NY Armory Show

Roberta Smith has written a review of the New York armory art fair. After a few years of hard times, Smith pleasantly reports the show, even with strong competition appears to be headed in a positive direction. Many of the big contemporary art have left the fair over the past few years, and while this has made some news, Smith beleives it has opened the door for other dealers, giving the fair a fresher look.

Smith states the Armory show has over 270 galleries and dealers exhibiting, some with a different view on fairs and exhibits. For example, Ben Kaufmann, a dealer from Berlin is showing a slide of works by 15 artists he represents.

Smith reports

Art fairs occur because hundreds of art dealers have decided that these temporary confabs help them raise their profiles and make it easier to find one buyer each for a certain number of artworks. While the dealers seek those individual matches of art and buyer, the rest of us are free, in a sense, to watch: to absorb the art and learn from it, which is another kind of possession.

Which brings us to this year’s bracing Armory Show, with booths outfitted by more than 270 galleries and private dealers spread between two piers jutting into the Hudson. It is a behemoth of a fair, the biggest by far of the weekend’s offerings.

Recent Armory buzz has not been good. Despite its size, or maybe because of, the Armory Show has been hemorrhaging important dealers for several seasons. It now has competition from the hip, new Independent art fair in Chelsea and the resurgent Art Show at the Park Avenue Armory uptown. And there’s also the increasingly impressive list of dealers here and abroad who simply abstain from all New York fairs. (Others include Volta, Scope, Pulse, Pool, Verge Art Brooklyn, Red Dot, Fountain and this year’s newbie, the Dependent.)

All things considered, I had expected to find a dying art fair at river’s edge. Instead, the show seems fresher than it has in several years. It has clearly been more revived than diminished by the loss of big-name, blue-chip or white-hot galleries, and has a younger, more egalitarian, free-for-all spirit. Lack of familiarity helps. New York dealers are sparsely represented in the show’s contemporary section, and there is a host of first-timers, including 18 galleries from Latin America in this year’s Focus section.

To read the full NY Times review of the Armory art fair, click HERE.

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