Truly, the band of bon chic bon genre artists, patrons and gallerists assembled at Capitale Monday evening all appeared in shades of sable. Black jackets, black cocktail dresses, black eye-liner and black ties streamed into the room, punctuated by wan, porcelain faces. The group’s chatter  soon reached a dull roar, and guests did their best to shout and drawl simultaneously. “I don’t really think they’re crypto-fascists, do you?” someone asked. We did not catch the subject of her inquiry.

Christened in 1981, BOMB magazine has enjoyed three decades of blessings from artists of both wide and marginal renown, the art world’s papal personae and choir-boys alike. While the full spectrum of BOMB devotees appeared at the gala, the vast majority were noteworthy members of the contemporary art scene. Marina Abramovic, Klaus Biesenbach, Dorothy Lichtenstein and Tim Nye all greeted their coal-clad friends and enjoyed the array of comfort-food canapés.

Various paintings and sculptures, donated by artists and galleries for a silent auction, were scattered throughout the room. Our personal favorite, bar none, was an apparently kitchen-made concoction by B. Wurtz, crafted from a Citarella Tupperware (once filled, in all likelihood, with a truffled goose fat marinade), a piece of wire and small wooden cylinder resembling a toiler paper roll.

Having enjoyed a mini ham-and-cheese sandwich, The Observer spoke to Betsy Sussler, BOMB editor-cum-matriarch. “I thought it was going to ‘bomb’ in the first couple of issues,” she said, explaining the quarterly’s inauspicious title. “What I didn’t understand was the groundswell of artists who really, really loved the idea.”

Still, the handle has not come without difficulty. Mayhem erupted after a box of magazines, with the ominous return address label, was sent to the Smithsonian. “People at the Smithsonian called the fire department because they thought it was a bomb. But we all said, ‘Would we have put it on the box if it were?’” Still, however, she doesn’t expect bomb-squads or naysayers to dismantle the publication anytime soon. “It delivers the artists voice,” she said. “And that can last generations and generations.”

Richard Serra, one of the evening’s honorees stood quietly amongst the crowd, a glass of cold water in his hand. A longtime friend of Ms. Sussler, Mr. Serra noted the unique space BOMB has occupied for the past thirty years. “I think it provides a venue for a multiplicity of media, that are unavailable in other formats. So whether its architecture or poetry or literature or film, or interviews, they not only cover unexpected youth, but they cover people that you would not be aware of,” he said slowly, deliberately.

Although BOMB helps him stay abreast of emerging trends and art personalities, Mr. Serra has little interest in many other mainstays of the contemporary art realm. Art fair season has long since lost its appeal, he explained. “I don’t pay attention to that. When I started making art there wasn’t a cultural industry, and now there’s a cultural industry that’s worldwide, and billions of dollars,” he said. “And I don’t go to those events.” Still, he doesn’t oppose the concept of art fairs, walks, tours and parties, he prefers his singular, steely zen. “Its not my interest,” he said with a wizened shrug. “I’m not trying to be cynical,” he added quickly.

Meanwhile, on the other end of the spectrum and the other side of the room, Eric Fischl shook hands and chatted loudly, clearly comfortable in the cocktail milieu. With his hair tousled and his oxford shirt half tucked into his jeans, he was indeed at ease.  We asked Mr. Fischl what recent art trends he finds most vexing. “Probably all the art that is like art made by children. Like the pre-pubescent adolescent jokey type stuff: Toys, dolls. It’s time to grow up. That’s where I’m at,” he said, with a beer-on-the-beach intonation.

Soon, guests were ushered into the main dining space, flanked by gilded Corinthian columns and two full bars. Honorees were toasted by friends and contemporaries over a first course of yellowfin tuna sashimi. Taking the stage for her introduction of Mr. Biesenbach, Patti Smith was welcomed with a warm ovation. “If you’re applauding my glasses, the frames are from Germany,” she began. Theresa Rebeck presented her close friend Marsha Norman with a bomb-shaped award, while Hal Foster saluted Mr. Serra.

After a course of stuffed leg of lamb, guests made their way back into the foyer for dessert and final auction bids. James Franco materialized from the twilight Chinatown ether and entered the vaulted, vaunted room. Serendipitously finding him adjacent to the B. Wurtz piece, we asked him what he thought of the sculpture (which had by this time reached a high bid of $4,100.) “Don’t ask me that,” he said, heaving a disinterested sigh. Well, fine.

