"The artists [I represent] are midcareer," said Ms. Boone, during a quiet moment in her uptown gallery at 745 Fifth Avenue, where she moved from SoHo in 1996. "I know that they like the space with higher ceilings and skylights."

Ms. Boone is trying to prevent another defection like the one last spring, when Ellen Gallagher, a Boston-based artist who showed at Mary Boone when the gallery was located in SoHo, elected to show at Gagosian Gallery in SoHo instead. Ms. Gallagher went to Gagosian because it was a downtown-style space.

The flood of galleries into Chelsea is not lost on Ms. Boone, either. "I think when you are showing living artists and you are showing younger artists as well, they want to have a connection to the art community," she said.

"I am looking for a space like I had [in SoHo]–a garage, sky-lit, ground-floor space," said Ms. Boone. "I already have a space that I have made an offer on and we are trying to negotiate terms. It is on 26th Street." Ms. Boone said she would keep the uptown gallery.

"I am not thinking about it as a business tactic. I am more thinking about it in terms of what spaces do for work … In terms of business, I think it makes a lot of sense to be uptown," Ms. Boone said. "Uptown is really about collectors and history and being aligned with the museums."

Keith Sonnier Debuts at Marlborough

With the Jan. 14 opening of a 30-year survey of 31 of Keith Sonnier's sculptures at the Marlborough Gallery at 40 West 57th Street, Mr. Sonnier marks his departure from the Leo Castelli Gallery. He is the most recent of Mr. Castelli's original stable of artists from the 1960's–Cy Twombly, Richard Serra, Ellsworth Kelly, Robert Rauschenberg–to decamp from the SoHo gallery. After the big survey show, Mr. Sonnier is scheduled to have a smaller show of new works at Marlborough's Chelsea gallery in 2000.

"I still am in touch with Leo and Barbara," said Mr. Sonnier of Mr. Castelli, 91, and his wife, whom he last saw last summer in the Hamptons. "And it was just an arrangement that we made together because the gallery was not going to be ready for me to show. It was time basically to move on because other people had moved on [from Castelli Gallery]. People I worked with for years were no longer there."

At 57, Mr. Sonnier is a distinguished-looking man with long gray hair and a roly-poly frame. He still speaks in the languid dialect of the town in southwestern Louisiana where he was born and raised, in which 80 percent of the residents still speak French. But for the last 30 years, he has been an integral part of the downtown art scene, a regular at the Odeon bistro and twice married to downtown divas–first, artist Jackie Winsor; then, Brazilian socialite Nessia Pope, who was a partner at the restaurant 150 Wooster. He and Ms. Pope have a 10-year-old daughter, Olympia, a student at Brearley.

"I wasn't so interested in moving uptown because I have always worked downtown," said Mr. Sonnier, who lives in a fifth-floor walk-up in TriBeCa, a collegial loft with old worn furniture and battered filing cabinets that gives the impression that neither he nor his growing staff of assistants have acknowledged the 1980's or 1990's.

But Marlborough was very interested. Robert Buck, a Marlborough director who curated the current exhibition, has known Mr. Sonnier since 1968, when he curated a show at Washington University in St. Louis that included Mr. Sonnier, Bruce Nauman, Richard Serra and Fred Sandback. Last year, Mr. Sonnier worked with Dale Lanzone, the director of Marlborough's Chelsea gallery when he did a large commission in the Ronald Reagan Building and International Trade Center in Washington, D.C. "He had tremendous respect for what Dale was able to do in terms of public art and commissions," said Mr. Buck. "So he was quite determined that it was time for him to wean himself from the Castelli stable. All of the signals were right.… And [he knew] that Marlborough would be interested in also changing directions to some degree in seriously considering Keith. I think he needed the kind of oomph at this time that we can try to do." Mr. Buck came to an agreement with Mr. Sonnier to join Marlborough last September.

Mr. Sonnier was most interested in showing right away. "It was very difficult for me to get things done," he said of the later years of his relationship with his former gallery. "At one point, I was really only doing commission work.… Doing a gallery show does feed into all of the other projects that I do. My work is not something you can put up on the wall. So it gives me a great opportunity to see certain works I haven't seen in years."

In his loft, looking up at his neon sculptures, which emit a hot spectrum of reds and purples, Mr. Sonnier said, "I don't think [Marlborough has] had stuff that plugs in very much."

But the combination of artistic talent and suave style that makes Mr. Clemente an appealing candidate for a Guggenheim exhibition has flopped out of town. The standard practice for a museum exhibition of this size is to ship it to several other cities afterward to defray the costs, which can be upward of several hundred thousand dollars. According to Lisa Dennison, deputy director and chief curator of the Guggenheim, and the show's organizer, the museum approached more than 25 American and European museums, and actually had some interest from the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Houston Contemporary Arts Museum and the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. But none of those venues decided to take the show. Instead, when the New York exhibition closes on Jan. 9, it will go directly to the Guggenheim branch in Bilbao, Spain, from Feb. 14 to June 4.

"In the end, it is always a question of timing or changes in leadership," said Ms. Dennison.

But size might have also mattered, as well as differences in taste. "The thing is that this is a large exhibition. It would have taken up the whole San Francisco Museum of Modern Art," said Ms. Dennison. "A lot of times when you are dealing with contemporary art-and we would have to say that Francesco is a contemporary artist-the directors of museums prefer to have their own curators organize these shows, because the work is open to interpretation. It is different from, say, a Mondrian show, where everyone simply wants it."

Ms. Dennison argued that shipping the show to Bilbao will help absorb some of the cost to the New York branch. So will the sponsorship of Hugo Boss, who it seems underwrites almost every one of the museum's New York shows and is sponsoring Clemente's. "Our whole rationale for the globalization of the Guggenheim-for having our own network of museums-is to not have to engage in that kind of negotiation with other institutions for shows but to know that from the beginning we have a partner in Europe, and we know that we have covered our development costs for the project because two institutions are involved," she said. "We have economies of scale in terms of staffing and fund-raising efforts. From time to time we are going to partner with other institutions, but we don't have to because our utmost priority is to have the show at the Guggenheim."

