See Art Now

SEE ART NOW

THERE is no New York art world; there are only art worlds: a planetary system with no sun at its center.

Certain alpha institutions, collectors and pundits may dispute this decentralized model, but galleries tend to confirm it. There are many hundreds of them, if not thousands, large and small, throughout the city. Most are commercial enterprises. A rich, tiny handful has a ridiculous amount of power over what should be shared resources, like museum exhibition schedules and the attention of curators and boards of trustees. But most galleries get by the way we all do in this city, on work, budgets and luck. And they're a bargain for art lovers.

They're open, free to the public, much of the week. They rotate their retail regularly. And most of them are welcoming places, though the lack of diversity in artists shown is a persistent problem.

Another challenge, purely logistical, is numbers. Even back when there were many fewer galleries, the average Saturday in SoHo or Chelsea or on the Upper East Side turned into a game of beat-the-clock: How much can you see before doors close at 6? Three critics for The New York Times recently fanned out into art neighborhoods in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens to report on just such tours. As the accounts here suggest, the process was absorbing, the art, for the most part, stimulating. Soon enough I'll be doing a tour again.

But now it's your turn to take a planetary spin:

Galleries to Visit In:

Brooklyn and Queens

Chelsea

The Lower East Side

Soho and Tribeca

The Upper East Side

By Holland Cotter

A version of this article appears in print on April 17, 2015 on page C23 of the New York edition with the headline: See Art Now.

Reprinted from The New York Times, April 17, 2015