What was the most outrageous thing Mr. Franco had seen recently, we wondered. “That’s a weird question,” he grumbled, proceeding no further. He was, however, eager to discuss his most recent art project. “I’m doing a big show in L.A at the MOCA, called rebel,” he recited. “It’s inspired by the Nicholas Ray movie, the James Dean movie, rebel without a cause.” Whether he is a rebel and what his cause may be the, world might never know, as he chose not to answer our question. Instead, he asked us if we had seen HBO’s Girls.

As the evening was coming to a close, guests nibbled cannoli, brownies, lemon bites and chocolate peanut butter squares as they scribbled their final bids on the auction artwork.  Coffee (black) concluded the evening. Mr. Biesenbach, Mr. Franco and Ms. Smith left together, a triad of noirish sang-froid disappearing into the still-young night.
editorial@observer.com

"DJED" (2009-2011) by Matthew Barney.

The materials of Richard Serra’s two enormous new sculptures, currently dominating the Gagosian Gallery on 24th Street, will be recognizable to anyone who knows Mr. Serra’s work. They’re made from curved, continuous steel plates more than thirteen feet high, rusted into shades from powdery orange to Martian mahogany, and marked with what are or appear to be scales, drips, streaks, stretch marks, shadows, calcium deposits, water stains, and lightning bolts. The rust continues so evenly that it’s only the occasional glint of a silvery, unrusted corner that looks like evidence of the human hand. Seen from above, their shapes are also recognizable: Cycle is a triskelion composed of three floppy, interlocking “S”s, which create three roughly circular clearings and three spiraling corridors. Junction, also made of steel plates doubled into corridors, looks more like a pinched, four-pointed star.

An abundance of visual references presents itself, too. Two great, bowed curves meeting in a single opening—the visitor’s first view of Cycle—seem to mean something clear enough, particularly when, on closer inspection, the one opening actually offers two, one leading quickly into an empty round chamber, the other continuing on with narrow walls that move rhythmically together and apart. Walking between them doesn’t feel like something that should be done in public. But then that tunnel becomes a primordial cave, and the cave becomes the ocean, and the swaying of the walls, the tides, and you pass glaciers and teepees and burial mounds and abattoirs until you emerge into a grotto where a surprising patch of light falls on a splash of brighter orange. When you stop walking, you see nothing but steel.

Because the only place you can see Junction and Cycle from above is in photos on the gallery’s website. The impossibility of seeing the whole of a piece from any single angle, a defining feature of sculpture as a medium, is raised in Serra’s work to a monumental haughtiness. Their size and the size of their fame always draw an audience—people take pictures of their friends against the rust while little children go running past them—but it’s an audience that’s merely permitted, not required. And the pieces are certainly activated by walking. Every step reveals a new grand gesture of color and shape, and a numinous presence seems to hover behind you as you move. But the effect is less like art speaking to you than it is like a striking desert vista changing the way you hear yourself. Even the strips of black rubber hidden between the joints read like some geological buildup. It’s sculpture that can be looked at but refuses to be seen.

Matthew Barney’s “DJED” at Gladstone Gallery, another crowded spectacle, is equally monumental in its conception and also uses large quantities of metal to imposing effect. But where Serra’s monuments can be remote, casting off emotion, images, and ideas with the same indifferent tranquility, the four large sculptures here have, if anything, as many ideas as they can handle.

Canopic Chest, DJED, Secret Name, and Sacrificial Anode, being shown along with a dozen drawings, were made in connection with a multi-part, multiple-site-specific, not yet completed opera—directed with Jonathan Bepler, who also wrote the music—that takes its name and its conceit from Norman Mailer’s 1983 novel Ancient Evenings. Mailer’s novel follows one ancient Egyptian soul through death and rebirth in three successive incarnations; in Mr. Barney’s opera—which hovers over “DJED” like the ghost of Egyptian grandeur over the British Museum—the hero is incarnate as multiple cars: a 1967 Chrysler Crown Imperial, a ‘79 Trans Am, and a 2001 Ford Crown Victoria.

DJED, twenty-five tons of iron poured live during the performance of the opera’s third act in Detroit, is now a smokey gray puddle with two spindly tributaries flowing out to two hard graphite blocks, with a casting of a car’s  undercarriage set beside it. Secret Name is a broken, melting bathtub cast in lead and partially covered in white plastic. (There’s also a short, thick wall of black plastic, a piece of copper with the texture of scorched pig skin, and a self-consciously arranged cast lead rope.) Secret Name shares with DJED the power of its monumental scale, which, even prior to its particular formal details, inspires you to imagine our small American stories with the silent, alien grandeur of the distant past. Sacrificial Anode, meanwhile, a row of crowbars and rods cast in zinc and arranged on a white plastic beam, marks out an intriguing alternate direction: the smallest piece, it’s also the only one that could really stand alone as a sculpture without the context of the larger project.

