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By Peter Plagens
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IN THE ART WORLD NOTHING EXCEEDS like success. Take New York's SoHo district, where airy galleries show cutting-edge art, where artists live and work in spacious lofts and where esthetes chow down together in local bistros. Well, that's what SoHo used to be, until Eurotourists, Japanese shoppers and a horde of suburbanites discovered it in the 1980s. Now SoHo (for ""south of Houston Street'') is home to as many espresso bars as expressionist painters. On Sept. 11, the neighborhood's first hotel, the 15-story SoHo Grand, will officially open with an 89th-birthday bash for Leo Castelli, the Godfather of New York art dealers, whose gallery has been a SoHo landmark for 22 years. Despite the tribute, many longtime residents think the hotel's opening marks the end of SoHo as a center of fine art and the beginning of unabated commercialism. They see SoHo's transformation as a tragedy that could befall any major city's art district.
For the past two decades, a trek through SoHo could put you inside perhaps 50 of the best contemporary galleries in the world and give you first looks at breakthroughs in everything from photorealism to performance art. Oh, there are still scores of galleries, but a number of important ones have left, driven out by upscale shops selling Italian shoes and expensive cosmetics -- and by the suspicion that the place has become about as cutting-edge as Rodeo Drive.
Thirty years ago artists started renting studio space in SoHo's derelict factory buildings and living in them illegally. Eventually, they got the city to regulate rent increases and legalize their residences. Then came the '80s art-market boom. Newly arrived artists could no longer afford the rents.Rents kept soaring even when the market bottomed out around 1990. Some galleries went out of business; others simply felt the pinch. Last fall, after 15 years in SoHo, big-time dealer Mary Boone (who promoted Julian Schnabel and now shows Barbara Kruger and Sean Scully) decamped to 57th Street -- where the rents once drove dealers downtown.
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The same sort of real-estate ""Hokey Pokey'' (let the artists in/ price the artists out/ that's what it's all about) afflicts cultural districts in other major cities, too. Venice and Ocean Park, Calif., where artists rent industrial spaces a paintbrush throw from the beach, have been up, down and back up again. Now maybe they're a little too far up. Arnold Schwarzenegger has opened a restaurant on Main Street in Ocean Park. The area still has upstart galleries, but its flagship is the elegant, three-story premises of L.A. Louver, which shows such blue-chip artists as Mark di Suvero and David Hockney. Yet it's not quite the end of an era here. Sheila Goldberg, chair of the Venice Art Walk (a tour of artists' studios, for charity), says, ""We've had this fear that we're going to run out of artists because they can't afford the area. But we've added between six and 12 new artists every year. They find a way.''
San Francisco's SoMA (south of Market Street), once the city's grittiest skid row, saw an influx of artists in the 1980s. There, painters and sculptors are competing for space not with Urban Outfitters and Starbucks but with multimedia artists. ""SoMA is not a SoHo story,'' says David Weir, an executive with the online Hot Wired network, ""because a lot of young people are still streaming in.'' But some real estate is definitely beyond the struggling artist: condos in a former Hills Bros. coffee plant run as high as $400,000. Galleries invaded Chicago's River North area about 20 years ago.It, too, is now filling up with high-end furniture stores and restaurants. According to Jennifer Footlik, who opened Lineage Gallery in River North a year ago, ""People come here not just to shop but to get culture. That can work very well with the restaurants, or it can get pushed out. The next couple of years will tell.''
What's the solution to the gentrification crunch? In Chicago, pioneers have set up shop in what they call Uncomfortable Spaces -- three small, less polished venues in outlying districts like Wicker Park. Beer for one art opening was stored in the refrigerator -- to keep it from freezing in the unheated gallery. In New York, some veteran dealers are trying out a new part of town. SoHo pioneer Paula Cooper, along with Barbara Gladstone Gallery and Metro Pictures, will reopen two miles away among the former garages in west Chelsea. The neighborhood is on its way to becoming the latest chic art stop -- and it may be too out of the way for the trendy boutiques to follow. Tom Healy, a partner in the new Morris Healy gallery there, says, ""People have to make an effort to get here [subways are far away], so they're serious.'' Other young New York entrepreneurs show art in their apartments, in vacated galleries and in co-op spaces in hardscrabble Brooklyn neighborhoods -- a movable scene for the newest generation of artists and their fans.
There's even an alternative to SoHo springing up in SoHo itself. Dealers Friedrich Petzel and Paul Kasmin are happy in newish galleries on the neighborhood's southern edge. (Did somebody say So-soHo?) ""SoHo cannot preserve the late '70s and early '80s,'' Petzel says in defense of the area's changes. ""We needed a hotel. And I need a restaurant where I can have lunch with a client.''
Whitney Museum curator Lisa Phillips moved to SoHo in 1978, saw the place as ""over'' in '79 and left in 1980. But, she admits, ""it was far from over. It keeps recharging itself, shifting form.'' Phillips is co-curator of the Whitney's 1997 Biennial exhibition. Is she scouting current art in SoHo? ""Absolutely.'' But if SoHo continues to go for the glitz, she may soon put it lower on her list.
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