This Weekend's Miserable Art Fairs
New York City was beset by art fairs this weekend. There was the New Art Dealers Association fair in Chelsea, and the Frieze fair on Randall’s Island. Both were their first ventures in New York City. The Randall’s Island thing was an ordeal, particularly if you are coming from Brooklyn, God forbid, though it’s nice to spend the weekend on the East River and then also nice to have something to complain about. The location actually worked, but… Holland Cotter, writing in the Times, summed up the prevailing mode: “Now artists, whether they know it or not, are worker bees in an art-industrial hive. Directed by dealers and collectors who dress like stylish accountants, they turn out predictable product for high-profile, high-volume fairs like Frieze.” The problem with these fairs is that the art was almost invisible. You had your process-conceptual: was I going to ask why those big drawings of concentric circles were circles, and what they might possibly represent? No. Your object fails to make me interested in its obscure backstory! What else? You had your big ticket items, though not in overwhelming numbers, like at an Armory or Basel fair; that’s fine, your secondary market is good for business.
You had your ephemeral whatnots, which failed to hold down a booth. You had your paintings struggling with the history of painting, which are usually boring and pointless. Sure, there were highlights and surprises! But this slideshow does a pretty good job of capturing the Frieze fair’s overall inability to capture interest.
What you didn’t have much of, in the massive tent at Frieze or in the three crowded floors of NADA, was the real deal. (This is particularly disturbing, as NADA does a really good job of this in Miami.) The real deal was occupying elsewhere. The grand, the emotional, the harsh, the crude, the bold, the visionary, the psychotic, the gestural, the queer, the elaborate; almost all of that was almost completely missing. Maybe it’s just a current vogue for reduction in art work. Maybe it’s a question of commerce, of what can travel, of artists committing their better work to actual shows, or having sold it already. (Even the German galleries, after their long run, have given up on good painting!) In the course of two days, I was introduced to the work of exactly one artist that I wanted to know more about. That’s a new low.
One of the real deals, Sarah Sze, is profiled in the New Yorker today (subscription-only). You’re better off going to look again at her birdhouse sculpture on the High Line than wandering around today on the last day of these fairs. At least someone’s having a good time.
