From the category archives:

Art Fair

Frieze In-and-Out

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on January 28, 2013
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Frieze New York has released their list of fair exhibitors, so we took the liberty of charting exhibitor movement in and out of the fair. Expect a slightly more upscale fair without much change in size. Their debut last year included 180 “of the most exciting contemporary art galleries working today,” whereas this March,we’ll see “a carefully selected presentation of over 180 of the world’s leading contemporary art galleries.” They can’t expand their tent—it’s apparently as large as legally possible—so the bulk of the changes we’ll see won’t be with the shape of the floor plan, but rather who’s on it.

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The Armory: In-N-Out

by The AFC Staff on January 7, 2013
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Here at AFC we like to carry on traditions worth repeating. One such tradition is Art Market Views’s annual summation of galleries joining and leaving the fairs. Editor Lindsay Pollock is now Art in America’s Editor-in-Chief, so we’re picking up this one up in her absence and, as it happens, just in time for the Armory show.

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Art Fairs: The View From The Top

by Whitney Kimball and Will Brand on December 10, 2012
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What a turd. Reporting from Art Basel Miami Beach, New York Times writer Patricia Cohen gets the exclusively super-rich take on class war. Unsuprisingly, they don’t get what the big deal is.

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Art Basel Satiated, Returns to Lair: All Our News From The Fairs

by The AFC Staff on December 10, 2012
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Like most art fairs, Art Basel Miami Beach is conspicuously unaware of its past. The fair closed yesterday, and already its website header has begun hyping Miami Beach 2013. As an art fair, with its accompanying talks, lounges, and VIP access, it’s something between a market and a luxury brand, and neither markets nor luxury brands have much use for memory. In the business of selling “the very best,” you shouldn’t say whether it’s more or less “best” than last year; this is most true of “the very best price.”

So if you missed it, you missed it, and good luck piecing it back together. Thankfully, AFC is here to help, chiseling snide remarks into the bedrock of history. We went to the fairs and then wrote about what we saw at the fairs, which means this: If you say you saw the things we wrote about, some people will believe that you went to the fairs, yourself. Try it out; it’s fun. When art fairs give you false forgetting, give them false memories right back.

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Miami Project is Good and Here to Stay

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on December 8, 2012
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Art Basel Miami has a new fair in town, and if Miami Project’s first run is any indication, it will be a player for years to come. That has a lot to do with the fair’s organizers, artMRKT Productions, a company operated by Max Fishko and Jeffrey Wainhause that is known for its fairs in Houston, San Francisco, and the Hamptons. This experience has clearly paid off, as they were able to draw 33 solid exhibitors, and produce a beautiful fair.

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Miami Project: Slideshow and Commentary

by Paddy Johnson and Corinna Kirsch on December 8, 2012
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Is Miami Project the new PULSE? No. It’s better, and we’ve got a slideshow with commentary to prove it. After having spent a good portion of our evening last night touring the fair, we offer our highlights, lowlights, and everything between.

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SEVEN: The Fair We Enjoy

by Will Brand on December 8, 2012
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There’s not much point in comparing SEVEN, the boothless, 7-gallery satellite fair in Miami’s Wynwood district, to Art Basel Miami Beach. It has no roving carts of champagne, no collectors’ lounge, and no dealers with hungry eyes sitting watch over their wares. When we visited for their party on Thursday, there was a distressing lack of Diddy. The attitude there—and we say this every year—is simply different.

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NADA Slideshow: What We Liked

by Will Brand and Paddy Johnson on December 7, 2012
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Half the Lower East Side transplanted itself in Miami this week for NADA, so we decided to join them. We spent most of yesterday hanging out with the 70 plus international exhibitors at the fair, and have a slideshow with commentary to show for it. What we liked below.

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Once Again NADA Opens to Strong Sales

by Paddy Johnson on December 7, 2012
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I keep hearing that dealers don’t ever tell press the truth about sales, but when absolutely everyone in a 50-foot radius has the same story, I think we can draw some basic conclusions. By almost all accounts, NADA did fabulously yesterday. “This morning it was like a feeding frenzy,” Invisible Exports dealer Benjamin Tischer told a group of friends as his partner Risa Needleman huddled in a corner of her booth nibbling on something greasy from a paper bag. “Have you eaten today?” I asked her, though the answer was clear. “No!” Needleman chirped resolutely.

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Highlights from Art Basel Miami Beach

by Paddy Johnson Corinna Kirsch and Will Brand on December 6, 2012
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Art Basel Miami Beach is not fun, but sometimes, through the fluorescent lighting, puzzle-piece layout, and brazen privilege, you see some art you like. This is not a typical sentiment at an art fair, populated as they are with the type of work only a catnipped cat would love. However, this year we—and a few others—noticed something a little fishy: for an art fair, the work was in surprisingly good taste.

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