The supporting mythology of divine incest, murder, and miraculous rebirth, as detailed in the illustrated libretto booklet, seems disturbingly well chosen and fresh. After Osiris, the prototypical Egyptian god-king, is murdered and dismembered by Set, for example, his wife Isis finds and reassembles all of the pieces except the penis, which she can’t find and so replaces with a replica made of gold. Canopic Chest is a bronze casting that looks like a pile of black slag molded into the shape of a car hood and infested with short lengths of protruding wire, and on top of it there rests a long, golden, ibis-shaped crowbar. What could possibly be a better metaphor for where we stand as a country than a reassembled Chrysler sarcophagus with a prosthetic gold penis?

editorial@observer.com

According to Halstead broker Cynthia Hepner, who once put the property on the market, Mr. Serra owns several floors in the building already, two of which that she knew of. "He used one for his studio one for living and I guess he just wanted another floor," she explained. (The third floor was unlisted when the Serras bought it on August 25, according to the deed.)

Records on Property Shark show that in 1996 Ms. Serra applied for the permits to transform the first floor of the building from a residential space into an art studio. Another record from 1996 show that Ms. Serra asked permission "for the removal of interior partitions at the second floor." Again, in 1998, Ms. Serra applied successfully to add a sixth floor penthouse to the building, designed by ur-gallery architect Richard Gluckman. According to phone records, they have been on the fifth floor since 1977.  That leaves everything but the fourth floor in their control—it must be mighty lonely there.

The Observer called Ms. Serra, whom an assistant declined to make available.

It's no wonder that Mr. Serra, known for his giant steel sculptures, has an affinity for the building. Ms. Hepner explained that the building was once an industrial factory. "They used to do heavy machinery and construction or something," she told The Observer. "It’s a pretty durable building."

According to Ms. Hepner's old listing, the newest edition to Serra's Duane street spread includes "original steel and wood columns and beams throughout." Photos show vintage looking beams, nicked and discolored with wear.

The home was sold by Gilles Frydman and his wife, Monica. Mr. Frydman founded the Association of Cancer Online Resources which, according to their website, is currently based out of the Duane Street property.

"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

With 43 drawings and 28 sketchbooks tracing his work from the 1970s to the present, this is a drawing show where you don't need reading glasses. A few early works in the first room map in charcoal on paper something Serra drew, but soon giant oily shapes take over. Triangle affixes a 6-foot triangle to the wall. It's solid black, sculptural, smearily gestalt. The drawing is not about how your eye sees line, but how your body reacts to its massive shape. A number of pieces have been remade for the exhibition; the galleries smell like fresh oil paint, like newly cut hay to an art viewer. Black paintstick--an oil-based, oversize crayon--is Mr. Serra's medium of choice. This is the ideal art exhibit for someone who is color blind. Every piece is black.

Donald Judd wrote in 1965 that "half or more of the best new work in the last few years has been neither painting nor sculpture," and you get the sense that Mr. Serra got the memo. In the late '60s, he made up a list of verbs on a sketchbook page. which is on view: "to roll," "to crease," "to fold," "to time," "to laminate," "to scatter," "to grasp," "to knot," "to cut," "to curve," "to remove." "To draw," and "to paint" were not among them.

Mr. Serra was born in San Francisco in 1939. A muscular man with an M.F.A. from Yale and two years of looking at art in Paris and Italy under his belt, he was 28 living in New York in a loft on Greenwich Street, supporting himself by moving furniture. He had just started to work in lead, fiberglass and rubber. At about this time Dan Flavin, Carl Andre and Sol Lewitt had been in the 1966 Primary Structures show at the Jewish Museum; their move to make impersonal, reconstructable work and use the gallery as an installation environment is evident. But Mr. Serra's real community is Robert Smithson, Eve Hesse, Yvonne Rainer and Bruce Nauman--people who politicized and eroticized Minimalism, who above all brought it back to the body. Mr. Serra's brother is the counterculture San Francisco trial lawyer Tony Serra ("More freedom for more people through law is a beautiful concept"), and both Messrs. Serras may err on the side of defiant anti-institutional idealism.

