Delfina Delettrez “Stonehand” cuff bracelet, image via Vogue.com

There is nothing quite as pleasurable as having your mind changed. It's almost as pleasurable as being right.

I am The Observer's Culture Editor -- hi -- and I am not what you might call a fashion person: I appreciate a fancy frock as much as the next gal; I can slip into an attitude of connoisseurship towards the impeccable construction of any given garment as easily as I might when confronted with an expertly made artwork; I am sensitive to the creativity that goes into creating clothing or jewelry;  I, too, went gaga for the McQueen show at the Met. But I don't build my life around it. Fashion's Night Out has historically been my night in. Which is all to say I hadn't planned on going out of my way to see jewelry designer Delfina Delettrez's bracelets at the Gagosian shop last Friday night. I'd gone uptown to see Richard Pettibone's diminutive copies of paintings by Warhol and Lichtenstein, around the corner, at Castelli Gallery.

But on my way to Castelli I passed the Gagosian shop, and observed that a modest crowd of attractive, well-dressed people had gathered inside, and remembered that Ms. Delettrez's bracelets were being debuted. Having taken in the Pettibone copies, I walked back to the shop and stepped inside to give one of the bracelets a spin.

I'd seen photographs of these bracelets -- delicate feminine hands made in a variety of materials ranging from marble to wood, fashioned to appear to grip the wearer's wrist -- and expected a facile surrealism along the lines of Salvador Dali's Ruby Lips brooch. Instead, once one of Ms. Delettrez's bracelets was snapped into place on my own wrist -- the wooden one, with each fingernail painted a different color -- I detected a potent metaphor. These wrist-gripping hands were evocative, it seemed, of the, let's say, possessiveness problem in relationships.

A couple holds hands, but a hand around the wrist is something else entirely. There's a darkness: wrists are often gripped to pin a person down. And then there are handcuffs, which are misnamed, as they, like these bracelets, encircle not the hands, but the wrists. The commitment-phobe ponders the wedding vows. "To have and to hold." Okay, but maybe hold the have part. And the hold part.

I removed the bracelet and stepped out, alone, into the cool early evening, felt a breeze tickle the skin of my unencumbered wrist. But I hadn't gone half a block before I wanted the thing back. I wished I'd bought it, so that I could take it home. And put it on, and take it off again.

"Junction" (2011) by Richard Serra. (Photo by Lorenz Kienzle / Gagosian Gallery)

The New York art world may be entering uncharted territory.

Why do we think so? Let’s look at the big picture: In June, dealers at the Art Basel fair reported that business was booming. Art, we were told in report after report, was selling as it had in the heady days of 2006 and 2007, when the housing crash and the worldwide economic crisis were merely theories in the heads of a few sharp-eyed economists and canny hedge fund managers.

Last month, the world’s two leading auction houses, Sotheby’s and Christie’s, announced record revenues for the first half of the year, having moved $3.4 billion and $3.2 billion worth of art and other goods, respectively.

Now, for New York: there are, at this moment, more galleries, more artists, more curators and—perhaps most significant—more square footage devoted to art than at any time in the city’s history. The art world has never been wealthier, and that wealth has never been more intensely concentrated.

A handful of top-flight galleries are vying for the attention of a growing number of unprecedentedly wealthy collectors. At the auction houses, guarantees (an amount promised to a seller regardless of what an artwork sells for), which vanished during the recession, are back on the table, an indication that the houses are again flush and ready to compete for consignments. Ambitious young dealers are entering the fray.

It is a thrilling moment, and a frightening one. Call it Boom 2.0.

Unlike with the last upswing, this time around, as the art market rallies, the broader economy is stuck in a ditch. Unemployment hovers around 9 percent, twice what it was back in the last boom, just five years ago, and the stock market—historically a serviceable indicator of the art market’s health—has been erratic.

This week, the first shows of the new season open. By the end of the month, there will be hundreds of new exhibitions on view, and much of the art in them will, as usual, be uneven in quality. But as the painter Alex Katz once told critic David Bourdon, “If we only wanted to look at masterpieces, we’d spend all our time at the Frick.” The market aside, there will be unexpected thrills and disappointments, and endless fodder for arguments.

As the season opens, here are a few predictions about what it will bring.

POWER WILL BEGET POWER

The gap between the big winners and everyone else is widening quickly in the art world, as it is elsewhere. With his 11 global galleries, and now his $36.5 million Upper East Side mansion, Larry Gagosian, who some believe is the world’s first billionaire art dealer, remains the most powerful man in the business, more the CEO of a luxury brand than an art dealer. (Jay-Z dropped his name on Watch the Throne.)

Mr. Gagosian is opening the New York season with the sort of firepower that would be the envy of any dealer in town: two monumental new steel sculptures by Richard Serra, one more than 75 feet long; a survey of Andy Warhol’s prized Liz Taylor portraits; and, because the dealer can now do anything he wants, a show of new paintings by Bob Dylan.

