If the modern art world has a single headquarters, it is probably West Broadway below Houston Street in lower Manhattan. SoHo is the world's premier marketplace for contemporary art. Nowhere else is there a greater concentration of galleries whose business is solely contemporary art. In the twenty square blocks extending south ("So") from Houston ("Ho") Street between West Broadway and Broadway, there are nearly two hundred modern art galleries. Some buildings house five, ten, or even more--like department is Modern Art. Each gallery represents up to around twenty artists, exhibiting their work on a rotating basis and retaining a hefty portion of sales revenues. Collectors, critics, artists, and the more casually interested flock to SoHo to take advantage of the convenience of having so much art within walking distance. Like a year-round trade fair, SoHo acts as an ever-changing showroom for contemporary art. To tour the galleries of SoHo is to see firsthand the current state of modern art.
American Mainstream
SoHo hosts all kinds of new work, from established names to first-show artists, from run-of-the-mill to way-out, from cheap to outrageous. There are painting and sculpture galleries, poster and graphics galleries, galleries that feature photography, galleries that sell pottery. An ocean of art has resulted from modern art's having moved into the American mainstream, a phenomenon that has transpired over the past twenty years and that has exactly paralleled the development of SoHo.
Since the Pop Artists (Jasper Johns, Robert Rauschenberg, Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, et al.) began incorporating comic strips, American flags, newspaper photos, advertisements, ovens, fighter planes, and other media-borne images into their work, there has occurred a gradual erosion of the exclusionary "high art"-"low art" dividing line. A new modern art market has opened up with an ever-growing number of active collectors, both private and corporate.
In the past two decades, the number of artists and galleries has risen to meet this demand, and continues to expand exponentially. When Paula Cooper opened SoHo's first gallery in 1968, it seemed doomed to fail. Within a few years, however, other dealers were attracted to the roomy, inexpensive lofts that afforded ample storage space and easily accommodated the large-scale paintings of the Pop Artists and their contemporaries. The studios of a number of artists were already situated in the SoHo district, and dealers soon recognized the benefits of moving from upper Madison Avenue or 57th Street to the quiet, slow-paced, light industrial area. Today, the area is densely packed, and in addition to SoHo's core along West Broadway, a stretch of Broadway four blocks to the east is the site of scores of new galleries.
During the seventies, SoHo enjoyed the undisputed status of the capital of the avant-garde. Pop Artists continued to break new ground, and Minimalists and Conceptualists had their heyday. To get an idea of the kind of installations that helped generate SoHo's reputation, visit the New York Earth Room (upstairs at 141 Wooster Street) or the Broken Kilometer (393 West Broadway), two works commissioned of Walter De Maria in 1977 by the DIA Art Foundation. The Earth Room consists of a twenty-two-inch-deep layer of soil covering the entire gallery floor (visitors observe through a doorway but do not tread on the exhibit). The Broken Kilometer comprises
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