There have been some important art fairs in New York in this last month: first it was The Art Show; then came Scope Art Fair and The Armory Show, together, plus a certain video fair that went rather unnoticed.
Going to fairs is interesting, but not fun. It tires, overwhelms, and many times irritates. Even though some of them are a good place to watch beautiful people and others are a great spot to catch first-class art, they are invariably boring and predictable. I see them more as an obligation to check the state of the art (market).
What I saw first in fairs was The Art Show, mounted at the Seventh Regiment Armory, Park and 67th, in a snowy freezy late February weekend of this snowy freezy winter we have had in New York. I went on a Monday afternoon, so the whole place was calm and quiet, like if all the sales would have been done in the opening night and a probably intense weekend (despite the snow storms).
The Art Show is an Upper East Side-driven fair. It is that fair where the opening night and all ticket admissions go to charity. That fair where, paying a $1000 ticket, you will dance among Park Avenue mummies, plastic-beyond-belief faces and stratospherically-rich-and-generous collectors plus the most revered museum directors and curators.
The Art Show, organized by the ADAA (Art Dealers Association of America), hosts only the very best of the best among the superbly excellent. Forget Chelsea galleries, young artists, Tribeca lofts and rock stars. This is all about Madison Avenue dealers (except for Larry Gagosian, who I’m still to find in any fair in New York), townhouse galleries, suits and ties, fur, surgery, bigger-than-anything names and labels that say “3,500,000 million dollars”. It is the museum-style fair that I normally enjoy, for - nothwithstanding my interest in cutting edge art and young artists-, nothing compares to a Willem de Kooning here, a Picasso there, Diane Arbus on the corner, Klimt in between… or “better the great known than the to-be-known”. Is that a symbol of conservatism on me, fear of the unknown? I think it's just a taste for high art. The museum-quality fair has, nevertheless, the inconvenience of being boring and predictable. It’s all so good and perfect that you die for something incorrect. “The most prestigious art show in America”, The Art Show is called, and spotting old ladies with their mouths full of canapes feels like and adventure. That boring it is.
Highlights that I remember from my visit are, first of all, a couple of those wonderful late de Koonings, where the brush of the master seems to have floated magically, subtly over the canvas, spreading surfaces of pure color, lyricism and the simple joy of the art of painting. Totally opposite, a Maurizio Cattelan in Richard Gray was the sensation of the fair. Titled “Good Versus Evil”, it is a chess set that includes in the Good side figures like Mother Teresa and in the Evil side the likes of Hitler and Stalin. Amazingly crafted and painted, funny and historically responsible, it is a great table-size example of Cattelan’s humor without the grandeur and excessiveness of his roomed installations.
One of the most astonishingly powerful pieces of art presented at the fair was a small acrylic on paper by Mark Rothko in Greenberg Van Doren St. Louis. In vaporous and ethereal red tones, executed in the last years of the artist’s life, it had the remarkable capacity to move the soul of his oversize canvases (even with the $1.25 million label on the side).
C&M had a nice, surprising find- a big Ethel Scull black-and-dark multiple portrait by Andy Warhol, like the famous one she donated to the Whitney. Picassos, Lichtensteins, Warhols, were more or less all over the booths, as did photography: great prints of Diane Arbus, Robert Frank, Walker Evans or August Sander. I was shocked to see a Robert Frank 1972 print of “The Americans” priced at $125,000, but apparently it has become normal to see those tags attached to photography. Charles Sheeler's photographs of the cathedral of Chartres were a discovery for me, in which the arches and vaults took an almost menacing aspect due to the effects of light.
The stand of Galerie St. Etienne New York was outstanding as the gallery accustoms to be. There was a Klimt, and a number of Schieles, and a Modersohn-Becker, and tons of great German Expressionist prints priced as if you and I could have a Grosz right away.
After a non-exhaustive walk around the place, I left the fair with that same feeling you get at places like MoMA: oh it’s so great, so masterful. But so boring and perfectly tidy.
Then was the turn for Scope Art Fair, where I was actually participating in one of the booths, aiding a certain gallery from overseas. This is a fair I abhor and loathe- the concept of Scope, a fair in a hotel with the booths in rooms, is cheap, unfit for a correct display, unable to manage crowds, poorly looking (art in the bathroom!) and just well below the standards one expects from a professional fair. What many people label as “cool, young, alternative” I call “cheap, low-class, stupid; even denigrating for the gallery employee that has to close the whole booth to take a pee”. That is. The mission of Scope is, they say officially, “to demystify the buying process of contemporary art while challenging our static views of the art world”. Excellent proposal, but you need not to diminish the quality of an art fair and make it look poor, unprofessional and rather pathetic to “demystify” the art market. I would remember that boring and good is better than deceptively challenging and cheap.