Also on tap at Gagosian is an exhibition by British figurative painter Jenny Saville, whom he first showed in 1999, earning skeptical whispers as he furiously raised her prices into the six-digit realm early in her career. “That girl is 29 years old,” an anonymous dealer was quoted as saying soon after. “If she is not going to make it, she is never going to have a career ever. … These are live and die prices, motherfucker.” Here we are, about a decade later: Ms. Saville’s current auction record, set at Christie’s in February, is $2.42 million.

Meanwhile Arne Glimcher’s Pace Gallery—which is by some estimations second in the world to Mr. Gagosian’s—is breaking ground on a fifth New York branch, which will be tucked underneath the High Line in Chelsea. “Not every gallery needs 20-foot ceilings,” Pace’s heir apparent, Mr. Glimcher’s son Marc Glimcher, told The Observer.

But Pace will vacate its hulking West 22nd Street gallery at the end of next summer, clearing the way for its landlord, the Dia Art Foundation, to move forward with plans to build a new space there. “It’s tragic, but it had to happen,” Mr. Glimcher said. “We can’t be too unhappy about it, if it means Dia comes back.” Whether that will happen remains to be seen: the foundation announced its plans to build on the lot in November 2009, but it has yet to name an architect. (This week, Observer columnist Adam Lindemann reveals that Dia has also purchased the building next door, for $11.5 million.)

Chelsea and its longtime elite remain the engine of the market and the center of attention. The West 20s are lined with galleries that started elsewhere in the city in the 1980s, and a few that began far earlier. Some muscled into that group’s rarefied realm in the 1990s, but power relations have ossified in recent years. Will any young gallerists join their ranks?

THE LOWER EAST SIDE WILL START TO FEEL CROWDED

Most venturesome dealers are still opting to open on the Lower East Side, which has been the nexus of Manhattan’s emerging scene since 2007, when the New Museum opened there. “A walk is becoming a run is becoming a stampede,” said Josh Frank, of Misrahi Realty, when asked about galleries opening in the area. “Mass has gravity.”

Recent migrants to the area include Chicago’s Golden Gallery, on the western edge, and Maxwell Graham (formerly of Renwick Gallery), whose new space is on Essex Street, the eastern frontier. According to Mr. Frank, galleries in the area are paying between $3,500 and $6,000 a month for relatively modest storefronts. “It’s much cheaper than West Chelsea,” he said, “and you just can’t find these small stores anywhere else.”

In a sense, it’s sophomore year on the L.E.S.: on Orchard Street, the neighborhood’s main drag, many dealers are hosting second shows by the artists they debuted over the past few years. In September, Sara Greenberger Rafferty returns to Rachel Uffner, Lisa Kirk to Invisible-Exports and Sarah Crowner to Nicelle Beauchene. Just off Orchard, dealers Margaret Lee and Oliver Newton are showing Anicka Yi for a second time at their gallery, whose name changed from 179 Canal to 47 Canal with a relocation in May.

“Second shows in New York can be more important than first shows,” said Ms. Beauchene. “Artists have to prove they can push their work.”

Newness fades quickly in the art world. It always has. The East Village scene of the mid-1980s disappeared in a matter of years. Some dealers folded, unable to hold the attention of collectors and curators, while the savvier ones left for Soho in search of lower rents and more space. How long will the Lower East Side district endure? We may know soon.

“If the landlords get greedy, they’ll move on,” said gallerist Jay Gorney, a veteran of the East Village, who is now at Mitchell-Innes & Nash in Chelsea. “If their spaces are big enough and their rents are workable, they’ll stay.” He cautioned, “We should be talking about the survival of individual galleries, not necessarily neighborhoods.”

Perhaps the right comparison isn’t the East Village, but Soho, which galleries fled for Chelsea in the mid 1990s, when retailers—including large corporate brands willing to pay astronomical rents—started to take over.

On the swiftly gentrifying Lower East Side, retail looms. Mr. Frank mentioned that three new hotels are in the process of opening in the area, and that a chocolate shop on Broome and a beer shop on Orchard are on the way. “People are going to get soused and walk around and buy art and chocolate,” he said jokingly. Many galleries signed five-year leases back in 2008, and they’ll need to decide if they want to stick around to experience that.

And yet there are lingering concerns, even now that the neighborhood is booming, that it still isn’t attracting the right art crowd. “I’d like to see MoMA and Whitney curators a little more,” one dealer told us.

Of course, not all young dealers move to the L.E.S. The award for the most exotic move of the year goes to the energetic Parisian gallerists Daniele Balice and Alexander Hertling, who have linked up with critic David Lewis to start a small project space in a Hell’s Kitchen office building. “Some people may not think it is a very sophisticated place, but it feels real,” Mr. Balice told The Observer earlier this year, speaking warmly of the neighborhood’s cheap bars and restaurants. He added, “I may be wrong.”

ALTERNATIVE SPACES WILL LEAD

Many nonprofit galleries have been taking admirable curatorial risks.

