Like most businesses these days, art galleries are cutting corners (culling invitation lists to save on the cost of printing cards, reducing staff hours) and thinking hard about new ways of generating revenue. For some, especially those whose business depends on introducing young or little-known artists to the market, that means a departure from the discreet courtship between dealer and collector that makes the white cubes of Chelsea feel so charmingly indifferent to the casual visitor. Mr. Foley, perhaps more forthright than most in his marketing efforts, is in talks with another gallerist in his building about the possibility of joining forces to open a small, ground-level cafe. “We feel it would not only be lucrative,” said Mr. Foley, “but it would draw people to the building.”

Some gallerists have also noticed a change in Chelsea’s social atmosphere. A fizzy market made dealers competitive or indifferent to one another: “In Chelsea I worked in one of those big buildings with lot of galleries and there were only two other gallerists who ever came down to see our shows,” said dealer Benjamin Tisch, who left Chelsea last September to found his own gallery on the Lower East Side. But in a down market, dealers have more time on their hands:

“Suddenly, dealers have become more collegial than competitive,” said Jen Bekman, a Soho gallerist who has embraced Web marketing. “The general feeling is that people are getting friendly,” said Mr. Foley. “It’s an amazing thing—people are coming out of their galleries and having cocktails.”

Others argue that the culture of art-dealing is moving, inexorably, out of “meatspace” into the chilly confines of the World Wide Web. “Collectors are more comfortable purchasing from JPEGs,” Mr. Winkleman said. “There’s going to be lot less brick and mortar. You get the sense that everyone is waiting for the revolution.”

Get used to it, said gallerist Jen Bekman, unusual because of her background in online marketing for companies like Disney and Netscape. “The Web is a populist medium,” she said curtly. “The world is changing.”

And yet maybe the community could also use some historical perspective. Paul Morris, vice president of MMPI Art Group, remembered deciding “to play into the myth of the avant-garde,” as he put it, back in 1994, when he and two friends staged art openings at their respective Greenwich Village apartments on the same night; visitors were lured from one opening to the next by the promise of free artwork. The event captured the attention of New York Times art critic Roberta Smith, whose above-the-fold article on “micro-galleries” drew such a crowd to Mr. Morris’ apartment that he was forced to relocate his operation. Together with his business partner, Matthew Marks, Mr. Morris then started one of Chelsea’s first gallery spaces.

“A lot of these dealers have never negotiated a problem,” Mr. Morris said. “It’s about being creative.”

ddacosta@observer.com

Dia Art Foundation director Philippe Vergne, who was primarily responsible for the selection, told The Observer in a phone interview that he first met Ms. Raymond five years ago, while overseeing the expansion of the Walker as its deputy director. She was in the curatorial fellowship program.

“She was so good we decided to keep her,” Mr. Vergne said, adding that he was especially impressed by an exhibition Ms. Raymond curated that combined the politically engaged works of Joseph Beuys with Donald Judd’s platonic formalism. “The tension between them is what defines her work,” he said. “She is someone who can give a form to the questions that shape our time.”

Ms. Raymond, 31, who grew up in Puerto Rico and earned degrees from the Art Institute of Chicago and the Bard Center for Curatorial Studies before going on to the Walker, will join Dia in the midst what Mr. Vergne describes as “a process of transition.” Since vacating its Chelsea site in January 2004, Dia has been without a permanent New York City location. Mr. Vergne declined to comment on Dia’s ongoing search for new space, but said in reference to the economic instability that has gripped Manhattan that it was “not necessarily a bad thing to be taking our time when things are changing so fast.”

According to Mr. Vergne, Ms. Raymond was chosen partly for her youth—“she brings a culture and artists that I’m not necessarily familiar with,” he said—and partly for her relationship with Ms. Cooke, who advised Ms. Raymond’s M.A. thesis at Bard. “There’s nothing broken here,” said Mr. Vergne of the hand-off.

