Chelsea Chelsea Chelsea has a corporate gallery scene that's so ...

Chelsea has a corporate gallery scene that's so huge, there's a Chelsea Art Map of 101 galleries. "Where you should go," it's optimistically titled. There's a scene of professional gallery-goers, and any celebrities in attendance are regularly chronicled by Baird Jones, who sells anecdotes to Page Six and the Rush & Molloy column of the Daily News. Peter Falk, Sigourney Weaver, Dennis Hopper and my favorite artist, Martin Mull, are among the hundreds he's quoted as quoting, buzz from a buzzard. "I'm the curator of the doomed!" crows Baird, who has a habit of booking galleries with people who are about to drop off.

The artist James Tully and I met up with him at the Luhring Augustine Gallery on 24th St., and there were four other openings just on that part of the block. The Janine Antoni opening was the best emperor's new clothes example of modern art I could've hoped for?there was a huge pile of hemp that was already beginning to stink , with a 120-foot expanse of hemp rope linked by two nine-foot steel reels. "The hemp rope aches with tension," a handout told us.

Apparently, Antoni, an attractive girl from a wealthy family known for chewing her artwork, had walked across the rope in a don't-miss performance. "It'll be a toxic hazard!" Baird squealed happily in the cab to the Deitch Gallery. Apparently, huge pointless works like this are purchased mainly by corporations, and as the possibly chewed hemp gets to smell worse and worse, it could result in a huge lawsuit.

The Deitch Gallery in Soho had a Kristin Baker exhibit of race cars crashing in pretty colors. The owner said he's happy to be the last gallery in Soho, and the crowd there wasn't quite as snooty and white as the Chelsea crowd. There were adorably precious young Parsons graduates, a fashion artist and Patricia Field buff wearing a tight suit jacket, and Eugene Lang student James Andrews, who came back from living in a Bosnian refugee camp in 1998 and decided to start an art collective after seeing how similarly artists in the NY boroughs were living.

He couldn't help but notice that "they all had these microscopic apartments." Andrews formed an art collective board complete with an engineer and a psychiatrist, and his main goal now is to hook up with cutting-edge landlords and?

Ah, youth.

Willoughby Sharp is another art-opening pro, and his website listed a Jeff Koons opening at the Sonnabend Gallery on 22nd St., up from 10th Ave., so the artist James Tully and I headed over there recently. James was fussing with his phone on the way: "I feel like they're just throwing me to the wolves," he said of his cellphone company. "I feel like calling them and getting paid for the time I've spent dealing with these frauds!"

I can always rely on James, wearing a snappy outfit of a velvet-trimmed coat and blazingly white shirt complete with cufflinks, for a stylish reaction to the most unstylish kind of adversity.

Koons is the greatest pop artist of all time, and one of the only people who could make me feel like a British Cockney nervously approaching a member of the upper class. The show, which is up until Dec. 20, features hyperrealist paintings of inflatable toys with gleaming chains dangling in front of them, and solid-as-steel sculptures of the same toys. "It's a mixture of different vocabularies that I enjoy a lot," said the artist. Imagine just talking like that naturally.

Koons, who once married Italian porn star/Parliamentarian Cicciolina, made three copies of a campy life-sized sculpture of Michael Jackson and his chimp Bubbles, in white and solid gold, and I've seen it in galleries all over the world. "It makes me happy!" I blurted out, cleverly edging away before he did.

A sharply dressed little boy walked up to him and asked, "Can you help me see if that icky lady's gone? The one with the huge lips and the silicone breasts?" He meant Amanda Lapore, the famously altered transsexual, who was there with Pamela Anderson.

"I don't even know why I'm doing this!" remarked Scottish artist Ian Charles Scott as he involuntarily snapped a picture of the tired-looking little celebrity. Of the fake inflatable animals, he raved: "They're like the people here, they have a surface, but you find out they're totally solid, they're a marvelous creation!"

I looked doubtfully at an aspiring socialite who was having a phantom conversation with Mark Kostabi: "It was great talking to you!" she improvised, as he continued to completely ignore her.

"What does she do?" an intense-looking Baird asked Kostabi, looking over at Pamela Anderson.

"Baywatch! Barb Wire!" I told him. "It's not so much what she does, she's really made something of herself."

The people over there on 10th Ave. in the 20s really know how to live?we stopped in at the beautiful bar-restaurant Bottino, and then had delicious garlic bread at the affordable and packed Don Giovanni.

"Bernadette. Bernadette?" exclaimed the cute gay guy at the next table, inches away. "Bernadette and him can just go straight to hell!"

I ended the night with the international young crowd at Lot 61, sitting in front of the fireplace, across from the Donkey Show at El Flamingo. I had asked the doorman if it was burlesque.

"I think it has somethin' to do with Shakespeare," he told me, looking distracted. "I don't know about no burlek."