WITH apologies to provincial visionaries everywhere, it’s always been tough to argue with Ezra Pound: “All great art is born of the metropolis.”

For more than 20 years I’ve lived in New York, and for the last 7 as a newspaper reporter I’ve written about the art world of this metropolis. So for a long time now it’s been second nature for me to look at the city as if many things in it are unintentional works of art — or performance art — and to see much of the art I come across in the becalmed rooms of galleries and museums as unconscious extensions of the teeming city beyond. Sometimes the real art is indeed great. But there are also those beautiful moments when the not-real art that seems to jaywalk in front of me and bubble up out of the manhole covers can seem just as great.

This is the first installment of an occasional column that will wander around in search of those moments, looking at New York as one of the most astounding concatenations of readymades in the world, a city that exists both in imagination and in fact, where the surreal, the abstract, the figural, the conceptual, the minimalist and the maximalist can, and often do, converge on a single corner.

It might no longer be the New York that I hear a lot of artists pine for, the desolate but dirt-cheap and fertile one of the 1970s where “the jungle growth of vacant blocks gave a foretaste of the impending wilderness, when lianas would engird the skyscrapers and mushrooms would cover Times Square,” as Luc Sante so memorably described those years. Now it’s overcrowded and cruelly expensive. Even starving-artist neighborhoods like Bushwick in Brooklyn have restaurants that serve carpaccio with caviar and enthrall the critics.