Hurricane Sandy and the Future of the New York Art World

Michael Neff

The cleanup at Zach Feuer Gallery

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More About

• Lebbeus Woods
• Hurricane Sandy
• Chelsea (New York City)
• Visual Arts
• Arts, Entertainment, and Media

Add to this the innumerable gallery reopenings, auctions, benefits, and online sales organized to support hurricane relief—one ingenious work by artist Sebastian Errazuriz features an "I Love NY" T-shirt half-submerged by Sandy's waterline—and you have lots of innovative new business being done, much of it different from the conventional me-first variety.

Yet the best examples of the post-Sandy pluck come from the impacted dealers themselves. Marisa Newman of Newman Popiashvili, for example, has already scheduled an exhibition above her old space for November 15. Ed Winkleman of Winkleman Gallery has imagined an "adopt-a-gallery model"—in which larger businesses donate space for a month for impacted shows so their less fortunate colleagues can maintain the momentum of their rebuild. (Like all retail, galleries make money by being open, not closed.) Such an effort—and there are many other such ideas out there—seems entirely in keeping with Lebbeus Woods's embrace of the suspension of normal rules. Which brings me to a related thought I connect firmly with our new two-term president, Barack Obama: Never let a good crisis go to waste.