After the Internet, There’s Always Art

From Alex Williams at The New York Times…

Tim Nye, the bon vivant, Park Avenue heir and Chelsea gallery owner, has a theory about art openings. “You’ve got to do something that makes them say ‘Wow.’ ”

By that standard, the festivities for Swell, a three-gallery exhibition on surfing-inspired art that opened last month, lived up to expectations.

This was no typical art opening, in a windowless white box with chablis in plastic cups. Instead, the post-opening party crammed 250 scruffy artists, well-dressed buyers and art world insiders onto a 108-foot wooden Turkish sailing yacht moored on the Hudson River. A live band thundered funk-inflected free jams, while kegs flowed. The artist Norton Wisdom created a “live painting” on a sheet of translucent vellum illuminated by stage lights.

Always near the center of the action, sporting a broad mustache and chin puff, was Mr. Nye. “People are so jaded,” he said, shouting over the band while he leaned against the port railing. “You have to make it a happening.”

That seems to be his specialty. But Mr. Nye is not your usual scion of a New York real estate fortune, going about town, quietly sprinkling money around art fairs and museum boards. He has always tended to make big professional statements. In the 1990s, he earned millions of his own, as a high-flying dot-com entrepreneur, when the Web was in its unprofitable infancy. More…