For the past year, at the Artist’s Institute, down on Eldridge Street, curator Anthony Huberman has been shaping freewheeling idiosyncratic programs based on the work of a single artist each semester with help from his students at Hunter College, which backs the venture. It has held lectures, organized an orchid sale, hosted performances and baked bread. Somehow, it’s made sense. Through December, its focus is on the septuagenarian Native American artist Jimmie Durham, a critical favorite who hasn’t shown in New York recently.

In Soho, Recess Activities has been handing over its space to emerging artists since it opened in 2009, and letting them organize shows, make work and host events while in residence. The results have been unpredictable and messy and exciting (which can’t typically be said of most Chelsea galleries), and it recently added a Red Hook location.

And there are new appointments to watch. With new director Stefan Kalmár at its helm, Artists Space has had a streak of smart solo shows, and a survey of the work of the little-known renegade New York interventionist Christopher D’Arcangelo is up next. Former Artforum czar Tim Griffin has just taken the reins of the Kitchen, and onetime Creative Time curator Peter Eleey has started as chief curator at MoMA PS1.

DEALERS WILL GO BACK TO THE FUTURE

Across the city, from the Upper East Side’s Alex Zachary and the aforementioned Essex Street to the West Village’s Algus Greenspon and the Ridgewood, Queens, space Regina Rex, galleries are hosting exhibitions of older artists that the New York market had previously ignored—or loved once and dropped.

A segment of the 1980s East Village scene is enjoying a surprising resurrection this season, with a few artists from the Neo-Geo movement making appearances in unexpected places. Sculptor Haim Steinbach is showing with Chelsea powerhouse Tanya Bonakdar, and Meyer Vaisman, a reclusive figure of late, will have a show out in Williamsburg, at an artist-run gallery called Soloway. It will be Mr. Vaisman’s first show in New York since 2000.

“I studied Meyer’s work in school,” said Soloway’s Munro Galloway. “The way he uses found imagery and digital manipulation in his work has resonance with what is happening now.” Mr. Vaisman’s experience running the storied International With Monument gallery in the 1980s—the former home of Jeff Koons, a onetime Neo-Geo star—is also an inspiration, Mr. Galloway said. Artist-run spaces like International are opening at a breathtaking rate in Bushwick, but it still feels too early to hazard a guess of what will happen there.

WHAT COMES NEXT

With so much money flowing into the art world today, it should be a time of diverse and far-reaching experiments and innovations, and alternative spaces should be vigorously expanding. Instead, that money appears to be flowing into the same few hands, supporting the same well-known names. Collectors are building private museums as nonprofits announce layoffs.

The price of the cheapest sculpture in Japanese artist Takashi Murakami’s recent show at Gagosian London was $1.8 million, a sum that would cover the operating expenses of a New York nonprofit like White Columns or SculptureCenter for two years—or buy, en masse, a dozen shows on the Lower East Side, giving enterprising dealers some breathing room.

If some economists prove right, a double dip recession looms. Big-ticket items by established names selling smoothly could just be one more indication that investors want somewhere to park their money other than the wobbly stock market. If the economy worsens, the effects could be painful for many. For now, though, the art world feels strangely insulated from that broader turmoil. In other words, Boom 2.0 is in full swing.

arusseth@observer.com

Artist Corban Walker, Marc Glimcher and Arne Glimcher stand next to a glass sculpture by Mr. Walker. (Photo: Patrick McMullan Company)

Pace Gallery founder Arne Glimcher and his son Marc are profiled in a Kelly Crow story in the new WSJ. magazine, who gets a few juicy details out of the father-son duo.

We learn, for instance, that Pace, which operates four galleries in New York and one in Beijing (with a London branch on the way), sells $400 million of art a year, and that Marc, 47, who has been positioned as heir apparent, was the motivating force behind the gallery's decision last year to end its partnership with Wildenstein & Co., the storied French firm that has run into messy legal trouble in recent years.

"I wavered several times," Mr. Glimcher père, 73, who established Pace in Boston in 1960, tells The Journal of the decision to end the PaceWildenstein partnership. "I have a smart kid." Ms. Crow writes that Pace spent "more than $100 million" to buy out the Wildensteins' share of their joint business, a deal that included a trove of art. (At the time of the deal The New York Times reported that "hundreds of millions of dollars are said to have changed hands.")

Can Mr. Glimcher fils successfully lead Pace without his father? Swiss dealer Iwan Wirth shares his views. "I don't believe in second-generation galleries because every gallery needs to have an identity, one soul," Mr. Wirth says. "Marc needs to prove he can leave his footprint on Pace." Those sound like fighting words.

Ms. Crow notes that the younger Glimcher left the gallery twice in his earlier years, apparently uncertain about joining the family business. "I've told Marc, 'You've run twice before—this is your last chance to prove yourself to all of us,'" artist Chuck Close, who has shown with Pace since 1975, says rather ominously. However, Mr. Close says he will stay with Pace as long as Marc remains there.

