What you might expect to read next is that the 84-year-old painter, whose bald pate and sinewy build lend him a monk-like aspect, who has lived and worked in this space since 1968, when Soho was an industrial slum—before the artists arrived, before the galleries moved in, and before retail forced them all out—leads an isolated life, toiling away at his canvases, far above the fray, immune to any sense of competition.

Not so.

“We compete for audiences, as artists,” Mr. Katz said, leaning toward The Observer across a coffee table, his eyebrows raised intently. “I’m competing with the Abstract Expressionist guys. I’ll knock ‘em off the wall. If you put my work next to an aggressive A.E. painting, I’ll eat most of ‘em up.” He paused. “And I want to compete with the kids. I’m there with the kids.”
He was wearing a red polo shirt open at the collar and neat white pants. He’s lean and rangy, and was evenly tanned. His voice retains traces of a gruff accent from his youth in Queens.

Mr. Katz, whose work figures in major museum collections the world over, and who has a couple of important museum shows coming up next spring—at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and London’s Tate—recently made an unexpected move. After parting ways last fall with his gallery of 10 years, the Pace Gallery, a 51-year-old establishment that represents blue chip artists like Chuck Close and Robert Ryman, as well as the estates of Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning, he signed on with the 17-year-old Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, a gallery known for a stable of talked-about talents most of whom are half Mr. Katz’s age. (Before showing with Pace, he’d been with the equally blue-chip Marlborough for 30 years.) The Observer spoke with him last Thursday, two days before his debut exhibition at Gavin Brown.

The association with Mr. Brown, Mr. Katz said, didn’t come out of nowhere. He’d been following the gallery since it opened on Broome Street in 1994. (Mr. Brown subsequently moved to Chelsea, then to his present location in the West Village.) He participated in a group show there, at the request of Elizabeth Peyton, a painter Mr. Brown still works with. He watched the dealer develop the careers of artists he admired, like the Trinidad-based painter Peter Doig. “It’s a hot place,” he said. Last year, he was in Mr. Brown’s gallery, speaking with the dealer about his own work.

“He talked about the immediacy of light,” said Mr. Katz, who counts among his influences Matisse and Bonnard. “Subject matter is what people usually talk about. I realized he knows what I’m doing. Not many people know what I’m doing.”

Now on view at Mr. Brown’s gallery is a group of large portrait paintings depicting only the subjects’ faces, as well as several paintings of flowers. Mr. Katz’s style has gotten more abstract recently, but he is still working consistently in a mode he began developing five decades ago: flat, simplified depictions of landscapes, or of friends and acquaintances. The current crop includes paintings of the wife of his son, the poet Vincent Katz; his London dealer Timothy Taylor’s wife; and his own wife, Ada, who has sat for countless portraits since they married in 1958. The sole man in the group is a dapper young Brazilian fellow, Ricardo Kugelmas, painter Francesco Clemente’s studio manager.

Although figurative painting, like abstraction, waxes and wanes in popularity—every few years, art magazines declare a renaissance—it’s not as though Mr. Katz’s work has ever really gone out of style. In 1989, the respected art journal Parkett devoted an entire issue to his influence on younger artists. Liam Gillick, Peter Halley, David Salle and Richard Prince have all written about, or interviewed him.

Even with his own star set pretty firmly in art’s firmament, he is concerned about remaining relevant. “You saw that film about the cave paintings from 20,000 years ago?” he said, referring to Werner Herzog’s recent documentary. “There’s no progress in art. There’s merely change. And that’s like fashion. I want to make something new, and it has to do with change. It’s more like a dress designer than a 19th-century idea of an artist. I’m restless.”

He took The Observer on a tour of his studio. Two assistants were busy photographing paintings. He showed us some drawings that derived from dress patterns in ads for Macy’s—he’s always been interested in clothing, his portrait of Vogue editor Anna Wintour was just acquired by London’s National Portrait Gallery—and small study paintings on masonite that he makes outdoors, then transforms into larger, highly abstracted landscapes on canvas.

What about Milton Avery? The Observer asked, naming the titanic American modernist who died in 1965. “My light is fast, his is slow,” he replied. “My drawing is much more complicated. We were both influenced by Matisse. I always thought he was a very good American painter. But I was better than him at 22.”

Mr. Katz’s ambition is disarming, because it doesn’t come off as swagger. He makes these statements casually, with an easy grin, as though he’s telling you whom he played tennis with this morning.

Last fall, after he left Pace, Mr. Brown wasn’t the only one to make a studio visit. Larry Gagosian, the world’s foremost dealer, also came by with, as Mr. Katz remembers it, a director of his uptown headquarters, who was keen to bring him on board. The 66-year-old dealer runs 11 galleries around the world and is known for aggressively raising artists’ prices; his seductions are notoriously difficult to resist. Earlier this year he reportedly paid a visit to the 83-year-old sculptor John Chamberlain’s studio on Shelter Island and walked away having bought the studio’s entire contents; shortly afterward he brought Mr. Chamberlain, who had been with Pace, into his own stable of artists.