The museum in Bilbao still has to find a sponsor to pay for the underlying costs of the four-month-long Clemente show, some of which go toward shared costs with the Guggenheim in New York. "All venues of a tour eventually have to find additional sponsorship," said Ms. Dennison. With its Frank Gehry-designed building, the museum in Bilbao has attracted a great deal of attention, and finding a sponsor should not be difficult.

Steichen Family Album At Auction

Edward Steichen, the elegant photographer who captured the glamour of New York and France before World War II, and then went on to snap Hollywood celebrities as a staff photographer for Vanity Fair , is probably best remembered today as the curator of the 1955 Museum of Modern Art's The Family of Man Exhibition . Steichen, who was then an elder statesman in the field, took 503 photographs and divided them into such general categories as creation, birth, love, work, death, justice, democracy and peace. As naive as the show's premise seems today-in the world of Nan Goldin and Andres Serrano-it marked a turning point for photography by suggesting that the medium could aspire to universal themes the same way as do other major art forms.

On Oct. 5, Steichen's granddaughter, Linda Joan Steichen Hodes, is putting 25 of his photographs up for auction at Phillips Auctioneers (406 East 79th Street). The pictures, which are portraits of the artist's family, will be on exhibit at the auction house starting Oct. 1.

Until now, little has been known about Steichen's own family, which consisted of two daughters and three wives. Like most families, the Steichens had some skeletons in the closet. Steichen's first wife, Clara, was mentally ill, and he was prohibited for a time from seeing one of his daughters, Kate Rodina Steichen. But overall, he was an extremely devoted family man who entertained a stream of visitors at Umpawaug, his glass house on a pond in Connecticut, until his death in 1973.

"I know that he had lots of other qualities that I never saw, but he was-with me and anywhere around me-the most steady, profoundly loving man," said Ms. Hodes, who referred to Steichen as "the main man in my life."

"My overall sense of Bumpa, as I called my grandfather, was that his most profound connections were to children (especially his own), his beloved dogs, gardens, wilderness and the earth," said Ms. Hodes.

Her mother, Mary Steichen Calderone, was a physician and expert in human sexuality who is credited with introducing sex education in American schools. Her mother, who died in 1998, left several boxes of family photographs to her, as did her Aunt Kate. She said she discovered, after going through the boxes, that she had a surplus of Steichen photographs.

Gabellini Associates, founded by Michael Gabellini in 1991, will also be among the 20 or so exhibitors selected to represent contemporary American architecture. New York architects Tod Williams and Billie Tsien, who are designing the Museum of Folk Art on West 53rd Street, have also been invited to be part of the exhibition, which will also include sections on graphic design and product design–a total of 80 exhibitors. Some of the projects that will be exhibited are still in the planning stage, some are under construction, and a few have been completed. The show is supposed to be similar in ambition to the Whitney Biennial, the museum's assessment of the contemporary art world, held every two years, and has the potential to become as important to the careers of architects and designers as the Biennial is to artists. The entire design community is awaiting a formal announcement of the exhibitors, which they expect from the museum in late September.

"No one has offered me a round-the-world tour," said Donald Albrecht, the curator of the architecture section of the exhibit, "but I have been approached by a lot of people."

Architecture is at a crossroads right now, and the Triennial will help clarify where the future of the field lies. Mr. Gabellini, Mr. Williams and Ms. Tsien are part of a group of emerging New York architects that also includes Steven Holl and partners Henry Smith-Miller and Laurie Hawkinson (neither of whom were asked to exhibit in the Triennial). In his choices, Mr. Albrecht has already sent out a message concerning the form the architecture section of the Triennial will take. Both firms are noted for cool minimalism that is finely crafted, and for being closely aligned with the art world.

Gabellini Associates has designed the new 20,000-square-foot Nicole Farhi storeonEast60th Street, the Linda Dresner and Jil Sander showrooms and the Grant Selwyn Gallery here in New York. Mr. Gabellini, 40, is a leader in a style of finely crafted architecture that is rooted in environmental art. He has publicly decried the excesses of postmodern theorists like Michael Graves and Peter Eisenman. According to sources familiar with the selection process, Mr. Eisenman will not be invited to be a part of the Triennial.

Mr. Albrecht said he has tried to focus on younger architects, which is difficult in a field where those in their 40's and 50's are still coming into their own. He has also tried to get firms from outside of the Eastern Seaboard and the West Coast, which dominate most of the practice. "The person who follows the trade publications will not be surprised by our selections," said Mr. Albrecht, "but we are interested in educating the general public."

The Cooper-Hewitt exhibition will underscore an easing out of the old guard in architecture, which has been dominated by postmodern theorists like Messrs. Eisenman and Graves, and formally introduce a new school. Susan Szenasy, editor in chief of the design magazine Metropolis , said she supports the direction that the Triennial appears to be taking. "Eisenman is still talking in a language that only he understands," said Ms. Szenasy. "The new ones like Gabellini and Williams and Tsien do see the need to communicate a larger idea to the audience. They are working more like artists, and their work needs to be seen in the context of a museum. When I first started looking at the idea that architecture is an artistic statement, I said, 'Yes, [buildings] are very artistic, but they are also functional. In the final analysis, it is art, but it is really there to be used. Artists, after all, are who still provoke us to think about who we are.'"

Look, Ma, No Camera

At 38, Adam Fuss is as tightly coiled as a boxer. He has closely cropped hair and a trim beard, and he speaks in a definitive English accent that has the rich, fulsome timbre of a headmaster from 100 years ago. Born in London in 1961, he grew up in a cottage at the edge of a village in West Sussex. "It was really their weekend house that they moved to after [my father] lost his business," Mr. Fuss said of his parents' place. On Sept. 9, Mr. Fuss (pronounced Foos) celebrated the opening of My Ghost , an exhibition of works in which he has illustrated personal memories in the antiquated style of the daguerreotype, a photograph on a metal reflective surface and the photogram, a photograph made without a camera by exposing photographic paper directly to light. The show is at Cheim & Read Gallery, 521 West 23rd Street, until Oct. 16.