Photographer Hiroshi Sugimoto is more guarded. "After Arne, I can't say what I'll do," Mr. Sugimoto says. "The gallery is great, but things change." Mr. Sugimoto joined Pace only recently, having left rival Larry Gagosian, today's most powerful art dealer, whose high-flying real-estate dealings The Observer detailed this week.

A handy interactive chart accompanying the piece sets the Gagosian and Pace empires side by side, and Gagosian looks dominant: his 77 artists accounted for a crisp 50 percent of total auction sales in the first half of 2011, while Pace's 54 artists were responsible for an impressive but comparatively paltry 12 percent. (To be fair, a large portion of Mr. Gagosian's lead in this category is attributable to his representation of the estate of Andy Warhol, whose work typically accounts for an outsize portion of contemporary art auctions--in New York's May contemporary sales, a full 25 percent of the works, as measured by estimated value, were Warhols. And even Mr. Gagosian does not have a complete hold on the Warhol market.)

Also intriguing: works by Gagosian artists have made, on average, $3.23 million at auction this year, while Pace's artists averaged $2.14 million. In a 2008 profile of Mr. Gagosian in The Economist's Intelligent Life magazine, another rival gallerist, David Zwirner, said of the dealer, "He wanted to be known as the guy who could really maximize the career." That certainly seems to be the case for now.

With Pace adding younger artists in recent years--Tara Donovan and Sterling Ruby, for instance--and its London operations going live in June, its longstanding rivalry with Mr. Gagosian--who recently lost the de Kooning estate to Pace--may grow more intense over the next few years. Mr. Gagosian is 66, almost two decades older than Marc Glimcher. He has not said what his long-term plans are for his network of 11 international galleries.

Tom Sanford, "Portrait of a Genius" (2011)

The artist William Powhida was a thousand miles away in Wisconsin on the evening of July 27 when a man claiming to be William Powhida drove into the ground-floor garage of the Marlborough Chelsea gallery in a vintage green Mercedes convertible, drinking from a bottle of Champagne. He sat on a couch that was barricaded off and continued drinking, inviting a few friends to join him. While an audience watched, the man bossed around an assistant, sent out messages on his Blackberry and flirted with the two svelte blond women seated next to him. A painting by the artist Tom Sanford hung on the wall: it was a depiction of the man who was in the gallery, acting the fool. In the painting, he was releasing a dove from his hands while a busty blond woman clung to his leg. It was all an act staged for a gallery opening. On the wall by the entrance, in big black letters, was the name of the show: POWHIDA.

“It was meant to bring in a new crowd and start a discourse,” Max Levai told The Observer last week. At 23, Mr. Levai is responsible for Marlborough Chelsea’s new programming that focuses on a younger audience. POWHIDA was a high-profile gesture announcing this new direction. The gallery had been cleared out save for Mr. Sanford’s painting, as if cleansed of its history and reputation.

“It was clearly a show conceived by Powhida,” Mr. Levai said when asked if he thought Marlborough was one of the themes the show was taking a swipe at. “The fact that it was a large gallery space on the ground floor helped the project conceptually, but I don’t think it would have been that different in any other context.”

“I wouldn’t have done that performance anywhere else,” the real William Powhida told The Observer last week. “It really was site specific to Marlborough. It sort of hinged on their reputation as I knew it at the time and as a lot of people know it: not really being a part of the contemporary art conversation. They do really well in their sphere in selling really established artists, but as part of the art scene that I’ve been paying attention to, they just weren’t really on my radar.”

It was a surprising pairing, Marlborough and Powhida. The crowd was a mix of art-world cognoscenti and young kids in flannel and sneakers. People sipped on Pernod absinthe instead of white wine and occasionally scoffed at the actor, who by now had lit a cigarette. A Marlboro. The writer Anthony Haden-Guest told The Observer, “We’ve been here before.”

“Someone at The New York Observer wrote an article saying the actor was really William Powhida,” Mr. Levai told The Observer a few days after the show’s two-week run at the gallery had ended. “They just didn’t get it.”

“Yeah,” The Observer said, “I wrote that article.”

“Oh.” He paused. “That was you.”

A brief but significant silence ensued.

Later, Mr. Powhida told The Observer the performance was meant to bring the character he had been developing for five years in his paintings (and in at least one YouTube video) into the real world. If this was the public birth of the William Powhida persona, how was it wrong to call that person William Powhida?

As it turns out, the show marked the birth of something else as well: the new Marlborough Chelsea. It has hired a younger staff and is recruiting younger artists. Still, the name Marlborough is one that few would consider at the cutting edge of contemporary art. The Chelsea gallery opened in 2007 with a show by Tom Otterness, whose public works can be seen all over New York. His private commissions sell in the low seven figures. (To put that into context, Mr. Sanford’s painting in the POWHIDA show sold for $18,000.)

