Art That’s Best Seen Through the Bottom of a Glass
Culturefix is a combination bar and gallery on the Lower East Side/Eirini Vourloumis for The New York Times
With notable exceptions like long-distance running, any-distance driving and matters of personal hygiene involving sharp blades, most activities go down easier and happier with a drink in hand.
This certainly applies to the viewing of art, which can otherwise be too passive an affair — at least for me. It’s safe to say that if museums permitted visitors to tote stiff, cold gin martinis, I’d be a veritable squatter at the Louvre and on infinitely more intimate terms with Michelangelo.
Alas, they don’t. But Culturefix, a combination bar and gallery on the Lower East Side, does. It won’t let you gaze upon art with a martini per se, but that’s just because its liquor license covers only beer and wine. So perhaps a glass of grüner veltliner or a stein of German ale is what you’ll carry as you wander from the front of this multichambered, multicharmed establishment to the back, where the paintings (or whatever else Culturefix is displaying) hang.
Spirits have long been a big part of spectator sports. Of live music, too. But apart from the perfunctory pinot grigio at many a small-circle gallery opening, the integration of cocktails and chiaroscuro isn’t nearly as routine. Maybe that’s best. Red wine stains aren’t the easiest to remove, and it would be a shame to lose a masterpiece to a merlot.
Even so, there have long been scattered opportunities around town to have your art and drink to it too — in a fashion. While the King Cole Bar in the St. Regis New York hotel is first and foremost a watering hole, it is defined, really, by the “Old King Cole” mural, painted by Maxfield Parrish in 1906 and treated to a $100,000 restoration just three years ago.
There are also murals — entrancing, wraparound ones — at both of the magazine editor Graydon Carter’s Manhattan restaurants, the Waverly Inn in the Village and the Monkey Bar in Midtown.
And a wraparound mural is what all those drawings by the illustrator of the Madeline books add up to at Bemelmans Bar, on the Upper East Side. But in a room so dark, they essentially play the role of wallpaper, the visual equivalent of ambient noise.
Besides, I get the sense that few Bemelmans bons vivants notice them, just as I too infrequently hear people who have been to the Rose Bar in the Gramercy Park Hotel rave about the art in and around it, by Andy Warhol, Julian Schnabel, Jean-Michel Basquiat. Rose Bar is essentially a liquid gallery that gets credit for the liquid part only, and maybe for the velvet upholstery and chessboard floor as well.
So I was intrigued to hear about the opening this year of two bars on the Lower East Side that conceived of — and advertised — themselves as spaces for the exhibition of art too. Culturefix is one; the other is called Panda.
I hit Panda, on Chrystie Street, first. It’s a raw, ramshackle place that looks sort of thrown together and half-baked. I don’t mean grunge chic; I mean just grunge.
The small bar in front stocks hard liquor as well as beer and wine, but doesn’t have an extensive or inspired selection of any of those. I took a chance on the red sangria, figuring an operation this modest wouldn’t bother with sangria if it didn’t have a tasty trick up its sleeve. I figured wrong.
And yet I wasn’t unhappy here. That I could take my sangria for a walk —and that the walk could lead to a back area with ample elbow room — were pleasing anomalies in space-crunched Manhattan. In that back area I unhurriedly examined about a half-dozen paintings, including two portraits of black women with majestic presences by an artist named Francis Simeni. I also gazed upon a pink neon L-O-V-E sign in which the L and O weren’t illuminated.
“What’s the significance of that?” I asked the bartender, who had left his post and was ambling around. I tried to sound all thoughtful and art critic-y.
“It’s just broken,” he said. “And it’s not art. The artists keep asking us to get rid of it, because people keep making that mistake.”
Culturefix is on Clinton Street, and it’s a more composed affair through and through, opened by two refugees from Jeffrey Chodorow’s restaurant empire: Ari Stern, 33, who worked as a chef, and Cole Schaffer, 25, who worked as a manager.
Their wine choices aren’t utterly obvious — there’s a Côte de Gascogne blanc, for example, by the glass, for $6 — and the beer selection is even more interesting, with more than half of the dozen choices ($4 to $9) brewed in New York State. Mr. Stern also executes a limited menu of small plates ($4 to $12), including braised pork cheek and roast duck, and occasionally converts the bar into a dining room for a multicourse chefs menu he calls Dinnerfix. It is announced about a week in advance on the Culturefixny.com Web site and Facebook page, and costs anywhere from $50 to $150, depending on ambition and theme.
To reach the rear gallery space, which is furnished with tables, chairs and a long couch, you walk up a festively painted ramp from the bar. This back area is used for a variety of musical and culinary events and private parties; on the night I stopped by, there were about eight people taking a “Joy of Cheese” seminar.
Their high-lactose chatter formed an aural backdrop to my perusal of nearly 20 painting and drawings by about a dozen artists, one of whom really got under my skin. His name is Geoffrey Carter, he works with charcoal and graphite on paper, and his vaguely deformed, archaic characters and lugubrious landscapes might well be labeled prairie macabre. I was riveted, unsettled and glad I had that Gascogne blanc to steady my nerves.
Up another ramp, back in the direction of the street, is a store connected to the bar and gallery. Called Dijitalfix, it’s a new outpost of an established Williamsburg, Brooklyn, business that sells whimsically designed desk and office paraphernalia, unusual calendars and electronics accessories with as much of a premium on design as on function.
Its manager, Ruth Gruca, is an evening’s entertainment all her own, so quickly and deftly does she extrapolate and celebrate the virtues of any item you touch, pause over or comment on.
I admired a camera.
“It’s really exciting!” she chirped.
I said a computer bag was handsome.
“And it’s really durable,” she added, within a nanosecond.
My companion said a pair of headphones was shockingly comfortable.
“They’re like feathers,” Ms. Gruca marveled. “They’re like La-Z boy chairs for your ears.”
Then she really got our attention, informing us that any purchase in the store meant a free drink from the bar. I bought a BlackBerry accessory and some ridiculously fancy alternatives to Post-It notes, totaling about $35. These two items meant two free drinks, a value of $15.
And in this store my wineglass was welcome: I sipped as I browsed. What do you know? Shopping turns out to be yet another activity abetted and enhanced by a tipple.
From: The New York Times, November 26, 2010 by Frank Bruni
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