"The daguerreotype is the perfect medium for what I am trying to capture," said Mr. Fuss, standing next to a photograph of a child's toy rabbit, "because it is a mirror and a photograph at the same time, the mirror being the present and the photograph being the past–simultaneous memory, the past and the present at the same time."

Mr. Fuss' earlier work took natural subjects and made them into abstract shapes. In his current show, there are photograms of birds in flight and plumes of smoke that represent the spirit world. Although he considers himself a modernist, he has some connection to the thinking of the symbolists and pre-Raphaelites. His show also depicts a child's christening gown, a baby's dress, a self-portrait of the artist and several photograms of a woman in profile.

Working with such a rich narrative language is not easy for him to talk about. "I am reluctant to say too much because if I could say it, I wouldn't be trying to make art," he said. Pointing to a baby's dress, he added, "It could be about a male child because the christening gown is ambiguous. So it is an empty dress. There is no human there. The idea is that the child's body is without life. It is actually the spirit of love. It is like disembodied love without the ground, a kind of childish love, the spirit of a kind of love."

Mr. Fuss, who lives by himself in a loft in Chelsea with a black pet rabbit, explained that he began working on My Ghost in 1994. "The photographs represent a personal expression of loss," he said, "and an attempt to express in visual terms an emotional presence of a human who is now absent."

"His work comes out of the very American Western heritage. In some ways he is more exotic than Mariko Mori," Mr. Deitch said. "It is a fascinating irony. He has positioned himself squarely in the middle of the American middle class."

The 31-year-old artist's exhibit is called State of the Union and will feature five or six of his storytelling works made out of hand-cut paper resembling lace, which he created in his studio in the Clocktower Gallery in TriBeCa. "I don't mind being asked to represent Mormonism in the context of the New York art world," said Mr. Twitchell with a somebody-has-to shrug. But his Mormon family and friends would probably be offended by some of the art being made and shown there, he said.

Mr. Twitchell moved East to study art at the School of Visual Arts in 1993. He lives with his wife, Adriana Velez, who is also a practicing Mormon, in Park Slope, Brooklyn. He dresses like a 60's suburban kid, in clothes like a polo shirt with a penguin on the pocket, and has a wholesome, ingenuous quality that probably made him an effective advocate during his two-year term on a bicycle as a Mormon missionary. He speaks in a soft, lyric, Western accent that makes him sound like Roy Rogers. Mr. Twitchell likes to talk about his work as much as he likes to talk about God. He can jump from a rant on abstract art in the 1950's to a discussion of the Bible in a nanosecond, reciting James 1:5 from memory as if it were his e-mail address.

At his studio, in late August, he pointed to a large, mandala-shaped collage with a circle of pennies in the center and a great deal of information embedded in its paper folds and cuts. "This painting is called Pluribus State 31, 1999 , and it is a response to Jackson Pollock's painting, Number 31, 1950 ," Mr. Twitchell said. "The piece is divided into three sections: Utah in the center, Nevada in the outside and California in the middle.… Copper for Utah, silver for Nevada and gold for California.

"For one, Pollock was from California," he continued, gesturing to the California section where a U.S. postage stamp of Pollock pouring paint over one of his creations was stuck on the collage. "Here is a Lincoln Continental containing Nancy and Ronald Reagan, über -Californians, elected in 1980, on a freeway, and when the freeways spin around it creates a Pollock drip."

Mr. Twitchell uses many numerical references to tie his themes together, although he rejects the label of mystic because he said that might make people think his work comes to him in a trance state. His work is more like that of a jazz musician, creating riffs out of riffs out of riffs. "California was the 31st state in the nation. The name of Pollock's painting is Number 31, 1950 . I am 31 years old this year. Thirty one and 49 are the significant numbers in the painting." California is 149 years old this year.

He pointed to a landmark pyramid-shaped building in the California portion. "Here is the Trans-America building," he said, "which is a reference to a pyramid, and further in we see a Mormon polygamist standing beneath the pyramids, which is a reference to the Luxor casino in Las Vegas but also more specifically a reference to the … covenant, when Abraham, in Genesis, was promised that he would be the father of a nation and that his descendants would outnumber the sands of the seashore or the stars of the heavens-that was the foundation of Mormon polygamy.

"My great-great-great-great-grandfather had 44 children," Mr. Twitchell revealed proudly. "If you were going to settle a new nation in the American West, polygamy was a very effective means, as shown in the Old Testament, for jump-starting the birthrates. In the Nevada sections, the main motifs are these two casinos: the Dunes for the sands of the seashores and the Stardust for the stars of the heavens … Las Vegas was founded as a Mormon colony in 1855 by William Bringhurst under the direction of Brigham Young," the artist explained.

What explains the small photograph of Steve Young? "He is the great-great-great-grandson of Brigham Young and plays for the San Francisco 49ers.

"I had other things to go in there, but it got too shrill," Mr. Twitchell said.

Near the end of the interview, he revealed that he was celebrating the sixth anniversary of his move to New York from Utah. Then he went over to a box of invitations for the opening, picked one up and handed it over.

"Note the date: 9/9/99," Mr. Twitchell said. "That's very important. That's the date that California became a state … Sept. 9, 1850."

On July 22, he closed a deal to pay $5.75 million for a 21,000-square-foot, one-story building on the corner of 24th Street and 11th Avenue owned by Tom Gambino Jr., the son of deceased Mafia boss Carlo Gambino.

"I have felt in the last couple of years that the shift to retail has been so pronounced [in SoHo] that I don't feel as comfortable having a gallery there as I did at one time. When you feel that way, it is always a good idea to try to adjust," Mr. Gagosian told The Observer .

A low-slung, midcentury industrial structure, across the street from a post office parking garage, Mr. Gagosian's new building, 202 11th Avenue, is a cement-floored, undifferentiated space with a 23-foot-high ceiling and three large loading docks on the north and south sides. When it opens next spring, it will be by far the largest gallery space in Chelsea.

