A young gallerist with a good reputation decides to rent space on the ground floor of a legendary Chelsea building and the New York art world gets excited. Both ArtInfo.com and Lindsay Pollock raced to get the “scoop” that Zach Feuer and CRG gallery had leased space on the ground floor of the former Dia building, here’s Sarah Douglas in ArtInfo.com which won the race to post:

Feuer has signed a ten-year lease and will open his gallery in October when renovations, due to begin this week, are completed. The dealer declined to comment on the rent he’s paying for the space, but ARTINFO understands the rent is in the low $20,000 range, which is comparable to going rates for street-level space in Chelsea.

This comes on the heels of New York Magazine art critic Jerry Saltz’s latest Facebook outburst. Fulminating against the record Picasso sale last weekend, Saltz unleashed some vitriolic condescension toward the buyer and proposed an alternative use of the $106 million.

Had you taken $106 mill. & bought a gigantic building in the West 40s in NYC: 500,000 sq. ft.; & simply rented space ONLY AT COST to 100 good galleries & 100 artist studios you’d… have changed American art & the American art world, forever.

The statement is odd when juxtaposed with Saltz’s gleeful prognostication just after the financial collapse that 40- 50 Chelsea galleries would close and other institutions would suffer but that it would end up a good thing:

Recessions are hard on people, but they are not hard on art. The forties, seventies, and the nineties, when money was scarce, were great periods, when the art world retracted but it was also reborn. New generations took the stage; new communities spawned energy; things opened up; deadwood washed away.

Feuer, CRG to Former Dia Building (ArtInfo.com)

Zach Feuer, CRG Gallery Snag Ground Floor in Former Dia Building (Lindsay Pollock)

The Crash and the Critic (ArtMarketMonitor.com)