April 3, 2008

{     New York Art Fair Snapshots 2008     }    

Another round of art fairs wound up here in New York this past weekend and again crowndozen.com was on the beat taking snapshots of the cream. I had Sunday afternoon, one charged camera battery and a gig of SD card space to get it all so the fact that the pickin's were slim this season wasn't a problem.

Here are the fairs I had time to see:

The Armory Show
Pulse New York
Scope New York
Bridge New York
Volta New York
LA Art in New York

Other blogs have already reported their favorites with much gusto. Check out artinfo.com, artfagcity.com and the always solid artnet.com for their excellent reporting. And, of course, if you want to do some in-crowd star gazing artforum.com never fails.

In case you don't have time to go through all those links here's some opinionated Cliff Notes:

Pulse muscled their way up the food chain. Scope sacrificed edge for austerity and sank. The Armory while doing away with secondary market chaff added nothing groundbreaking or spikey to augment thus falling sadly flat. Volta had some mojo but was difficult to get to in midtown (across from the Empire State Building? What were they thinking?). The LA Art Fair was there. Bridge stunk as it usually does. Attendance and sales were down across the board as recession jitters kept folks who don't have to worry about that kind of nonsense from writing too many checks. Quality and ingenuity were down but so was quantity which felt good. There's been too much art for a while now. I hope the recession thins the herd more. We need it.