IT'S AN IDEA THAT HAS OCCURRED to many a young urbanite, sitting around with friends: Why don't we open a shop? We can sell Bob's paintings, Joan's jewelry, and Calvin's clothes. We can hang out together in the store, and show movies or have parties at night. It'll be great!

Most of these ideas are so much late-night chatter, but some people actually have the money to put them into practice. Hence Second Avenue Pizza, the pizza place/ gallery/screening room in Belltown. And hence Houston, a gallery/design studio/furniture shop that opened Saturday, July 17 on East Pike Street.

Matthew Clark, the mastermind of Houston, left Microsoft after a five-year term (and after his stock options vested). He had worked there on Mint, a too-cool-for-school, pop-culture webzine that fell victim to Microsoft's umpteenth abandonment of its ambitious plans for Microsoft Network. He now seems to have enough money to do whatever he wants, and what he wants is Houston.

Houston is a beautiful space. A storefront with a loft in back, the space has been filled out with a large orange frame outlining the walls and loft. A large, custom-designed rolling cart in the center of the ground-floor space is mission-central, holding a computer, posters for sale, and featuring locked drawers with rounded rectangular fronts in orange and yellow, echoing the orange frame. Upstairs, an Eames couch, computer desks, and beanbag chairs create a comfortable-looking work and hangout space for the graphic designers who will work there, including Clark and Shawn Wolfe.

The walls, floor, and cart are filled with Houston's inaugural projects, including an expensively produced, slip-covered hardback book collecting the sketchbooks of a New York tattoo artist; a show of street posters by Shepard Fairey (Andre the Giant), Kaws, Perks, Phil Frost, and Barry McGee, organized by the L.A. magazine Tokion; and a line of plywood tables, consoles, and clocks by Kerf, a collaborative team which also designed Houston's custom furnishings. Clark also plans to sell a line of geek-chic workwear which he is designing.

Obviously, Clark has a deep and abiding love for pop culture. His gallery name contains a triple reference to the pop culture of his and my youth: Houston as in the home of NASA Mission Control, Houston as in the home of James Caan's team in Rollerball, and Houston as in Matt Houston (the pseudonym Clark uses in press releases for his space), the hunky TV detective played by Lee Horsley in 1982.

This love for pop culture extends to its underground variants: nominally subcultural art forms (tattoos, posters, graffiti) with subject matter drawn from the dominant pop culture (Star Wars, ape movies, Calvin Klein ads). Most of the work on display at Houston fits this description.

This all could be expected to catch the attention of Seattle Times reporter Cynthia Rose, who's been covering the alternative space beat with some dedication. Her recent dispatches covered Vital 5, Project 416, Howard House, and the various small galleries in the Washington Shoe Building on Jackson Street in Pioneer Square. Highly sympathetic to her subjects, Rose usually lets the artists describe what they're doing, and takes their statements at face value. In the Houston article, Clark nails a looming problem in Seattle alternative spaces: "I look at people's art and here's what I ask: Do they work in several mediums? Do they have a website? Have they got a set of works that can be sold at different prices? Because I want each artist to have at least one piece priced around $10."

Is this really how Clark looks at artists? He might as well judge them on how they dress as by these criteria. Like so much of the talk surrounding alternative spaces, and thus so much of the talk in Rose's Times dispatches, all of this has little to do with actual art. Substituted for aesthetics or poetics--even politics--is a kind of absurd, high-concept attitude that insists the story behind the art is more interesting than any stories inside the art. Artspace's Box Populi and half the shows at CoCA (which propose working methods to artists and then display the results) are good local examples of this kind of ass-backwards thinking, which imposes conceptual order on almost randomly selected art, instead of order emerging from the art itself. This attitude descends from '60s conceptual and process art, but lacks much in the way of careful thought. It's a throw-everything-at-the-wall-and-hope-something-sticks mode of curation.

This may be too much to impose on Houston, which is at core a personal project that happens to occupy a storefront and call itself a gallery. The space is swell, the opening party was fun, and people seemed to be enjoying themselves. Call it a social space for a certain set, an idiosyncratic boutique, or an open studio. If some future shows generate sparks--and I have high hopes for Shawn Wolfe's millennium-ending show there--so much the better.