Courtesy Gagosian

Jeff Koons's 1998 "Puppy Vase" (shown with flowers)

Damien Hirst Andy Warhol Tom Friedman Edward Ruscha Cy Twombly Takashi Murakami Jeff Koons Franz West

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

The sleek, 2,500-square-foot, bi-level space, which opened to the public this past weekend, also inaugurates London import (and Gagosian artist) Damien Hirst’s publishing company and retail shop Other Criteria on the lower level, making for a kind of casual art emporium with a fancy ZIP code.

The street-level portion includes a video art projection wall and a cozy reading lounge, complete with a leather sofa and decorated with a wall of nonvintage black-and-white photographs of Pop art stars back in the day by Ken Heyman and boxed as a set of 13 prints from an edition of 46, for $8,500.

The shop offers virtually all of the Gagosian-empire publications, posters, and prints, as well as limited editions by John Currin, Tom Friedman, Ellen Gallagher, Hirst, Jeff Koons, Marc Newson, Richard Prince, Ed Ruscha, Tom Sachs, and Franz West. But the selection is certainly not limited to printed matter. The vibrant mix of stuff in the shop, a definite takeoff on Hirst’s New Bond Street and Hinde Street Other Criteria stores in London, included a set of 12 signed and numbered Hirst Superstition Plates, with a butterfly pattern in bone china, from an edition of 250 and priced at $15,000, including the presentation box. (You can also purchase them through Other Criteria in the U.K. for £10,000.)

Also among the offerings are a limited-edition print of Koons’s Monkey Train (2008) for $50,000 (from an edition of 40) and a Franz West Uncle Chair from 2008, in metal with textile bands for $6,000. A row of Koons’s puppy-shaped flower vases in white porcelain, from an edition of 3,000 and priced at $7,500, were stationed on top of a Newson marble Low Voronoi Shelf (White) (2008), priced at $375,000 in an edition of eight.

There was plenty of rubbernecking on the sidewalk on Saturday afternoon, as Madison Avenue window shoppers took advantage of the beautiful September weather and tried to make sense of a crowded window display replete with black-and-white images of a burlesque queen’s cheesecake poses by Prince juxtaposed with the slashing strokes of Franz Kline.

"What is it, honey?" asked one pencil-thin but matronly blonde bedecked with gold jewelry and two Prada shopping bags, staring at the window that included an Eames look-alike lounge chair, also by Prince.

Her companion hesitated before replying, "Oh, it’s a Gagosian shop. He’s all about image."

"Do you want to go in?"

"Not really," replied her apparently discerning friend.

The two continued their march uptown.

There was surprisingly scant traffic inside the shop on its first day of official business, though Takashi Murakami, outfitted in jeans, a white shirt, and sneakers and accompanied by a camera-toting friend, dashed in for a look around before diving back into their chauffeured van.

Asked about his impressions, the artist, whose major four-panel work, Picture of Fate: I Am But a Fisherman Who Angles in the Darkness of his Mind, just opened at Gagosian on 24th Street, restricted his comment to a contemplative giggle and a joke that he wasn’t in the market for anything.

But there really was a lot to choose from, including Sachs's hardware store accessorized Kelly Bag from 2009, priced at $12,000 apiece in an edition of five, and a brand-new Anselm Reyle Untitled wall relief made up of a steel frame and something called crinkled lacquer, from an edition of 10. (Reyle is having his first solo show with Gagosian this month, titled "Monochrome Age,” at the gallery’s behemoth West 24th Street branch.)

There were also several silkscreen prints by Andy Warhol (to whom Murakami is often compared), including Study for Flash Cover (1963) and Car Crash (1978), both "P.O.R." (price on request).

Encountered outside the shop, Manhattan artist Irwin Berman weighed in on his shopping experience. "I came to see the Twombly sculpture show upstairs," he said, "before I fell into this metastasis of the gallery. ... It’s probably all that one can expect from a decade that is so material. This shop is all about stuff: art stuff available to all of the wannabes who aren’t hedge fund managers or even cold-call brokers yet."