In Blank, two giant facing rectangles press on either side of the narrow walls of gallery. Walking through the show you realize Mr. Serra's work is not compositional. It doesn't have parts or bases. When you get close, you see his infinitely dense shapes are held in place with tiny black staples pushed directly into the wall. If the show is not about painting, or even drawing, it is about scale, mass and the way planes pull at you. It's like meditation: You start to notice how you stand on the balls of your feet, the way certain things attract you or repel you.

The 1970s drawings are also often funny, even endearing. In Institutionalized Abstract Art, a black circle with a 90-inch diameter has been paintsticked directly on the wall about 7 feet up. The black registers as absence, a hole in the white wall, and the piece looks like a giant cartoon mouse hole. Mr. Serra knows that black empties out the steel shapes in Forged Drawing, so that rather than massive, these paintsticked sculptures look hollow, like pipes. It wasn't clear to me that laughter would be a welcome response, though, and the glee the works elicited seemed a little out of place, so I stifled it.

It was the 1980s when Mr. Serra was at his best. Pittsburgh has slightly Guston-y radiant shapes, and time has haloed the paper with oil around the two barely touching paintstick squares. He was ticked off at the government the year he made No Mandatory Patriotism, two rectangles just touching at top with a wedge of white showing through their lower facing edges. (Tilted Arc, that 1981 debacle of site-specificity once installed at the Jacob K. Javits federal building, was removed in 1989 after much public debate; another drawing from the same year is titled The United States Government Destroys Art). This is the best room in the show, where Mr. Serra wields with delicacy the powerful relationships of form to form and artwork to viewer.

In the 1990s, the scale of the work grows smaller. These more picturelike drawings recap earlier breakthroughs. Their size and framing seems to retreat from the kind of engagement with the viewer and the walls that made the earlier rooms thrilling. In the late 1990s and 2000s, square-framed circles like Robert Frank and out-of-round X swirl paintstick into what looks like black radiant suns with a centrifugal velocity. They aren't resolved and seem on the verge of proposing a problem that other artists will have to solve.

The show's final room puts on display 28 of Serra's never-before-exhibited notebooks. Almost jarringly representational after the exhibition's insistence on pure form, these drawings are like postcards from places you'd want to see Mr. Serra sketching: the Giza Pyramids, the Guggenheim museum, the Le Corbusier Chapel in Ronchamp, Machu Picchu. Four videos, among them the literal Hand Catching Lead, round out the show's generous definition of drawing.

The artist is now 72 years old. He spent three weeks at the Met installing his retrospective, and the staff there seemed proud and almost proprietary of his presence, as if the artist himself were an artifact on loan. Mr. Serra at the opening pointed out that the Met was exhibiting his work simultaneous to Cézanne's Card Player series; Serra's One Ton Prop (House of Cards) (1969) suggests another way to view the mass and weight of the planes of paint in Cézanne.

Speaking with Michelle White, associate curator at the Menil, I was told that the Met's galleries were remodeled to accommodate Mr. Serra: The continuous decorative molding along the base of the walls had been taken out to install his often floor-to-ceiling works. (You can spot the remains of wainscoting along one stubborn wall.) The museum's molding is gone for good, and this is fitting--if works in the Met have influenced Mr. Serra, this exhibition has in turn definitively made the Met more modern.

editorial@observer.com

Six years later, the Belgian-born Mr.  Van de Weghe appears to have made a $1.2 million profit on the 2,100-square-foot Soho loft. Dubbed “THE most elegant condominium in Soho!” by a Corcoran rental listing in the building, it isn’t hard to see why Mr. Van de Weghe garnered such a high price. The buyer is an LLC called Real Mercer 77, a limited liability company first registered this past August care of the LLP Withers Bergman, who could not be reached for comment.

cmalle@observer.com

But you’ve got to start somewhere, right? Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years, on view at the Museum of Modern Art, would be an ideal pedagogical tool. It’s certainly kid-friendly. Mr. Serra has transformed the museum from a building full of stuff that’s good for you into a gargantuan playground of sloping corridors, towering hideaways and places to ditch your friends.

That the sculptures are kind of scary increases the fun. A commanding figure in the international scene, Mr. Serra has the pull and reputation to translate his ambitious vision into daunting realities. Anyone encountering his immense, undulating walls of Cor-Ten steel can’t deny the skill with which he draws spectators into the teetering parameters and hollows. Looping like Möbius strips, Mr. Serra’s “torques” engulf the viewer. We don’t look up at them; they look down at us.

Mr. Serra is probably best known for the Tilted Arc controversy. Bisecting Federal Plaza in lower Manhattan, his 120-foot-long running steel wall was commissioned by the General Services Administration in 1979 for the sake of the greater good. But to hell with aesthetics: Workers considered it a traffic obstacle. (The sculpture was also accused of attracting rats.) Public art typically functions as a modest complement to a city space. Mr. Serra put the 800-ton gorilla in the town square. Tilted Arc didn’t withstand the notoriety: It was removed and destroyed.