Speaking to The Observer from Minneapolis, Ms. Raymond expressed unbridled enthusiasm at her new appointment. Asked about plans for Dia’s future, she recalled large, ambitious exhibitions by Jorge Pardo, Gerhard Richter and others that took place at the foundation’s former space in Chelsea.

Ms. Raymond also downplayed her youth. “Some people say I have a 52-year-old woman inside,” she said. “I agree with Dia’s philosophy that we’re here to serve artists, we’re here to defend and take care of them. … It’s not about replacing, it’s about rethinking, restarting. It’s about continuation.”

Right now, she said, she was busy installing her most recent show at the Walker: an environmental installation by Argentine architect-turned-artist Tomás Saraceno that includes wind turbines on the roof, an irrigation system and growing grass. Ms. Raymond noted with good humor that defending, supporting and making sense of the art of our time sometimes involves a little gardening, too.

ddacosta@observer.com

It’s a question that the forty-something Mr. Brubaker, chair of the piano department at the New England Conservatory in Boston since 2005, has lately dedicated much of his time to answering. In one recent experiment, Mr. Brubaker joined composer Nico Muhly at Boston’s Institute for Contemporary Art to create a piece called Haydnseek, in which Mr. Muhly added an overlay of electronic sound to Mr. Brubaker’s live performance of works by Haydn.

The idea, Mr. Brubaker explained, was to revive our experience of canonical composers by making them seem less familiar. “Because of the nature of old classical-music culture, certain pieces are just repeated so often that they become difficult to hear; your recognition mechanism kicks in and says, ‘That’s the Fifth Symphony,’ or, ‘That’s a certain piece by Mozart,’ and you don’t really hear it anymore,” Mr. Brubaker said. “It’s almost like putting graffiti on something. Some people have said, ‘Isn’t that kind of disrespectful or offensive to Haydn?’ My sense is, it’s actually a provocation to people to really listen. You have to scrutinize it much more.”

On the topic of music’s future, Mr. Brubaker is, in the manner of all visionaries, vague but inspiring. He is especially intrigued by the way the Web makes collaboration possible on a seemingly unlimited scale. At any rate, Mr. Brubaker said, the kind of unconventional programming that combines pop music with standard repertory is unlikely to revive the economically stagnant classical-music establishment.

“I get the feeling that people from the classical side have done this as some kind of last-ditch effort to hang on to the way they viewed the old classical-music establishment,” he said. “It’s as if to say, ‘I’ll play this pop music and you’ll still get to hear me play Liszt.’

“It comes back to the idea that I’m still a real pianist because I can play these really hard virtuoso pieces, or that I have some kind of legitimacy because I spent 20,000 hours practicing—that I have this legitimacy just because I can subdue you by the force of my Liszt!”

Mr. Brubaker’s demeanor was calm, cheerful, optimistic—as though the idea of classical music vanishing into a virtual cloud of perpetual recombination didn’t bother him one bit. And it doesn’t: Mr. Brubaker sees the modern focus on virtuosity and concert performance as a historical anomaly. “Take Beethoven’s Hammerklavier as an example,” he said. “I think pianists took that home, looked at it and said, ‘Wow.’ I don’t think they mastered it.”

He has made a point of championing the work of living composers like William Duckworth, whose Time Curve Preludes Mr. Brubaker has revived on his newest piano recording, Time Curve (Arabesque), set for a summer release. “The old idea that you’re going to … just have the linear work that’s going to be bounded and contained—it’s going to be really hard to hold on to it,” he said. “And I’m not so sure that we should lament that.”

ddacosta@observer.com

Ms. Zwilich, who will turn 70 on April 30, occupies a unique place in the pantheon of contemporary classical music. In 1975, she became the first woman to earn a doctorate in composition from Juilliard, and eight years later became the first woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for composition. The popularity of her music, often described using terms like “romantic,” “accessible” and “audience-friendly,” has lifted her name into the firmament of Americana: “Zwilich” has been the answer to a New York Times crossword clue and a Jeopardy! question, and appeared in Charles Schulz’s Peanuts comic strip.

