Opening my mail recently, I found a group portrait of the Leo Castelli Gallery stable. Some celebrated faces were instantly recognizable and the photograph itself recalled those postwar pictures of the "Irascibles" and other Cedar Bar denizens. Like them, this image exudes history. Unlike them, it served as an invitation to Leo Castelli's birthday party at Palladium, Manhattan's au courant nightspot.

It also served as something else: a potent reminder of the odd coupling of art and discotheques. Call the offspring of this union "artisco"--that is, art exhibited in, and frequently made expressly for, discotheques.

Precedents for Artisco can be found in nearly a century of artists' (and artist-decorated) cabarets and clubs from Le Chat Noir, Cabaret Voltaire and Wyndham Lewis's decorations for the Cave of the Golden Calf, to the more recent Exploding Plastic Inevitable and the Mudd Club. Inspiration might also be traced to the Happenings and psychedelia of the Sixties. A late Seventies' contribution to the genre was Club 57 where the thematic decor changed frequently, often at the hands of Kenny Scharf and Keith Haring. With antecedents like these, the line between Modernist high art and popular culture invariably blurs. And it is precisely this tension which, until recently, animated such enterprises.

Post-Modernism's apotheosis of popular culture has obliterated this tension along with any lingering edge of Modernist criticality. While Leo Castelli's up-to-the-minute imprimatur may certify a place as fashionably mainstream, it offers nary a clue as to whether or not what goes on inside is important. According to convicted felon Steve Rubell, who--along with Ian Schrager--is a former owner of Studio 54 and a current operator of Palladium, the media blitz is the message. "Artists," Rubell recently told the New York Times, "are becoming the stars of the 1980s, like the rock stars of the 1960s or the fashion designers of the 1970s..."

Locating art-filled discotheques is a snap. The trend is as national, perhaps international, as Neo-Expressionist painting. Within the last few weeks I've stumbled unawares into hotbeds of Artisco in Baltimore (Signals) and San Francisco (Nine). Can Peoria be far behind?

Perhaps the most startling aspect of all this activity is the nature of the art itself. For the past decade, Artisco or club art was nearly synonymous with performance art. In New York that meant artists like Ethyl Eichelberger, Karen Finley, John Jesurun, Anne Magnuson, Tom Murrin, and Mike Osterhout performing at predominantly East Village clubs like Darinka, 8 BC, the Peppermint Lounge, the Limbo Lounge, and the Pyramid. It also meant eccentricity, theatrics, hysteria, glitter, insight, aggression--the usual characteristics of performance art in hot, smoky places. (Alas the city of New York recently closed four of the five clubs mentioned above for zoning and licensing infractions.)

Today Artisco means are art that doesn't move--painting, sculpture, and, best of all, site works, by contemporary artists of note including Jean Michel Basquiat, Francesco Clemente, Eric Fischl, Keith Haring, Michael Heizer, Jenny Holzer, Alex Katz, Barbara Kruger, Les Levine, Larry Rivers, David Salle, and Andy Warhol. I say site works "best of all" because painting and sculpture (unless embellished with neon) are nearly invisible in discotheques. Imagine a gallery darker than your average restaurant. Then imagine that restaurant at 10 pm on the busiest night of the year and you've imagined Kamikaze, a West Side discotheque that pioneered the dance floor-cum-gallery concept. The specialty here is huge group shows of generally small works by local artists with long mailing lists of thirsty friends.

The best site works in clubs are specially tailored to the psychological, as well as the physical, qualities of such spaces. If awards were presented for thematic decor, the hands-down winner would be Area, the Zelig of art-oriented clubs and discos. Every six weeks Area opens a new show on a theme like the automobile, science fiction, or even art. The decor is entirely revamped and the challenge is to create the most complex environment possible in the few days allotted to the task. While nobody involved calls this process or its outcome art--although the crew is comprised mainly of moonlighting artists--it frequently comes sufficiently close to make one consider what might qualify for such a designation. Huge vitrines, for instance, sometimes house living sculpture of both human and animal varieties. Nearby, in a pit adjacent to the dance floor, punked-out performance types gyrate. You try to distinguish between art and decor.