Marlborough opened its 57th Street business in 1963 with a stable of artists that reads like a checklist of the then-dominant New York School, including David Smith, Robert Motherwell, the estate of Jackson Pollock and Mark Rothko. After Rothko’s suicide in 1970, the artist’s three executors—one of whom was an artist represented by Marlborough and another the gallery’s accountant, who would later became its director—sold 798 Rothko paintings to Marlborough at the wholesale price of $12,000 a piece, far below the artist’s market even at the time. They sold 36 of those paintings at a profit of over $2 million. Rothko’s children filed suit against the gallery, resulting in a tangled court case that dragged on for three years. The court ruled in favor of the artist’s children, saying each painting was valued at a minimum of $90,000. Marlborough’s founder, Frank Lloyd, was later charged with tampering with evidence. Despite the scandal, Marlborough continued to be commercially successful in the years following under the leadership of Mr. Lloyd’s nephew, Pierre Levai (Max’s father), known to the art world as a serious, no-nonsense man. (Max Levai said his father was not available to speak with The Observer.)

Marlborough is not the only blue-chip gallery to try to appeal to a younger crowd. For years, the Pace Gallery, founded by Arne Glimcher in Boston in 1960, was known mostly for a stable of seminal Minimalists. In the past few years, the gallery has brought on younger artists like Sterling Ruby, and hired directors who have worked with emerging talent.

Working both ends of the Modern and contemporary art spectrum has proved to be a solid model for dealers, at least financially. The Gagosian Gallery, founded in the late 1970s and widely considered to be the world’s most successful art dealership, trades in Monets and Picassos but also does brisk business in work by 32-year-old Dan Colen. Mr. Colen’s show there last year, “Poetry,” was met with almost universally negative criticism, but the works sold. Contemporary auctions have recently surpassed Modern and Impressionist ones in terms of profit. If high-end galleries don’t start paying attention to more youthful artists, they risk becoming nothing more than mausoleums. For a primary market gallery, though, Marlborough’s roster has a large number of artists in their 70s. Many others are deceased. The gallery’s movement toward contemporary art may be a push for relevancy, but it is also, arguably, a necessity.

“I think this change is natural,” said the art adviser Todd Levin, who counts the Levais among his friends. “As the gallery gets older, the issue of succession becomes more an issue at the front of the house. You know, ‘We can’t keep existing on the same old stuff, or we’ll just be Old Master dealers.’”

One challenge Marlborough faces in changing its programming is building a new collector base. A curator who works with another blue-chip gallery, who spoke off the record, pointed out the paradox that Marlborough’s collectors aren’t so interested in emerging artists, and people who collect emerging artists aren’t so interested in Marlborough.

Two group shows last year—“Look Again” and “Grass Grows by Itself”—demonstrated that the gallery is serious about transforming. “Look Again,” curated by Casey Fremont and Karline Moeller (the press release was quick to point out that both women are in their 20s), was a way of bridging more contemporary works with the gallery’s older artists to provide new context. Artists like Peter Coffin and Chakaia Booker mingled with the paintings of Manolo Valdes, which are heavily influenced by the gallery’s history with Abstract Expressionism. If the suggestion to “look again” at the gallery in a different light was somewhat blatant, it was also a practical way for Marlborough to test how well it could do in a contemporary art market. One source said the idea of separating the Chelsea gallery from its midtown headquarters through the introduction of young artists “wasn’t even a question” before the young Mr. Levai came on board last year.

“The gallery, since it was conceived, was intending to bring on new artists,” Max Levai said. “Our Chelsea space is completely different from the 57th Street space. There are shows we’ve done in Chelsea that would have been impossible at 57th Street. Everybody calls it an emerging artist program and I think it’s a classic art world misnomer. In the gallery scene, they’ve already emerged, even though they’re only emerging in the auction houses.”

One of those artists is Rashaad Newsome. His work combines the iconography of heraldry and hip-hop through elements of painting, music and dance. Mr. Newsome was “suspect” when the gallery first approached him.

“My work really didn’t fit into that gallery,” Mr. Newsome said, speaking of Marlborough in its previous incarnation. “Not only because of the work itself, but because half of their artists are dead. You know, I’m alive. But they can obviously finance certain ideas that a younger gallery couldn’t. For me, it’s about the work existing, and if they can help to facilitate that? All good.”

At a party in March in collaboration with BOMB Magazine, Mr. Newsome played hip-hop beats through a laptop while wearing a big, black crown. A small group of musicians played live with him, including the young rapper Nast.

“I’m gonna promise I smoke some good weed,” Nast bellowed into his microphone.

It was quite a departure for a gallery that shows the innocuous, often idealistic work of Dale Chihuly and Red Grooms. It was also anticommercial, especially considering the gallery’s secondary market includes powerhouses like Francis Bacon.

“Ask me if I give a fuck what the haters say,” Nast continued.

Even though the press picked up on the fact that it consisted of an actor playing a role, a majority of critics, unsurprisingly, were still not pleased with any component of POWHIDA. They dismissed it as derivative schlock—from the performance right down to the audience itself.