The sculptor’s early efforts are part and parcel of the heady milieu of the late 1960’s. Experiments with rubber, lead and neon reflect the pretensions of Conceptualism, Minimalism and performance art. A title, Remnant (1966-67), a hanging slab of vulcanized rubber, encapsulates the chief characteristic of Mr. Serra’s works around that time: inertia. They’re not self-sustaining art objects, but merely leftovers from specific actions: cutting, for instance, or tearing and splashing. Mr. Serra, in a fleeting moment of humility, admits that the “residues … didn’t always qualify as art.”

Nonetheless, he trumpets their purpose and presence: “Some of [them] were so replete in their exploration of material and the simplicity and singularity of the process that they would go unquestioned.” Has it occurred to Mr. Serra that the questions (forget the answers) weren’t worth the trouble?

The Prop series, dating from the late 60’s and early 70’s, incorporated a much-needed sculptural dimension and an intimidating—because potentially dangerous—equipoise. Utilizing thick lead planks and poles, Mr. Serra employed a house-of-cards logic. (One of the pieces is even subtitled House of Cards.) Precarious balance holds the props together. Four-foot-square sheets of lead touch, lean and balance with alarming necessity. In 2-2-1: To Dickie and Tina (1969-94), a pole glances lightly off a quintet of lead slabs, holding it all together and preventing collapse, disaster and lawsuits. A glass wall cordons the audience away from the Props, presumably because the slightest elbow bump would send them toppling. Threat is vital to Mr. Serra.

He’s a consummate showman, and an unforgiving one. Entering the sixth-floor galleries, visitors come upon Delineator (1974-75). A 10-by-26-foot sheet of steel lies on the floor: just another exercise in unadulterated material, you might think—until you look up. Affixed to the ceiling is another sheet of steel the same size. Mr. Serra’s shtick is to diminish the viewer, making him subservient to art and the artist’s will. Theatrical domination leads to awe—of a sort, anyway. Practicality becomes a focus: Gee, you think, it must’ve been a bitch to get that up on the ceiling.

From the mid-70’s on, Mr. Serra’s sculptures increasingly rely on engineering; the “how” outstrips “why.” This is especially true of Mr. Serra’s three-ring circus on the second floor: a parade of humongous funnels of steel, their surfaces burnished rich and ruddy with rust. Art often feels abandoned in MoMA’s cold and cavernous spaces, but the ebb-and-flow created by Mr. Serra’s edifices does much to remedy the shopping-mall ambiance. They’re great conversation starters: After the novelty of scale and size has lessened, museum-goers can mosey through the torques, squeezing around their edges and taking pleasure in Mr. Serra’s chutzpah and ingenuity. And again, we wonder how the installation crew dealt with these monsters.

Ultimately, Mr. Serra’s tremendous skill is overpowered by hubris. Aesthetics take a backseat to haughty spectacle. Responding to the Tilted Arc imbroglio, Mr. Serra stated that “art is not democratic. It is not for the people.” Engagement with the people? Creating objects that enrich our experience? Mr. Serra is above such mundane matters. He’d rather bully the audience than transfix them.

Perhaps it does take a 7-year-old’s sense of wonder to get around Mr. Serra’s heaving machinations. By the time I got to Torqued Ellipse IV (1998) and Intersection II (1992-93), both ensconced in the sculpture garden, I couldn’t help but smile at how Manhattan’s lofty buildings humanized the sculptures, effectively putting Mr. Serra’s overweening art in its place. The trees peeking over the top of each piece provide a lovely grace note.

Once outside, kids can run around and enjoy themselves without guards shushing them. Adults can inhale deeply and relish the sunlight. No one should have to withstand art for too long.

Richard Serra Sculpture: Forty Years is at the Museum of Modern Art, 11 West 53rd Street, until Sept. 10.

Never Mind Neverland

Fans of Sophocles, “Billie Jean” and the National Enquirer might be interested in Paul Pfeiffer’s Live from Neverland, a video installation at the Project. On one TV, Michael Jackson refutes charges of child molestation; on an opposite screen, 77 college students, dressed in angelic white robes, recite the entertainer’s lyrics en masse. Mr. Pfeiffer deftly syncs and stutters the silenced Jackson film to the cumulative blare of the adolescent Greek chorus. It’s unsettling and clever, but as a commentary on the arrogance of celebrity, Mr. Pfeiffer’s installation is too artful and fatally shopworn, not least because the King of Pop has long been beyond the reach of parody. Live from Neverland is satire without bite, sociology without insight and moralism without outrage.

