Close Encounters

THE LOWDOWN ON THE UPPERCRUST ART FAIR

The Art Show. The very title makes it sound important. It says this isn’t a show of just any art but the show of the art, the best available to the finest tastes. That is hyperbole. As the annual trade fair of the Art Dealers Association of America, the Art Show is limited to American (mostly New York) galleries that cater to a conservative, older crowd from the neighborhood around the Park Avenue Armory, the fair’s palatial uptown venue.

For much of its 50 years, the fair emphasized secondary market Modernist, Impressionist, American realist and Old Master works from small uptown galleries. Over the last several years, as good material from ages past dried up or went to auction and contemporary art became more fashionable, the ADAA has brought an increasing number of primary-market, contemporary art dealers into its fold. Still, art that might be considered provocative or cutting-edge rarely find a place here.

The 2012 Art Show’s vernissage on Mar. 6 -- as usual a benefit for the Lower East Side’s Henry Street Settlement -- may have marked the fair’s most of-the-moment appearance yet but also toed the established line. It offered complimentary champagne, a wide array of delicious hors d’oeuvres, and works by artists whose prices have risen with current or recent museum shows.

Given pride of place front-and-center, Metro Pictures brought a nearly complete set of Cindy Sherman’s “Murder Mystery,” a handmade, cut-paper, black and white photographic narrative from 1976 showing the now-celebrated artist dressed as 13 different characters. Divided by the artist into mini-episodes of three, five or six frames, prices went from $200,000 to $400,000. The booth was crowded from the jump.

Hard on the heels of Sarah Sze’s appointment as the artist representing the U.S. at the next Venice Biennale, Tanya Bonakdar Gallery immediately sold out a group of the artist’s new assemblages of everyday materials that look far more fragile than they actually are.

Its booth walls painted a bright red, L&M Arts presented works from the 1970s by John Baldessari priced from $500,000 to $800,000. One was the Untitled (Directional Piece) – 22 black-and-white snapshots of people on the street or seated in an outdoor café, their facing directions drolly marked by the artist in red directional arrows that anticipated the primary-colored dots he would attach to his signature later works.

But the booth that raised the most comment belonged to Marian Goodman Gallery. With only a week to go before the Guggenheim Museum opens its Francesca Woodman retrospective, the dealer presented a collection of the late artist’s small-format, black-and-white still-lifes and self-portrait nudes, each a dark and deep head-turner priced at about $32,000. Get one now! Since the artist committed suicide in 1981, at age 22, there aren’t many available and they are unlikely to go for such relatively low prices again.

But who can understand our seemingly irrational market? The Woodmans’ dollar as well as historical value sharply contrasted with that of the portraits that Los Angeles artist Henry Taylor painted during his recent residency at MoMA PS1. L.A.’s Blum & Poe sold them all in the first hour to hands shelling out $15,000 to $60,000.

The Yoshitomo Nara drawings at the Pace Gallery booth across the aisle went just as fast, with price tags that started at $16,000 and went to $50,000. Two of the more fetching, painted on envelopes in 2006 and 2008, were $30,000. Nara joined Pace just this past October. Making his gallery debut at the fair’s opening, he looked mighty happy about the whole thing.

So did Regan Projects’ Shaun Caley Regen, who sold out all of the labor-intensive Elliott Hundley collages in her booth at $50,000 each. Such solo presentations, which include Margo Leavin Gallery’s array of vintage-1970s photographs and paintings by William Leavitt and Luhring Augustine’s new Elad Lassry photographs, drawings and objects (all sold at $9,000 to $45,000), give this fair the illusion of a curated group exhibition that took some nerve to mount.

Nowhere else would one find, say, the juxtaposition of kitschy 1920’s portraits by Francis Picabia (at Michael Werner Gallery stand) right next to Blum and Poe’s Taylor show. It was plain weird to see a 1974 Ellsworth Kelly shaped painting in the same booth with a Renoir portrait (at Acquavella Galleries). And who would have expected to find the edgy David Wojnarowicz’s 1978/79 photographic series, “Arthur Rimbaud in New York” on Park Avenue? The last of this 44 picture set, printed in 2004, was selling at PPOW for $400,000.

Another surprise was waiting in Peter Freeman’s booth, where dealer Paula Cooper stopped in to inquire about one of the many 19th-century works by James Ensor. Mostly small in scale, they were priced from €15,000 to €650,000, with the larger still-life of flowers that interested Cooper, briefly, going for around €1.4 million.

James Cohan came closest to theater with a stage set of a display that included works by Shinique Smith ($40,000), Mario Merz ($600,000), Yinka Shonibare ($125,000) and had its own title: “The History of Darkness.” A little pretentious but it worked.

Mary-Anne Martin Fine Art, the lone representative at the fair for Latin American surrealism, brought eye-catchers by Leonora Carrington, Rufino Tamayo ($575,000) and Joaquin Torres-Garcia (around $850,000), while Lehmann Maupin had a new sequined painting by Mickalene Thomas ($85,000) that is among her best to date, and David Nolan Gallery offered one of the finest Jim Nutt paintings I’ve ever seen ($350,000) with several of the artist’s penciled drawings ($30,000 to $85,000).

Among the recent additions to the ADAA were Anton Kern Gallery (which brought large sculptures by Matthew Monhan), Nicole Klagsbrun (showing engaging new photographs and text works by Xaviera Simmons), and Greene Naftali, which may have had the coolest booth. It included works by Whitney Biennial artist Richard Hawkins, a small floor sculpture featuring a plastic hot dog by Rachel Harrison, and a small painting (with its own overhead lamp) by Paul Thek. The first to go, however, was a door construction by Gedi Sibony.

By 8 p.m., the aisles were filled with art lovers like Donald Marron and Peter Brant, and art professionals like Met curator Marla Prather, MoMA curators Ann Temkin and Laura Hoptman, Whitney Museum director Adam Weinberg, and Dia Foundation president Nathalie de Gunzbourg, and more were pouring in. The event raised over $1 million for the Henry Street Settlement and put a lot of old money in new hands. And if the show didn’t have the art of the moment, it did provide the most personal and pleasant entry to our crazy-quilt market for some of it.

“The Art Show,” Mar. 7-11, 2012, at the Park Avenue Armory, Park Avenue and 67th Street, New York, N.Y. 10021. Admission: $20.

LINDA YABLONSKY is an art critic who writes for Artforum.com, the Art Newspaper, T: The New York Times Style Magazine, W and other publications.