Mr. Katz thought about going with Mr. Gagosian, but ultimately turned him down. He told him, referring to Gavin Brown, “You have more taste, he has more style.”

What did Mr. Gagosian say to that?

The artist smiled. “He said, ‘You’re right. He does have a hot crowd. He knows what’s going on.’”

By the time Gavin Brown, a swarthy, bearded 47-year-old Brit, arrived an hour late for a Friday morning interview at his Greenwich Street gallery—police security prior to the 9/11 anniversary had traffic on the West Side Highway backed up all the way to 125th Street, where he lives—The Observer had installed herself behind a wooden table in the gallery’s cozy second-floor kitchen-cum-viewing-room. Winded, Mr. Brown, seemingly by way of apology, collapsed into a chair and momentarily buried his face in his hands. It was the day before Mr. Katz’s opening and the city was ajitter with terrorist alerts. His shirt was halfway unbuttoned, a disheveled look The Observer initially took to be some sort of fashion statement, until he glanced down and hastily buttoned up. As a display of unpolished vulnerability, it was charming.

Mr. Brown’s gallery—its official name, Gavin Brown’s Enterprise, aptly captures its air of freewheeling experimentation—has become synonymous with today’s avant-garde. In 2007, he allowed Urs Fischer to dig a giant hole in the floor. (Mr. Katz admires Mr. Fischer’s work. “He’s a screamer,” he told The Observer, adding, “I’m competing with that guy.”) Last year, when Mr. Brown doubled his gallery’s square footage, this newspaper all but crowned him the next Jeffrey Deitch (the longtime downtown impresario who became director of the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art.) Buzz comes at a cost—the big guns have taken notice of Mr. Brown’s artists; Mr. Gagosian will soon do a show with Mr. Fischer in Los Angeles.

But Mr. Brown’s Enterprise is more than a place for youthful avant-garde hijinks. It’s also becoming one for the return of forgotten midcareer talents. This summer, he turned over his gallery to Peter Nadin, who hadn’t shown in New York for 20 years; Mr. Nadin filled it with sculptures made of 6,000 pounds of honey and 57 hemlock trees.

Growing up in Britain, Mr. Brown said, he had a different perspective on Mr. Katz, who is widely considered to be the quintessential American painter. “He’s a homegrown artist here,” he said. “Oftentimes when things are that close you can’t see them. He always seemed quite exotic to me, from a distance.”

Last year, after one of his first openings in his newly expanded gallery, Mr. Brown’s director told him that Mr. Katz had told her, “I could do a show there. I like the space.” Around the same time, Mr. Brown heard that Mr. Katz had left Pace. He swiftly requested a studio visit, and Mr. Katz invited him to come around and make his case.

He didn’t recall saying anything specifically about Mr. Katz’s use of light. “I’ve always felt that his work is about the lived, present moment,” he said. “That’s what I’ve always been concerned with in my own life, and in my gallery—to try and stay present. I felt that rather than worry about his legacy, he should continue to stay in the present moment.

“He repeated that to me,” he said of Mr. Katz’s comment about taste and style, with regard to Mr. Gagosian. “I still don’t quite know what it means. You could interchange those words.”

Mr. Katz may be well established in art’s pantheon, but his prices don’t necessarily reflect that position. That is where Mr. Gagosian might have come in. Forty-nine-year-old figurative painter John Currin went to Gagosian in 2003, and it wasn’t long before his prices jumped from around $500,000 into the millions. Mr. Currin’s current auction record is $5.5 million; Mr. Katz’s is $690,600.

But catapulting the artist’s prices into the stratosphere is unlikely to be Mr. Brown’s role.

“If I have a role here,” Mr. Brown said, “it’s to reveal things in the work that perhaps people don’t see anymore, or perhaps take for granted. This body of work in particular has that kind of urgency to it.”

The opening on Saturday night was a convergence of worlds. There were grey eminences and young Turks; art people and fashion people. One woman wore a dress in the same tart green hue as the leaves in one of the wildflower paintings. There were established painters—Chuck Close, who studied at Yale when Mr. Katz taught there, and David Salle. There were Gavin Brown’s artists, like Rirkrit Tiravanija.

There was the sculptor Rachel Feinstein, wife of John Currin; New Museum curator Massimiliano Gioni; up-and-coming curator, gallery owner and Interview magazine online editor Alex Gartenfeld.

Ricardo Kugelmas described posing for Mr. Katz: first, the artist spends about an hour and a half making a small painting, then he makes a drawing, and from those two things the final painting is made.

Art historian Irving Sandler, who has written extensively about Mr. Katz’s work over the years, was in a powwow with his wife, NYU art history professor Lucy Sandler and Guggenheim director Richard Armstrong.