Paul Pfeiffer: Live from Neverland is at the Project, 37 West 57th Street, third floor, until June 22.

Two Thumbs Up

Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism, on display at Pace Wildenstein, purports to uncover a crucial link between Cubism and the advent of cinema, between modernism’s fractured surfaces and the flutter of filmed images. The gallery mentions a “syntax of radical juxtaposition,” “an artificially constructed context” and other highfalutin’ ideas, but the basic point is that Picasso and Braque liked going to the movies. If that’s what it takes to bring together an astonishing array of paintings, drawings and prints, so be it. The inclusion of cinemabilia—such as an Edison kinescope and a Pathé phonograph—doesn’t distract, and silent movies on continuous loop have their charms. Particularly recommended is Slippery Jim (1910), a delightful cops-and-robber caper with special effects that are no less amazing for their quaintness.

Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism is at Pace Wildenstein, 32 East 57th Street, until June 23.

With Neo Rauch at the Met (May 22 to Sept. 23), the museum takes what might be its most convincing step yet into the 21st century. Mr. Rauch (b. 1960) is that rare creature: an international art star who merits the hype. In the German painter’s kaleidoscopic dreamscapes, nostalgia and dread are inseparable, and the present is a tenuous proposition.

Absurdly mixing and matching the conventions of Social Realism, the collage aesthetic and a disappointed futurism, Mr. Rauch’s paintings underline the burdens of history and the hopelessness of transcending them. Think of him as a slacker Max Beckmann for the Information Age, albeit without rage and without options.

Mr. Rauch’s bad pictures are few and far between, but neither has he created an image that brands itself on the memory; a dry and dour blur of portent is par for the course. Maybe one of the six canvases he’s painting exclusively for the Met will pin down the anxieties particular to our age.

New Yorkers who didn’t get their fill of grimly prophetic art with the Met’s Glitter and Doom can head to the Morgan Library to view Mr. Rauch’s forebears in social and psychological unrest: The museum will display German and Austrian works-on-paper by Egon Schiele, Max Beckmann, Oskar Kokoschka, George Grosz and Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, among others.

Culled from the collection of Fred Ebb—yes, the man who wrote the lyrics for Cabaret—From Berlin to Broadway (April 20 to Sept. 2) celebrates the estate’s gift of 43 drawings. Ebb’s interest in German popular music produced between the two world wars led to a specialized and, in retrospect, inevitable taste in art. Most of the drawings haven’t been exhibited for close to 30 years; they’re sure to benefit from a public airing—as, in all likelihood, will we.

How much bad acid trips, black-light posters and the Strawberry Alarm Clock will figure in Summer of Love: Art of the Psychedelic Era remains to be seen, but the Whitney’s foray into hippiedom will include a section devoted to the Human Be-In, with Allen Ginsberg and Timothy Leary, and Jimi Hendrix’s only known watercolor (May 24 to Sept. 16). Less hallucinogenic, though perhaps as vulgar, is Rococo Exotic: French Mounted Porcelain and the Allure of the East at the Frick Collection, an exhibition that details the fascination of mid-18th-century Parisians with Far Eastern porcelain, as well as their subsequent efforts to elaborate upon them: Florid metal stands were crafted to hold these exotic items. Presumably, the Frick will explore whether this was an homage to the exotic, or an imposition on it (March 6 to June 10).

Jonathan Lasker’s paintings, on display at Cheim & Read, revel in the clichés of abstraction: Touch is rendered chilly and gross, the relationship between figure and ground a ham-handed joke, and the palette is awful, acidic and loud—but in a good way (March 29 to May 5).

Whether you’re looking forward to Carroll Dunham’s crudely cartoonish paintings, upcoming at the Barbara Gladstone Gallery, will depend on whether you think murderous, fedora-wearing dickheads constitute a credible form of “psycho-sexual cultural critique” (March 24 to April 27).

Eric Holzman’s drawings, on display at the New York Studio School, promise pleasures of a more evanescent sort. A draftsman of unrelenting subtlety, Mr. Holzman demonstrates his love for Renaissance art and the everyday with works that fade in and out with a silvery ghostliness (March 29 to May 12).

Pace Wildenstein’s 57th Street branch will be presenting Picasso, Braque and Early Film in Cubism, a titillating conceit that will likely be another museum-quality exhibition from this redoubtable venue (April 20 to June 23).

