What Happened to the Armory Show?
Is this year’s fair a reflection of a tired, oversaturated, and complacent art market, or am I looking for excitement and discovery where they can no longer be found?
Armory, mon amour, what happened to you? I hardly recognize you anymore.
You used to be the best of the best, the jewel in the crown, the flagship, the mothership, the talk of the town. How did you become so bloated and dull?
I used to think of you as the Rolls-Royce of art fairs; now you feel like a Tesla at best. During the VIP preview yesterday, September 5, I had to skip over every five or six booths before finding something worth stopping for. By God, even the coffee was bad. The sandwiches, worse.
Also, why are you suddenly selling jewelry and mattresses? Where's your famous refinement and class? Who are you?!
I'm standing in front of Sanford Biggers's “Mirror” (2024) from his Chimera series at the fair’s Platform section, curated by Eugene Tsai, former senior curator of contemporary art at the Brooklyn Museum. It’s a classical European marble statue of a woman whose head is replaced with an African mask. I couldn’t quite tell if it was a European woman wearing an African mask, or an African woman wearing a Greco-Roman garb.
“Hence the title,” says Biggers, with whom I shared these thoughts. “It mirrors your own assumptions and beliefs. It is what you make of it.”
Could that also be true about the 2024 Armory Show? Is it a reflection of a tired, oversaturated, and complacent art market that can only offer more of the same? Or am I the problem, desperately looking for excitement and discovery where they can no longer be found?
Visiting the 30th edition of the Armory Show with its more than 235 exhibitors was akin to the momentary disappointment you feel when you think you bought a refreshing, super-fizzy sparkling water but instead it's just still, which actually happened to me there. It’s a consummate bummer. I was hoping to luxuriate in the Armory's prickly bubbles, but that didn't happen.
On my way out of the fair, I meet a young artist who was once my student. She tells me she's about to have her first solo exhibition and that she hopes to show at the Armory one day.
"But can you imagine if I'm asked to make endless replicas of the same work?" she says. "I'd feel so miserable and empty; I would die."
If that is the case, I thought, then many of the artists at this fair have already died a hundred deaths. And they couldn't be happier. Could they?
With all that said, a ticket to the Armory Show still allows you to survey thousands of works by some of the world's leading artists all in one place, which is certainly not something that happens every day. Below are some of my favorites.