“Look at figurative art today,” Mr. Sandler told The Observer. “Ask pretty much any figurative artist and they’ll owe quite a bit to Alex. And some of the abstract ones too. I can’t think of a more influential artist in figurative art today.” He paused. “Can you?”

Standing nearby was Mark Greenwold, a figurative painter himself and a longtime friend of Mr. Katz, whom he referred to as Katz, as though he were a character in a novel. “I’m a huge fan,” he said. “For those of us who work with the figure, it’s always been mystifying how brilliantly and economically Katz makes these things over the years. He’s kept this interest not only in painting, but in the world. Well, he only paints beautiful people.”

The Observer glanced around. Where was Mr. Katz? He was standing near one of the doors, wearing a suit jacket, looking content, scribbling his signature on an announcement card for a fan.

“Katz,” Mr. Greenwold went on. “He’s eternally youthful. It’s like that moment with Manet and Baudelaire—he’s interested in the modern, and in being this sort of dandy. It’s the idea that painting needn’t be this existential, hideous, Kafkaesque struggle to say something, but can rather be a kind of beautiful celebration.”

He looked at the art on the walls. “These are the paintings of a very young artist, in some odd way.”

sdouglas@observer.com

B. Wurtz: Works 1970–2011 at Metro Pictures

Recycle, reuse, conserve, go green, go organic—all the exhortations of today’s pop-environmentalism—have been anticipated by artists, as two current exhibitions prove.

1. SLEEPING 2. EATING 3. KEEPING WARM. As declarations of priority go, B. Wurtz’s handwritten list Three Important Things (1973) is disarmingly modest, and emblematic of his down-home style. While numerous artists have salvaged inspiration and materials from the mess of thrown-away products and packaging that surrounds us, few have done so with this Californian’s light touch, or with his consistency (in an exhibition spanning four decades, it’s nearly impossible to distinguish old work from new). Guest curator Matthew Higgs—director of respected not-for-profit gallery White Columns and a long-time Wurtz fan—has crammed the sleek and spacious interior of Metro Pictures with several dozen sculptural assemblages made from string, socks, buttons, household implements and plastic bags.

At first look, it seems as though Mr. Higgs might have overdone it, diluting the works’ effect by packing in too much. But once the show’s organizational principles take hold, it is the opposite impression that persists. In the first room, an array of variously sized and tinted vinyl records impaled on wooden poles, dated 1981, stands adjacent to the following year’s Hula Hoop, in which Mr. Wurtz pays winking homage to Marcel Duchamp’s epochal ready-made sculpture Bicycle Wheel (1913). Ranged along a shelf nearby is a set of tiny, delicate hanging banners made from bits of timber and food wrappers. And on the walls to either side of the entrance to the next room are Three Orange Mops and Three Blue Mops (both 1986), in which collections of clean-up gear become three-dimensional paintings.

The critic Bruce Hainley once identified Mr. Wurtz’s capacity for allowing banal materials to remain “so close to their use value—even seeming to revel in it—that many people would blush with embarrassment.” And the pieces at Metro can elicit just such a red-faced reaction. How often have you seen the lid of a pot of supermarket hummus take center stage in an artwork, as it does here? Or observed an aluminum can topped with a white tube sock and presented not as a one-off experiment but in an edition of 12, no less? Such works have a confrontational awkwardness even for audiences accustomed to the prosaic as medium and subject matter. They prompt us to re-examine where the boundaries between the mundane and the beautiful, the pathetic and the endearing might truly lie.

While Mr. Wurtz could be dubbed a poet of plastic, Peter Nadin, whose showing at Gavin Brown’s Enterprise is his first in New York since 1992, is steeped in the organic and the earthy. “First Mark,” an expanded version of an exhibition previously seen in Cuba and Ecuador, features five paintings and two vast installations. All are the products of Mr. Nadin’s upstate studio at Old Field Farm in Cornwallville, Greene County, and make pointed use of back-to-the-land materials. Mr. Nadin, who moved to New York from his native England in 1976, is serious about his agriculture; he maintains a wild bee pasture, a goat habitat and a 150-acre forest alongside his workspace, and he has persuaded the gallery to host a “Bootleg Buying Club” offering for sale everything from head cheese to musk melons. In Mr. Nadin’s art, wool, fur, ham and honey (some 6,000 pounds of it) are combined with more conventional materials in a rich and sometimes pungent mix.

The paintings that line the gallery’s first room, all from 2010, are large abstractions on coarse brown linen framed in black walnut. Gestural daubs and splatters reminiscent of Cy Twombly or Julian Schnabel at their most hands-on share the surface with crusty accretions of wax and cashmere, each textural passage emerging from a sparser field of raw or lightly tinted canvas. Smears of pink and white punctuate the mostly indigo- and earth-tone surfaces, suggesting a push-and-pull between cultural or personal identity and the physical realities of the environment. And while Mr. Nadin’s reliance on a well-worn AbEx aesthetic does soften the works’ initial impact, the particularities of their physical makeup ultimately distinguish them from retread or pastiche.