Of course, Ms. Zwilich knows very well that in the world of contemporary music, “accessible” isn’t always a compliment. “I think people will look back 50 years from now and think: What on earth were people talking about in the latter part of the 20th century?” she said. “For some people the word ‘accessible’ means the music is not quite good enough. It’s ridiculous. I mean, the whole history of music, of all different kinds of music, shows that music is meant to be heard, it’s meant to touch people. It’s not some kind of phenomenon that’s evolved and had historical necessity, and all of that BS.

“I think that, first, people have never understood the history of their own time, never understood the significance of it,” she continued. “And second, it’s a particular point of view—it’s an attitude—that music progresses. It probably started with Wagner as champion of the idea that this is the new music, this is the way we go, and everything else is irrelevant.”

Ms. Zwilich went on to list composers she admires that are still typically excluded from standard accounts of important 20th century music. (Alan Hovhaness and the Neo-Classicist David Diamond are two examples.) As the first occupant of Carnegie Hall’s composer’s chair, from 1995 to 1999, she organized a series called Making Music that brought together musicians and composers from across the range of sensibility, ignoring what she viewed as needless divisions between tonal and atonal, standard repertory and contemporary. “Things that are silly in real life are silly in artistic life, too,” she said. “Kids standing on different sides of the street sticking their tongues out at each other. That’s all it is.”

Warming to the topic, Ms. Zwilich waved her hands slowly in front of her, tracing the shape of her thought. She compared writing down a score, which she often does with the help of a violin, to writing stage directions in a play. “[A playwright] isn’t just writing sentences in the abstract,” she said. “Take, for example, the stage direction ‘John comes into the room and puts his head on the table.’ … I think a good playwright knows how John will come in and put his head on the table. In other words, a play has to be thought of in performance; in my opinion, music has to be thought of in performance.”

ddacosta@observer.com

Meet Jeff Atman, aging hack journalist:

“He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ‘think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch of tedium that he’d spent half an hour staring at the one-line email to the editor who’d commissioned it:

‘I just can’t do this shit anymore. Yrs J.A.’”

It’s downhill from there for Jeff. At 45 years old he’s off on yet another junket, this time to Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale for the pretentiously named art magazine Kulchur. A freelancer, he’s never written a book or made a splash that might have landed him assignments from Vogue or Vanity Fair. A nobody among his colleagues, he’s a high-class amanuensis employed conducting interviews with people more talented and important than himself—poor Jeff’s inner monologue is an endless grind of solipsistic self-torment. “The biggest joke of all—the thing that made him more depressed than anything,” writes Geoff Dyer of the hapless hero of his brilliant new novel, “was that at a certain level he was considered successful. People envied his getting assignments like this.”

It’s more of the same when he arrives in Venice—until he chances to meet a younger writer named Laura (book deal, Vogue assignment).

Jeff’s aimless existence rallies itself into organization around his desire for her. They fuck in expensed hotel rooms and snort cocaine on a friend of a friend’s yacht. That their lives in Venice are ungrounded aside from their attraction to each other focuses that attraction into something closely resembling love, allowing Jeff, and also, I suspect, authorial Geoff (the slippage between them is, as always in novels where the writer shares a name with the protagonist, the fun part), to divagate on that “strange, modern form of intimacy … that made it easier to lick someone’s ass than to ask when you might see them again.”

IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST, if you spend time at galleries or art fairs, you can read Jeff in Venice for its fresh observational humor and amusingly substance-starved conversation. But Mr. Dyer doesn’t reference Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for nothing: Jeff in Venice picks up Mann’s themes of yearning for beauty and lost youth, but also Mann’s deadly seriousness of artistic purpose. Jeff Atman may be a shmuck, but he is a representative shmuck, capable, with the assistance of the usually sadistic but occasionally, strategically beneficent Geoff, of illuminations on art that are thoughtful and new to the precise extent that Jeff Atman is jaded and used up. Here, again disappointed in love and work, Jeff wanders into the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he encounters Tintoretto’s spectacular wall-to-ceiling painting of the biblical prophets:

“Jeff’s knowledge of the sources was a little sketchy; beyond the fact that these were biblical scenes, he was completely in the dark. As far as he could make out, Tintoretto had compressed the best bits of both Testaments into one building. In a way, though, it was an easy book to compress, the Bible. Basically things were always getting hurled—out of the light and into the darkness—or were ascending—out of the darkness and into the light, of which there was not a vast amount. Bearded prophets, swirling drapery and billowing clouds—it was all go up there. In marketing terms, though, the pitch seemed fundamentally and horribly flawed: the idea that we could be bullied into paradise.”