And finally, the real reason the Museum of Modern Art undertook its expansion and renovation: Richard Serra. Well, perhaps not really, but is there another contemporary artist whose work wouldn’t be dwarfed by MoMA’s cold and cavernous spaces? Heading into the summer, the museum will fête Mr. Serra with a 40-year retrospective (June 3 to Sept. 10).

Having established his Minimalist bona fides by flinging molten lead into a corner of the room, Mr. Serra went on to achieve considerable notoriety with his towering walls of Cor-Ten steel—torquing panels that reconfigure space for those brave enough to sidle up to them. Bullying and elegant, Mr. Serra’s rusted monoliths and mazes are intimidating as sculpture and impressive as engineering. Getting the damned things into MoMA will be a feat in and of itself.

On a recent Saturday night, a cab deposited me a block from Schiller’s Liquor Bar in front of the hotel’s huge glass front door, which faces the graffiti-covered walls of a tenement across the street. I entered into a bulbous, red-carpeted white tunnel (the designer Marcel Wanders based it on a vase he molded from a condom filled with eggs). The tunnel wends its way into a bar and lounge whose soaring ceilings and walls are covered with a lacy, silver, black and white print that looks like snakeskin.

In the back, the 100-seat dining room is set with black polished tables, black chairs and black banquettes. Through the lofty glass ceiling and windows, the tenement fire escapes are like a West Side Story set. A giant black hulk of steel dominates the center of the dining room. It’s not a Richard Serra or a David Smith; it’s the entrance to a clanging metal staircase leading down to the bathrooms (where it’s too dark to fix your makeup). In the gloom of the cellar corridor, the men waiting in line looked like inmates in a gulag.

Thor has all the trappings of full-blooded downtown trendiness: the deafening bar scene; the wait staff, all great looking, all in black; the hostess telling you to wait “until your party is complete” before you sit at a table for two (which is actually already taken and won’t be free for half an hour); the bar bill to be settled before you’re finally allowed to sit down at your table, which is of the kind beloved by restaurateurs, narrow in width and extra long, like a table soccer game, so you have to shout across it.

But all this belies the seriousness of the food served here. Mr. Gutenbrunner’s cooking at Thor focuses less on the Austrian and more on greenmarket produce (although there is a pumpkin-seed vinaigrette on the Bibb lettuce and side dishes of spaetzle, rôsti potatoes and kohlrabi gratin). The wine list is international, reasonably priced and has many interesting choices from lesser-known vineyards. I also like the fact that the wine is served in elegant, thin-rimmed tumblers.

The menu is divided into categories by temperature: cold plates, warm plates (including a salmon lasagna with fresh tomatoes and a potato gnocchi with wild mushrooms) and hot plates. Begin with the white tomato mousse: It looks like a large scoop of vanilla ice cream and arrives on a bed of sliced heirloom tomatoes and opal basil. When you bite into the mousse, you get a subtle crunch from a thin pastry disk hidden underneath.

An herbaceous spinach and parsley soup is laced with croutons and enlivened with pieces of trout. Hamachi is cut in chunks and served in a spicy marinade with avocado and heirloom tomatoes. And a foie gras terrine comes with the last of the season’s peaches.

But piling American sturgeon caviar and finely diced tuna on top of the Kumamoto oysters amounted to overkill. My friend liked the oysters anyway. “The aftertaste is as though you’d dipped your head in the sea,” he said.

Baby romaine lettuce with one-hour poached egg is essentially a Caesar salad, topped with white anchovies and a Parmesan crisp. “One hour is a traditional Viennese way of poaching an egg,” said our waiter. Those lucky Viennese, with so much time on their hands!

My companion searched his salad with his fork. “I can’t find the yolk,” he said after a while. “I think it hatched.”

Main courses include perfectly nice but undistinguished venison (a special one day) and lamb chops, the latter with “14K golden nugget potatoes,” those waxy little numbers from the greenmarket. Sea scallops come in a subtle curry sauce on a bed of freshly shucked corn with a basil purée. Steamed duck is rolled in three dim sum-like cylinders wrapped in cabbage, with green asparagus and a jolt of mustard seeds.

Pastry chef Pierre Reboul previously worked with Jean-Georges Vongerichten and at Blue Hill in Greenwich Village. A “spur of the moment” raspberry vacherin was marred, for me at least, by licorice that left a nasty after-taste. But the cheesecake, with a tortilla-like wafer and a fromage blanc sorbet, was excellent, as was the homemade yogurt with pistachios, brown sugar and sesame. I also liked the lollipops filled with chocolate and served on sticks. They’re really beignets, and they’re delicious.

