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Elmgreen & Dragset's 'EVERYONE IS BROKE' at Galleria Massimo de Carlo's stand at the Armory
These are strange days just about everywhere and in New York the strangeness has been taking its own distinctive forms. "There are fewer people on the streets," said Phoebe Eaton, a writer. "There are fewer parties." A usually brash collector told me, "The world has turned cruel." A friend in the East Village says there has been an outbreak of early 80s Mad Maxness in the neighbourhood streetwear. And why were so many local antiques and Pop knickknacks stores closed mid-morning? "Just the recession," a passerby said carelessly. "It's going to get worse."
There were further intimations of strangeness at the Armory and at such satellite fairs as Scope, Pulse, Volta, Bridge and Pool. There were spasms of high spirits, if not always supported by concrete results. At the Armory the Manhattan dealer Edward Tyler Nahem said, "We've had a lot of good visits. A lot of interest. There are people here we don't normally see in the gallery. So it has been worth our while."
Chris Taylor of Museum 52 was cock-a-hoop at sales of Sarah Bramen and a write-up in the New York Times and other galleries who reported better than expected results included Sean Kelly and Riflemaker. But many gallerists conceded that things were "slow". Louisa Guinness, who is married to the Cork Street gallerist Ben Brown, had a vitrine of artist-made jewellery. How were things going? "It's pretty dire," she said. "I just sold a piece for five hundred dollars. He asked for a discount. I said you must be joking."
Eva and Adele, the painted and costumed twin Performance artists, have been an inescapable part of art fait circuitry forever. This year I only saw Eva. Or perhaps it was Adele? One artist let it be known that he was planning a piece based on a graph illustrating the vertiginous collapse in jobs that had dominated the front page of the Times, and generally skulls had been replaced as a walkaround leitmotif by more cashflow-oriented examples of tumbril humour.
Yan Pei-Ming's painting of fraudster Bernie Madoff at David Zwirner's stand
Yan Pei-Ming's painting of the sociopathic fraudster Bernie Madoff with his tucked-in Mona Lisa smile hung in the David Zwirner booth priced at $100,000. A piece by Elmgreen & Dragset at the Galleria Massimo de Carlo stand read EVERYONE IS BROKE. The letters had been incised into a broken slab of white marble and gilded. The Paris and Miami dealer Emmanuel Perrotin was showing a piece that read STOP COMPLAINING WE JUST BOUGHT IT in blue neon and there was an orange acrylic oblong by Adam McEwen reading PAY ½ PRICE at Nicole Klagsbrun.
How much did it cost? "Sixty-five thousand dollars" Klagsbrun said. So I could get it for half price? "No discount" she said, firmly.
The surface of a piece at the Bartschi Gallery, Geneva, had been pierced by 800-plus paper darts made from dollar bills. The artist is called Tom Molloy and it was priced at $16,500.
"It could be more big even," Bartschi said. This was his second time at the Armory and he had only been offered this position in December. Which was just when the recession was beginning to bite. He took the spot anyway. "Of course!" he said. "You have to be ready."
There were further signs of optimism. Josh Lilley has recently opened a London gallery in the teeth of this perfect storm. He was at Volta, the most tightly curated of the satellite fairs, with some strong work by Vicky Wright, a painter from Britain's industrial North-West. "I've got resources in place for two years. Hopefully by then things will be better," Lilley says.
Vicky Wright at Josh Lilley
Scaramouche, a gallery which has just opened at 53 Stanton on the Lower East Side on February 28, was showing the Moscow Conceptualist, Dmitri Gutov. Why open now of all times? "We are crazy! We are crazy!" said Lorin Prince, who runs the gallery with her husband. She added more soberly "The timing was right for us personally. There are a lot of opportunities when times are hard. We sold one of the smaller pieces and are negotiating one of the larger ones. The real collectors don't go away."
