Capital New York

Last night, Alexandra Baer and Ryan Cronin threw a one-night-only party—or, rather, art show—at the Bowery Hotel. The big attention-grabber was Cronin’s painting of rows of marshmallow Peeps, entitled “To all my Peeps,” which hung alongside a five-foot-tall sculpture of a Peep emblazoned with the words “Buy Art.” The message doesn’t get much clearer than that.

The show was called “State of the Union,” but it said a lot about the state of the art market, too. Stylish (if shabby-chic) venue! Beverage sponsors! DJ sets! This is the way we gallery now.

As one visitor told me, “I almost forgot I’m at an art show.”

He could be forgiven for forgetting. The work was easy-going and easy-to-digest, and mixed well with the free artisanal whisky and the alt-country-rock music of Rhett Miller, Baer’s brother-in-law and the front man of the Old 97s, who served as musical guest. Cronin’s paintings, which were hung mostly near the outdoor terrace, are big, bold, and almost cartoonish, but they play nicely with Baer’s subtler mixed-media collages.

The work wasn’t lacking in the political and social content implied by the show’s title, the glimmer of edginess that marks an artist as “serious.” Baer’s “Captain America” depicts a soldier pointing his machine gun. Cronin’s “The Empty Suit” depicts, well, an empty suit—a meditation on contemporary masculine anomie, perhaps? Unemployment?

But lest economics ruin anyone’s good time, much of the work aimed simply to seduce. Cronin’s brightly-colored pictures have sensuous appeal at first glance. The lightly painted text running up the side of Baer’s “Composition with Embrace” reads, “I’m gonna love you like you always wanted someone to love you.” On a beautiful if muggy night, drink in hand, beautiful people all around, that grandiose sentiment didn’t seem too far out of reach.

When the doors opened, fashionably late, at 6:06, the assorted guests—friends of the artists and tourists who had seen the event’s listing in Daily Candy that morning—made a beeline to the open bar, provided by Tuthilltown Spirits and Izze Sparkling Juices.

Around seven, Rhett Miller began the first of his two sets, performing a few Old 97 hits and an as-yet-unreleased song from their upcoming double album. “I’m here because I believe in this art and because I like to rock,” he explained.

Indeed, even with the fancy digs, this was an evening that went for simple pleasures, with an all-in-the-family, or at least all-in-the-suburb, feel: both artists live and work around New Paltz, and have been friends for a while. And despite the hardish-hitting title and the Captain America imagery, the artists emphasized the warm and fuzzy and salable. “The show is called ‘State of the Union,’ which references politics,” Baer explained, “But it also had to do with the union of men and women, and people in general. We all have this idea that there is a person who is your perfect state of union, which is a broader philosophical idea, rather than political.”