"It is our intent to create a series of different-sized exhibition spaces," said Richard Gluckman, the architect who has designed all of Mr. Gagosian's galleries. One of the spaces will duplicate the SoHo gallery, a 2,400-square-foot, column-free room that has drawn many young artists to Gagosian Gallery.

Mr. Gagosian's investment in Chelsea marks a sea change in the way the neighborhood has evolved from a desolate, truck-filled outpost of lower Manhattan into the epicenter of the contemporary art market. "I like the neighborhood," Mr. Gagosian added. "People are walking around looking at art and, well, it is a whole different scene than SoHo." According to the Gallery Guide , there are now 124 galleries in Chelsea, and art dealers are battling over locations.

Susan B. Anthony, a SoHo-based realtor who represented Mr. Gagosian in his purchase of the Chelsea building, said she has approached almost every building owner on behalf of clients. She contacted Mr. Gambino, thinking that she could put together a group of dealers who would want to share such a large space.

She said Mr. Gambino initially preferred to rent the space and "only wanted one tenant, so I showed it to a couple of dealers who could afford it alone." The annual rent was $399,000 and the raw space needed renovating. In March, however, Mr. Gambino decided he wanted to sell the property, and Ms. Anthony approached Mr. Gagosian, who had been trying to find a space in Chelsea for three years.

Gallery owners have traditionally avoided buying their spaces, preferring to sink their capital into art acquisitions, but that has not always been the case in Chelsea. "Most of the people I have talked to down there–they all own," Mr. Gagosian said. "I think that because the dealers are owners, it is less likely that there is going to be a turnover to retail. They are not going to be bumped out by rents.… That was impossible in SoHo, because the prices were just prohibitive."

In SoHo, rents for upper-floor gallery space now range from $25 to $30 per square foot and ground-floor space goes for about $200 per square foot. In Chelsea, rents range from $17 to $23 per square foot on upper floors to around $40 on the ground floor. The gallery owners who have purchased space in Chelsea include Barbara Gladstone, who paid $1.995 million for her gallery at 515 West 24th Street in 1996, and Paula Cooper, who purchased her gallery at 534 West 21st Street for $512,000 in 1995.

Mr. Gagosian said he is also looking for gallery space in London, which would make him a major presence in three cities, including Los Angeles. Gagosian Gallery is a private business and does not release financial figures, but sources said it has been inching forward in its head-to-head competition with Pace-Wildenstein gallery, its main rival in the contemporary field, which represents the estates of Donald Judd, Mark Rothko and Alexander Calder. The Gagosian Gallery, which is heavily invested in the resale market, has been particularly well placed to reap the benefits of the recent interest in Warhol, whose prices have gone through the roof in recent years, through a special arrangement with the artist's estate to purchase paintings at a discount. Mr. Gagosian's Los Angeles gallery, the setting of fabled openings, is also said to be doing very well. Meanwhile, earlier this year Pace-Wildenstein stopped holding regular exhibitions at its Los Angeles gallery.

It seems appropriate that Mr. Gagosian, who next year will edge out Matthew Marks, who has dominated the Chelsea art community lately with two 5,000-square-foot galleries, is buying the former headquarters of T. Gambino Dynamic Express, a company owned by Mr. Gambino. In 1991, the Manhattan District Attorney's office accused the company of putting a stranglehold on the garment industry, whose goods the company traffics with a fleet of 1,000 vehicles.

The Year of the Urinal

In1917,theFrenchartistMarcelDuchamp submitted an upside-down urinal for an exhibition being organized by New York's Society of Independent Artists. He had taken the urinal–which bore the signature "L. Mott," the name of the manufacturer–turned it upside down and put the signature "R. Mutt 1917" on the bottom. The R. stands for Richard, French slang for moneybags, and Mutt referred to the short, hairy, rotund man in the popular comic strip Mutt and Jeff . The original was destroyed. But the artist made eight signed replicas in 1964, primarily to supply museums with examples of the artwork, for which collectors have been paying top dollar. One of those replicas will go on the block at Sotheby's in November.

Sotheby's would not release a presale estimate for its fountain, but earlier this year the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art paid $1 million for one of the 1964 editions.

Also this fall, Christie's reportedly plans to auction off 26 of Duchamp's works for a Japanese bank and Harry N. Abrams will publish Marcel Duchamp: The Art of Making Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction by Francis Naumann. Mr. Naumann, who along with Arturo Schwarz is one of the two leading Duchamp experts in the world, is also curating two Duchamp exhibition: one of Duchamp multiples at Achim Moeller Fine Art Limited, 167 East 73rd Street, and a larger show of artworks by followers of Duchamp at Curt Marcus Gallery Inc., 578 Broadway.

Because his art is basically nonsensical, the possibilities for Duchamp's followers are limitless: The Duchamp school's artists included in the show will be Richard Pettibone, Elaine Sturtevant, Sherrie Levin and Mike Bidlo, who wallpapered a bathroom at P.S. 1 with an image of Duchamp's urinal in 1997. That work of art is still on view.

The curators are basing their observation on a series of events that took place before the show opened on July 31. "No one has come out and said anything to us, and in fact everyone involved has been very nice, but a number of strange things have occurred," Mr. Drago said.

Three days before the 15-sculpture show was to open, park workers roped off a significant area the curators had intended to use and planted grass seed. Deciding to have some fun with their misfortune, the curators turned the roped-off area into its own art piece. They erected a plaque that identified the adopted artwork as Untitled and assigned its authorship to N.Y.S.O.P.R.H.P.–shorthand for New York State Office of Parks, Recreation and Historic Preservation, one of the show's sponsors. "There is nothing wrong with wanting to improve the park," Mr. Drago told The Observer , "but I think it is suspicious that the state decided to reseed the area in the middle of a drought at the end of the summer the week that the sculpture show was to open."

Frank Spano, a park employee, told The Observer that the ground had to be reseeded. Asked why it was reseeded at this time of year, he said he didn't know, he was "just fulfilling orders from above."

Next, a truck that had been sent into the park by the state to clean out the Portosan on the site, ran over one of the sculptures. Mr. Drago said that he has learned that the truck was driven by an independent contractor who did not know that the circle of bricks in David Limoli's untitled sculpture was art. But he, Ms. Walsh and many of the other artists in the show take it as further evidence that they are no longer wanted in the park.