The art/decor line was irrevocably blurred with the opening of Palladium, this year's center of Artisco activity in New York. At Palladium, themes are nowhere to be seen, except on invitations to events. Instead, the gallery approach was married to the site-specific decor direction--with a vengeance. Palladium's official art curator is Henry Geldzahler, former curator of 20th-century art at the Metropolitan Museum. Blue-chip artists were commissioned to do site-specific works in the styles that made them famous.

Francesco Clemente frescoed a vaulted chamber at the top of a stairway with marvelously dreamy images of floating heads and body parts. Kenny Scharf--reprising his vivid work for the last Whitney Biennial and inadvertently demonstrating today's pressures to specialize--turned the lounge near the restroom into a day-glow-cartoon. Jean Michel Basquiat's behind-the-bar mural for the sepulchral Mike Todd Room is an elegant version of graphic street imagery gone indoors. Finally, to cite just four works, Keith Haring's likeable new age leprechauns embellish a movable wall which descends on (or ascends from) the dance floor.

Perhaps surprisingly, these are among the finest large-scale works any of these artists has produced. The vastness and romanticism of this environment seem perfectly suited to this sort of evocative figurative art. Here it functions as theatrical backdrop for an arena in which we come to lose ourselves. Fantasy is the nature of this business and Artisco plays its supporting role.

Is there an aesthetic operating here? Not unless representation and accessibility are your only criteria. Artisco embodies the none-too-challenging values of the glitzy, apolitical wing of the East Village art scene. When a well known art critic opines that "at last, Neo-Expressionism has found its true home--the discotheque," he oversimplifies. In fact, Clemente and Haring share little as artists. Rather than fetishizing the (sometimes) bouncing brushwork, we'd do better to train our eyes on the images.

One practitioner mistakenly omitted from Steve Rubell's list of culture heroes is the architect. (Chronologically [s]he should be inserted between fashion designer and artist, although a problem may be that architects tend not to be as photogenic as their buildings, not to mention the models of their buildings.) Among other things, it is the age of architecture we inhabit that makes the current development of Artisco possible. Palladium's boldest move was enticing Arata Isozaki into transforming a large and dilapidated former movie palace into one of Manhattan's most spectacular spaces. The brilliant Japanese architect of Los Angeles' forthcoming Museum of Contemporary Art preserved the seedy exterior of the aged structure and constructed a virtually new building within its shell. Glimpses of the old abound, offering both richly metaphorical vistas and contextual frames for the artworks. Note that the artworks I've described are not merely attached to, but congruent with, architectural elements--vaulted ceilings, walls, or the doors and even furniture of the lounge.

This integration of art and architectural site, of course, subverts the Modernist autonomy of the work. It tugs these paintings back into the realm of the non-ideal, the conditional, even the functional world of, say, the architectural drawing. What was once--like the architectural drawing--"merely" artistic, is now art. An ambiguous amalgam of the functional, the decorative, and the quasi-public, these works embody a virtual programme of anti-Modernism.

One essential consideration is the quasi-public aspect of this work. Needless to say, this is not true public art in the sense of the Statue of Liberty. It may, however, be as public as one of the interior artworks at Rockefeller Center: that is to say, experiencing art is not the viewer's primary purpose here. What Artisco shares with all public art is its non-museum or -gallery site and the necessity to communicate with a broad--not necessarily art smart--audience.

The alliance between populist and post-Modernist values that this implies is unprecedented. Populist and Modernist tastes rarely converge. Consider the two Vietnam War Memorials in Washington. Or Tilted Arc. The Modernist paradigm teaches us that real art is disturbing and inaccessible. From Picasso we learned that art is "an instrument of war." Have we learned this lesson but lost sight of our real enemies?

Deep down, my hunch is that most of the disgruntled sniffling one hears about Artisco springs from the illusion of lost innocence that post-Modernism has left in its wake. Somehow, a discotheque seems more disreputably commercial than a Soho gallery. Even more difficult to swallow is the idea that some of our most esteemed talents are working in such environments. If Bill Blass and Oscar de la Renta design limited edition interiors for luxury cars, why not Jasper Johns or Donald Judd? Or, more important, what exactly would it tell us if they did? It usually takes longer to determine the proper questions than the answers.