IN Death in Varanasi, the second, more somber half of Mr. Dyer’s diptych (and a novella unto itself), the author lifts the lid on his capacity for insight. The gears shift, and we now follow an unnamed first-person narrator, a freelance art-journalist who closely resembles Jeff Atman and whose work takes him to Varanasi, the city on the Ganges where devout Hindus burn their dead on outdoor pyres and spill their ashes into the sacred river. Mr. Dyer’s Varanasi is at once parallel with and opposite to Venice: Venice during the Biennale is aggressively profane; in Varanasi, contemplation of the divine saturates the air, bending the spirits even of tourists passing through. And where Jeff in Venice is about the mysterious eruption of desire into a life that seemed irrevocably dulled by habit, Death in Varanasi is about the renunciation of desire and the hunger for stasis.

On assignment for the Telegraph, our adorably desperate hack retains the jokey skepticism that made him charming in Venice. But here, writing directly from his character’s point of view, Mr. Dyer is able to let go of the momentum toward plot development that naturally arose from the “he said, she said” mode of Venice. Instead, the narrator (more and more dominated, I think, by the authorial Geoff) becomes an observer, an interpreting eye that floats fascinated through Varanasi’s inconceivably crowded and complex society. Death in Varanasi grows into a tapestry of description—of India’s art and culture, of the relationships the narrator strikes up and of his own mental state (which may or may not be Mr. Dyer’s, too).

Mr. Dyer has written a book, Out of Sheer Rage, on D. H. Lawrence, but it’s Henry James that emerges as the real influence on Varanasi. It first manifests itself in the double-negative atmospherics of the opening sentence—“The thing about destiny is that it can so nearly not happen and, even when it does, rarely looks like what it is”—and shows up again in Jeff’s relationship with two of his traveling companions, a man and a woman:

“It is strange when two people fancy one another, when liking turns into reciprocated desire: it is tangible. You can see and feel it as a physical force, a kind of gravity. Even when they were talking, on opposite sides of the table, not touching, their arms were reaching towards each other. When they spoke, their lips were on the brink of touching, just through the word they used. I looked on. I didn’t mind.”

In another novelist’s hand, that “I didn’t mind” would be certain cover for jealousy, the first step toward a love triangle. But Mr. Dyer means it: His art is one of languid, suspended watching, lulling the reader into a morbid Jamesian arousal.

By the end of Varanasi Mr. Dyer has created a character whose stillness of mind is as compelling to the reader as Jeff Atman’s lunging neurosis was in Venice. But Varanasi is the more serious project: There’s much to admire in the steadiness, the thoroughness of description, the way Mr. Dyer, who is capable of allusion and eloquence, restrains himself, and keeps his character’s mind so exquisitely focused on whatever passes before it—proof that the landscape faithfully observed comes to life of its own accord.

Damian DaCosta is a culture reporter at The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com

Thelma Golden, chief curator of the Studio Museum in Harlem, gave an ecstatic greeting to arriving Kim Hastreiter of Paper magazine (understandably, since Ms. Hastreiter was responsible for introducing Ms. Golden to clothing designer Duro Olowu, the man she would eventually marry). Ms. Hastreiter stood modestly by as Ms. Golden returned the favor by singing the praises of Ms. Hastreiter's pop-culture mag.

