Culture on the Verge Party Flatotel Hotel Reviewed by Jeffrey Gangemi Photographed by Evan Sung

Outside on a chilly almost-yet-not-even-close-to spring night in mid-town Manhattan wasn’t exactly where I wanted to be on this Friday night. But the image I had fabricated of the cozy loft with free wine and expensive spirits was too intriguing to pass up. The last thing I had pictured was this mob scene, this clusterhump that somehow spoke of the arrival of some European rock band in times less crazed than these. Somewhere inside, the thumping of dueling DJ’s mocked us.

There was no obvious entrance to this melee, otherwise known as the Scope New York Art Expo. Finally, I displayed my credentials and made my way into the hotel – the eye of the arty tornado. It was heartbreaking – hipsters everywhere mourned the “crazy” and “hectic” scene they had been forced to navigate en route to such a prodigious collection of art.

Some background on scope: their mission is to demystify the buying process of contemporary art while challenging our static views of the art world. They stage events that bring together up-and-coming dealers, curators and artists, in a relaxed atmosphere. These events attempt to serve as an alternative to the typical art fair by requiring each gallery to devote 80% of its art to one artist, allowing the viewer to have a personal dialog with the artist.

Basically, the show encompassed a rented hotel with galleries from around the world, each housed in a separate room. Every room we entered seemed to have a couple speaking in tongues, wearing Spanish leather and eyeing you up as you walked in, supplying no specific direction or background on the pieces you were looking at.

This trend continued until we came upon the Apollo Prophecies, the imaginative, daring, and eccentric work of two artists now displaying at the Yancey Richardson Gallery in Chelsea (www.yanceyrichardson.com). Nicholas Miles Kahn of New York and Richard Selesnick of London have worked together since the mid-80’s, when they graduated from art school together and began teaming up to present their collective flights of fancy.

The Apollo Prophecies is the work of these two self-proclaimed “frustrated filmmakers,” depicting a flight of modern astronauts to the moon, where they meet a group of 15th-Century Edwardians, a society left to fend for themselves on the barren lunar surface. The installation encompasses all artistic realms imaginable – from video to sculpture to graphic print to text, as well as the one-of-a-kind, exquisitely crafted book of the scenes encountered by this group of fearless explorers.

To me, this exhibit was the one offering that displayed such talent and irreverence for the simple strategies of smaller minds. Not to say there wasn’t talent elsewhere. It just required a fuse the length of the line to get in, and a zealous desire to understand and experience all you could, knowing that you never could take it all in – even if you had two weeks to spend exclusively on the mind-bending intake of image and idea. Such is the nature of art – vast, timeless, limitless in scope – a scope through which we see the experience of other minds.