New York Art Fairs Doing Brisk Business
Published February 27th, 2007
Bloomberg - The 150 dealers at the annual trade show, ending today on the massive Hudson River Pier 94, largely put business before pleasure, generating a high volume of sales but little that was challenging or new.
Gone was any trace of the fair’s former life as the unpredictable, primary-market alternative to its staid uptown sister, the Art Dealers Association of America Art Show, held concurrently this year at the Seventh Regiment Armory on Park Avenue.
Sure, there were mild amusements. Parked in the Ronald Feldman Gallery booth was a New York City garbage truck, gussied up with mirrored panels by the worthy Mierle Laderman Ukeles, who has been the city sanitation department’s official (though unpaid) artist-in-residence for 30 years. Most people passed it right by.
“What’s new and exciting isn’t the art,” said one collector, Niva Grill, at the Harris Lieberman gallery booth. “It’s the new collectors.” She was speaking of a generation of bonus-rich buyers who seem willing to pay any price for entree to the increasingly fashionable contemporary art market.
Meanwhile, the ADAA fair, with 70 galleries, underwent a sea change. There, the once plentiful modern, postwar and Old Master dealers are almost outnumbered by contemporary blue-chip dealers such as Marian Goodman, Barbara Gladstone and Andrea Rosen, formerly fixtures of the pier show. Most limited their presentations to works by a single artist, making the whole fair seem tightly focused.
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