The Structure of Contemporary Art: The Case of Chelsea in New York City

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The commercial gallery system in Chelsea, on Manhattan's Far West Side, has now replaced SoHO as the center of Contemporary Art in New York. The dense concentration of galleries there, numbering over three hundred in 2006, offers a remarkable opportunity for research on Contemporary Art--the art, galleries, artists, and audience including those who just come to view and the far smaller number who come to buy. The topics we have uncovered include the emergence of new subject matters in art, the tension between small and large galleries, the unexpectedly favorable light in which the artists tend to view the system of commercial galleries, and the ongoing dialectic between art, real estate and urban politics as represented, for example, by the efforts of New York City's Department of City Plannning to foster both art galleries and residential condominiums in Chelsea.

Stream: Arts Agendas

Paper: A paper has not yet been submitted.

My books include New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2003),which is an edited collection of essays by leading scholars in the two regions; Inside Culture: Art and Class in The American Home (University of Chicago Press, 1994), which is a study of the art displayed in the homes of different social classes in the New York region; and America's Working Man: Work, Home and Politics among Blue-Collar Property Owners (University of Chicago Press, 1984), which is a study of the lives and beliefs of better-paid, New Jersey blue-collar workers in and outside the workplace.

Grew up in Italy, worked on monument restoration in Rome, later helped to found and run the Niki de Saint Phalle foundation in Europe. Teaches art history at Parsons and The School of Visual Arts and co-teaches the UCLA in New York summer program at the American Institute of Architecture.