"I adore Marcus Samuelsson ... and I love Converse, so when Converse said come to a dinner for (RED), which is a great thing, with Marcus, who's brilliant, I was kind of like, no-brainer," Ms. Hastreiter told the Daily Transom. She added that her only reservation was about the possibility of dining on raw lamb, a staple of the African cuisine scheduled to be served. "I guess they aren't Swedish meatballs," she said, referring to the Ethiopian-born chef's expertise in Swedish cooking. "They're African meatballs."

A row of 13 pedestals, each bearing the prototype of a Converse sneaker designed by an artist or celebrity, notably including one by U2 guitarist The Edge, lined the back wall of the restaurant. Eventually, the fancy footwear will be sold in stores, with a portion of proceeds benefiting the Global Fund.

Artist Terence Koh's design stood out for its white-on-white minimalsm, reflecting the current vogue for simplicity in sneaker design. Fashion duo Lisa Mayock and Sophie Buhai of Vena Cava, looking resplendent in dresses of their own design, took an altogether different approach, creating a sneaker made to appear as though it were drawn with a pen. "I always customized my sneakers by drawing on them when I was younger," said Ms. Buhai, standing in front of the Vena Cava display.

It seemed, in fact, that everyone in attendance had gone through a Converse phase at some point during their youth. "There's something timeless about them," said Chioma Nnadi, fashion director of Fader magazine. "You can wear them with anything. Everybody has their own way of wearing them ... I  like to wear my leather ones, silver and leather."

Susan Smith Ellis, CEO of (RED), offered some perspective on the evening's perhaps understandably relentless product-pushing: "If Converse can make a profit where they get a part of it, and they give a piece to the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, [those companies] will stay at it, because young people find (RED) products attractive." She added, "We've raised $130 million in two years, and that's had an impact on four and half million people in Africa."

Mr. Kline was talking about his recently released recording, a mass for string quartet called John the Revelator (Cantaloupe), and The Long Winter, a piano sonata performed by Berkeley-based pianist Sarah Cahill at the Merkin last month.

Revelator closely follows the form of a Catholic mass; The Long Winter offers irresistibly beautiful harmonies. To most listeners, both works will sound, by contemporary standards, quite traditional.

Then again, most listeners don’t know Mr. Kline.

The composer, 53, is best known to aficionados of experimental music for compositions consisting of repeating loops of a single sample, played simultaneously on several different cassette players. The samples start in unison, but drift slowly out of phase due to minute differences in speed among the devices. The result is a complex and shifting brocade of sound.

How did Mr. Kline get from downtown avant-gardism to the straightforwardly melodic, practically medieval harmonies of Revelator? “I think in a lot of ways I was trying to argue and reason with my parents,” he said. “They were very devout Christians. It’s a kind of religious argument, with me as the young agnostic.”

Mr. Kline, who grew up in Akron, Ohio, became infatuated with New York’s music scene while a student at Columbia in the mid-1970s, loitering outside Philip Glass’ downtown loft hoping to catch stray inspiration from the master. Mr. Kline also hosted a college radio show, on which he featured the work of a then-little-known musician named Steve Reich.

After a post-college year playing guitar in a cover band on the somewhat less progressive Cleveland bar circuit (“It was a really bitter pill to swallow,” he says of the Eagles songs he had to learn), he rushed back to Manhattan, getting a Soho apartment for $125 a month two blocks away from his childhood friend, the director Jim Jarmusch. “Everybody we knew lived within a half a mile or less,” Mr. Kline said. “I always wondered, just within that square mile, how many artists there were.”

For a while, it was paradise: Everybody was creating. Recalling the era, Mr. Kline lapsed into the peculiar trance induced by the recitation of rock-band genealogy: “The very first band I was in downtown was a DNA spin-off. The original DNA keyboard player, Robin Crutchfield—DNA is classically known as the trio of Arto, Tim and Ikue—I think Robin was the third guy on keyboard, and he left DNA and started a band called Dark Day, and I played with Dark Day, I don’t know, a year or so. And toured briefly with Tuxedo Moon. … Then I guess we started the Del-Byzanteens in ’80, ’81 …”

If Mr. Kline speaks with some pride of his connections, it’s because his rock genealogy is also in large part the story of No Wave, the downtown music scene that followed in the wake of punk. Along with Mr. Kline on guitar, the Del-Byzanteens featured Jim Jarmusch on bass, and their friend, the writer Luc Sante, occasionally contributed lyrics. Plus, as YouTube will confirm, their songs were actually good.