“Powhida fans smirked knowingly,” Brian Droitcour wrote in Artforum’s online Scene and Heard diary. “Marlborough regulars furrowed their brows … The venue brought out the worst in the opening’s two demographics: The Bushwick types enjoyed playing rock stars-and-groupies beyond irony, and the actual rich dudes felt entitled to shove their way to the front of the line for absinthe mojitos.”

On Artnet, the reliably irascible Charlie Finch was more forthright. “What does it say about the art community that a derivative, no-talent turkey can create a sensation by reviving an old Andy Warhol trick to impress young morons and get a lot of summer press attention for doing nothing original?”

It is rare for a gallery to be so much a part of the show that the institution must bare the brunt of the criticism.

“Most of the reviews,” Mr. Powhida said, “I’m not gonna say they let the gallery off the hook, but there was never any question of why they did this show. For me, it was about twisting that quest for fame back on Marlborough.”

The audience’s frustration was palpable, even at the opening. Guests carried it with them as they migrated to the roof of the Mondrian Hotel, where everyone drinking switched from absinthe to vodka. A few of the actors had slipped out of character, but “William Powhida” was still at it. He was being followed by a cameraman. He spoke loudly of his genius. Many people ignored him.

mmiller@observer.com

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: August 24, 2011

An earlier version of this article stated incorrectly that the Pace Gallery's new space on 25th Street had been designated as a venue for showcasing younger artists.

Mr. Cave was speaking on the telephone from Chicago, where he has been working for two years on pieces for two shows that will run simultaneously at two prominent New York galleries in September. He and his assistants were packing up the last of his sculptures. The latest milestone in his rapidly rising career was only a few weeks away: the exhibition at Jack Shainman, his dealer of six years, opens Sept. 8; the other show, at Mary Boone Gallery, on Sept. 10. “We’re coming down to the wire right now,” the artist said softly, without a hint of concern in his voice.

“I’ve been looking at the pipe cleaner as a structural component to build volume and shape,” Mr. Cave continued, explaining his enthusiasm for that humble object. “It becomes a sort of bone on which one can make the skin.”

As his choice of words suggests, Mr. Cave’s work is intimately and intensely corporeal, particularly the works he calls Soundsuits—intricate, often ornate sculptures in the shape of bodies that he has constructed for almost two decades from materials like crocheted hats, knitted sweaters, plastic sandwich bags, hot pads, sequins, buttons, beads, ceramic birds and other items that he finds at thrift stores, flea markets and estate sales.

The Soundsuits are hollow. While they are displayed on mannequins in galleries and museums, in archival photographs they are worn by Mr. Cave, and they are sometimes used for performances created by the artist and others. Their name derives from the fact that, when they are worn, they double as strange, alien instruments. Those covered with synthetic hair give off light swooshes. Others, fitted with metal toys, clink and clank and crackle like broken bells.

“I’m totally consumed by the special attire that has a powerful and meaningful purpose within a culture,” Mr. Cave said. “I’m looking at rituals and ceremonies: Mardi Gras, Indian clothing, West African pieces, Carnival in Trinidad.”

The moods his works conjure are as multifarious as his source materials. They are often effervescently colored and topped with bulbous, phallic heads. They can be cartoon-like and uproariously funny, but they are also just as frequently disturbing and enigmatic. Mr. Cave refers to them as “armor, a second skin,” and they seem designed to shield and protect a wearer’s identity at least as much as they are meant to entertain.

Despite the joyous, extroverted appearance that many of them have, they share a sobering origin story. Mr. Cave, who is black, has said that he produced the first example while thinking about the Rodney King beating. He collected twigs from a Chicago park, drilled holes in them and threaded them together to create a sculpture of a man. And then he climbed inside.

Until about five years ago, Mr. Cave, 52, was a relatively little known artist. He had taught in the fashion department of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago since 1992 and had a number of shows at mostly regional and university museums, but he didn’t show regularly at commercial galleries. “I was like a Gypsy,” he said. “I would do exhibitions and then pack up my stuff and go.”

“It was important for me to find someone who understands my vision and understands how I work and what I do,” he added. “I’m not that desperate to be part of a gallery.”

In the mid-2000s, Mr. Cave’s friend Greg Cameron, who was the associate director of the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago at the time, sent a package of the artist’s work to Jack Shainman, a New York art dealer who was already showing work by a handful of black artists at his gallery on West 20th Street.

“I was just blown away,” Mr. Shainman told The Observer of seeing Mr. Cave’s work for the first time. “It was so personal and so much his own. It felt really new.”

Mr. Cave happened to be visiting New York when he heard of Mr. Shainman’s interest. “I visited the gallery, but I didn’t tell them it was me,” he said. “I wanted to see if I had a good feeling about it.” He did. After returning to Chicago, he called Mr. Shainman.

The artist’s first show at Mr. Shainman’s gallery, in 2006, was well received, with New York Times art critic Roberta Smith writing that Mr. Cave’s works “fall squarely under the heading of Must Be Seen to Be Believed.” His second outing, in 2009, also earned largely favorable reviews and his Soundsuits sold in the range of $45,000 each. They’ve gone up in price since then: in his September shows, they will be offered at $85,000 to $125,000.

