McCarthy's Lewd Little Santas, Gormley's Fog, Baselitz's Angst , Yazzy's at www.williamverdult.com

Paul McCarthy, a gross-out artist who has spent much of the last 40 years messily exploiting every part of his body (particularly his genitals) with ketchup, mustard, mayonnaise, chocolate syrup and paint, has suddenly gone into the stocking-stuffer business.

His chocolate Santas are displayed in a sculptural installation at the Maccarone Gallery that is also a fully functioning chocolate factory through Christmas Eve.

Ten-inch, 1-pound, bell-ringing chocolate Santas cradling a kind of Christmas tree in the crook of one arm are lined up by the hundreds on bakery shelves in the mirrored gallery, where an assembly line of human elves in red and green aprons mold, wrap and box some 1,000 units a day in yellow or black cartons adorned with colorful seals.

The cost: $100 each.

That's right.

Of course, McCarthy's Santa has the artist's own grizzled face, while the ``tree'' bears an unquestionable resemblance to a phallus.

The figurine, made of dark Guittard chocolate (in collaboration with chocolatier Peter P. Greweling), is also for sale through a company Web site, http://www.peterpaulchocolates.com, though online shoppers will miss the action in the gallery, where the manufacturing operation is visible through a glass wall.

Your Own Wallpaper

Surrounding it are pink, yellow or blue limited-edition wallpapers printed with repeating chocolate Santa images. For $65,000, a collector can buy lifetime rights to reproduce and install it in any quantity.

It recalls the pink cow-on-yellow (or blue) wallpaper produced in 1966 by Andy Warhol, the first to describe himself as a ``business artist'' when the line between art and commerce seriously began to blur.

With McCarthy's operation, that line completely disappears, along with the gap between art and sex toy, giving our consumer- driven market a lewd, cocoa-pop sneer.

`Blind' Sculpture

An even more visceral thrill awaits visitors to Sean Kelly Gallery for ``Blind Light,'' a steamy, walk-in sculpture by the British artist Antony Gormley that's as close to an out-of-body experience as a person with two feet on the ground is likely to get.

Stepping inside the large, glass-enclosed room means being swallowed whole by a fluorescent white fog of moisture condensing so thickly it obscured my own hands from view.

Taking snow-blind baby steps along the slippery cement floor, with no idea where the walls were or whether I was about to crash into someone else, I lost my bearings entirely. I realized I couldn't find the door.

This was not very pleasant. As perceptual art goes, however, the piece could not have been better. It made all my senses powerfully acute. It also rendered them useless.

Gormley's wood or steel sculptures, a couple of which are on view, customarily contrast the human body (often his own) with the scale and form of its surroundings. Here, he dematerializes both at once.

``Blind Light'' costs 1 million pounds ($2.07 million); the other sculptures are 150,000 pounds each.

Hitler Moustache

Dadaist Marcel Duchamp famously drew a moustache on a Mona Lisa postcard. Now the German artist Georg Baselitz has updated a character from his own paintings of the 1960s by giving it a Hitler moustache.

The figure, a masturbating dwarf that was also partly a self-portrait, was one way the artist, born in 1938, addressed the burden of German history that his generation had to face.

In the 10 impressive canvases at Gagosian Gallery, dated 2006-07 and sold out before the show opened (at prices the gallery declines to divulge), Baselitz's old grotesque appears even more disfigured by patches of pastel and black paint and inky splatters.

In one painting, the dwarf is a scarecrow crucified to a bare tree. In another, it's a demented clown that could be either male or female.

By adding the moustache, Baselitz makes his country's relationship to fascism explicit, while the fractured planes of the canvas and the disintegrating face of the figure also makes it seem a dim memory.

Paul McCarthy's ``Chocolate Santa'' factory will be in business through Christmas Eve at Maccarone Gallery, 630 Greenwich St., between Leroy and Morton streets. Information: +1-212-431-4977;http://www.maccarone.net.

Antony Gormley's ``Blind Light'' is on view through Dec. 1 at Sean Kelly Gallery, 528 W. 29th St. Information: +1-212-239-1181; http://www.skny.com.

``George Baselitz: The Remix Paintings,'' runs through Dec. 22 at Gagosian Gallery, 555 W. 24th St. Information: +1-212-741-1111; http://www.gagosian.com.