Frieze Week is upon us — exciting, to be sure, but almost monstrous in its complexity, with new satellite fairs joining the crowd every passing year. Even the most refined art lover will admit that the people-watching is as much fun as taking in what’s hanging on the walls of all those booths, and in that spirit, we’ve put together a vastly unscientific guide to the types you might expect to rub elbows with in the crowds.
Frieze New York: The Cosmopolitan Collector With a Taste For Roberta’s
Despite the off-the-beaten path location — you have to take a boat to get there! — the now iconic S-shaped tent on Randall’s Island has become a can’t-miss destination (even for those who grumble about how awful fairs are). This year, 190 top international galleries take part in the third New York edition, from Air de Paris to Zwirner. Add special commissions and a panel of talks deftly curated by Cecilia Alemani and Tom Eccles, respectively, and you’ve got an event that aims beyond the oft-derided “shopping mall for art” model.
NADA New York: The Alternative to the Alternative
If Frieze itself crashed onto the scene as a hip cousin to the now-fusty Armory Fair, think of NADA as Frieze’s plucky, less market-focused sister. Housed in a converted basketball facility, NADA draws a chicly independent roster, including San Juan’s Roberto Paradise, The Sunday Painter from London, and Knowmoregames (a Brooklyn gallery sited in a far-flung hotspot dubbed the Donut District, due to its proximity to... a Dunkin Donuts). Meanwhile, outside the venue, Shoot The Lobster will further explode the boundaries of the humdrum white-booth exhibition format by presenting works by Ryan Foerster, Denise Kupferschmidt, Eddie Martinez, and others inside of a 1964 Ford Galaxie 500.
Collective 2 Design Fair: Trust Fund Kid With Impeccable Taste
Ah, the good life, when you can not only afford the rent on your enormous New York apartment, but you still have cash left over to populate it with sinuous chairs, salacious lamps, and all manner of refined baubles. At Collective 2, even the plebes can wax aspirational, imagining an existence of Sebastian Errazuriz shelves, India Mahdavi tables, and $21,000 gold necklaces by Annelies Planteydt. Browse; gawk; dream a little dream.
PULSE NY: The Art Student Taking Notes
This mid-sized fair is undergoing a big overhaul this year under the leadership of its new director, Helen Toomer. New to this year is the POINTS section, devoted to alternative spaces and non-profits, as well as PULSE Play, showcasing video and new media curated by Art21. Trimming the fat and beefing up the accompanying programming, Pulse is aiming to step back into the spotlight after years of sharing the scene during Armory Week.
Cutlog NY: The Europhile With An E-Cig
In its second year in the city, the French fair’s exhibitors list leans heavily toward New York locals, but also invites visiting participants from Paris, Amsterdam, Basel, and Kuala Lampur. Located once again in the Neo-Gothic Clemente building on the Lower East Side, Cutlog will capitalize heavily on its European roots while embracing and showing off some up-and-coming New York galleries, like Bleecker Street Arts Club, Judith Charles, and SIGNAL.
SELECT: The Under-the-Radar Out-of-Towner
Let’s say the glass is half full: the good thing about a fair in which you’ve never heard of any of the participating exhibitors is that you get to make new discoveries. Pulling in a far-flung assortment of galleries — from Osaka, Japan; Melbourne, Florida; and Steamboat Springs, Colorado, among other locales — SELECT encourages everyone to “alter the existing white booth to appeal to the sensibility of the work being shown,” which might help to alleviate the week’s omnipresent fair fatigue. One likely highlight: A performative, one-day installation-building project by Santa Fe-based collective Meow Wolf.
VERGE NYC: The Anti-Market Traditionalist
Verge says that it wants to “recover a space for artistic practice that is artist-centric [and] D.I.Y.,” helping to “return art-making front and center where it belongs.” You’d think a mission statement like that would site the fair in the industrial playground of Bushwick, but instead Verge has set up shop in the flashy bustle of SoHo. A slightly eccentric list of exhibitors features two from New Jersey — including the renowned International Sculpture Center from Hamilton — and a high percentage from New York and Chicago.
