Boyce Cummings, Anthony Lister, Brian Ulrich, Roz Chast, Jack Earl

January 4, 2007 was a quiet night. Everyone was still recovering from the holidays and Miami, so there were almost no gallery openings in Chelsea, almost no postings on the blogs, almost nothing happening in the art world at all. But J.T. Kirkland was in New York and he wanted to go out -- in fact was going out almost every lunchtime and going through Chelsea -- and since Lyons Wier • Ortt was having an opening, we decided to get together and see what there was to see. J.T. had never seen a New York opening and he was interested in seeing "the scene" for the first time.

He picked a bad night. A really bad night. But he saw what he wanted to see, which was how many people -- and what kinds -- show up for openings around here. Answer: Lots and all kinds. In fact the wide range of attendees at art openings in Chelsea is boggling. I was so worried a year ago when I first started going to shows that I'd look somehow wrong; ordinarily I don't give a crap how other people perceive me, but when I began in the art world I wanted to make a good -- or anyway accurate -- first impression. Turned out I needn't have worried, because everyone and everything can be found inside a Chelsea gallery opening. People wear black tie; people look homeless. Goths, punks, street artists, street people, classical musicians, oil refinery mechanics, horse traders, professional golfers, dumpster divers, captains of industry, Mole Men from the Underdark. Everyone. It's as if you took one of those Victorian illustrators who made engravings of various ethnic groups and plunked them down in 21st century America, then flipped through the resulting book. Chelsea galleries, often thought, casually, as being elitist, are in fact one of the most egalitarian gathering places in all of New York City outside of Central Park itself. Even on a bad night.

The night wasn't just slow, it was also disappointing. I started at Winkleman where Ed was in a meeting involving a gesticulating Orthodox Jew so I couldn't do more than wave to him. I gave a quick look around at the show, Boyce Cummings, which I'd really thought would be better. I won't say too much about it because I didn't look that closely at any of the paintings; but then none of the paintings really made me want to look too closely. As near as I could work out, each canvas consisted of an argument between representation and abstraction; abstraction appeared to be winning, possibly because it's easier to paint.

I went next door to see Lisa and Sara Jo at Schroeder Romero and arrived just as they'd turned off all the artworks. (J.T. reports the show, by Ted Victoria, was very cool.) The result was a pretty fantastically minimalist installation of smooth glossy black rectangles hung on the wall. Lisa invited me to their next opening and I was off to meet J.T.

J.T. ran late -- through no fault of his own -- and left me at possibly the worst show of all time for waiting for someone. I'd had high hopes for Anthony Lister's show: First, Michael Lyons Wier and Anna Ortt had yet to disappoint me. For an entire year, I liked every show they had, and even loved some of them. Second, the image for the show online looked intriguing. And third, according to the gallery verbiage, Anthony was exploring a subject in which I was very interested. As a father of young children, I've wondered about the effect and influence of advertising, sponsorship, and consumerism on the minds of my kids. And as the gallery says, "As a conscientious 27 year old citizen and parent...Lister has created a body of work that unabashedly combines seemingly passive content with its probable underlying subversive message."

What I found in the gallery, however, was three paintings and an installation consisting of a pile of cardboard boxes. In the corner of the boxes sat some unfortunate performer in too-tight shorts and a homemade papier-mâché Batman mask playing with an old kiddie electronic keyboard and occasionally singing along very badly.

The show's signature image was the only decent painting, and that might have been okay only because it was so big, and I find big paintings tend to look better than small ones, if only because the large size lends more gravity. As usual, Anthony fell into the fine artist trap of being unable to competently reproduce cartoon characters like Mickey Mouse and SpongeBob, and ultimately his message was hopelessly shallow: Corporations use the same techniques to sell porn that they use to sell movies for kids! Sex sells! Won't someone think of the children?

I tried to give the show some slack, I really did. Then I noticed that there were three small LCD screens set crudely into some of the stacked boxes, and one of them was showing footage of the World Trade Center on September 11th. That did it for me: This show was not deserving of any goodwill. It simply sucked.

J.T. finally found me outside. Rather than make him shuffle through the tiny show on his own, I went up with him. I refused to say anything about the show until he saw it for himself so as not to poison the jury pool. Luckily, J.T. is a man of few words and quick opinions: It took him less than a minute to realize the work was crap. We left and, since we were in the building, floated next door, where we found a show -- I didn't get the names, but it was a two-artist team -- consisting of large hunks of rusting iron on the floor and some poorly stretched canvases which appeared to have been painted with metallic housepaint then left out in the rain for a year. I'll say this: Very few shows require tetanus shots if you accidentally brush up against the artwork, and that's a damned shame.

After that we were at something of loose ends; I didn't know of any other openings. J.T. only had one more he thought might be worth the walk, so we found our way to the Julie Saul Gallery to see Brian Ulrich's Copia. This consisted of several large photographs of American stores and Americans shopping. A guy pensively examines a fishing pole. A line of checkout counters at Target marches to the vanishing point. A woman on a cellphone muses over the refrigerated section of a supermarket. The gallery attendee grows so bored his autonomic nervous system shuts down and he has to be revived with an Automatic External Defibrillator (not available at Target, although you can get one very reasonably here).

Standing in front of one of the prints, I said to J.T., "Okay, so are these about the relentless dehumanizing effect of our shallow consumer culture on the human spirit?"

"Wow," he replied, "you figured it out that quickly?"

"Well, it could be about how there's beauty even in the mundane."

"It's the former."

In the next room, Roz Chast, the cartoonist, was showing some of her drawings. Cartoons. Comics. Whatever you'd call them. I have great good feelings towards all cartoonists. I think cartooning is a really difficult field of endeavor; I think it communicates with such a large audience that its practioners are very influential; I think all cartoonists are, in some measure, saints; and cartoonists have given me, collectively, so many hours of pleasure that I cannot ever put a cartoonist down, no matter what. That said, I never really understand or find amusing any Roz Chast cartoon. More power to her: I wish her all the success in the world. But if I never see another one of her drawings, I will not go to my grave disappointed.

J.T. and I wandered a bit after that. I'm not sure what else we saw. I know we stopped in at Nancy Margolis where we saw Jack Earl's show. Jack is a ceramic sculptor and this show looked like the Attack of the Hellborn Tchotchkes, like someone made a line of the worst Father's Day Hallmark figurines of all time. There were guys with bags over their heads, and, geez, you know, I don't even remember. They were all grimly humorous, well made, and ultimately not very exciting.

What else was there? We peered in the windows of some closed galleries, and that work was much better than what we'd subjected ourselves to. We walked dispiritedly back and forth across Chelsea hoping something good would fall on us. Eventually, I drove J.T. back to his hotel, got mildy lost in the financial district, and made it home early.

However, while we were walking around, J.T. confided in me his GREAT IDEA, which I highly recommend you go read about.