The Brooklyn Rail

Damon Crain says collectors “clutch their pearls” about visiting chaotic West 38th street to see his expanded field art gallery Culture Object, even though it’s only situated half a mile north of Chelsea. After four years and twenty-eight shows at this location, Crain is closing the maximalist atelier to strategize his next moves. While that means New York is losing one of its most interesting exhibition spaces at present, he’s going out with a flash. Crain put out an open call on Instagram, took ten weeks to sort through the four hundred applications he received, and chose forty-six artists who haven’t yet shown with Culture Object to curate THE END, the gallery’s last exhibition—for the time being.

Entering Culture Object is like falling down a rabbit hole. There’s a compact first room packed with larger-scale works of otherworldly furniture, but THE END begins the next room over, naturally illuminated by a full street-facing wall of windows—then concludes in a second room behind its first. There, a vast bounty of art objects play among black walls, stark lighting, and the two bookshelves beckoning visitors through a succession of grand spaces. It’s honestly astounding—every time guests think they’ve gotten all the way through, Culture Object offers another new room, including one inspired by James McNeil Whistler, a gilded cave, and another towering showroom stocked with shelves of vases, candelabras, ashtrays, and more.

Works in THE END, however, markedly balance visual drama with dimensions that lend them to easy acquisition, as well as their interpretation as art objects rather than furnishings. Every work in the show serves a function and, together, they account for a wide range of art historical movements. Two mirrors that Brooklyn-based Anna Rindos made in 2022 evoke Abstract Expressionism. The multiple mouths on Seattle-based Emily Counts’s cat lamp Tender Familiar (2024) feel markedly surreal. Two new, bold single-stem stoneware vases by Ariana Heinzman radiate like Fauvist foliage. Kate Rusek’s gourd-like vessels made from porcelain, gold luster, and the packaging of fertility medications speak to feminist art. Kalamazoo-based Jessica Brandl’s latest conglomerates of household utilities participate in the current trend of off-kilter ceramics, noticeable at art fairs across America.

THE END culminates the Midtown chapter of Culture Object’s mission to champion the concept of Expanded Field Art, reuniting the overlapping domains of art, craft, and design that have viciously distanced themselves from one another since the Industrial Revolution. Crain—who began in fine art but left the gallery scene in disillusionment two decades ago—has penned a long, intellectual manifesto advocating for that reconciliation. His press release for THE END is a more emotional treatise on the matter. Crain appeals to the growing malaise of an art industry totally sapped by our era’s quintessential economical adrenaline, both for buyers who want the hottest scores, and legions of artists, gallerists, and more who all fret over whether they’ll be able to eat.

“Do you remember when art was meaningful?” Crain’s release starts. “Now we have BMW-sponsored VIP rooms at the collector preview party, and virtual viewing rooms to push the latest drop to your Hamptons home without the inconvenient mess of a sticky East Village opening. Art is rebranded as a fashionable investment vehicle, gussied up as lip service for social justice.”

As we stood among the compelling works in the space, Crain pointed out that five galleries run the art market. “You cannot have a rich dialogue and interesting ideas in an environment that’s driven by an economic system controlled by a cabal,” he remarked. The galleries at the top are the few that don't have to worry about insolvency, for the most part. Art world professionals in power want to keep it that way. Scores without aspire to their spots. Even those who detest money’s dictatorial regime heed its stranglehold simply to keep doing their work. A desire for survival mediates every move, but constraints can inspire exploration as much as they inhibit it. The most valuable resource in this economy isn’t cash, but attention. Let the new generation of art patrons continue buying what the blue chips deem important. What’s their glamor worth without the admiration of the million eyeballs that also keep art magazine ad budgets afloat? Expanded Field Art exposes art, craft, and design for what they mostly are—aggressive market segmentation meant to move more merchandise in a system based on infinite growth.

None of the many artworks in THE END are much concerned with what’s happening on art fair floors. Literal function takes the place of an economic one, standing in for the conceptual engine visual art once offered. Crain is inspired by the defunct SoHo design store Moss—he’s even included four elegant upcycled hardware vessels by Harry Allen, who designed the landmark space. But where Moss’s catchphrase was “please don’t touch,”visitors at Culture Object can physically engage with whichever works they want, from opening the aluminum doors on Peter Harrison’s mahogany cabinet Ganymede (2019) to fingering the spindles on Bethany Strohm’s Spine Basket (2022), whose underside reflects with a blue tinge atop San Francisco-based Leslie Podell’s Baby Cloud (2021), a mixed media table. The relational nature of this show recalls the founding tenets of Dada.

Society is currently founded on the base assumption that everyone must earn their right to exist. Food, water, and shelter are not considered basic rights. Art, freshly separated from function in the grand scheme of history, justifies its own existence by serving economic ends. THE END concludes both this iteration of Culture Object, as well as the notion that functional art isn’t art. Overall, THE END is a must-see, for the works and the space, since there’s no other like it. Crain anticipates his next setup will be a little more practical for selling purposes, since that’s what will help his mission to survive. Not that he intends to give up his gusto. “Art is a dialogue we’ve been engaged in, in its current form, for 150 years,” he says. “It’d be criminal to let that dialogue die out because of economic interests. There’s a lot of juice to be wrung from this.”