School is Back in Session for the Art World, for Better or Worse

About three hours into prowling the aisles at the VIP preview of The Armory Show earlier this month, I began to feel déjà vu. It’s difficult to say what triggered it. Was it the sounds of The Dare, an indie sleaze pop revivalist whose sound is reminiscent of 2010s LCD Soundsystem, pumping through my earbuds? Or maybe the performance artist clad in thigh-high fishnets whose plastic-wrap dress listed her phone number and a summons to sext her, a stunt that felt very Art Basel Miami Beach 2016. Or could it be that it was only three years ago that I received the first of two Covid vaccine shots right here at the Javits Center? Back then, the vast, fluorescent-lit convention center was largely deserted, a set for a zombie apocalypse were it not for all the front-line workers.

Covid wasn’t the only reason memories of 2021 felt poignant. It was then, during the dark days of lockdown, that collectors, stuck at home, started bidding up the works of young painters in online auctions. Now, we are paying the price, with an overall market slowdown. Wandering the Armory Show, I wondered what art dealers made of it all.

“We also have been very conservative with our pricing from the very beginning,” Mariane Ibrahim, whose eponymous art gallery is based in Chicago, told me. Ibrahim supported artist Lina Iris Viktor in a 2018 lawsuit against Kendrick Lamar after Viktor alleged that Lamar’s “All The Stars” video drew from her work without her permission. “Even when the market was very high, we kept our prices at a level that was not fitting with the demands.” In other words: she didn’t let the secondary (auction) market determine the prices of primary market works. “Our currency is still the relevance of the artist within an institutional background, and that is what justifies the price.

By increasing the price, Ibrahim continued, “you also lose the younger collectors. You also lose the opportunity to engage with certain demographics. … So we keep it really steady.”

Elsewhere at the Armory Show, New York art critic Jerry Saltz held court at a pop-up cafe, graciously taking selfies with fans and trying mightily to pass off my questions to passing friends who, he insisted, would be better equipped to answer my queries.

“I don’t look at art at art fairs,” Saltz quipped. “I’m just sort of smelling for pheromones.”

I ran a quick mental inventory of the few canvases at the Armory I’d taken snapshots of in my head. “There’s a lot to look at, but there’s not a Cy Twombly, you know what I mean?” I offered as a Saltz prompt.

“And I’m glad for that,” Saltz returned. “I don’t need another goddamn genius painting by Cy Twombly. If you’re lucky, you’ll spot two or three things you like and a bunch that you instantaneously forget.”

What Saltz seemed to echo is the phrase the Armory Show uses so much in association with the event that it’s come to seem like a tagline: a fair for discovery. But there was just as much discovery happening in New York’s galleries.

The art market has come out the other side after a raft of techno-trends that, looking back, seem largely hysterical. The insistence that NFTs and the blockchain were revolutionary and paradigm-shifting ended up insisting upon themselves too much; so that whole thing collapsed, and basically went nowhere.

An aesthetic correction to the netherworld of blockchain and NFTs—a return to a more embodied present—could be spotted at the Ethan James Green show “Bombshell” at Kapp Kapp gallery in Tribeca, where images of resplendent young stars like Hari Nef were cooed over by Interview magazine tastemakers and frenzied 20-somethings.

Writer Devan Díaz penned the introduction to Green’s ‘Bombshell.’ At the Kapp Kapp opening, we compared notes on how we were feeling about back-to-school season, and the pros and cons of having artwork of ourselves hung up in our homes (Díaz has a drawing of herself by Drake Carr; I have a framed photo of me in a New York mag winter coat spread; brag). “You don’t feel like Dorian Grey a little bit?” Díaz asked me.

The next night, I trotted from a group show opening at James Cohan gallery to the Purple NYFW block party at 50 Howard street. The party spilled out into the street, where well-heeled guests were smoking and chatting, and a few NYPD roamed around for some reason (it was 8pm, probably too early for any real trouble). At the door, the formal invitation I clutched meant nothing, nor did my Sandy Liang micro-miniskirt and Chuck Taylors qualify me for entrance. A gaggle of better-dressed kids swarmed past me.

Perhaps the real discovery of the week is that, for certain things, you will just never be cool enough.