But one evening, I looked down at my plate in bewilderment. What had I ordered? Perched on a lump of ice the size of a bowling ball was a small mound that appeared to be covered with green slime. It was crushed avocado, sprinkled with salted caramel, placed on top of a tart lime sorbet. The whole thing taken all together was weird, one of the oddest things I’ve tasted, and not pleasant.

At the end of dinner, instead of petits fours, you’re given a sealed tube and some small, cold doughnuts. The tube contains not toothpaste, but a dark chocolate sauce. It’s a cute idea, and I’m sure some imaginative guests will go beyond cold doughnuts and find other interesting uses for it.

The Guggenheim’s adumbrated overview makes plain how hugely and gratefully indebted Oteiza was to the innovations of early Modernism, Cubism and Neo-Plasticism in particular. (You’ll find on display openly stated homages to Klee, Boccioni, Malevich and Mondrian.) Constantin Brancusi and Henry Moore also had a powerful effect on the young sculptor; with them he shared an abiding interest in the art of non-Western cultures. According to Oteiza, it was a love of pre-Columbian art that occasioned a 13-year stay in Latin America during the 1930’s and 40’s. He subsequently melded his attraction to primitivism with a greater fascination with “nothingness”: sculpture in which solid form is altered and defined by the space surrounding it.

In an appealing and folksy analogy, Oteiza likened this phenomenon to eating an apple: The core is determined by what has been displaced. The earliest pieces on view are totemic figures that the sculptor crafted by “scooping” out from the materials at hand: Indentations, incisions and drilled holes maneuver the eye away from the object to the outside pressures shaping it. He declared that his intent was “emptied” space, which would bear evidence of action having taken place.

Oteiza’s work wouldn’t altogether shed its allusions to the figure, but it came to rely less on the human form’s symbolic associations. Instead, by conveying a refined and elusive sense of musculature and presence, his later sculptures suggest organic systems powered by interdependent forces. Even his most architectonic creations—his hollowed-out blocks of black marble, for instance—preserve an indelible sense of the body’s logic.

When working with flat planes of steel, the sculptor transformed the “body” into a gathering of open-ended, contrapuntal surfaces, lilting envelopes of space. The Guggenheim describes the work as “proto-minimalist”—that’s what happens when Richard Serra bestows his stamp of approval on an artist. But Oteiza’s armatures slant, tiptoe, stretch and pirouette distinctively enough to escape that label. He may have limited his materials and means, but he didn’t rob them of possibility. He never reneged on art’s purchase on life.

What he did renege on was art’s purchase on passion. While Oteiza was undeniably in command of an intelligent and rigorous sculptural faculty, he never once went out on a limb. Problems posed in the studio (which he tellingly dubbed his “experimental laboratory”) never went beyond the scope of a ready answer. Given his tendency to frame artistic issues in scientific terms, Oteiza may well have considered art an adjunct of technology rather than an outlet for poetry. That probably accounts for the oeuvre’s intense, but ultimately detached and dulling, consistency. There are no high and low points. Each piece is invested with the same level of sculptural engagement—that is to say, just enough.

In 1959, Oteiza concluded “that sculpture can no longer be associated, as an expression, to man or the city.” He subsequently abandoned his art to pursue utopian politics. (He would take it up again, but only for three years during the 1970’s.) In advocating on behalf of Basque nationalism—a lifelong preoccupation—Oteiza gave free rein to the mystical bent that was embodied only glancingly in the sculpture. “A sculptor is no more or less than the initial and dramatic form of a universal form of man,” Oteiza said, rationalizing his attempts to reconnect contemporary Basque culture with its archaic roots. Part of the upshot of these efforts to revitalize Basque society was the solidification of his own standing as an artist.

Not being a student of Spanish history, I can’t vouch for how much credence the Basque people gave to Oteiza’s “anthropological aesthetics” or how much political impact they had. Putting naïve and convoluted philosophies into political practice is a recipe for disaster; better they be expended on something as lowly as art. Had Oteiza’s romanticism been put into play while folding sheets of steel or burnishing marble surfaces, perhaps the work would have reached beyond the scope of its politely circumscribed imagination. As it is, you’ll descend Frank Lloyd Wright’s edifice respecting Oteiza’s art, and remembering it, too. You might not love it, but can still be pleased to have made its acquaintance.

Oteiza: Myth and Modernism is at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, 1071 Fifth Avenue, until Aug. 24.