Outsider Art Fair: That Middle-Aged Man With a Treasure Trove of Drawings Hidden Beneath His Bed
The way one becomes an artist is pretty pre-determined these days — you spend $150,000 in an M.F.A. program, naturally, and hope for the best. Yet perhaps the art world is finally growing jaded of business-as-usual, because so-called “outsider” art continues to thrive. Big dealers like Marlborough Chelsea, showing Tony Cox, and Hirschl & Adler are setting up shop in Chelsea at Center 548 Modern, and talks spotlighting famous self-taught artists Jean-Michel Basquiat and Henry Darger will be taking place Saturday. Mainstays of the scene (like New York’s Andrew Edlin) are joined by lesser-knowns (Gilley’s Gallery of Baton Rouge).
Parallax: The Exuberantly Inebriated Philosophy Grad Student
If Zizek got high and launched an art fair, it might look a lot like this one. Billing itself as “the first non-art fair,” Parallax claims to make a “uniquely refreshing conceptual statement about subjectivity and the commoditization of taste.” (This all begs the question: Is Parallax a non-fair, featuring art? Or a fair, hawking non-art? Or merely an ephemeral quasi-event, blowing in the breeze of postmodernism?) Perhaps a closer look at the press materials-cum-manifesto will help: “Parallax Art Fair recognises no ‘superiority’ or extra-relevance of any form of object making of any kind and questions the ability to determine content in this way — a process that leads to undemocratic structures in the arts. At the edge of the fair’s core is a contradiction: a problem of relativism is absolutism.” Now it all makes sense: Parallax is a showcase of objects which might have no value whatsoever — who can really know, because, like, what is truth, or “value”?!! — though you should definitely buy them with non-theoretical money.
Downtown Fair: The Aspirational High-Roller
Stepping out onto the scene for the first time, the Downtown fair presents a quandary, since it seems to want to be all things to all people: collectors (rich! But also the modest ones!) and artists (new, on-the-cusp talents! But perhaps also some expensive dead ones!). The brainchild of the people behind Art Miami, Aqua, Art Southampton, and others, it has attached itself to Frieze’s flank — Frieze VIPs get in gratis, and there’s a shuttle from the Frieze shuttle dock — though that cross-over appeal seems a bit optimistic.
Contemporary Art Fair NYC: The No-Nonsense Bargain Hunter
Rather than branding themselves with some clunky, quirky name (SEE ALSO: Fridge, Pool, Lump, Blargh, Fountain, Squish, et al), these guys cut right to the chase. And not only is the art contemporary, it’s relatively cheap ($100 to $6,000!). There’s also furniture, jewelry, and glass work.
Fridge Art Fair NYC: The Outer Borough Proselytizer
The only fair to spotlight Long Island City’s burgeoning art scene, the small, scrappy outer borough defector from Armory Week is only showcasing a curated group of galleries under the banner “Ice Cream Sundae Project.” But what the roster lacks in quantity it makes up for in diversity, sporting talent and representation from Latvia, Austria, Sweden, Cleveland, Honolulu, and Atlanta. While the fair is in Queens, at least you don’t need a boat to get there. And cat-adoption non-profit City Critters, Inc. is a fair sponsor, which is frankly adorable.
PooL: Artists Off-the-Grid
This scrappy hotel fair began in 2000 as the New York Independent Art Fair, and has continued to toot its horn as the go-to fair for unrepresented artists. Frieze may be advertising a hotel experience this year through the restaging of Allen Rupersberg’s 1971 “Al’s Grand Hotel,” but PooL will let anyone explore its rooms without reservation.
Seven: The Post-Internet New Media Pioneer
This year’s iteration of the concisely curated “collaborative exhibition,” as organizers bill it, has seven galleries presenting video-based works at The Boiler in Greenpoint. We’re most excited for Melanie Bonajo’s “Pee on Presidents,” an irreverent take on public urination and feminism; Kate Gilmore’s “Love ‘em, Leave ‘em,” 2013, a typically athletic performance-based film that finds the artist surmounting a “a 10-foot tall structure...carrying hundreds of vases and pots filled with paint”; and Rafaël Rozendaal, showing with Postmasters Gallery, whose website-works pleasantly fuzz the boundaries of contemporary art. The whole event doubles as a bittersweet tribute to the late Feature Inc. dealer Hudson, who passed away earlier this year.
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