The second space is fully occupied by The Bo’sun’s Chair (2011), a thicket of 57 hemlock logs boasting a variety of curious embellishments, many held in place by alarmingly oversize nails. The fetishistic decorations include several roughly modeled figures, a scattering of houselike structures and a large number of giant disembodied noses, many of which are tied on with twine like Halloween masks. It’s difficult to know quite how to contextualize this project; Joseph Beuys comes to mind, but the reference is less to that late German sculptor’s neo-shamanic persona than to his predilection for tactile and edible materials. The Bo’sun’s Chair does have something of a ritualistic feel however; its forms evoke totem poles, hinting at the re-emergence of ancient earth gods and goddesses.

The air in gallery three is heavy with the scent of honey, which fills the 24-foot-square pool of Raft (2011). The liquid’s surface is broken by, on one side, a cluster of pagodalike white model huts that sits atop an island of soil. Facing this is a group of terra-cotta pots, some with small figures crawling from their tops. And steering a course between the two is a makeshift wooden raft piloted by two ghostly wax oarsmen. Mr. Nadin has compared honey to glia, the cellular “glue” of the nervous system; here he sets us adrift on an ocean of the stuff, sticky-sweet with strange ideas.

editorial@observer.com

Onto the film's title, "Other Faces," fall two fuming black rectangles--a modernist terrorist's Malevich cocktails--followed by a circle, and then the dissolve into a verdant gray landscape. On a hill in the background, a lonely white movie screen is still standing, but small black animals are moving through the grass in the foreground. Mr. Kentridge makes his animations by erasing and reworking--the drawings he used for this one fill the rest of the gallery--so it's sometimes hard to tell a shadow from a shape from an erasure. When a small bird crosses the sky, following a billowing red ledger line, it leaves behind it a smudgy trail.

Eckstein is leaning against a window but he can't see out; his very heaven is only a page from an account book. But against this safely inhuman material sky forms the profile of a dying older woman; black marks like raindrops or inkblots fall around her brow, forming a crown of thorns. And then we move, to the sound of traffic, down from the empty white screen on the hilltop to the city, where one black face after another poses, immobile except for shifting eyes, against another white screen. (Those shifting eyes look like a technical limitation turned to advantage, like rigid masks used to suggest the wary hostility of immobile faces--which makes it an even better trick, since there is no such limitation.)

Somehow the simple black rectangles of the past have turned into cars, and the clear lineaments of colonial reason into a tangle of highways. Eckstein tries to navigate them--where else can he go?--but is stopped dead against a black doppelgänger trying to go the other way. They scream at each other in profile, with a noise like howling crowds, while Mr. Eckstein's thoughts turn back to better days. Once he was a happy child in a stroller, with a black nanny who loved him. But the child is gone, and the nanny, freed or deprived of her charge, has turned into something else. Once Eckstein went swimming at a country club with the woman who's now dying--but only snapshots remain, and Eckstein can only read beside her hospital bed. The night sky is dotted with stars and lines, and her face forms against it like a constellation. We see fragments of text: "That Which Is Not Drawn," "Healing to All Global," "You Fucken [sic] White Man," "Just Get Out of Town." Another, from an early Marx essay, could be either the hidden boast of the oppressing class or the rebel motto of the class defined by opposition: "I am nothing and should be everything." A thumbs-up. A revolver. Eckstein cradles a dying animal in his arms.

Mr. Kentridge's starkly smudged animations are so thoroughly black and white that they seem to be missing gray­--but there's also no white that hasn't been drawn on or black left unerased. Apartheid has been dismantled, and so has much of the triumph of its defeat, but you can't remove only one term of a dialectic. (As Marx also says, "If I negate powdered pigtails, I am left with unpowdered pigtails.") If you do, the hidden structures endure and fester, and you get a leveling down, not a leveling up. In the end, we see Eckstein shoveling dirt for a grave, and then a solid-black figure dancing with two spades. The lonely white screen falls, its ramparts dissolved. The dancing figure turns into a bird. We can only hope that chaos will be fertile: A flower grows from the top down, out of nowhere, on top of the grave.

"I am nothing but should be everything" also encapsulates the grandiose insecurity of naked young ambition. Nate Lowman's enormous new show "Trash Landing" fills both Gavin Brown's Enterprise and Maccarone Gallery with half a dozen different kinds of art that looks like art. There are large canvases "painted" with sugar and dirt, giant air fresheners and Apple logos, a bank window perforated with bullet holes, collages and silkscreens of images from the news, ranging from the clever to the trite, a suite of obsessively repetitive deconstructions, and sculptures made of plaster and plastic bags and horseshoe pitches. Trying to do everything is the same as committing to nothing, and the size of this show does a severe disservice to the parts of it worth looking at, because it makes it all seem interchangeable. The only discernible reason for showing so much is that it's all expected to sell--which is fair enough, of course, but no better.

editorial@observer.com

“Gavin Brown’s enterprise,” as the gallery is dubbed, is in many ways an island, as far as the greater New York art world is concerned. But, in two weeks, that island is set to double in size. With his landlord and co-tenant, famed downtown butcher Pat LaFrieda, decamping to New Jersey, Mr. Brown has finally gotten his hands on the back half of the building. He’ll inaugurate it May 1 with a conceptual show by New York art star Jonathan Horowitz, “Go Vegan!”, that will hang works in LaFrieda’s old butchery and dry-aged coolers.

