New York - part 2, 2024

Maurizio Cattelan, Sunday and November, Gagosian, New York

WHY I’LL NEVER BE LIKE LEONARD COHEN

Chelsea Stories: Anarchy, Art, and Affairs.

I'm a lousy singer. Can't dance either. I don't connect with music. Once—at a nightclub in Ibiza I'd been dragged into—someone asked me if I was the manager. That's painful. A night on the town with me is as lively as watching cacti grow.

But I connect with lyrics.

Chelsea Hotel #2 had been ringing in my ears for years. I know the lyrics by heart. I still don't need Spotify to hear Leonard Cohen's raspy voice croak, "You told me again, you preferred handsome men / but for me you would make an exception."

It's the story of my life in a single sentence.

I had convinced Reinhilde to stay at the Chelsea Hotel that year. She had been working in New York as I flew in from New Zealand. We stayed for three nights. Somewhere in the building, a baby was howling throughout the night. It was hot. We couldn't sleep. I was having "Visions of Johanna" while Reinhilde worried about the job she needed to finish in the morning.

We're quite complementary.

Strangely similar: a detail of Julie Mehretu’s work and the atmosphere at The Standard rooftop in 2011

I remember that the interior had been painted so many times over that the coating was like a thick white crust on the pipes, radiators, and all the woodwork. The room was bare. Someone rode a unicycle through the corridor and into the elevator, rocking it backwards and forwards all the way up without putting a foot down. The reception desk had the biggest reservation book I had ever seen. A bearded, balding man with black-rimmed glasses minutely recorded every guest in pencil. A small horsehair brush was within reach to wipe off eraser rubbings. He had no computer. Most things worked. For things that didn't work, there was a solution or an excuse. The excuses were more creative than the solutions.

Chelsea in the mid-nineties was an endless succession of outlandish encounters against a degenerate but beautifully brutal backdrop.

We used to walk from the hotel to the meatpacking district. In between abandoned warehouses, carcasses hung from rails under the canopies of the remaining meat wholesalers and packing plants. They stained the sidewalks with blood and fat. Transvestite prostitutes in chiffon bell bottoms hung around on Gansevoort Street and smiled at us, expecting we'd be in for a threesome. Around the corner, bikers and cops were drinking scotch and soda at Hogs and Heifers, country music playing loud. The Old Homestead served 115 dollar Kobe beef steaks to professionals from the Village. Every man-made construction was covered with the graffiti that—only years before—adorned the subway trains.

FAILE, night bender - video montage at The Standard - Stuart Parr Gallery, Chelsea

In Gasoline Alley, a few blocks further north, body shops and scrapyards were running their businesses amid decrepit freight tracks and streetwalkers. There were loading docks, leaking gas tanks, and discarded pallets. Richard Serra's Torqued Ellipses were on show at the Dia Art Foundation on 22nd Street. The space was too compact for the grandeur of the artworks, which made them look even more ominous. Their corroded steel smelled of blood.

Art had arrived in a gritty industrial wasteland. Bleak times required bleak environments.

It was rough then. Chelsea was for those who could stand the stink, and the gloom, and the perception of threat. A cloud of Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho seemed to loom over it.

We felt magnificently uncomfortable.

Barkley L. Hendricks, Steve - Chelsea in the noughts

Less than a decade later, Chelsea had 350 galleries. It took us two days to visit them all. We ended up at the cluttered Chelsea Market for noodles and Singha beers to recover from the monotony of the white-cubed spaces.

Then fashion moved in. Jeffrey's opened in 1999 among the butchers and the hookers in the Meatpacking District. Stella McCartney and Alexander McQueen soon followed. Spaces were bought, rebuilt, and reopened as shops, restaurants, and hotels. Soho House and The Gansevoort paired bobo chic with grime. The Standard was under construction. By 2009, I'd be standing stark naked in our hotel room on the 14th floor, overlooking the Hudson through its floor-to-ceiling windows, and exposing myself to the endless stream of traffic on 11th Avenue, hoping I wouldn't be recognized in the morning. Others wished they would.

A shimmer of sophistication had already blunted Chelsea's roughest edges.

We were there when the Highline opened and the last bars closed. We wondered how on earth flashlight batteries would ever propel a car at Tesla's showroom on W25th Street. The Whitney was set to arrive. Franchise stores were already there. Someone said to me, "If you want to make a fortune, buy property where the hookers and the depraved hang out, keep it for 15 years, and retire on the profits."

I guess he was right. But he was also late.

Paul Insect, untitled - William Pope, Red People Are My Mother when She Sick and Visiting Me in the Hospital

We kept coming back. Today, Chelsea is clean but lifeless. Chelsea Market is spotless, well organized, boring, and full of people with backpacks. It's owned by Google. There are package tourists at The Standard. They draw the blinds before they undress. The Whitney feels worn out and is full of retirees. Ten million visitors to the Highline crane their necks to get a glimpse inside the luxury condos that surround it.

We feel tediously uncomfortable.

The smell of gasoline and welding has disappeared. There's no more blood on the sidewalks of Washington Street. Hookers have become sex workers. You'll find their services online. Just like ordering pizza.

Chelsea is bland and commonplace.

Except for the art. The smaller, cutting-edge galleries are long gone. They have been displaced by global behemoths where Big Art meets Big Money.

Little embodies today's Chelsea better than Maurizio Cattelan's last show at Gagosian: in front of a 17 by 68-foot wall of bullet-riddled stainless steel panels, plated in 24-carat gold, is a white life-sized sculpture in Carrara marble of a homeless man on a bench wetting himself. It's flawless, emotionless, beautiful, and poignant.

Leonard Cohen died in 2016, and I'm still humming Chelsea Hotel #2 occasionally. For old times' sake, because there's little left of the hotel's past but its name and 20 rent-controlled apartments.

I'll never be like him. I'll never treasure "You were talking so brave and so sweet / Givin' me head on the unmade bed / While the limousines wait in the street."

Because it's all SUVs now.

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