Another show to purposefully proclaim its difference from the humdrum exhibition model is Marina Faust’s “Im Raum bei Song” at Song Song, a newly opened gallery attached to the couture shop Song, which features contemporary fashion of the more brilliant and difficult kind.

“As an exhibition space, Song Song does not have any particular ambition to bring together the so-called ‘worlds of art and fashion’,” said its owner, Myung Il Song, “but we look for artists who show the same spirit of material invention that we have come to appreciate so much in the clothing designers on the other side, in the shop.”

In Faust’s case, however, the invention is located not in the objects themselves, but in the social space that they generate. The gallery is filled with secondhand chairs of all shapes and sizes, which have been outfitted with wheels and handles for pushing them about. The chairs do have esthetic merit, but the real question is clearly where they situate themselves as art. The opening proved this avant-garde proposition, as the room full of people talked, looked and rolled each other about, scuffing and spilling wine on a floor that was left as it was for the exhibition’s duration.

Was the opening of “Im Raum bei Song” a presentation or an installation of objects, or a performance by the show’s viewers? In fact it had something of each but was contained by neither. A liminal event, it served as a reminder of the narrow set of circumstances by which something is defined as “art” at all, an observation that is, of course, a very artistic gesture indeed.

Abraham Orden is a New York art critic.