The gruff and reticent dealer, 46, admitted it’s something of a dream come true: “I have been looking at it for a while—since I moved in, really. I never assumed it would become available but obviously I imagined it.”

The expansion will increase the footprint, and the power, of an art dealer already influential, wealthy and under fire both for too-close ties to the New Museum and for operating something (depending upon which side of it you are on) of an exclusionary art-world clique. But another development in May is also poised to push Mr. Brown more into the spotlight: If that old adage is true—when one door closes, yet another opens wide—then someone stands to gain something in gallerist and Soho impresario Jeffrey Deitch’s pending exodus from New York. And a lot of people are betting the heir apparent is Gavin Brown.

On that Saturday, the casually dressed, heavily bearded dealer was holding court upstairs in the gallery loft where he sometimes presides over cozy, post-opening dinners. As he talked about his gallery and artists, he was demure and more than a little oblique. He became enlivened only when speaking about recent projects (such as Jeremy Deller’s Conversations About Iraq at the New Museum). And, he stressed, he is not such a fan of the sort of hierarchical terms and distinctions divvying up the art world today. “I don’t really know what a gallery is—it’s just a space for potential imagination.” His role sometimes, he explained to The Observer, is less gallerist than “lobbyist.”

Friend and colleague Tom Eccles accused the dealer of having something of an “outward obnoxiousness.” But “he’s actually a bit of a soul brother at heart,” Mr. Eccles, of Bard College, added. “He needs to have artists whom he really feels close with, and he will stick with them long term. It’s different with Jeffrey.… Gavin is a lifer. With Gavin, everyone grew up together—he and his artists.”'

There are vast differences between the two men (and in their respective operations), of course. If Mr. Deitch, the constant, even visionary purveryor of hip, throws the art world’s parties, Mr. Brown runs a private club. Not exclusive, per se, but (and much like his program) tight-knit, with openings that are intimate, almost uncomfortably so. Mr. Deitch shows a slew of artists, some of whom he doesn’t even formally represent; Mr. Brown has had relationships with many of his for years. One man is famous in the broader world; Mr. Brown has long flown, by choice, far lower on the radar.

But there are similarities, too. Over the past 15 years, the British “dealer” has built a reputation that is predicated on close working relationships with the artists he represents, some of whom have stuck with him since the very beginning, Peter Doig, and Elizabeth Peyton among them. (Notably, superstar Chris Ofili, whom Mr. Brown represented during the high-profile “Sensation” controversy nearly a decade ago, has moved to David Zwirner.) Through the years, Mr. Brown enabled their whims and fancies—be it in his own gallery (Urs Fischer’s ground-excavating You, 2007) or in someone else’s (Rob Pruitt’s freewheeling “Art Awards” at the Guggenheim last year). He helped many of them earn institutional attention and support; the Museum of Modern Art, for instance, has acquired no less than 16 Doig works and about 30 Peyton drawings and paintings.

And like Mr. Deitch, who declined to comment for this story, Mr. Brown knows how to create a scene. His Passerby art bar in the meatpacking district was the establishment for much of its eight-year existence. And for now, he has no plans to reopen. But even though Mr. Brown’s bar-back days might be over, his program remains intrinsically social. Mr. Pruitt’s “Art Awards” was but one of these endeavors—in the sendup-of-a-gala gala, various members of the Brown clique gave awards to each other and friends. The Guggenheim confirmed that it will host a second installment in December.

“It feels like he’s everywhere,” said Alex Zachary, a former GBE director who recently jumped ship to open his own gallery on the Upper East Side. 

Mr. Brown admitted that Mr. Deitch’s departure for Hollywood, to run the Los Angeles Museum of Contemporary Art, got him thinking. “For any person who owns a gallery in New York, the news of that was sort of ‘Huh … could I do that?’” he told The Observer. “I thought about it and came to the conclusion that no, I probably shouldn’t. Probably couldn’t do it—I’m not sure I’d feel my life would be my own anymore. I’d probably make a complete hash of it.” He’s also pretty tied to New York, he noted: The father of three is in the midst of moving to a new home in Harlem.

“I think one of the best aspects of a gallery is its very intimate relationship with the artist,” Mr. Brown said. “The process is much faster and more immediate. You have a one-to-one, almost simultaneous translation [that can’t happen in a museum]. I suppose it is actually a thrill and kind of a privilege to be there with culture as it happens.” 