Their suspicion stems from the fact that last December, David Walentas, a developer who owns a great deal of the historic property adjacent to the park, received a contract from the state to develop the parkland. The agreement was sent to former State Attorney General Dennis Vacco in time for him to sign off on it before he left office Dec. 31.

Mr. Walentas has made plans to build a marina in a cove next to where the park is currently located. He also hopes to build a supermodern luxury hotel, to be designed by French architect Jean Nouvel, jutting out over the East River under the Manhattan Bridge. The area next to the park, which is known as Dumbo, an acronym for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass, has long been settled by artists who have lofts in the area. Mr. Walentas has been generous in the past to some of the artist's groups. But Mr. Drago said that there is some concern among the artists that they will be evicted by Mr. Walentas, who wants to turn the area into a high-end shopping and tourism area.

Paul Parkhill, one of the artists in the exhibition, which was partially sponsored by the Brooklyn Waterfront Artists Coalition, headed a collaborative effort that turned the evolving history of the site into a memory piece. The team placed historic photographs and references to the evolution of the site in little black boxes, arranged in groups of three. In one of the boxes they included a quote from Mr. Nouvel, the potential architect for the site's redevelopment. "In fairy tales," Mr. Nouvel wrote, "the wicked witch keeps the princess from seeing herself in a mirror, which is the only way she can discover her real beauty. Admiring one's image, being confident of one's looks was such a pleasure that it was equated with sin. What we have here is a golden opportunity to reach out a Narcissus mirror to Manhattan: Look at yourself, and love it!"

On a recent day, standing on the park's waterfront boardwalk, overlooking the magnificent view of lower Manhattan that Mr. Nouvel was referring to, Ms. Walsh and Mr. Drago said they believe Mr. Walentas has benefited from the artists' settling in the area, but will eventually be kicking them out when he entices richer people to move into the neighborhood through his grand plans.

Both curators are Brooklynites and sentimental about their local parkland, but neither Ms. Walsh or Mr. Drago seem to believe they can do anything to stop Mr. Walentas. Ms. Walsh even had a fatalistic little art piece in the show: a cage of butterflies she had netted in the park. Since butterflies only have a life span of a couple of days, her art piece was over shortly after the show was begun–a bittersweet note that she sees as a metaphor for the site.

Louise Bourgeois Joins Cheim & Read

After more than a year of rumors that Louise Bourgeois was going to leave Robert Miller Gallery and join Cheim & Read, John Cheim announced in July that it is official: The 87-year-old artist will be formally represented by the two-year-old Chelsea gallery from now on.

"Representation means that we will be like an agent for Ms. Bourgeois," Mr. Cheim told The Observer . "If you have any questions about Bourgeois, you will come to us and we will help you." The artist will have a solo show in the gallery in spring 2000.

One of the most popular contemporary artists, the French-born Ms. Bourgeois is a feminist confessional artist whose strange vision is often applied with mathematical rigor to sculptures, drawings and assemblages. Although she has been working as an artist since the 1930's, when she studied in Paris with Fernand Léger, Ms. Bourgeois is one of those artists whose success has come late in life. Her big sales and big commissions did not take place until she began being represented by the Robert Miller Gallery in 1982. Earlier this year, Robert Miller told The Observer that he was upset that Ms. Bourgeois would be leaving the gallery.

Mr. Cheim and Howard Read worked for Mr. Miller until two years ago when they left to set up Cheim & Read. "When John and Howard left Miller, Louise and I tried to work with both Miller Gallery and Cheim & Read," said Jerry Gorovoy, Ms. Bourgeois' manager. "But it became impossible for us to work with both situations." Mr. Gorovoy said he and Ms. Bourgeois decided that since Mr. Cheim knows Ms. Bourgeois' work best, they would sign on with Cheim & Read.

Ms. Bourgeois, who lives in a narrow town house a couple of blocks from Cheim & Read's West 23rd Street location, told The Observer in a 1994 interview that community is important to her. Lately, though, the artist has been all over the world. This year, she won the Praemium Imperiale prize for excellence in art from the Japan Art Association. The artist was awarded the Golden Lion, also for outstanding achievement, at this year's Venice Biennale. A retrospective of her work opens at the Reina Sofia in Madrid in September. She is working on a large commission for an outdoor sculpture garden in downtown Pittsburgh. And an installation of her work is going to inaugurate the Tate Gallery at Bankside, which opens in London in May 2000.

Jerry's Follows SoHo Tide to Chelsea

"Everybody says why are you leaving SoHo. I say I am not leaving SoHo. It is one of my haunting places. Last year was our best year ever," said Jerry Joseph, owner of Jerry's on Prince Street, which has been the unofficial cafeteria to the art world since the early 1980's. Mr. Joseph is going to open a second restaurant in Chelsea on the southeast corner of 23rd Street and 10th Avenue in October:

The same chef will oversee both locations and in Chelsea there will be delivery service and enclosed sidewalk seating. "I've been looking in Chelsea because the art market is where I came from," Mr. Joseph added. "I was a dealer and a framer before I moved into the restaurant business. It is not only my market, these are my friends.

"I've been looking for two or three years in Chelsea. I always had my eyes on this corner space. Then the opportunity opened up and I jumped at it."

Mr. Stella was in China on a vacation with his son and was unavailable for comment, but Susan Brundage, a gallerist who worked with Mr. Stella at Castelli and who herself recently joined Sperone Westwater, confirmed that Mr. Stella had left Castelli. For more than 20 years, Ms. Brundage ran Castelli with her sister, Patty. She quit two years ago in a dispute with Mr. Castelli's new wife, Barbara, over the direction of the gallery. Ms. Brundage said she decided in June to join Sperone Westwater, which is run by her friends Gian Enzo Sperone and Angela Westwater. "I don't know who else we can pull over here," said Ms. Brundage of raiding Mr. Stella from Castelli. "But I wouldn't be adverse to it."

