“Viewer discretion advised: graphic sexual imagery,” reads some floor text that nobody seemed to notice or bother to read this afternoon as they entered Mendes Wood DM’s booth at the Independent.
The Independent
Posted inArt
Your Concise Guide to Armory Week 2015
It’s time for the art world’s annual migration to the far, far, far west side of Midtown Manhattan for the Armory Show and its many satellite art fairs.
Posted inArt
In Defense of Art Fairs
Walking around the two-pier behemoth that is today’s Armory Show, it’s hard to imagine that this was once a scrappy upstart hotel fair. Over the course of the week, I heard various people speak nostalgically about what the Armory had been like in its early years, as if it had been some prelapsarian moment before the art world discovered capitalism. However, in a 1995 Frieze magazine survey, co-founder Pat Hearn stated bluntly that “the art fair is simply an effort to move the product in whatever way possible.”
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Who Goes to NY Art Fairs? Emerging Collectors at The Independent
The third in a special series sponsored by 20×200 that profiles some of the people who are attending the New York art fairs this week. The following is a random sampling of attendees at the 2011 The Independent art fair on Friday night. Here is who and what I found on a Friday night in Chelsea.
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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.
