Wayne Coe creates complicated sand paintings on the sidewalks and floors of New York using the language of gay male porn theater advertising from the 1970s and 1980s to create ads for contemporary artists. I caught up with the artist, who was performing for six hours yesterday as part of Brooklyn Art Now in DUMBO , to ask him about “art-xploitation,” which he says is “the use of male film hyperbole to sell art.”
Art
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Feeling Civilized at the 2011 Volta Art Fair
Across the street from the Empire State Building is the Volta Art Fair, a sophisticated and civilized art fair where galleries from around the world present solo artist projects. Elizabeth Tenenbaum and Elissa Levy of InContext Studio Tours gave me a preview of Volta New York 2011. After attending six art fairs during Armory Week, Volta felt different to me. It was a tightly curated, intelligent and a refreshingly friendly view of international contemporary art. The attitude here was more like a TED conference than an art fair, seemingly more concerned with good ideas than with commercial sales.
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Is The Art Show a Senior Citizen’s Swinger’s Club Past its Prime?
The Art Show has been hosted by the Art Dealers Association of America (ADAA) for the last 23 years, reigning supreme as the longest running national art fair. The ADAA consists of 175 galleries but only seventy exhibitors enrolled this year, excluding stunners like Andrea Rosen, Betty Cunningham, PPOW and Gavin Brown. A large majority of the participants are located uptown between 50th Street and 90th Street. The generalized content (“cutting-edge, 21st century works” and “museum quality pieces from the 19th and 20th centuries”) and my fears of dated academia prepped me for the deflated viewing that was The Art Show. The ADAA’s Executive Director spoke to the “calm and intimate atmosphere” of The Art Show. Although the Park Avenue Armory’s soaring “balloon shed” construction is partially responsible, the cavalcade of elderly patrons weren’t exactly rambunctious. The air-kisses exchanged between crotchety senior citizens summoned a swinger’s club way past its prime.
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Any Place and No Place at Independent 2011
The art world has different tribes. The crowds at the Armory, ADAA Art Show and Pulse are different because the varying aesthetics and brands on display draw different audiences. To my eyes, the Independent was dominated by the ArtForum set, a post-minimal aesthetic that drew heavily on blank-faced conceptualism, the visual strategies of minimalism and the wallets of a coterie of black-garbed international hipsters. Of course, I still liked it more than any other fair I’ve attended yet.
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Who Goes to NY Art Fairs? Emerging Collectors at Pulse
Starting today, I will be posting a special series sponsored by 20×200 that will profile some of the people who are attending the New York art fairs this week. I did a random sampling of attendees at the 2011 Pulse Art Fair to give a sense of who the audience is for these annual events. Here is who and what I found on a Thursday afternoon in Chelsea
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Bushwick Brought the Party to NY’s 2011 Scope Fair
Perhaps going directly from the Armory to Scope was a mistake. At a significantly smaller scale, lower budgets, and complete with an indoor smoking room and a cash bar manned by none other than Bushwick artisanal pizza powerhouse Roberta’s, Scope Art Fair New York was very much like a Bushwick opening after a day at MoMA. The editorial lens of the significantly more exclusive (and expensive) art fairs do, in fact, produce better art viewing experiences.
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Trendspotting at Pulse 2011
Pulse 2011, a more emerging gallery-oriented fair than the Armory, ADAA or Independent, took place in a well-lit, pleasant space on West 18th Street that had more in common with a high-end mall than a convention center. Unfortunately, most of the art on view was just as anodyne as the space itself.
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Going Contemporary at the Armory
If the art world has been about globalism for quite a while I can say that is more true now than ever — if that’s possible.
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How Do You Sell an Animated GIF?
Last month, we learned that Paddy Johnson of Art Fag City curated a show of animated GIFs and now I’ve discovered that Lauren Cornell, the executive director of Rhizome, is selling these often trippy nuggets of Graphics Interchange Format at the 2011 New York Armory Show. Yes, that’s right. She’s a pixel pusher. Click through to see a guerrilla video interview shot on site at the Armory, featuring several of the GIFs for sale.
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20th C Moderne at the Armory
If the contemporary side of the Armory is flashier with its glamor and energy, this is the tried and true historical wing that presents a more reserved modernist face but not one without a lot of seduction. Here are some of my picks for what to see if you visit.
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Making Sense of the 2011 Armory Show Cacophony
New York Art Fair Week 2011 kicks off with the Armory Show! Over the course of a pre-show press conference we were treated to Mayor Bloomberg explaining his taste for Picasso, but that was just an appetizer for the exhibition ahead. The 2011 Armory presented a chaotic and inconsistent mixture, but there were still plenty of pieces that stood out of the general cacophony. Check out our first photo essay of the art fair below.
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Surviving the 2011 NY Art Fairs
We’re very happy to have partnered with 20×200 and Art Fag City to create the most useful guide (if I do say so myself) of this week’s events titled “Art Fag City & Hyperallergic Present the Very Excellent Event Guide to New York Art Fair Week” (sneak peak) for their very excellent survival kit. Inside our contribution to the schwag bag are listings for tourists, residents and city natives of what to do to augment your art experience in New York. Whether it’s off-the-beaten path performance festivals, culinary artist events or lectures with people in the know, this is your go-to guide.