This, of course, is not exactly a charitable venture. Mr. Brown represented Mr. Doig’s work, for example, when it was selling for a few thousand dollars; in 2007, the artist’s White Canoe set an auction record for a living artist when it brought $11.3 million. But, ironically, the man whose Internet address is gavinbrown.biz doesn’t like talking about money.

Mr. Brown’s program has been so successful, in fact, that harsh criticism arose last year over the dealer’s relationship with the New Museum (i.e., “Gavin’s Place,” to the naysayers), where four of his artists have had substantial showings in the past two years. Brown outright denied any insider politics (as did the New Museum at that time, though the institution declined to comment for this piece).

“I’m not sure I ever saw what was so controversial,” he bristled of the much-rehashed issue. “I just don’t buy into that cynical way of seeing it. In terms of my role in the supposed controversy, you could see me as a lobbyist. That’s one way of looking at it. Another way of seeing this is that people, curators amongst them, really believe in the voices of these artists. I don’t see the problem—are people upset about the works in the exhibitions? Do they not want to see that work? The ones who do see a problem are small-minded people keeping score in their small-minded game.”

Mr. Brown ended the interview waxing eloquent. “I wonder about the future and how people will communicate,” he said. “We’re at an epochal moment and I’m just trying to figure out what goes in the trash and what is to be taken up and passed on to future generations.”

When asked to explain, Mr. Brown said he’d rather not.

editorial@observer.com

Mr. Brown is British and can't vote here. Still, he said, "if [Barack Obama] loses, the city will feel betrayed. People will be angry." 

We wondered whether Mr. Brown's late, great Meatpacking District bar Passerby would have been a good place to throw an Election Night party. "It would be, but it’s not around. And that actually says something." Bottle service, said Mr. Brown, is what killed Passerby. "Those dumb fucks selling mortgages to people that can’t afford them--the city has been ruined by people like that. What’s going to happen to the Meatpacking district? It was created by those parasites.” 

Bottle service aside, how was Mr. Brown feelin generally about the election? "Optimistic!" he said. "A man like [Obama] can be so inspiring. Win or lose, nothing will be the same tomorrow.”

Earlier in the evening, the Daily Transom encountered fortysomething Columbia English professor Carol Peters, who was clad in all black. Ms. Peters had voted at 6:30 in the morning at a school on Spring Street in Soho, where she has been voting since 1982. "I feel part black anyway because I'm a New Yorker," she said. "I have a lot of black friends. I feel honored to be alive right now... I understand if by 7 [Obama] wins Virginia then we're home free. And if by 2 it's still undecided then we can expect anything. It almost seems too good to be true if he's elected."

The artist Cecily Brown stopped by wearing a brown Obama T-shirt and jeans tucked into black boots. “I am so nervous," she said. "I am terrified it will get stolen somehow. In fact I’m going home right after this. I need to be watching it in private. I’m just stopping by to say hello to some friends and hang out. I have never felt this way about a candidate before.”

Ms. Brown, who is 39, is a British citizen and so didn't vote today. But she had another motive for wanting Mr. Obama to win. "I’m actually pregnant right now, so I’m hoping—praying—that my baby will have Obama as a president," she said. "I can’t even drink right now!" (The gallery is serving Mr. Obama's official family chili recipe, all American beer—the Daily Transom spotted some Pabst Blue Ribbon—and hot dogs.)

Artist Jonathan Horowitz's installation takes up the entire gallery. In the main room, chairs are lined up in a circle-one side blue, one red. Two flat-screen televisions face either side of the red-blue divide: the red side is tuned to Fox News, while the blue is tuned to CNN. There are also several attention-grabbing images: one pair features Jamie Lynn Spears walking in a pink dress and says "Vote Obama"; the other is a photo of Snoop Dogg carrying Britney Spears and says "Vote McCain." Then there's the image that's Katie Couric on top and Britney Spears' vagina on the bottom. And lining the walls of the entire gallery are images of every president. At the very end, a picture of Mr. Obama is lying on the ground. If he wins, it will be hung up on the wall with those of the other presidents. If not, it will stay on the ground.

Mr. Horowitz, who is 41 and lives on the Lower East Side, told us that the image of Ms. Couric and Ms. Spears is called CBS Evening News/www.britneycrotchshot.org. "For Katie Couric’s inaugural broadcast, there was a decision made that her legs would be part of the broadcast," said Mr. Horowitz. "So I just paired that with Britney.”

He continued: “I think art should exist alongside other media. I’m very optimistic, I’m excited. It seems like it’s going to be a landslide. I don’t see what could possibly go wrong this time." In the last few weeks, Mr. Horowitz said, every couple of days people would stick McCain-Palin stickers on the glass on the front door of the gallery.

Alan Marlis, a 62-year-old communications professor at City University of New York, was confident that Mr. Obama has the election sewn up. "It will be over early enough. It's over now I think. They're just trying to make it seem like it's not."

We wondered whether Mr. Marlis thought John McCain had a chance of winning.

