including Amir Zaki, Andrew Guenther, Piero Golia, Maike Abetz & Oliver Drescher, Jesper Just, Lina Bertucci, as well as Australian–born artist Tracey Moffatt. There were scores of collectors including and Chicago’s Lewis & Susan Manilow, Connie Caplan, Glenn Fuhrman, David and Danielle Ganek, Daniel and Margaret Loeb, Michael and Ninah Lynne, Joe and Arlene McHugh, Frank and Nina Moore, and Allison and Neil Rubler.

The curatorial set was represented by Dan Cameron, Thelma Golden, Douglas Fogle, Lisa Dennison Laura Hoptman, Yvonne Force Villareal, Mark Coetzee, Christian Rattemeyer, Lydia Yee, Sophie Perrier, Yukie Kamiya, Christine Kim, Clara Kim, Olukemi Ilesanmi, and Tumelo Mosaka. Art merchants of all stripes were a strong contingent as well including David Zwirner, Mary Boone, Kazuhito Yoshii, Darlene Lutz, Thea Westreich, Tony Shafrazi, Christophe Van de Weghe, Cristina Grajales, Adam Sheffer, Alberto Mugrabi, Andrew Fabricant and Laura Paulson.

But the word wouldn’t get out the same way without the press, so Perry had a speckling of that crowd around the room including Brook Mason, Josh Baer, Adrian Dannatt, Daniel Kunitz, Judd Tully, James Reginato, Mary Barone, Edward Leffingwell, Anne Stringfield, Phoebe Hoban, Tim Griffin, A.M. Homes, Andrea Scott, Amanda Sharp and Charles LaBelle. The party was a smash — and fun too.

Meanwhile, on the other coast, a celebration of a different sort is happening. Soon after Rubenstein closed his gallery in 1993, Blum & Poe gallery opened in a Santa Monica gallery complex on Broadway Boulevard.
I first met Tim Blum in 1990 while I was still living in Los Angeles and organizing the Los Angeles Contemporary Art Fair that took place at the downtown LA Convention Center. Tim had heard that the London-based company I worked for, Andry Montgomery, was starting to entertain notions of a contemporary art fair in Tokyo and wanted to make our acquaintance before he moved to Japan.

A few month’s later, I flew over to Tokyo for two weeks to re-evaluate the logic of a Tokyo fair. The dealers there were not convinced they needed such an animal and I didn't want a disaster in Tokyo to affect the strong gains we had made with the LA fair.

As it happened, I ended up on the plane with an odd assortment of friends heading there for one reason or another. James Grauerholz, who worked closely with writer William Burroughs, was on the plane accompanied by Timothy and Barbara Leary on their way to open a temporary William Burroughs Nightclub. Also on the plane was Dale Chihuly on his way to install a group of his glass sculptures in a Buddhist temple. It was a quite a crew to travel around Tokyo with. Tim had mastered speaking Japanese and I soon enlisted him as my ad hoc translator in my meetings with the Tokyo art establishment.

The Tokyo art and club scene was expanding exponentially and Tim had arrived just at the right moment when the art scene and the Japanese economy were in overdrive. My headquarters for that visit was the glamorous Okura Hotel — designed by Yoshiro Taniguchi, father of MOMA architect Yoshio Taniguchi.

In the end, we decided to cancel the Tokyo art fair but Tim and I remained friends. For the next four years, he shuttled back and forth between Tokyo and Los Angeles and managed to meet and subsequently, champion a group of young Japanese artists, which included Murakami and Nara — two of the most collected contemporary artists today.

In 1994, Tim Blum opened a gallery with Jeff Poe in Santa Monica and it quickly became one of the most talked about galleries on the West Coast, and later, the world. Last year, they moved the gallery to more centrally located La Cienega Boulevard — heralding a new shift in the geography of the Los Angeles art scene. Actually that’s where the LA art scene began 40 years ago when Irving Blum (no relation) was showing Andy Warhol’s soup cans a few blocks up the street. The gallery, an existing industrial building, was re-imagined by Esher Gunwardena, best known for the restoration of John Lautner’s famous Chemosphere house in the Hollywood Hills now owned by Angelika Taschen.

The gallery had four artists in the most recent Whitney Biennial: Sam Durant (the gallery’s artist currently on view for their 10th anniversary exhibition), Sharon Lockhart, Slater Bradley, and Dave Muller. Dave is one of my favorite artists — his installation at the Whitney, “That Hollywood Adage: be nice to the people on the way up because they are the same people on the way down,” was one of the best pieces in the show.

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