"I have a good feeling about this fair," said Aidan Salakhova, who began the first private gallery in Moscow back during Perestroika. This, despite a Russian slump far severer than anything in America or Europe. "Eighty percent of my collectors are gone," she says. "They were not serious collectors. But they were serious buyers. They have lost all of their money."
They were billionaires. They must have kept something? "Now they are negative billionaires. You and I, we are richer than Deripaska." This being the Russian metals magnate who recently topped the Forbes list. His net worth was $40 billion.
Until recently the Aidan Gallery sold twenty or thirty pieces a month. Now she sells a tenth of that but she is buoyant. Her main piece at the Armory was 'Gynecologist's Office', a metal piece, effectively a drawing in air, by Anya Zholud. "She is going to be in Venice. We have had lots of interest," she says.
Anya Zholud's "Gynecological Office" at Aidan Gallery
It is worth remembering that the last serious art world slump, which was in the early 90s, saw the early phases of the careers of artists like Robert Gober and Matthew Barney and the opening of such galleries as David Zwirner and Matthew Marks. Which prompts a further thought.
The first major fair to focus on contemporary art was Art Cologne. But it was slackly run and choc-a-bloc with indifferent art so the younger, ruthlessly choosy Art Basel quickly cleaned its clock. Art Basel, however, was very much a dealers' fair. Then in the mid-90s four Manhattan dealers, Colin De Land, Pat Hearn (who were married), Paul Morris and Matthew Marks, launched a fair in the Gramercy Hotel.
The Gramercy Hotel fair was intended to ginger up the still flaccid market, and it did so with such success that in due course it morphed into the Armory. This, tightly curated, and as choosy as Basel, swiftly eclipsed the Chicago fair, which had been the numero uno in the United States, and it become the template for "Event" fairs to come.
But Pat Hearn and Colin De Land are dead. Last year Matthew Marks and Paul Morris sold the Armory to the Chicago-based corporation, Merchandise Mart. And Marks, the last of the originators to maintain a presence at the Armory, absented himself this year.
It has become in some respects a different fair anyway. To some extent necessarily. As if to get ready for leaner times, the Armory had piled on bulk. Not only were there more galleries present but a whole new section, the "Modern", was accommodated on an adjoining pier. This did indeed include much blue chip Modernism but also some pieces that would have seemed at home in a show put on by that repellently fascinating bazaar of commercial arts, Art Expo.
In fact there was plenty of Art Expo-ready material around the New York fairs last week. It was, for instance, a vivid presence at Bridge, which was located in the premises that once housed Peter Gatien's club, Tunnel. Here there were such excellent stands as that of the New York dealer, Michael Petronko, who had three Shadowman canvases by Richard Hambleden up, along with drawings by Marcel Dzama and a mural by Chuck "Koor" Hargrove, who had emerged with the early 80s generation of New York graffiti artists and is now a Belgium-based gallery artist.
There was so much weird stuff in Petronko's vicinity, though, that it was as if the booth had been kidnapped by art space aliens. "I would have pulled out if Koor hadn't flown over from Belgium," he said.
Granted, Bridge was a subsidiary fair, but it was surprising to find marginal work at the Armory. Art Expo material supplies a hugely rich and flourishing market, of course, but it is a different market. Let us count the ways. There's not much of as re-sale market for the kitschmeisters. You will very seldom find one such work in a sale of Modern and Contemporary art, nor will such work often get critical attention, except in specialty magazines. Nor is it likely to be seen in museums or any but the most eccentric collections. Indeed, galleries that show both "serious" contemporary art and work of this nature can find themselves seldom included in the reviewing loop. Just ask Ivan Karp of OK Harris. It is true that the Armory fair is strategizing for survival in tough times but this strikes me as a risky strategy.
Anthony Haden-Guest
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ANTHONY HADEN-GUEST is a writer, reporter and cartoonist who writes regularly for Saatchi Online's magazine, as well as for Esquire, GQ (UK) the Guardian and Britain's Observer Magazine. |
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| Published on 16-03-2009 |
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