"I've heard some desperate McCain people thinking he might still have a chance," he said. "But after they beat up on Sarah Palin for two weeks, I knew that was it."

An artist named James Morrison said he is ready for everything to be over. "I’m actually feeling a little exhausted of it. I’m just sick of it," he said. "I already voted, what else can I do." Mr. Morrison, who is 31, said he had had a "pretty Republican" upbringing in Ohio. In fact, he had just received a text message from his sister, which he showed the Daily Transom: "Dad voted for Obama and mom is still undecided.”

The installation is described as "[a] 38-foot-by-30-foot crater, eight feet deep," which "extends almost to the walls of the gallery, surrounded by a fourteen-inch ledge of concrete floor."

It took 10 days to "build," as Mr. Saltz reported, costing the gallerist Mr. Brown roughly $250,000.

Wow!

"Heaven only knows what his landlord thought of it," quipped Mr. Saltz.

According to PropertyShark.com, the gallery building at 620 Greenwich Street is owned by Patrick La Frieda.

And yet, for a guy who just spent a few hundred thousand to build a custom-designed gallery space-in his home, no less-the clean-cut and bespectacled Mr. Schachter seemed energized by the bad juju he felt would soon hang over the art world.

"When there are no opportunities, that's when all the great things happen," he told The Observer .

Mr. Schachter spoke from experience: His first big hit of New York success came during the art market's last belly flop, the early 90's. While the much of the art establishment floundered, Mr. Schachter flourished on the fringes, curating roving shows of new talent in often-desolate spaces in Soho and Chelsea. He was one of the first to show Janine Antoni and Cecily Brown, and his unorthodox methods earned him a New York Times Magazine cover story about the "do-it-yourself" art world in 1996.

But with the art-market boom of the late 1990's, Mr. Schachter's contrarian ways became de rigueur in the mad, market-wide scramble to feed the sudden spike in demand for art. "When I first started, there were no galleries in Brooklyn, there were no galleries in Chelsea. It was a recession, and I was literally one of the only people looking at unsolicited material, because there was no way to get a foothold into the system," he said. "What I realize now is that my shows and what I was doing became utterly indistinguishable from what 250 galleries in Chelsea were doing."

Now that market conditions threaten to turn inclement, Mr. Schachter sees opportunity once more. But though he wore black track-suit pants and high-tech Nike trainers to his interview, his second act won't be distinguished by the self-described "hit-and-run" strategy that dominated the first. For him, the future is a fixed point: his very first gallery space-designed in metal and concrete by the 70's performance-artist-turned-architect Vito Acconci-located in the former playroom of his Charles Lane townhouse, where he lives with his wife, Ilona Rich, the designer daughter of songwriter Denise Rich, and his four children.

Grandiose Terms

Mr. Schachter calls the space conTEMPorary, because he's agreed with his wife that it will only stay open a few years, until he finds the space for another, bigger project of his. Yet he clearly intends for it to make waves in the art world. "I'm speaking in grandiose terms but," he said, "I think it will turn the gallery world upside down."

The gallery opened in June, and in the spirit of his early art-world ventures, Mr. Schachter had the art/fashion collective As Four perform at the opening. Roughly 1,000 people came, including filmmaker Wes Anderson, "It girl" Chloë Sevigny and Whitney curator Lawrence Rinder. Soon afterward, W magazine wrote a piece about the opening, with a picture that made Mr. Schachter look grown-up and serious in a light-blue button-down shirt-a big change from the white T-shirt emblazoned with "Virgin Gorda" that he wore to this interview.

The show itself was a typical Schachter mix, from the dubious (blurry photographs from Imitation of Christ designer Tara Subkoff) to the edgy (videos by Bjørn Melhus, who plays all the roles in a mock talk-show video that's dubbed with the actual voices from episodes of Maury Povich's syndicated program) to the classic (architectural models and a 1935 lamp by Frederick Kiesler, whose design for Peggy Guggenheim's Art of This Century gallery inspired Mr. Schachter's space). And as Mr. Schachter noted: "Everything's for sale. Everything's always for sale."

Though the gallery space was still not finished on July 25, Mr. Schachter bounded around, pointing out its niftiest features. Toward the entrance, there was a gray desk made of rough steel that literally branched off from the entrance wall toward the inside, its various winding parts breaking into a bench and some storage space. The ceiling of the gallery, in the same omnipresent gray steel, curved toward the middle of the room to become a screen for video installations. Beneath it, vertical wall-sized panels of metal screens with eyelets could flip up, as Mr. Schachter eagerly demonstrated, and turn into seats or display shelves. Taking into account an upstairs office, the gallery amounted to 1,200 square feet of cramped contemporary space.

"This is like taking the outside of Bilbao and taking it inside," he said.

