NEW YORK—On Wednesday, June 27, the luxury-lifestyle-meets-art magazine Whitewall celebrated the launch of its summer issue in a gallery called White Space, which is actually a condominium. If this sounds confusing, don’t worry—it’s quite simple. Earlier this year, longtime Chelsea dealer Jack Shainman Gallery teamed up with young real-estate mogul Michael Shvo to create gallery-like offices in the lobby of Shvo’s new building at 650 Sixth Avenue. The idea is that prospective buyers can buy art to spruce up their new units, which, by the way, look a bit like galleries themselves.

The atmosphere at Whitewall’s party was buzzy, in part, no doubt, because the only sustenance on offer was Godiva chocolates served on gleaming silver platters. No, that’s not exactly true: the svelte crowd also sipped sweet rum drinks. So everyone was on a sugar high. Well, they sure seemed high on something. Life, perhaps? Or maybe the life promised by White Space in a propaganda reel that flashed across furniture (provided for the party by Chelsea’s Sebastian + Barquet gallery): images of Andy Warhol’s face, Marcel Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase, the words “1913: The Armory Show Shocks America,” and—jump to 2007—the opening of White Space.

So a lineage has been established, and if it sounds to you as though the avant-garde is being used to sell real estate, well, hey, you may be right. Consider how the work of Shainman artist Jonathan Seliger looks here. In Shainman’s gallery (and in museums, for that matter) Seliger’s sculptures—realistic re-creations of commodities like paper coffee cups, Chinese takeout containers, and bags from designer clothing stores blown up to well over life size—have a pleasant whiff of irony. In White Space, they look disturbingly earnest.

Of course, if Shvo is unusually explicit about his use of art to sell real estate (and vice versa), the spirit of his venture is nothing new. As I wrote in the pages of Art & Auction a year ago, New York dealers may heed the beck and call of grittier neighborhoods like the Lower East Side, fleeing Chelsea as the avant-garde gives way to luxury real estate: So many buildings! Thousands of units costing millions of dollars! Jean Nouvel! Frank Gehry! The High Line! Amenities! Lifestyle living! And also … wait for it … art!

The Caledonia on West 17th Street boasts in its print ads: “The comfort of home; the cool of West Chelsea.” Its Web site features a big color photo of youthful art lovers gazing at pictures in the cleanest of white box galleries; the caption reads: “Sunday, enjoy croissants and cafe au lait from a local bakery and then head to the DIA and the galleries.”

Wait a minute… The Dia Foundation’s Chelsea space has been shuttered for a while now, and it recently abandoned plans for Meatpacking district digs (at the southern tip of the High Line). And, by the way, art galleries are, like, closed on Sundays. Then again, in today’s market, they may be planning special opening hours just for residents of the Caledonia.

One work in the White Space show did throw a perhaps inadvertent pie in the face of new real estate. Leslie Wayne’s abstract painting is a flat monochromatic surface in which two large handfuls of paint have been violently scooped out, as though the wall itself had been violated. One wonders what the late Gordon Matta-Clark, whose retrospective closed in April at the Whitney, would have made of Manhattan’s booming Lower West Side. It was Clark, after all, who in his pursuit of what he called “Anarchitecture” led his band of pranksters to a disused building on the piers to slice a giant aperture in the top of a wall, so that light could flood into the warehouse-like space, Hagia Sofia-style. This bit of urban sublime was par for the course in the ludic downtown of the 1970s.

A generation later, we have White Space—and the manufactured sublime of high-gloss condos aping art gallery design.