“Ever-After” is the title of the show at Shainman. “It’s about death and mortality,” Mr. Cave said. “It’s very morbid, peaceful and tranquil.” Many of the suits in the show are white, some meticulously embroidered with hundreds of gleaming buttons. “It is an exhibition that talks about the afterlife, those who have moved on and forever after will be in my heart,” he said.

One group of suits, collectively titled Speak Louder, features suits with tuba-shape heads, their fronts filled or blocked with various fabrics—there are dark holes or blank spots where faces should be. “It’s a piece about speaking and not being heard,” Mr. Cave said.

He said that he wants to create a performance and video that will involve a 20-person gospel choir wearing some of the suits from the show, supplemented by others, and singing a gospel hymn. “Whew!” he said, with the faintest drawl, a holdover from his childhood in Missouri. “It’s going to be a lot of work.”

“That sounds fantastic,” said Mr. Shainman said after The Observer told him of Mr. Cave’s latest plan. “I love gospel.” He seemed unsurprised that Mr. Cave’s project was growing in scale; it usually does. “He’s incredibly ambitious,” he said.

The other September show, at Mary Boone Gallery’s soaring space on 24th Street, is called “For Now.” It’s the first time Ms. Boone is exhibiting the artist’s work and is a one-off collaboration with Shainman.

“Mary and I both loved Nick’s work when we saw it at Jack’s and at various art fairs,” Ron Warren, partner at the Mary Boone Gallery, told The Observer. “We approached Jack about doing a show, because we had the space to offer Nick the ability to do something on a larger scale.”

A decade ago, that ostensibly friendly suggestion might have been met with suspicion. Then, Ms. Boone, like many of her competitors in the upper echelon of the New York art world, was known for luring artists away from their longtime dealers. In the 1980s, for instance, Richard Artschwager and Troy Brauntuch left their representatives—Leo Castelli and Metro Pictures, respectively—for her gallery. (They have since moved on to other powerhouses: Mr. Artschwager to Gagosian and Mr. Brauntuch to Friedrich Petzel Gallery.)

But her strategy appears to have changed in recent years. This past season the gallery hosted, and helped finance, a show by Argentina-born artist Mika Rottenberg, who is represented by Nicole Klagsbrun, and staged a two-gallery show with American artist Phoebe Washburn, who works with Zach Feuer. Both are critically acclaimed artists who work frequently with installations, and both were born in the 1970s, placing them far afield of the predominantly older, male Neo-Expressionist painters whom Ms. Boone is best known for showing.

“It comes from the desire to show artists we admire without looking to take them away from their dealers that they have a long relationship with,” Mr. Warren said, explaining the gallery’s interest in collaboration. “We approach the dealer and see what we can offer them, what we can bring to the table.”

It turned out that what they could offer Mr. Shainman was higher ceilings. Mr. Cave had been talking with his dealer about making taller pieces, but the gallery’s ceilings are only 13 feet high. “Her space is so grand, and it seems like an interesting opportunity,” Mr. Shainman said.

Mr. Cave has big plans for his show at Mary Boone. His newest suits are emblazoned with images of a unicorn and Superman and laden with objects like a xylophone and ceramic birds. There are new twigs and, yes, pipe cleaners. “I’m pulling out the kitchen sink and everything around it and making it happen,” Mr. Cave said in a staccato burst. “It’s very playful, it’s whimsical, it’s animated, it’s colorful, it’s performance, it’s dramatic.” It is perhaps a happy coincidence that his show opens during New York’s fashion week. “It’s queer, it’s loud, it’s fashion, it’s pop culture.”

That word—performance—kept coming up again and again as we spoke, and it became clear that Mr. Cave uses that term in the broadest possible sense. He said that he continually asks himself, “How does my work perform out in the world?” That question suggests possibilities beyond simply wearing a costume to pose for photographs or letting a choreographer like Ronald K. Brown create dances incorporating the Soundsuits.

Recently Mr. Cave has been traveling around the U.S., introducing people in cities like Seattle and Memphis to his Soundsuits and working with them to create performances of their own. He’s interested in having his Soundsuits perform as social connectors, tools for bringing people together.

Their construction also carries meaning, according to Mr. Cave. “These suits are an amalgamation of surplus things that have been discarded,” he said. “Basically everything that I’m using has been used, and I’m elevating these things. It’s about creating work with a conscience.”

The Soundsuits that are sold in galleries are typically conceived as sculptures, not as wearable costumes, which differentiates them from expressly interactive art like Franz West’s Pass-stücke (Adaptives) or Franz Erhard Walther’s Handlungsstücke (Action Pieces). But when displayed on mannequins, they nevertheless express a potent optimism about the mutability of personal identity. Viewers can imagine slipping inside of one of the suits and becoming someone—or something—else.

