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THE STORY OF AUDART - continued from page one

BY DIANA SILBERT
 

Meanwhile, Audart was taking its gallery online and beginning to broadcast its openings live on the internet.  It was early 1997 and the corporate world was beginning to pay attention to what was happening in the once deserted bank.  With five exhibitions already behind them, including the highly successful "Ten Years After: The Warhol Factory", Audart was now planning the Art & Technology Circus.  Audrey Regan came up with the circus concept, as a way to integrate art and technology and capitalize even further on Audart's interdisciplinary approach.   John Toth, an established multimedia artist and designer created the first "tent" in the Audart gallery.  Other tents were created by a number of artists.  Artworks discovered on the internet by Regan, were shipped to NYC from all over the world to be exhibited in the Circus and performance rehearsals took place in the gallery,  for months, at all hours of the day and night.   The Audart Gallery was being described in the media as a "spaceship" and a zone of perpetual twilight where the work of creativity never stopped.  The Art & Technology Circus opening was attended by 3000 people, topped only by the Warhol opening which attracted 5000 people.

Encouraged by the success of the first circus opening, Audart planned a second one with a full performance schedule.  It was to be the final farewell.   The sale of 60 Broad Street in January of 1998 brought the notice Regan and London had expected and it prompted a game of speculation about the future of the space.

Would it become a supermarket?  Or a Barnes and Noble? Or a huge Nike emporium?   Would it rent for thirty to fifty thousand dollars a month?   In the day to day operation of whatever business might acquire the space, would anyone remember where the sculptures had been exhibited or where the tent of chain had glistened in all its splendor?  One thing seemed certain as Audart packed up and moved on to other dreams - the new tenants would not work by candlelight in the draped glamour of crimson silk and yellow velvet, while artists worked from ladders and napped in darkened corners of  art filled rooms.

There could never be another SoHo, no matter how many dollars are spent trying to make it happen, but it cannot be said that art, in all its glory, didn't happen in New York's financial district.  It was a brief  flash of light, missed by many but experienced by thousands.

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