Ever since the bad old pluralistic seventies, there's been a persistent itch among many, always looking for the next Big Idea, the next Movement, the next 'ism in the art world. Not too long ago, at a post-opening dinner celebrating an established painter (who had helped invent Op Art in the '60s), I was confronted with one of the artist's former students, who had since settled into a comfortable academic job in an art department someplace in New England. At dinner, he came across as a bit too grandiose (about art in general and his own painting), and at one point vigorously gestured across the table as he informed us that he tells his students that he feels that "the next big movement is coming, just around the corner—you just need to keep your eyes open."

Poor misguided soul—he's probably been feeding them that line for 20 years! How long do you have to wait around before you figure out the bus isn't coming?

In the postmodern era (postmodernism being probably the last of the significant "isms" at this point), the emergence of particular movements in a linear chronology has become so passé as to be laughable. How can you make a definitive statement or create a specific aesthetic when the world has been opened (largely by virtue of the ever-expanding world of media) to anything and everything under the sun? In this brave new (art)world of ours, aesthetic choices are no longer charged expressions of a coherent worldview—one way you might attempt to define an artistic movement as such—but have become instead something more like the decisions you make at the store: acid wash or over-dyed? Coke or Pepsi? Everything becomes a matter of (often arbitrary) taste, a fashion rather than a real position.

Two Views Of Lola-loli, 2005, Rubber, 73" X 16" (Diameter)

Now all of this can sound pretty damn cynical, and in fact—especially in the art world—it usually is, which is what makes an encounter with John Davis and his gallery in Hudson so special. His example leads me to think that instead of the Next Big Thing, we ought to consider a number of Next Little Things instead.

After Davis's four-year hiatus, the Hudson Valley is once again blessed with his presence and ever-expanding vision. Davis started his first gallery in Akron, Ohio, in 1981, shifting operations to New York City in 1985, and focusing on primarily abstract painters and sculptors. In the 1990s, he moved again to Warren Street in Hudson, where he luxuriated in the space afforded by the upstate area's then-lower real estate prices, filling not only a two-story exhibition space, but also a sculpture garden and a carriage house, not to mention the four-story elevator shaft that was regularly transformed by installations and experimental work.

Circumstances shifted again, and Davis closed the gallery and spent a year programming exhibitions at TSL in Hudson. In 2004 he was offered a space to show work in Manhattan, where he introduced a number of his artists directly to the New York audience, to positive response.

Now that chapter has closed, and Davis has moved back into his former space at 362½ Warren Street in Hudson—his favorite, he says, of all the galleries he's ever run. But this is no simple walk down memory lane: He's spent a year doing studio visits, and has expanded his stable of artists to 30, doubling the number he represented in Hudson last time around. About a third of Davis's clients are from Columbia County, another sizable group work in New York, and the others are scattered geographically from Boston to Connecticut to New Jersey.

Columnus Interruptus, 2005, Rubber, Pvc, 17" X 12"

Davis has always been oriented toward abstract work, which can be a bit tough to sell up here, given the region's historical predilection for landscape painting. The atmosphere isn't necessarily favorable for it in New York, either. A member of the art world cognoscenti recently remarked to him, when looking at work by one of the abstract painters he was representing, "You can't be painting that way"—which confirmed to Davis that it was exactly the sort of work he should be supporting. His gently contrary spirit remains intact, guided by his very direct, genuine, and obvious enjoyment of the work and the artists that he shows, which allows him to ignore the vagaries of fashion, to provide a place where artists can find a voice and, in the process, develop a rich heritage of such work.

On February 4 Davis is opening a show of sculpture by Victoria Palermo, titled "Endangered Species." Both attracted and repelled by consumer products and packaging, she emulates the bright and shiny surfaces by dipping hollow, abstractly shaped armatures in often colorful liquid rubber. The almost obscenely glistening "skins" of the work both echo and critique the eye-candy emptiness of the boxes, bottles, and containers lined up on store shelves, pushed under our noses by advertising, that ultimately wind up in the landfill.

The show's title plays on multiple levels. Perhaps we are the endangered species, after we drown in our own shiny, plastic world—or, as the artist herself puts it, "I wonder about the viability of my endeavor—this spending endless hours in process in the age of instantaneous communication of ideas and images in cyberspace." She nostalgically wonders whether there will be room for art objects, or for the concerns of her modernist art heroes in the future, which renders them (artists and art objects) something of an endangered species.

I like to think that with the assistance of people like John Davis, there may still be hope for us after all. Instead of focusing his energies on chasing the latest fad, or courting the elite and powerful in a quest for his own fame and fortune, he's got a much healthier and sane approach. Summed up nicely in a quasiZen motto he shared with me recently, "The most important part of what we're doing is what we're doing."

One (little) step at a time.