“I want to provide them with transitional experiences,” Mr. Cave said. “It’s about providing a moment of silence, and at the same time asking, ‘Come out with me and play.’”

arusseth@observer.com

Already on the back cover of  James Frey's new novel The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, published in April by Gagosian, the publisher was listed on the back as Gagosian, rather than as Gagosian Gallery.

And now, the ultimate indicator of changes in an art business’s presentation, the September issue of Artforum magazine, has landed on our desks and we notice that whereas the Summer issue of the same magazine listed, over several pages, the various exhibitions at something called Gagosian Gallery, the September issue tells us, again over several pages, about exhibitions at an entity referred to as Gagosian.

What does this indicate other than our perspicacity? Well, it tells us, perhaps, that the 32 year old business, now with a shop and a publishing arm, is morphing into something much more than merely a venue for the presentation and selling of art.

Like Richard Serra, Bob Dylan will be showing at Gagosian in September.

The Observer has learned from a source who spoke on condition of anonymity that Gagosian Gallery will present an exhibition of Bob Dylan's paintings in New York in September.

Artnet reported this morning that the gallery has added Mr. Dylan's name to its artist roster, and that rumors have been afloat on a Dylan-related Facebook page that the gallery has been selling, and will exhibit, the musician's visual art.

Gagosian operates 11 branches around the world.

Chinati! McCracken! Dumas! A selection of books that David Zwirner is selling at its pop-up bookstore. Photo courtesy David Zwirner.

Summer is in full swing, and New York's galleries are beginning to close up shop. It is time to retreat to the region's fine beaches or at least air-conditioned apartments. Regardless, you will need books, and New York's art-book purveyors have plenty of special events, sales, and exhibitions on offer. Below, five art-book events that caught The Observer's attention:

Printed Matter Has Reopened
After closing for two weeks to do its annual inventory, Chelsea's nonprofit Printed Matter shop reopened July 15, and has announced that it is co-publishing an artist book with the young painter Tauba Auerbach, who recently signed with Paula Cooper Gallery. Titled [2,3], the pop-up book will be available in an edition of 1000 (plus 100 proofs) and can be pre-ordered now for $350-- a full $100 less than its sticker price. It ships in October.

David Zwirner's Pop-Up Shop
Zwirner is once again hosting a temporary summer bookstore, which it started for the first time last summer. (The Observer--full disclosure--purchased a bag full of books.) This year films by Raymond Pettibon, gallery catalogues, and posters by Christopher Williams will be among the works on offer. The pop-up shop runs through Aug. 5, and will be open until 8 p.m. on Thursday, for the Chelsea Art Walk.

Independent Curators International's Summer Sale
Those outside of the city can still partake in ICI's summer sale, which is being conducted solely online. Every week, through Sept. 4, the New York-based organization is offering one of its exhibition catalogues for a cool $5, and other books--like, say, its tasty history of painting in New York from 1967 to 1975, High Times, Hard Times--are on sale.

Gagosian Shop Has James Frey Books to Spare
The international dealer's Upper East Side corner store is open seven days a week throughout the summer, though it has no special events on tap before September. However, there are still limited-edition, signed copies of James Frey's latest book, The Final Testament of the Holy Bible, available for $150. A trade version, printed in an edition of 10,000, can be had for $50.

Specific Object's Non-Show
As The Observer previously reported, David Platzker, whose gallery Specific Object specializes in art books and editions, has shuttered his exhibition space for the summer, for Robert Barry's Closed Gallery Redux.

"He was such a prolific artist" that he's always in the auctions, noted David Norman, co-chairman of Sotheby's Impressionist and Modern art department, which holds its $200 million evening sale on Tuesday, May 3. (Christie's auction is the following day.)

But nothing happens by accident at these carefully orchestrated events. In February, Christie's got $7.8 million for a 1901 Picasso, painted at a time when the artist was 19 and a new immigrant to Paris; this time around there are two from that year for sale. Similarly, "we had a great result--$40.7 million in February" for a 1932 Picasso, said Mr. Norman, and now the house is offering a stylistically similar 1934 portrait, though such works are not generally easy to find. "Great results get the attention of collectors who have similar paintings," Mr. Norman noted.

They'd be loath to admit it, but the auction houses are also aping über-dealer Larry Gagosian, who opened "Picasso and Marie-Therese: L'amour four" last week, an 80-work blockbuster show featuring images, in many mediums, of Picasso's longtime secret between-the-wars mistress, Marie-Therese. Suffice it to say that virtually any collector who wants a Picasso, and can afford one, is coming to New York City in May.

Also on the auction block are a Picasso sheet metal sculpture and a salute to Delacroix at Christie's, and a provincial family portrait at Sotheby's. There are Surrealist Picassos, Classical-era Picassos, heroic Picassos. There's an artwork for every taste, if not for every budget, as most unique works are in the six to eight figures.

So here's the real reason for the Picasso perfect storm: The art market seems robust, and the country seems recovered, but nobody's taking any chances. An unusual Picasso is, ultimately, less of a bottom-line risk than a great work by another artist. This year, in a still-iffy economy, the blue-chip Spanish master rules.

editorial@observer.com