Narrow aisles and big-but-small rooms plus few elevators made the hotel hosting Scope New York 2005 overcrowded, messy and unmanageable. There is a certain uncomfortable feeling of getting one’s privacy violated when people walk into the rooms. A booth on a warehouse is meant to be opened and public, a hotel room is private and feels private. And then the art; mostly young art lacking quality and looking childish, like if it were a big scissors-and-glue fun class in school. Although there are not yet results of sales, what I got there was a feeling of few sales and many visitors. Young, generally bad-looking rich indie-punkies and many foreigners flocked to the hotel, but probably only a very few actually spent bucks.
I was at first doubtful about the gallery I worked with in the fair- while most of the art presented by other galleries looked young and cutting edge, using video, installation, photography, we had a stand full of paintings that made me thought sort of “we’re out of place, we’re old-fashioned”. But in the end, good classy art demonstrated its power and appeal- people not only came en masse but bought, and those who didn’t shake the wallet praised profusely the quality of our paintings and artists while taking cards and papers. It was literally a “Triumph of Painting”, Saatchi style. You better have good-but-old-looking art than young-but-childish-and-empty pseudo-art. And I say “old-looking” being the artists we had as young as those using scissors, glue and poop to create their supposedly innovative but cheap creations of contemporary inanity.
The Armory Show coincided with Scope, totally not by chance. It was a monumental disappointment that I was not expecting, at all. I thought I was going to The Art Show, Tribeca version: big names and galleries, high art, but a younger, fresher look. But oh was I wrong! The Armory resulted to be not an Art Show cool version but a Scope in huge! Two entire piers by the Hudson near my home (that was good) filled with junk, crap and garage art. Bad Art! The same I saw in Scope, the scissors-glue-and-poop young vacuity, but magnified and corporatized. Whereas in The Art Show I went inside most of the booths, looking at the pictures and prices, browsing, enjoying, in The Armory Disaster I crossed fast the aisles looking left and right but not stopping. It looked bad, cheap, awful, uninteresting, unappealing, low-class. I felt bothered by that big wasteful concentration of amateurish and childish art.
The very few pieces that made me stopped and look, even making my heart beat like it happens with great art, were two photographs by Todd Eberle in the stand of Kenny Schachter Rove London. One was titled "The Art World (Jeff Koons' 50th Birthday)", 2004. Jeff Koons’ birthday is widely considered the biggest and grandest event the art world has seen in New York probably in decades, and the multi-faced photo of Todd Eberle offers a glimpse into many of the classic presences of the art sect, a veritable who-is-who that I observed with interest, distant envy and disregard. Yes, it is all so fake, collectors and dealers and curators and critics and socialites hugging each other while thinking “I’d kill you, loser” (but isn’t that just life, period?). The other photo-work by Todd Eberle (Agnes Martin, 2004) was a big, clean portrait of the late artist wherein she looks at the viewer with affection, fear and fragility. The immense power her eyes exude despite that sense of weakness is contradictorily fearful and astonishing. I felt like if she were actually there, staring at my eyes, silent. Agnes Martin was an artist I enormously admired and respected; I wanted to visit and get to know her, thus her death came untamed to me, despite her 92 years of age, leaving me saddened and mournful.
(Back to the commerciality of the fair) there was a lot of photo art, and Stephen Shore’s depictions in that medium of the American suburbs of the 70’s got my attention, not in vain I am passionate about urban planning and the way America lives, socially and geographically. A German gallery was devoted exclusively to photography, with gorgeous prints of August Sander, an übermeister still affordable in comparison to the young German artists of the medium (there were a lot of brutally pornographic pictures by Thomas Ruff in the fair, of which I wonder how easy they sell)
A photo of a Nevada mountain gap in some booth I don’t remember the name totally caught me, due to my love for the desert and the great raw beauty of the Silver State's landscapes of sublime nothingness. Also, a Jasper Johns rare and colorful painting of 1987 I’d never seen took me to the Haunch of Venison booth. And it was good to meet Jeffrey Kastner, author of my adored “Land and Environmental Art”, though I just said “thank you, thank you for a great book” and left, not wanting to have any conversation and/or presentation.
Last but not least, I have to say the best of the fair was the people watching- beautiful young girls, no plastic surgery, and people looking at me in that way, like my wife says, of “that’s got to be somebody I want to know”. Well of course I am.
Seeing and be seen + beautiful girls did not, anyhow, help to raise my impression of The Armory Show. If this, and Scope, is what we have as “art” and “cool” and “fashionable” now… I’d rather take a late de Kooning in the Park Avenue Armory surrounded by scary mummies.
