My itinerary included stops at Derek Eller for some legitimately sick paintings by Austin Martin White-including a few illuminated in ghoulish ultraviolet for the opening’s hours only-as well as Artists Space for Jonathan Lyndon Chase, Theta for Kelsey Isaacs, and more. You would duck into a white cube for just long enough to cool off, say some peaked hellos, and return to your route as the street air settled back on you like a steamed duvet. On Friday, afternoon rains had failed to dispel the humidity, leaving the night saunalike and a little mad. As a result, I was continuously plagued by the sensation that my trousers were steadily, slowly being yanked toward my knees-getting pantsed in slow motion. I had failed to do my laundry, which meant that throughout the ludicrously hot, frantic, theoretically glamorous XXL weekend I was wearing socks with holes in them and my most uncomfortable underwear, including a defective pair of Calvin Kleins and some American Apparel nude women’s bikini briefs that I purchased for a Halloween costume nearly a decade ago. From Wednesday through Saturday, there were some one hundred and fifty openings at credible galleries, loosely defined, with myriad collateral dinners, parties, screenings, and performances along with at least three other fairs. All photos unless noted: Domenick Ammirati.Īs for the rest of the week, there was far too much to do and see. The most impressive command of the contemporary artist’s concerns was displayed by the jewelry brand Sauer, with their Zodiac collection offering the dozen astrological signs as signets and their questionably titled Fungus collection taking up the vocabulary of the magic mushroom. I spied filmmaker-artist Bradley Eros, an unlikely connection to the comparatively quaint world of Anthology Film Archives and Jonas Mekas, tipping an ear to it as if it were a cross between a Max Neuhaus and a Walter De Maria.
The most impressive feature of this ad hoc sculpture park-not Art Omi but Art? Oh My-was in fact part of the architecture, a monumental gray ductwork structure stretching to but not quite breaching the Javits Center’s glass ceiling, just like Hilary Clinton. The Armory’s Javits Center, oversized and airy, is designed for trade shows, naturally making it a better space for the display of art than Frieze’s Shed, which was designed as a kunsthalle.įor this go-round, the Armory’s organizers made the most prominent feature of the show’s layout a long, strange runway of oversize sculptures on round-edged beige carpet half a football field long. Now that the two shows are siblings, one wonders how much longer the more toned and tony Frieze New York will continue to operate at an inferior site. (Here my editor reminds me that, by some seventy years, Roland Barthes beat me to it.)
#Shadow era art professional#
Obviously I should follow the lead of Ari Emanuel and, rather than Owens and Strauss, try to synthesize art and professional wrestling to find the real key to our age. In July, the Armory was acquired by Frieze, which is itself owned by the entertainment giant Endeavor, which on Monday announced its purchase of WWE. The Armory Show moved to autumn a mere two years ago and has already implicitly made the first week of September “Armory Week,” lassoing the slew of exhibition openings that take place-not to mention Fashion Week, the finals of the US Open, and the VMAs-as its paraproperty: part of the brand. We just feel like we’re being lied to all the time.Īn art fair, of course, is not the place to look for coherence or aesthetics. The transformation of the art object into a financial instrument: What does it look like? It remains terminally hard to say, since what it looks like doesn’t matter. The confluence of postmodernism and antimodernism would seem to explain our reactionary aesthetic substrate as well as anything at the moment. Photo: Vincent Tullo/The Armory Show.ĪUGUST WAS SLOW and dull and frustrating I spent it trying to synthesize Craig Owens and Leo Strauss.
View of The Armory Show, at the Javits Center, 2023.
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