Mr. Stella is a feather in the Sperone Westwater cap. The serious, relatively small second-floor SoHo gallery has made its reputation primarily by introducing European artists such as Not Vital to the United States; it also represents notable Americans such as Susan Rothenberg and Richard Tuttle. The gallery has never represented an artist of the stature of Mr. Stella.

Since the late 1950's, the Andover- and Princeton-educated Mr. Stella has pushed the boundaries of abstract art, starting with his early black paintings, which foreshadowed the minimalist movement of the 1970's. That's still true. At 63, Mr. Stella is undergoing a revival of interest that is not unlike that enjoyed a few years ago by Tony Bennett, who became a Gen X idol for reasons that were never clear to anyone, least of all Mr. Bennett.

Several years ago, painter Peter Halley cited Mr. Stella as an important influence, but at the time he seemed to be in a group of one. Once considered the most important living artist, Mr. Stella has had his ups and downs. During most of the 1990's, he has been quietly working on public commissions, and has not had much of a gallery career. According to Richard Polsky's 1998 Art Market Guide , Mr. Stella's art is sorely undervalued. The artist's record auction price is $5.06 million, set in 1989 for Tomlinson Court Park , a seminal black painting from 1959. In recent years, auction prices have been in the low six figures.

But Mr. Stella recently completed his first architectural commission to be built–a bandshell adjacent to the Miami Heat's new American Airlines Arena on Biscayne Bay–that will debut on Dec. 31 with a show called "Gloria Estefan Millennium Spectacular." To coincide with the arena's opening, the Museum of Contemporary Art in North Miami has organized Frank Stella at 2000: Changing the Rules , a retrospective of the artist's 1990's work. Bonnie Clearwater, the director of the MoCA North Miami and curator of the show, said young artists often refer to Mr. Stella in awe. "A number of younger artists who are working in abstract art have cited him as an important influence," Ms. Clearwater said.

Since the late 1980's, Mr. Stella has aggressively pursued public sculpture commissions, and those who are close to him said he has long wanted to design buildings. He was commissioned to create the bandshell by Arquitectonica, the Miami architecture firm that is designing the arena. The result is a spiraling white armature, based on the shape of a Brazilian beach hat, made out of reflective aluminum and painted white.

Mr. Stella has also broken into computer-generated art. In March, his recent use of the computer in his paintings was noted in the San Francisco-based magazine Wired . Writer Steve Silberman heaped praise on Mr. Stella, whom he admired not only for his willingness to use new technology but for his gruff style. Mr. Stella turned to the computer because he wanted to find a way to represent the smoke rings he creates with his cigars, or in his own words, "creating shapes that I hadn't seen before–a kind of Faustian fantasy."

Mr. Stella's first exhibition at Sperone Westwater, scheduled for November, will challenge the gallery's small proportions. On one wall, he will show a 40-foot-long, brightly colored abstract painting based on his digitized rings of cigar smoke. He will also show what he refers to as an "easel painting," which is actually a three-dimensional aluminum sculpture that looks like it was the outcome of a serious explosion in a metalworks. Also on view will be a maquette of the Miami bandshell.

Chelsea Gains Another: Paul Kasmin Leaves SoHo

Continuing the northwestward migration of contemporary art galleries, Paul Kasmin Gallery has announced that it will trade in a small SoHo space for a larger one in Chelsea. Beginning in October, the eponymous gallery will be located in its own building at 293 10th Avenue at 27th Street. Mr. Kasmin told The Observer he is sorry to be leaving SoHo, but the economics were hard for him to continue to justify staying.

"My lease was up in SoHo and for what they wanted me to pay for 2,000 square feet I could have 8,000 square feet in Chelsea," he said.

The new gallery, housed in a former garage, is being designed by architect Fred Sutherland and will be inaugurated with an exhibition of paintings by Elliott Puckette, one of the gallery's most important artists. The second exhibition will feature stitched photographs by Andy Warhol.

"They told us they wanted to redesign the entire store to reflect and define what MoMA Design Store stands for and how it relates to the museum itself," said Juergen Riehm, a principal of 1100 Architect. "The current [store]," designed by the now-defunct firm of Hambrecht Terrell International, "is just an ad hoc thing they threw together."

Even though a museumwide expansion and renovation is under way, designed by the architect Yoshio Taniguchi and expected to be complete in five to six years, MoMA decided that renovating the Design Store could not wait. "We are really looking for a fresh solution to this store, which is at the same time mission- and market-driven," said James D. Gundell, president of MoMA retail, which also includes the museum's catalogue and bookstore and a portion of its Web site (www.moma.org).

Mr. Gundell selected the design of Mr. Riehm and David Piscuskas, another partner at 1100 Architect, last summer after approaching a small group of architects for proposals. The 21-member firm is best known in the art world for its clean, classic modern design for Metro Pictures Gallery in Chelsea, the Greenwich Village residence of Eric Fischl and April Gornik, and Ross Bleckner's six-story house on White Street in TriBeCa. They also designed the interiors of the J. Crew stores on Prince Street and lower Fifth Avenue and the Esprit showroom on Broadway, near 35th Street.

The 3,500-square-foot job at the MoMA Design Store is one of the most prestigious little commissions in New York right now. MoMA was one of the first retail outlets in New York for furniture and accessories by Alvar Kalto, Isamu Noguchi, Marcel Breuer, Mies van der Rohe and other leading architects and designers. Even though those products are now sold in other retail outlets, the design store still has "a symbolic place in the design and architecture community," according to Mr. Gundell.

As with its other retail spaces, 1100 Architect's design for the MoMA Design Store, which is being overseen by Ellen Martin, a project architect in the firm, will actually make the customer feel there is less, not more, for sale. Mr. Riehm said this approach will solve the store's main problem: merchandise overkill. For the most part, the tops of the counters will be cleared of display objects and the merchandise will be filed away neatly in drawers or on aluminum, plexiglass and frosted glass shelves, an 1100 Architect trademark. The store will be lit with neon panels that are recessed into the walls. The flooring will be a deep blue rubberized material that Mr. Riehm refers to as Yves Klein blue, after the French artist who painted striking all-blue paintings.

