Take Me To the Armory
Like any major art fair these days, the Armory Show is not just a chance to buy art; it's an immersion experience. Besides the show itself, which takes place next Wednesday through Sunday on Pier 94, major buyers can choose from a smorgasbord of other activities: panel discussions; tours of the Whitney Biennial; visits to New York collectors' homes, and separate cocktail parties hosted by the French Cultural Services, the Belgian and Swedish Consulates, and the general director for cultural affairs of the Netherlands.
But if this sounds like a busy week, it will only get busier in years to come. The new owner of the Armory Show, the Chicago-based Merchandise Mart Properties Inc., envisions "Armory Week" becoming a citywide event.
The president of MMPI, Christopher Kennedy, said that in the long run, he wants to partner with all of New York's museums and galleries, as well as restaurants and the hospitality industry, to turn these five days in March into "a destination-quality weekend to attract people from all over the world." He said he would like to expand the Armory Show beyond Pier 94 and to "expand other fairs around the city." Asked if he meant he might acquire some of the satellite fairs, Mr. Kennedy said: "Anything that's complementary to what we're doing would be on the table."
This year, MMPI is already expanding its reach beyond the Pier. It has brought another of its fairs, Volta, to the city for the first time. It has created a Web site, armoryartsweek.com, that lists all the satellite shows, including Pulse, Red Dot, Scope New York, the Bridge Art Fair, and the Art Now Fair. It has reached out to the city's tourism agency, NYC & Company, which is promoting the fairs on its own Web site.
Although the Mandarin Oriental is an official sponsor of the fair, Mr. Kennedy said that his friendship with André Balazs will also be a boon, with the latter's new Times Square hotel, QT, becoming "the center of the post-fair nightlife."
Despite the parties, though, Mr. Kennedy said that the focus will remain on educational programs. Asked if by developing the fair into a city-wide event, he was essentially aspiring to make the Armory more like Art Basel Miami Beach, Mr. Kennedy demurred.
"I don't think there's an intellectual component to Art Basel Miami," he said. "I don't know how many times you can go to the Rubell Collection and count that as an educational experience."
Besides, he added, New York is a completely different — and, he implied, more sophisticated — context: "I bet more people go to art museums in New York on any given weekend than go to Art Basel Miami Beach."
A better comparison, he said, would be to what MMPI has done with another of its fairs, Art Chicago, by assembling a group of shows around it and coordinating the fair with other activities around town. A dealer, Sean Kelly, said he thought it was wonderful that MMPI wanted to promote the Armory Show more heavily. Noting that the Armory was previously owned by the dealers who founded it — Paul Morris, Matthew Marks, and the late Colin de Land and Pat Hearn — and that these dealers had their own businesses outside of the fair, Mr. Kelly said: "Having a professional organization whose sole focus is fairs is very good. They can do a lot more with the marketing and outreach and event planning, [although] with the attendance and the queues what they were last year, you wonder how much more they have to do."
Besides having new owners, the fair will not be substantially different this year from last. It is still being run by the same staff, and Mr. Morris has joined MMPI as its vice president of art shows and events, managing Art Chicago and Volta, as well. One change is that opening night, which for years has been a benefit for the Museum of Modern Art, is now a by-invitation opening for the exhibitors' and the fair's own list of collectors and museum VIPs.
The 160 participating galleries will, as usual, display mostly primary market pieces — many of them made specifically for the fair. Cheim & Read will display a group of works, including four LED signs, by Jenny Holzer, on the subject of the Iraq war and the torture of detainees. Paul Kasmin will exhibit new works by Annette Lemieux, playing on the notion of the "Armory" and of "fairs" in general. Ronald Feldman Fine Arts is reviving an installation of Eleanor Antin's from 1986, called "Loves of a Ballerina," as well as the separate installation, "Portrait of Antinova." "Loves of a Ballerina" consists of a mock movie-theater façade, which viewers can peer through to watch short film clips of Ms. Antin appearing as an aging ballerina.
In terms of larger installations, Deitch Projects is producing a 100-foot-long work by Assume Vivid Astro Focus for the exterior wall of the VIP Lounge. And Elizabeth Dee Gallery is bringing back a popular work first exhibited in 2001: Alex Bag's "Untitled (The Van)," a white Dodge van, on the interior of which is projected a video of a dealer driving three of his artists, who talk crassly about their careers and possessions, to the Armory Show. The Show's executive director, Katelijne De Backer, said that the work was being brought back as a tribute to de Land, who was Mr. Bag's dealer and who died in 2003.
Asked if it was unfortunate timing for a major art fair to open in New York a week after a major investment bank collapsed and the Federal Reserve intervened to stem further financial turmoil, Mr. Kelly said: "If you said you weren't concerned about it, you'd either be an idiot, or you'd have your head in the sand. We all live in a very interconnected world, and what's happening in the finance industry in New York is very concerning." Thus far, though, he said, his gallery had done as well in the first two months of this year as it did in the same period in 2007.
Even in a bear market, he said, "Good galleries in the primary market have to work hard, but they do well. They control their inventory. They have access to the artists; they don't have to compete on the secondary market for material. In that kind of market, people go for quality, and, frankly, we do very well."
