Marlborough Chelsea, a garage space at the bottom floor of a residential tower that can only be described as High Chelsea Baroque, was packed with an art opening's usual cast of characters last night, semi-poised models, slack-jawed spectators, prowling critics, and wine-guzzling hangers-on. There was some art around, a portrait painting gleaming with drying oil, some paint and other studio detritus dumped on the floor (to give an impression that the portrait was just finished), and a vintage car parked in the gallery's mouth. Giant vinyl letters on the interior wall spelled out the last name of the show's ostensible artist, which is also the title of the exhibition itself: "POWHIDA."

And then in the center of the space, the focus of the milling crowd, there was the VIP section, where a tyrannical artist in a garishly colored shirt and faux power suit presided over a sloppy entourage befitting a fallen rap star: a woman in a rumpled white bikini top, a buddy-cum-business manager, and a gold-toothed man in a Hawaiian shirt who said he "bred mythical creatures" for a living. The artist sputtered and fussed over his crew while velvet ropes and a reedy, unthreatening bouncer policed the borders (hired by the gallery and slightly baffled by his surroundings, he stated his job as to "keep people out"). There were lit cigarettes and half-empty cocktail glasses in most hands.

"POWHIDA" is a project by artist William Powhida, a rising star of the Brooklyn art community who has never been shy about biting the hand that feeds him, grabbing the art world by the balls with a series of satirical drawings that diagram hidden power relationships, scene hierarchies, and the righteous frustrations of the emerging artist. He has also been known for his conceptual critique exercises "#class" and "#rank" events created with artist Jennifer Dalton and often hosted by Winkleman Gallery. His work succeeds in exposing the buried, exploitative structures of the art world, a kind of consciousness-raising for those lower than blue-chip status.

Powhida is a part of Marlborough's plan to rebrand its Chelsea location as a hip home for young emerging artists, a pivot led by Max Levai (son of the gallery's president, Pierre) and sales director Eric Gleason with a series of short exhibitions this summer. Powhida, alternatively, has cast Marlborough in his scheme to skewer the corporate art world. The artist in the shlocky suit? That wasn't Powhida, but an actor playing the character of POWHIDA, a fictionalized, egomaniacal über-celebrity persona that the artist has been developing for years. The Marlborough exhibition might be seen as the fruition of his 2007 drawing of a fake New York Magazine cover featuring POWHIDA sprawled on a studio couch, arms around two nude models, bottles at his feet. Part parody and part wish fulfillment, POWHIDA is the crusading Dr. Jekyll to Powhida's gentle — he's a high school art teacher in Brooklyn in real life! — Hyde.

Facing claims from visitors at the opening that he didn't actually paint his self-portrait hanging on the Marlborough wall, POWHIDA shouted for the canvas to be turned around. On its back, the painting was signed by Tom Sanford, a painter whom Powhida commissioned to create objects for the show. (As it turns out, Sanford didn't have time to finish the job and an unnamed third party completed the work. Such is the food chain.) POWHIDA threw a showy fit, a twisted half-smile ever present on his face.

As a social sculpture, "POWHIDA" attempted to supplant the reality of a megabucks gallery — it deals in multimillion-dollar artworks by Francis Bacon and Botero, among others — with an immersive satire of itself. The problem is that for contemporary art, reality and its parody are often so close as to be indistinguishable. What could be ironic satire, a knowing wink, might also end up as an ironic failure to satirize — funny and sad not for truth-telling and bullshit-cutting but for its own self-reflexive victimization, like a joke that falls flat. A large portion of the Marlborough audience wasn't in on the joke; they were there to see and be seen, and they were, regardless of the artist spectacle. For those in the know, the satire was present and diverting — everyone had something to talk about, at least — but the uncomfortable irony remained that this kind of opening is still the mark of an artist's success.

The problem here is that "POWHIDA" has nothing on Powhida, whose oeuvre has otherwise proven itself as a powerful source of straight talk. In comparison, "POWHIDA" plays into some of the same artist myths that Powhida hates on, and does not yet go far enough in debunking them. There are promises of gallery poker nights with POWHIDA that hint at a greater potential. I hope the performance becomes more cutting, nastier, meaner. I want the two-week long life of POWHIDA to end in a public failure, a knowing narrative twist that smiles viciously and says out loud: this is the underlying nature of the cannibalistic art world, a place of "Behind the Music"-worthy rises and flameouts. But only Powhida knows what will really happen.

The blissfully unaware POWHIDA, on the other hand, drove out of the Marlborough show in that classic car with a few of his entourage, the top down, a blond woman straddling his lap, pointing toward his adoring fans stuck standing at the gallery door. He knows how to make an exit.