What to do with the experience of going to the Armory Show? There are, it seems, two ways to approach it.
One is as a quest. You gird your loins, throw yourself onto the Piers, and go hunting for some good art. This year, every effort has been made to scale back the overwhelming massiveness of New York’s signature fair — but truth be told, art fairs are by their very nature more like panning for gold than shopping at a boutique: you have to sift through a lot of dirt to get to the good stuff.
The second way to approach the event — and for those of us who are not blessed with giant amounts of disposable income, this is probably the best way — is as an excuse to gawp at the craziness of it all. The Armory Show is sort of a temporary walk-in cabinet of curiosities. No matter how the sales are (and this year, we hear they're OK), there are always a few bits of excess or whimsy that get people talking.
To honor both these experiences of the fair, ARTINFO offers our very own 2012 Armory Show Honors: the things we painstakingly discovered, the things that we’ll remember, and the things we were just mildly confused by.
Click on the slide show for our illustrated commentary on the fair.