'A Dead Thing'

Mr. Schachter apparently intends for his gallery to have the same revolutionary effect on New York's art world as the Guggenheim Bilbao has on the eyes. "I feel that the [Barbara] Gladstones of the world, even the Matthew Markses, that's a dead thing," he said, describing his own plans for a new type of gallery. "I feel like galleries in the future are going to be of a whole other shape and form …. I'm hoping that another generation sees [my space] and goes on to do things that I never could have thought of."

How exactly Mr. Schachter intends to accomplish this, he didn't say. Apart from the W piece, his latest effort has so far prompted a mixed review from The Times. "Whether such an aggressively sculptural environment will be good for displaying art is debatable," the piece read. "But it is exciting to see someone dare to think differently."

Nevertheless, Mr. Schachter certainly seems to know what he doesn't want to be. Despite his hyperactive enthusiasm and omnipresent smile, he didn't mince words when it came to other denizens of the art world. Whitney Museum director Maxwell Anderson? "He wouldn't know a piece of contemporary art if it hit him over the head. He runs around with his wife squeezed like a sardine into these dresses with her boobs hanging out. It's disgraceful."

Gallery owner Barbara Gladstone? "She reminds me of that movie Michael Moore did, Roger & Me- it's like you could spend three days trying to find her in her own gallery."

Guggenheim Museum director Tom Krens? "I think he's a genius. I only wish he liked art more."

White Cube gallery owner Jay Joplin? "He's the snobbiest of the snobs."

Mr. Schachter also called painter Damian Loeb's work "utter shit," and lambasted Robert Ryman and Peter Halley for catering to collectors by painting in the same consistent style for the past 25 years, and knocked Gavin Brown (of the eponymously named gallery, Gavin Brown's enterprise), for "priding himself on being some obnoxious, arrogant, condescending person."

(Mr. Brown replied: "I don't know what I could have done to offend him. We barely know each other." But he added: "I hope everything goes well with his gallery.")

Mr. Schachter's readiness to take on the small, unforgiving universe of the New York art world might explain why, when things started to dry up after he hit a self-described "zenith" in the late 1990's-nabbing a Rockefeller grant, money from the Dutch government, and a show of his own art at the Sandra Gering Gallery-he found few sympathetic shoulders to cry on. The Times piece had, after all, provided him a pulpit from which to scorch the city's art scene. Among other things, he called it "small" and "provincial" and complained of its "exclusivity"-all the things he still harps on to this day.

Mini Midlife Crisis

So when the 90's ended, Mr. Schachter found himself desperately trying to get his shows reviewed and find cheap spaces-to no avail. "It became such a huge market; everybody opened a gallery," he said. The situation was such that he briefly toyed with the idea of moving to London and, in the spring of 2000, had a temporary show there entitled I Hate New York in a rented-out space.

The opening drew local rock stars and television personalities, but Mr. Schachter sold very few pieces. The experience culminated in his being violently robbed of his camera, computer equipment and phones while he was manning the show. He came back to New York in late 2000 and put together a show celebrating 10 years as a dealer. Ms. Antoni and Ms. Brown were among the artists featured, but still, he said, he got no reviews. Shortly afterwards, he had a crack-up. "At this point, I was having a mini midlife crisis," he said. "I started drinking, and I was so depressed I was going to quit the art world all together." By that time, the Williamsburg gallery scene was thriving, artist-run spaces had become commonplace, and Mr. Schachter started to feel the movement he'd helped create had been corrupted. It was emulating the four-white-walls model again, he felt, in another location, and trying to create another exclusive art bastion.

"I felt like what I was doing-the moving around the different locations-that was a novel thing in the beginning," he said. "But now I felt, like, so stale."

Attack of the Blob

So Mr. Schachter, who had worked briefly as a lawyer, stockbroker and traveling tie salesman for Nino Cerruti's grandson-"the most degrading existential dilemma"-before becoming an art dealer, considered even more briefly a post-art career in real estate. Serendipitously, in January of 2001, he met German real-estate developers interested in setting up a real-estate venture around a gallery. Mr. Schachter decided to team up with them to create a large space that would be both gallery and restaurant-whose design quickly took the shape, in Mr. Schachter's word, of "a blob." When no space could be found for the blob, Mr. Schachter decided to convert his kids' playroom, which also served as his study, while he kept looking.

"At first, [my wife] pretty much off-the-cuff agreed to it," Mr. Schachter said of Ms. Rich. "Then, when I had to move my office and started to encroach the place, she became progressively less complacent until she was pretty much at my throat. Then I explained to her that Vito's space was in steel, and she was like, 'I hate that-I hate that sensibility.' Now, of course, she loves it, but if she was ever in that space, it would be painted stripes."

Asked how other dealers had responded to the space, he responded with a characteristic shrug.

"As long as they don't feel economically threatened by what I'm doing, they won't care," he said. "They'll say, 'Good, good,' but they'll go back to their little white thing and try to hawk the same paintings they've been trying to hawk to the same people over and over and over. But I don't care. I'm not going to stop. I'm always yap-yap-yapping.