The Cut

2022-12-07

On a recent Wednesday night, O’Flaherty’s, a new art gallery named for an imaginary Irish pub, had an opening. The storefront space, which has a neon sign in the window reading WHAT’S WRONG?, shares its block on Avenue C with a community garden, a dentist’s office, and a Jehovah’s Witnesses Kingdom Hall, far from the decorous, museumlike megagalleries of West Chelsea. In the most overheated, self-serious, and asset-hungry contemporary-art market the world has likely ever known, O’Flaherty’s has so far sold nothing; it’s hard to say if that’s on purpose. By a little after 7 p.m., the gallery had filled with casually tattered, unmasked young people, and everything was bathed in a radioactive glow. “Black light is very important,” said Jamian Juliano-Villani, a rising-star artist herself who is one of the gallery’s three founders. “Taste is out the door.”