On Wednesday night, The Armory Show held a small, exclusive cocktail party for its collectors in the rotunda of the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, one of New York’s more opulent venues for a party. For hours, guests such as the collector Nicolai Frahm, the actor and Meryl Streep–scion Grace Gummer, and Powerhouse Arts director Eric Shiner mingled, nibbling on fluke crudo and mini truffle burgers.
On paper, it could be billed as the final touch of the fair’s glow-up, seeing as a few years ago, The Armory Show occupied a pier next to the stretch of West Side Highway, a location that forced visitors to enter as the Hustler Club floated ominously across the street. One year, the pier collapsed. Now, the fair is held in the shiny Javits Center, a few blocks from Chelsea. And the pregame is on Museum Mile.
“Yeah, it’s just some little shindig right,” Nicole Berry, the director of The Armory Show, as she flung her wrists toward the Frank Lloyd Wright rotunda.
This little shindig had a surprising number of Europeans who chose this art hoopla over the trip to Frieze Seoul, which is happening halfway across the world at the same exact time. Brussels-based art-world fixture Alain Servais, a collector and investment banker known for his ever-present cravat affixed to his collar, shook his head thinking about the fact that an identical merry-go-round of gallery fêtes and fair vernissages was happening in South Korea.
“I’m just so interested in the industrialization of the art world,” he said. “I invented the phrase ‘Grow or Go’ years ago and now I use it every day. The art world cannot stop growing. One day it might be the NFL.”
And now the Armory itself has become part of the ever-expanding industrialization—earlier this year, Frieze scooped up the fair for $24.4 million, and last month, also acquired Expo Chicago. (The seller of Frieze was Vornado Realty Trust, the behemoth Gotham building company chaired by billionaire Steven Roth, while Art Expositions LLC sold Expo Chicago.) In the face of an Art Basel that quite successfully expanded its empire to Paris, Frieze is now aggressively expanding its footprint in the States by acquiring two solid fairs that had been somewhat lacking the hip factor of, well, Frieze.
While the two events will retain their independence, Frieze’s chief executive Simon Fox said at the time the deal was announced, the expos in Chicago and New York are clearly thrilled to be brought into the fold by a fair group that seems to always burst with Mayfair chic at Frieze London and Hollywood glamor at Frieze Los Angeles. Tony Karman, the longtime Expo Chicago director who’s long acted as the Energizer Bunny of the windy city art world, has been telling people at parties that he recently got a phone call from Ari Emanuel, the cofounder of Frieze’s parent company Endeavor, and loved every second of it. The love is presumably mutual. The super agent grew up in Chicago, and his brother Rahm served as the mayor for eight years. Fox, the British media vet, was spotted in Chicago during this year’s fair, months before the deal closed, checking out the city’s famous architectural boat tour and basically having the time of his life.
And after making my way through the reams of Europeans quaffing negronis under the rotunda, and enduring an Italian furniture designer who insisted I was an actor—“What is that show, with the attorneys? Suits? Are you on that show?”—I ran into Christine Messineo, the director of Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles, who stayed in New York to oversee Frieze’s new acquisition while her colleagues manned the ship in Seoul. She insisted that The Armory Show was going to operate independently under Frieze, but let slip that she had been given early access to the fair a full day early.
“And I can tell you, honestly, it looks amazing,” she said.
Amid all this, should one be concerned about, say, the ever-shrinking art market? Auction sales are down considerably in the last year compared to the relative boom times of the immediate post-pandemic. The collapse of China’s real estate infrastructure has led the country into a recession, eliminating the sell-side’s most reliable buyer of the last decade. And China isn’t just not buying, they are actively unloading—the announcement that Shanghai’s Long Museum would be selling off a large chunk of their collection has deeply spooked the market. The first wave of casualties has started. Jasmin Tsou made the shock announcement that she would close her gallery JTT just a little over a year after moving to a splashy new space in Tribeca. Across the pond, one-time triple continental powerhouse Simon Lee went into court-ordered administration (similar to bankruptcy in the US).
But for those still standing, sitting out a fair week is not an option once the collectors return to New York after a long period of Hamptons obsolescence. On Tuesday, The Independent fair had a cocktail hour at Casa Cipriani, where, despite the sweltering heat, the bar room was filled with men in Loro Piana suits. There’s some great tennis happening in Flushing Meadows, and plus, lest we forget, it’s fashion week. J. Crew’s 40th-anniversary party featured a performance by The Strokes. I left after they played “The Modern Age,” which honestly sounded great despite the subtle hints of My Super Sweet 16 that came with the whole affair. After the band finished, Julian Casablancas said, “It’s been real… and a little bit fake.”
There was also a dinner for the artist Chase Hall, in celebration of his exhibition at David Kordansky Gallery, at Ignacio Mattos’s restaurant Altro Paradiso. Each table was studded with collectors from Miami and Dallas and Los Angeles, while Gagosian’s Antwaun Sargent was holding court at the same table at the same restaurant he sat at exactly a year ago to fête Rick Lowe. The following night there was another dinner hosted by Kasmin Gallery in honor of its shows for the artists Elliott Hundley and Bosco Sodi—and it was at the same restaurant, Altro Paradiso, as if the art world knows exactly one place to eat dinner on earth, and they happen to like it.
On Thursday, I made my way to Independent’s fall fair, which has the advantage of taking place at the Casa Cipriani’s beaux-arts Battery Maritime Building, its windows framing perfect views of an endless stream of helicopters depositing banking execs on the helipad next door. In other words, a perfect spot for Vito Schnabel to stage a booth of Andy Warhol’s society portraits—Liza Minelli, Jack Nicklaus, Giorgio Armani—curated by Bob Colacello (a former contributor to VF), who wrangled many of the subjects while he was editor of Interview in the ’70s, when the magazine was the Pravda of the Factory. Painter Peter Nadin was at the Off-Paradise booth to guide one toward a landscape that’s off to join the collection of an important European institution. This booth’s view included no airborne rotor-churning “Succession”-like portraits of Manhattan power, but instead the modest vista of the Red Hook docks, the epitome of working-class Brooklyn. Nadin loved it. He’s from Liverpool.
Nate Freeman
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