The new store will also introduce some low-tech solutions to merchandise display. Mr. Riehm said that one of the challenges in designing the space was utilizing the double-height ceiling and finding a way to show a wide range of objects. The entrance will be moved to the west side of the building to dramatize the scale of the double-height space, and merchandise will be projected or displayed on a giant screen that will also carry information about exhibitions currently showing at the museum.

"We wanted to make the store much more of an experiential event," said Mr. Riehm, "so that you could see and experience objects higher up and have them appear in multiples in a theatrical screen made out of stainless steel mesh."

MoMA plans to treat the reopening of the design store the way it would the launch of an important exhibition, by inviting luminaries from the design and architecture community. Perhaps some of 1100 Architect's other stellar clients will show up, too: The firm is currently designing the Lincoln Square apartment of actors Natasha Richardson and Liam Neeson.

1999's Michelangelo: A Man With a Brand

Thirty-year-old sculptor Toland Grinnell has kissed the downtown art world goodbye and found a way to capitalize on being both talented and beautiful.

Last year, Mr. Grinnell, who had arrived at a signature postmodern-inspired baroque style of work after a couple of years in France and Italy via Manhattan's School of Visual Arts, decided to part company with his SoHo gallery Basilico Fine Arts. In February, he got a call from a casino developer in Las Vegas and began to work on lucrative projects for the interiors of casinos such as the Venetian, a 3,000-room, Italian-themed resort, part of which opened in May. Then, even though some of his art-world friends advised him against it, he agreed to be branded one of the 50 most beautiful people in the world by People magazine.

"When I decided to leave the gallery … it was rough in the beginning, and then I realized that there was a whole community of people who appreciated what I was doing," said Mr. Grinnell, who has brown hair and bright green eyes. "And they are not connected to downtown. And then I suddenly realized that art was this gigantic nexus. It was not just between 25th Street and Canal Street. It is colossal. That's when I realized I was going to be O.K. … I am beginning to understand what I call the new economy of collecting. The scope out there is much bigger than people imagine.

"Right now, I am working on this giant ceiling sculpture," he explained. "Beautiful relief, covered literally with gemstones set into it, a real extravaganza. As one of the gentlemen who commissioned it from me said, 'The fun of having you do this is not only do I want to pay you but I get to have one of the 50 most beautiful people in my house measuring my ceiling.'

"I think people like putting a face on art. It makes people comfortable to spend money on art when there is a face. It is no different than being Karl Lagerfeld. Part of the association, part of the brand, is more than the clothes. A brand has multidimensions. This is part of my brand."

The package contained information about Ann Hamilton, an installation artist from Columbus, Ohio, who had been chosen to represent the United States at the 48th Venice Biennale from June to November. Mr. Kelly was asking Mr. Ford to help underwrite Ms. Hamilton's piece, called Myien (Greek for mystery), which would turn the United States Pavilion, which resembles Monticello, into a work of art itself for the first time. Mr. Ford had never met Ms. Hamilton and did not collect her work. But Mr. Kelly had an angle that he thought would appeal to him.

"I pointed out that here he was, an American and head of an Italian company, and here we had an American artist who was showing in Italy," Mr. Kelly told The Observer . Mr. Kelly had made up two lists of prospective angels: one of information-age moguls; the other of fashion people.

The timing could not have been more propitious. Mr. Ford was just about to successfully fend off the takeover attempt by Bernard Arnault, chairman of LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, and could have been searching around for a symbolic gesture. For a mere $100,000, Mr. Ford, 38, and Gucci had found one.

Mr. Ford's $100,000 helped pay for 24 electric motors that sift and release a fine fuchsia-colored powder that runs down the interior walls of the pavilion and a panel of Braille text translated from Testimony: The United States, 1885-1915 , a book of poetry by Charles Reznikoff. It also went toward a 90-foot wall of rippled glass set in a framework outside the pavilion; the pavilion is supposed to appear to melt or disintegrate when seen through the glass.

With Myein , Ms. Hamilton addresses violence and racism in America in a highly oblique manner that has left many people who have attended the exhibit perplexed. On loudspeakers, her faint voice can be heard reading the pleas for healing issued by Abraham Lincoln in his second Inaugural Address. But only those who read the lengthy (non-Braille) wall text that accompanies the exhibition can fully understand what the show is about. Many have left the four-room pavilion complaining about the fuchsia-colored dust that got on their shoes. Myein has not been panned, it has been ignored-which in some ways is worse. On June 12, The Herald Tribune weighed in with a major review of the Biennale that did not even mention the U.S. Pavilion. Writing in The New Yorker , Peter Schjeldahl said that Myein made him "dizzy."

Mr. Ford and Gucci also sponsored Vanessa Beecroft's Show , a one-night performance piece staged on the ground floor of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in April 1998, in which 20 beautiful models posed in various stages of dress for two and a half hours. Some of them were naked except for a pair of Gucci stilleto mules. Others wore beaded Gucci bikinis. The tie-in with Gucci and Mr. Ford was much clearer in its sponsorship of Show , but that exhibition was just as controversial as Myein .

Mr. Ford, who divides his time between apartments in Paris and Florence, and socializes in Los Angeles and Santa Fe, where he also owns homes, has been a peripatetic figure who has not stopped long enough to leave a lasting impression since arriving at Gucci in 1990. Like celebrity collectors David Geffen and Steve Martin, Mr. Ford now seems to have found a place for himself in the art world. He has gone about it with the cunning of Andy Warhol, an early role model. He seems to be attracted to exhibitions that bring him some extra frisson and he has tried to assert some control over them. When Mr. Ford came to the Biennale in June, he arranged for Wolfgang Tilmans to photograph him with Ms. Hamilton, a diminutive, sensibly attired woman who keeps her gray hair cut in a pixie and does not wear Gucci clothes. They will appear in the September issue of Index , artist Peter Halley's magazine, with an interview with Mr. Ford and Ms. Hamilton.