Fans of Mr. Kline’s experimentalist tape loops shouldn’t fear that the composer, now married and the father of an 18-month-old daughter, is buckling to convention. Asked about future projects, Mr. Kline sketched out his idea for an opera based on Samuel Beckett’s novel The Unnamable. Of course, this opera would have no singers. Or characters.

“Maybe it’s one of those things that’s better thought of and undone,” he said.

ddacosta@observer.com

The fans who filled the Robert Miller Gallery in Chelsea on Thursday night, April 2, to hear punk icon Patti Smith perform songs and original poetry inspired by the 19th century French writer Arthur Rimbaud bowed their heads as Ms. Smith intoned the literary rebel's last words: ''I am completely paralyzed, and so I wish to embark in good time."

Rimbaud, who famously quit writing poetry when he was 20 years old to become a gun runner, slave-trader and vague signifier of adolescent rebellion, had just had his gangrenous leg amputated when he spoke those words.

Not a little overcome by the solemnity of the proceedings, the Daily Transom scanned the room for signs of ubermenschlich amorality, or even just some moody teens. The closest thing we found was former Ramones manager and keeper-of-the-brand Arturo Vega, sporting a black Ramones T-shirt, which appeared to have been recently ironed.

Guitarist Lenny Kaye and former Television frontman Tom Verlaine also turned out for the churchlike performance. Afterward, congregants sipped Champagne.

Smitten by the willowy, lank Ms. Smith, the Daily Transom sidled shyly up to ask a question: "As you've grown up, how has your relationship evolved to the myth of Rimbaud, cursed poet of alienation and ecstasy?"

"I'm sorry, I've been talking all night," Ms. Smith replied. "My brain hurts."

Good. Now onto this season’s exhibitions. MoMA’s got a promising lineup: A retrospective of the work of German artist Martin Kippenberger (March 1 through May 11) features the work of the artist who died an untimely death in 1997 at the age of 44. Kippenberger was an artist whose fearless ecleticism was often spiked with a bit of self-parodying humor (for an example, check out his 1990 sculpture of a crucified frog grasping a beer mug). Also at MoMA, “Paper: Pressed, Stained, Slashed, Folded” (March 11 through June 22) investigates the works of artists who, during the ’60s and ’70s, rediscovered the virtues of paper as a medium. Featured artists include perennial curator crush-object Ed Ruscha, along with Sol LeWitt (subject of an ongoing exhibit elsewhere in the museum), Robert Rauschenberg and Richard Tuttle.

Downtown, the New Museum attempts to overcome its lackluster early impression with the first installment of its new triennial series, “The Generational” (April 8 through June 14). The show, subtitled “Younger Than Jesus,” will feature the works of artists born since 1976, and will attempt to capture the sensibility of a generation that, according to the exhibition’s Web site, “has yet to be described in any way beyond their habits of consumption.” Ouch! Fifty young artists from 25 countries round out the program.

Step into just about any artist’s studio these days, and you’ll find that the line between fine art, architecture and landscape design has all but disappeared. P.S.1’s summertime exhibitions have been at the forefront of showcasing this trend, and this spring, the Metropolitan Museum is making its own foray with its display of Roxy Paine’s site-specific sculpture Maelstrom (April 28 through Oct. 25), which will be installed on the Met’s roof garden. Check out his sculpture Conjoined, currently installed on the lawn of Madison Square Park across from the Flatiron Building, for an idea of where Mr. Paine will be going with the piece: He creates treelike sculptures that skip lightly between organic and man-made forms. And if it’s Friday night, when the Met’s open late, why not stick around for a classical music performance at the Grace Rainey Rogers auditorium? Like so many of the great things about this city, it’s world-class, weirdly affordable and hidden in plain sight.

ddacosta@observer.com