Art Fair Real Talk With David Everitt Howe
ArtReview sent me and David Everitt Howe to review the Armory Fair in New York, which includes stalls by 200 galleries from over 30 countries. I don’t think I’ve ever had so much fun writing anything in my entire life. David and I are like the Statler and Waldorf of the art world. Check out what we came up with here:
http://artreview.com/home/the_armory_show_new_york/
Not published — probably for good reason — was initial impressions after walking around the fair with our friend Conrad Ventur. Conrad is the most famous person with whom I text, and he was a great third wheel. If you’re looking for more insight about things like the furniture and what people were wearing and how much champagne cost at the VIP opening, read on below.
BW: This is the kind of place you should come to in a chauffeured car, or not at all. It’s at the end of the earth (aka Manhattan). It took me forty minutes to walk here from the subway. When I reached 12th avenue, I joined a parade of gallery girls in platform booties hoofing around like they were going to the most important event in the world. The most unfortunate thing about them is that they all looked very normal.
DEH: Man I loathe art fairs. Art always looks so bad in them; everything is stuffed into cramped booths with horrible lighting fixtures that make the place like an Ikea showroom. I mean, 200 big name galleries from 30 countries in a space that looks like an abandoned airplane hanger? Nothing good can come of this.
BW: The art, as usual, almost seems like an afterthought. It’s Gagosian’s first time participating in the Armory and all they can think of doing is plastering their booth with Andy Warhol wallpaper? It’s sort of indicative of the whole feel here — galleries forfeiting the opportunity to say something intelligent to an interested audience for the sake of making an easy sale.
DEH: But that’s sort of the purpose of the art fair in general, right? It’s to sustain artists’ practices. So it has to be easy. And because booths are so expensive, galleries have to use every available space – hence, the stuffing. But I think easy is the key word. This is a much more accessible place to come in contact with art than say, a white cube gallery, which has a very different scale and tone that’s not so friendly to outsiders. I don’t see many artworld insiders here except when it comes to artists and their dealers. At least not compared to other VIP events.
BW: The real question, then, is why do people come at all, especially when there’s no free booze? I think that there’s a general feeling, even among insiders, that if you don’t show up, you’ll miss out on something. Esther Kim, the LA dealer for Armory Commissioned Artist Liz Magic Laser, said it best when she told us, “art fairs, rather than museums or galleries, are where people come to see art these days.” I don’t necessarily think that’s true — in fact, this is my first time coming to the Armory, and I’m a professional art writer — but if the dominant narrative is that art fairs are where the proverbial magic happens, then people will feel guilty for not showing up. Which is kind of a shame because most of the art here is of very little interest to us.
DEH: I know. And there’s so much of it. You need at least five drinks to even get through it, especially if you’re the town drunk like me. But when I tried to get a glass of bubbly, it was $20! Fuck that. I’m not that VIP.
BW: While you were getting Champagne I tried to wrangle a seat from an old lady perched on the edge of a sofa who told me that she was “too afraid to sit down because she might never get up.” That perfectly describes half of the people here. Why is everyone dressed in such muted colors? The craziest person I saw was either middle-aged woman wearing a prom dress or Michael Stipe — who, by the way, almost swooned when he caught a glimpse of Bill Cunningham, the legendary New York Times society photographer. When did the art world become so un-fabulous?
DEH: I agree that most people here are boring looking, but I kinda want to fuck half of them because I’m strangely horny. I think it’s the propensity of beard art. There’s lots of vaguely homoerotic hipster painting — my favorite is one by London artist Ryan Mosley — which I like just because I like hipsters (or Otters, to use the gay parlance). If this place weren’t a black hole of communication I’d be on artworld Grindr right now. But if there is a silver lining to this place, it’s that that galleries and artists get to make some money, which is hard to come by.
BW: The biggest silver lining for me was watching you respond to every work that even remotely resembles something furry or bearded. I also was pretty into this one guy that was wearing a ripped white t-shirt, but he basically made out with our friend Conrad.
DEH: Sharing is caring.
BW: The more we talk about it, the more I sort of appreciated the scene this year — and not only because there were so many hot Otters. There were also no girls tottering around in cocktails dresses, puckering their lips for party photographers. There was no one sneering at you over the lip of their champagne flutes — probably because most people couldn’t afford them. People were here to work rather than to be seen. I didn’t feel out of place wearing jeans and comfortable walking shoes — and I won’t go home tonight and feel like a lesser human being. It has a much different feel than Art Basel Miami, or even the ADAA — an ordinary person wouldn’t feel out of place here, not even at the VIP opening. That’s more than you can say about most of the galleries in Chelsea, which is what you pointed out earlier.
I just picked something up off the table in front of me and realized it was a price list for the furniture I was sitting on.
DEH: Oh now that really is disgusting.
BW: And why was the line for the coat check an hour long? I had to carry my laptop on two laps around this monstrosity, and now my back is spasming.
DEH: Let’s find a place for a free drink. Or five.