FOR the throngs who pack its streets on any reasonably dry Saturday, the sprawl of art galleries known as Chelsea is one of the hot spots of cool. But for art-world professionals, it is the place they love to loathe.
After a decade of rapid growth, the neighborhood now harbors more than 230 galleries within its borders, which stretch from West 13th to West 29th Streets and from 10th Avenue to the West Side Highway in Manhattan. That's twice the number of galleries SoHo had at its zenith in the early 1990's. The notion of spending a day "doing" the Chelsea galleries now seems downright quaint, since it would take at least a week to see them all.
As a result of this explosion, the inevitable anti-Chelsea backlash has been on the rise, too. The rap against Chelsea is that it is too big, too commercial, too slick, too conservative and too homogenous, a monolith of art commerce tricked out in look-alike white boxes and shot through with kitsch. This litany is recited by visitors from Los Angeles and Europe, by dealers with galleries in other parts of Manhattan or in Brooklyn and often by Chelsea dealers themselves. As the Lower East Side gallerist Michele Maccarone put it recently in an interview: "The Chelseafication of the art world has created a consensus of mediocrity and frivolousness."
Two of the city's most highly respected small art museums, the Drawing Center and the New Museum for Contemporary Art, both recently rejected the idea of relocating to Chelsea, in part because they felt they would be lost among so many galleries. Christian Haye, who has a gallery on 57th Street and who once memorably described Chelsea as "SoHo on crack," agrees. "There are too many big galleries competing with one another and acting like museums," he said recently.
Mr. Haye's mention of SoHo is telling; for many detractors, the problem with Chelsea may be that it's not, and never will be, SoHo. Those who started there miss the beautiful 19th-century cast-iron buildings and cozy streets, where galleries stood cheek by jowl with artists' studios, shops, restaurants and every subway line in the city. It's true that Chelsea offers few comforts. It is short on charm, public transportation, live-in artists and landmarkable architecture. It is all but devoid of shops and restaurants.
But in its own garish, daunting way, Chelsea is a delight, a carnival without equal, the greatest showplace for contemporary art on earth - and never more so than right now, as the gallery count rises faster than ever.
The dealers themselves inspire much of the antipathy: Chelsea is often seen as "dealer-driven," in contrast with the purer, "artist-driven" SoHo. But the dealers are exactly what's best about Chelsea. As small, basically family-run businesses, commercial galleries are the closest link between new art and the everyday public. Unlike increasingly corporate, supposedly nonprofit museums, they are run by one or two people who decide what will go on view, without having to get permission from a director, board of trustees or corporate sponsor - and admission is free. The dealer may even look longer and think harder than his or her museum counterparts, because the dealer's own money is on the line. And the link between the art and the public is especially direct in Chelsea; the glass-fronted spaces currently in favor allow pedestrians to see a great deal of artwithout ever leaving the sidewalk.
In all, the Chelsea gallery scene is exactly the opposite of monolithic or homogeneous: astoundingly diverse, a series of parallel worlds catering to different audiences and markets, from avant-garde to academic, blue-chip to underground. With art fresh from places as far apart as China and Williamsburg, Chelsea is messily democratic, the most real, unbiased reflection of contemporary art's global character. The Gagosian Gallery's impeccable three-ring circus on West 24th Street, the art world's answer to Niketown, faces the one-man band photography gallery of Yossi Milo, upstairs from a taxi garage. PaceWildenstein's Minimalist mausoleum on West 25th is just down the street from a building rife with scruffy old-time artist's cooperatives, decamped from SoHo. Understanding the huge differences among Chelsea's current crop of galleries - their types, tendencies, and origins - is the only way to begin to grasp the complexity of the whole.
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Thanks to the presidential campaigns, political art is suddenly cool in New York, though after Nov. 2, it will probably all go away again. But in much of the rest of the world -- Asia, Africa, Latin America -- artists make political art all the time. They live political lives. They have an encompassing sense of what political means.
Nalini Malani, based in Mumbai, is such an artist. Now in mid-career, she has been seen here only sporadically, with paintings in museum group shows and an intensely theatrical video installation at the New Museum two years ago. Both media play a role in her strong first Manhattan gallery solo, which draws on mythology, religion and history, both Western and Indian, particularly as they shape the lives of women.
In paintings, she dovetails the figures of Sita from the ''Ramayana'' and Euripedes' Medea -- the one an ideal of submissive self-sacrifice, the other an emblem of destructive fury -- to propose a complex female persona beyond controlling stereotypes. The conflicts implicit in their stories are also embodied in ''Game Pieces,'' an installation of mylar cylinders painted with animals and deities. As the cylinders rotate, the shadows of the figures travel across images of mushroom-shaped clouds projected on the wall, as if heaven and earth alike were trying to escape devastation.
For the installation ''Unity in Diversity,'' we are invited to sit in a parlor with blood-red walls and a short video. The video opens with an image of a 19th-century painting of smiling Indian female musicians. The original picture was exhibited at the World Congress of Religions in Chicago in 1893, where the spiritual leader Vivekanada spoke against the dangers of religious orthodoxy. Those dangers have been realized many times since, in India and elsewhere, and are dramatized in the video, as the women come to life in an account of the mass killing of Muslims by Hindus in Gujurat two years ago. Like everything here, this piece is subtler and sharper than a description may suggest. Ms. Malani is a political artist of impressive visual range, now at the height of her power.
HOLLAND COTTER
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