The list of people willing to put money into 25 art as difficult as Myein is not very long. The total cost of the project was $650,000. Mr. Kelly and the two co-curators, Katy Kline and Helaine Posner, were able to raise the rest from 53 private donors including the president of the Museum of Modern Art, Agnes Gund,and her husband, Daniel Shapiro, and Jo Carole and Ronald Lauder. For Mr. Kelly, who has yet to sell Mr. Ford an Ann Hamilton installation for one of his homes, being able to get Mr. Ford and Gucci to sponsor the exhibition was in itself a triumph. And for Mr. Ford, maybe one day his portrait with Ms. Hamilton will prove to have been prophetic.

In the Museum of Modern Art's exhibition entitled Fame After Photography , there wasn't even enough room to accommodate the life-size cutout of Mike Myers as Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me that stands in the office of the show's co-curators, Carole Kismaric and Marvin Heiferman.

"That's just our mascot. It's not going in the show," said Mr. Heiferman on June 24. You have to draw the line somewhere when you're dealing with a topic as large as fame.

Following the death of Diana, Princess of Wales, the pair, partners in Lookout, a firm that organizes museum shows and publishes books on pop culture, art and photography, was hired by Museum of Modern Art's photography curator, Peter Galassi, to accumulate hundreds of images for an exhibition about the modern fascination with photographs of the famous. Since December, they have been sequestered in a tiny office in a brownstone on West 53rd Street, without phone or fax, poring over piles of pictures. The show, entitled Fame After Photography , opens on July 8.

The exhibition is concerned with, but not condemning of, our celebrity-obsessed culture. ''We live in a world in which there is so much need for photographic imagery. Fame is how you communicate what you would like people to think is going on," said Mr. Heiferman. "When fame gets out of control, when pictures get out of control, then fame is threatened, basically."

Fame as merchandise seems to be one of the show's guiding principles; there are photographic images from practically every medium that has been used to sell something. The curators assert that fame needs new images every day to keep it going, feeding on itself in often self-destructive ways, as the world saw in the ghoulish documentation of the tragic death of the Princess of Wales. They try to show how fame was changed by the invention of photography.

"We wanted to show who becomes famous and how they get famous," said Mr. Heiferman.

There's a peek at how fame was addressed prior to the invention of photography with some early images of George Washington and a small mounted photograph, known as a carte de visite, of Alexandra, an earlier Princess of Wales, that sold more than 300,000 copies in the mid-19th century. The show also includes celebrities whose fame did not outlive them, such as Mary Anderson, the most photographed person in the world in 1882.

Ms. Kismaric and Mr. Heiferman are both especially fond of Hollywood ephemera. They pointed excitedly to a "light box" by Bernard of Hollywood of Lili St. Cyr, a stripper famous for taking a milk bath at Ciro's nightclub. "She would emerge from the bath to reveal that she was completely naked," Mr. Heiferman said.

Other sources are Life , Vogue and the original Vanity Fair . One ad from Vogue shows Eleanor Roosevelt selling a mattress. "It was common for women of her class to endorse products and give the money to a charity," said Ms. Kismaric.

The ephemeral nature of fame made it hard for the pair to find some of the show's images. "It was really difficult to find the old tabloids," she said, pointing triumphantly to a wall of vintage tabloids with screaming headlines alerting people to such important news as "Rhinelander Weds Negress." A poster of Mark Spitz in his American flag swimming trunks with gold medals draped around his neck, which is today a collector's item, was especially hard to locate.

The show's power is derived from its accumulation of disparate imagery. There are early movies of Annie Oakley shooting at targets, Charles Lindberg receiving a hero's welcome. There are also clips from Andy Warhol's screen tests of Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick and Susan Sontag. Mr. Reed and Sedgwick are deadpan but Ms. Sontag hams it up for the camera.

There is a television clip of Dinah Shore singing the Chevrolet theme song, Edward R. Murrow in a Person to Person interview with singer Julie London in which she reveals sadly, "I am not a really good singer. We spend more time at the record company worrying about the pictures on my album cover than I do about recording the record."

A fame-meets-fame shot from I Love Lucy shows Lucille Ball going to Hollywood and finding William Holden at the Brown Derby. Nearby, a clip from Wayne's World is playing: In a dream sequence, Garth and Wayne go to Madonna's bedroom and Wayne makes out with her. There are clips of Martha Mitchell, wife of then-U.S. Attorney General John Mitchell, pointing the finger at everybody during the Watergate hearings and of Charles Van Doren being questioned about the quiz show scandal.

Also, there is a clip from the TV show Queen for a Day , in which an ordinary person went on TV, was crowned and awarded a lot of appliances.

The final part of the exhibit is subtitled "Fame for Everyone." There are shots of Tinseltown Studios, a theme restaurant in Anaheim where you dress up like a movie star. There are examples of people who make themselves famous on the Web. Besides Warhol, there are examples of the work of current artists who are "responding to the environment of fame," as Mr. Heiferman puts it: Richard Prince, David Robbins, Larry Johnson, Cindy Sherman, Karen Kilimnick, and Yasumasa Morimura, a Japanese artist who dresses up as Marilyn Monroe.

Notwithstanding the death of Diana, which was the catalyst for the exhibition, the question that emerges from all of this flotsam is, How can you argue with fame?

"There is a deep psychological need for fame," said Ms. Kismaris. "As well as it being a social commodity."

Faith Ringgold Is a Rolls-Royce

On June 21, at a reception at Matthew Marks Gallery in Chelsea, artist Faith Ringgold received a Making a Difference Through the Arts award from City Arts, a nonprofit program that brings art into neglected areas of New York.

"A few years ago, I thought maybe I could buy a work by Faith Ringgold," said Mary Schmidt Campbell, dean of the Tisch School of the Arts at New York University and a friend of Ms. Ringgold's, who delivered the award. "I was going to buy a car and the kind of car I was thinking of was a Jeep Cherokee. So I went to the ACA Gallery on East 57th Street and I said, show me something in the category of a Jeep Cherokee. The gallery's director made it very clear to me that this lady's art was in the category of a Rolls-Royce. So I did not leave the showroom that day with a new model."

Ms. Ringgold, who is best known for her quilts that treat African-American subjects, laughed heartily.