8.28.23 — Left Behind?
Enjoy those last long days of summer before the mad rush after Labor Day, especially in art. That includes the fall New York art fairs. So while you are bracing yourself, this would be a good time for my recap of the crop just before summer, as context. Go for it.
Spring New York art fairs keep departing, but it takes longer and longer to see what they left behind. More than ever have moved to September, for that first week of the fall season. Yet May fair week now stretches to two weeks, enough to exhaust anyone. With September fairs coming soon, along with the wild and crazing fall openings, it’s time I looked back and caught up.
They are a busy two weeks at that. The March fairs are gone for good, as the spring fairs that remain join Frieze in May. They also join what has become a seeming nonstop fair weekend, counting city after city, running year round. Can galleries afford it, and can collectors afford two straight weeks in New York? If they can, why not use that time to take in the galleries and forget the fairs? My highly selective tour sorts out the competition, and it is my subject for all this week, starting with an extra post this week, for Tuesday.
I have balked in the past at TEFAF (the European Fine Art Fair) for its mix of furniture and jewelry with posh European dealers, but this year it balked at me. I faced a steep price without press credentials. I should have loved to see paintings by Winold Reiss for the art deco interior of a long-departed restaurant, for just one view of the multiplicity of early Modernisms in New York. Instead, I begin next time with another European import, London’s Frieze, now the heart of May’s fair weeks. From there, I look at alternative fairs struggling to break through and to the one that does, the Independent. Will it be enough to sustain a future for the fairs?
Read more, now in a feature-length article on this site.
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