Last Wednesday night, approximately 150 art lovers, artists and hipsters mooching free Grolsch braved the cold to write the final chapter of the Guild & Greyshkul gallery.

The Wooster Street gallery—a multiartist space known for taking a chance on young untried talent—had rode the crest of overvaluation and was getting out when the it was still good. One of the space’s owners, sharp-featured Johannes Vanderbeek—a tuft of chest hair poking out from his sweater—didn’t need a weatherman to know which way the wind was blowing. “We didn’t want to get into debt, and start taking money from the artists,” he explained honestly. Rents might go down, I prodded hopefully. “Yeah, but, we haven’t paid ours in three months,” he shot back. I shook the man’s hand and went on my way.

The crowded space was packed with paintings, sculptures, multi-media installations and even human puppet shows. I wasn’t the only one to kick a small torso bust that was laid out on the floor. The only thing funnier than Polaroid-camera-clutching Ryan Johnson’s purple sculpture of Clara Bow holding a cigarette was the price he quoted for it. Looking puzzled he said, “It’s around 20…or maybe 15 grand, I never can remember.”

I’m not sure what was more inviting about Isabel Asha Penzlien; her Teutonic good looks, or the pint of whiskey she was clutching. Penzlien, who had a small photo in the exhibition, passed me the bottle and explained: “It’s cold out.” She said the art market crash wasn’t the worst thing for people like her. “It’s nice to make money, but we’re all artists of the heart here.” Around the icy corner at art-fashion franchise Deitch, it was still 2007. Multimedia star Ben Jones was having his first big show. “What we do is completely unaffected by market trends,” curator Kathy Grayson sniffed. “A hiccup only affects the part-time collectors, the dabblers.The hardcore ones keep at it and the majority of our price point is from $10,000 to $50,000 but goes to $5,000,000.”

“Oh, that’s too cheap to be affected?” I asked. She glared at me. “The prices on both ends of the spectrum [cheap and expensive] are not affected.”

Jones, himself, was less sanguine. How are you going sell these video installations? Hiding from his well wishers in a corner, the tall, shy artist admitted; “I don’t think anyone really knows yet.”