There are many pleasures to being an art critic in New York. One, in my view, is definitely the late Saturday afternoon crunch in Chelsea, that day’s-end rush through a last few galleries, seeing shows and squirreling away experiences and ideas just before they all close for the weekend.

I had a great final 60 minutes in Chelsea last Saturday and, consequently, one of the last looks at what would suddenly become, on Tuesday, the old, pre-Sandy Chelsea gallery scene. That day, as I started hearing reports of flooding in the neighborhood, some of the art I had seen on Saturday became increasingly vivid in my mind, as did the weird thought that I might be one of the last people who would ever see it.

I had enjoyed Eberhard Havekost’s show at Anton Kern on West 20th Street, a don’t-pin-me-down stylistic array that gave this German painter a sharper, slyer edge than he had ever had for me. There were hard-edge abstractions, diaphanous images of sunsets and one quirky, crusty Expressionist exercise that seemed laden with enough paint to make the rest of the show.

On West 21st Street, a small new gallery named Guided by Invoices (talk about sly) had been showing small abstractions on Masonite, enlivened by spurts of spray paint and rugged lines that appeared to be more sawed than incised. They were by a virtual unknown: Rafael Vega, a 2012 graduate of the School of the Art Institute of Chicago, making his New York debut.