Armory Present, mon amour, what occurred to you? I hardly acknowledge you anymore.
You was once the perfect of the perfect, the jewel within the crown, the flagship, the mothership, the speak of the city. How did you grow to be so bloated and boring?
I used to consider you because the Rolls-Royce of artwork festivals; now you are feeling like a Tesla at greatest. Throughout the VIP preview yesterday, September 5, I needed to skip over each 5 or 6 cubicles earlier than discovering one thing price stopping for. By God, even the espresso was dangerous. The sandwiches have been even worse.
Additionally, why are you all of a sudden promoting jewellery and mattresses? The place’s your well-known refinement and sophistication? Who’re you?!
I’m standing in entrance of Sanford Biggers’s “Mirror” (2024) from his Chimera sequence on the truthful’s Platform part, curated by Eugene Tsai, former senior curator of latest artwork on the Brooklyn Museum. It’s a classical European marble statue of a lady whose head is changed with an African masks. I couldn’t fairly inform if it was a European girl sporting an African masks, or an African girl sporting a Greco-Roman garb.
“Therefore the title,” says Biggers, with whom I shared these ideas. “It mirrors your individual assumptions and beliefs. It’s what you make of it.”
Might that even be true concerning the 2024 Armory Present? Is it a mirrored image of a drained, oversaturated, and complacent artwork market that may solely supply extra of the identical? Or am I the issue, desperately on the lookout for pleasure and discovery the place they’ll now not be discovered?
Visiting the thirtieth version of the Armory Present with its greater than 235 exhibitors was akin to the momentary disappointment you are feeling once you sip from a can of fizzy water gone flat. It’s a consummate bummer. I hoped to luxuriate within the Armory’s prickly bubbles, however that didn’t occur.
On my means out of the truthful, I met a younger artist who was as soon as my scholar. She tells me that she’s about to have her first solo exhibition and hopes to point out on the Armory at some point.
“However are you able to think about if I’m requested to make infinite replicas of the identical work?” she mentioned. “I’d really feel so depressing and empty; I’d die.”
If that’s the case, I believed, then lots of the artists at this truthful have already died 100 deaths. And so they couldn’t be happier. Are they?
With all that mentioned, a ticket to the Armory Present nonetheless means that you can survey 1000’s of works by among the world’s main artists multi function place, which is actually not one thing that occurs daily. Beneath are a few of my favorites.
