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A Fair Death
John Haberin New York City
Art Fairs After Covid-19 and Frieze Online
2020 Frieze Sculpture and Art on Paper
Concerned for the art fairs after Covid-19—the very week after the largest fair has passed without a physical trace? For now, you will just have to settle for the social distancing of Frieze Sculpture—and even that arrived months late to Rockefeller Center.
What does that say about the future of art fairs? Not just Frieze Online has gone virtual. Allow me, too, to catch up with one remaining spring fair, Art on Paper, for more on the state of the art.
But are they dead?
When I wrote about Art on Paper the week of March New York art fairs, I held my review for inclusion with other single-purpose fairs, the AIPAD Photography Show in April and a Korean Media Arts Festival last fall. Not that art on paper is any less worthy, 
but it need not be a mere footnote to painting, as a draft or a reproduction—and, besides, more fairs were looming in May. And then they were gone, apart from Frieze Online. Instead of a big tent covering global art and a healthy stretch of Randall's Island, it had only a virtual "viewing room." Surely, though, it will soon be roaring back, as part of that cycle of fairs here and abroad that never seems to end? Not to one of New York's essential dealers.
For one truly perceptive player, the fairs are dead—and she knows something about survival. Magda Sawon founded Postmasters with Tamas Banovich in 1984 as a spur to the East Village art scene. They also outlasted it, moving with other surviving rebels to the greater safety of Soho and then Chelsea. They landed in Tribeca in 2013 against all odds, only to become a hub for former Lower East Side and Chelsea galleries now just a few blocks away. They have tested my limits with such artists as Diana Cooper, Oskar Dawicki, David Diao, Spencer Finch, Natalie Jeremijenko, Mary Kelly, Bernard Kirschenbaum, Jennifer and Kevin McCoy, Serkan Ozkaya, and Sally Smart (so, yes, I have reviewed it a lot, also including group shows). Holly Zausner showed my limits all too well in video and performance, on empty streets that look newly relevant under lockdown, when I buried what I meant as praise in a critic's smug certainties.
No one feels the pain of art after Covid-19 more than galleries—especially, I have argued, the downtown and midlevel galleries that keep contemporary art alive. They and their artists are losing revenue and attention, while still having to pay the bills, and some will not be back. As I have argued, too, interim "virtual exhibitions" can do only so much even before cautious reopenings. Fairs, in contrast, have the wherewithal to pick up right where they left off, and even as a virtual fair Frieze reports that prices are holding up (and, by month's end, NADA and Scope will be moving online as well). Should dealers continue to work behind the scenes, without a physical space, they may depend on fairs more than ever. So how could they be dead?
Sawon drops the bombshell as part of an online response to the crisis. She means it to be personal. She also means it to be anything but pessimistic. How could the death of fairs be good news? The dealer is more concerned for her future and yours than for the fairs. She mentions them only in passing, but the outlines, I think, are clear.
How could it help to see much of the art world vanish? Fair enough, but big money is hardly everything. Art fairs bring opportunities but also still more financial pressures on top of competition and the cost of real estate. That applies especially to smaller galleries, with fewer clients and smaller staffs. Neither can be in two places at once. Besides, without the fairs, collectors and the rest of us would have to rely on galleries more than ever.
Closures have the same silver lining, she concludes, quite apart from the fairs. As you might expect, she is unflinching but also not easily giving in. Where I saw only doom and gloom (as always), Sawon cannot. Did I worry that serious collectors would simply dry up? On the contrary, she finds, they keep buying because they cannot help themselves. That may not include clients for the largest galleries, in it for fame and fortune, but it may for riskier galleries that need support the most.
Just enough sculpture
"Just enough, just enough for the city." The sheer energy in Stevie Wonder's music felt perfect for midtown Manhattan, piped out from behind the rink, or sunken plaza, at Rockefeller Center. It applies pretty well, too, to Frieze Sculpture, on its second year. Planned for May, when Frieze found itself with only a "virtual fair" before moving to the Shed a year later, it slipped quietly into place right there, just days before summer's end. After the chaos of 2019 Frieze Sculpture, it has also cut back to six artists with an eye to their surroundings, just when "Monuments Now" outdoors in Queens is expanding into the community. They want to be just enough for the city.
As usual with New York, there is a catch. They push so hard on the site that they hardly fit. Thaddeus Mosley created his three works for the occasion, with a pillar off Fifth Avenue as their pedestal. Yet they rise high above the scant crowd, and their rough-hewn wood points only to modern art. The African American artist teases out the possibilities of black abstraction with reference to such giants of European art as Isamu Noguchi in his Noguchi garden museum, now nearing its fortieth anniversary. Like so much of New York summer sculpture, he reaches well beyond Wonder's wonders and Wonder's city.
The rest, too, are all over the map. Andy Goldsworthy, a Brit known for engagement with the land, means that literally. He replaces the flags lining the rink with earth tones from each of the fifty states. The result is a near uniform orange—lovely, but neither here nor there. Recreating a work from South Korea in 2000, Ghada Amer replants the long channel garden so that it spells out qualities that volunteers found important in women. Just try to read them.
Others are site specific and then some. Two coiled masses by Lena Henke evoke more modern sculpture, a near abstract horse by Raymond Duchamp-Villon. Did you catch the reference to horses in reliefs and murals throughout Rockefeller Center? Probably not, but she and the Center alike look better for it. Did you catch the reference to the city's hated makeover by Robert Moses, from expressways to the fall of the old Penn Station? Surely not, and you will just have to take her word that it matters.
Beatriz Cortez, who appeared last summer in Socrates Sculpture Park, looks to the entire city, with a steel boulder suited to New York's glacial history and to Central Park now. Its patched metal befits a tortoise shell, reptilian scales, or armor—marvelous but frightening. That leaves Camille Henrot to head indoors, beneath the historic Mexican mural by José Maria Sert. Her vases look suspiciously like office decor, while a work by the garden looks vaguely like a bird or shark. Its green planes belong, again, to modern sculpture. Yet the site wins out
Like the site, that song seems to belong to each work and to none. (Also on the playlist, Frank Sinatra wants to wake up to a city that never sleeps, like all of us after quarantine.) Wonder's cold, cruel city may seem remote from an urban oasis now, with crime way down, his its tale of black lives lost has new relevance. A multinational city, in turn, accords with art today—including Amer from Cairo, Cortez from El Salvador via LA, Henke from Germany, and Henrot from France. Still, by song's end Wonder can only ask that we "stop giving just enough for the city." It may take more for fairs to survive as well.
Paper tiger
The death of art fairs, then, may not be such a bad thing, but is it true? I am not so sure—not when dealers boast of their presence in Frieze Online day after day. They sure sound mutually dependent, as much as ever. I am in no position to judge sales for a courageous gallery apart from fairs, but there, too, I have my doubts. Museums after Covid-19 as public institutions have reported on revenue losses and staff layoffs, big time. One has to assume more sad news that one cannot read, and closures have already begun.
Still, Frieze Online also shows what fairs can never provide. What is it but a portal to existing gallery Web sites? What can it contribute that a page of gallery and museum links cannot, like indeed my own? What if fair booths, too, are no more than teasers for what galleries, month after month, do better? One can always hope, but the real message may lie not in success and failure. It may lie in what they do.
As for all that paperwork, Art on Paper is that rare contributor to March fair week: it has a purpose—a diverse, valued, and relatively affordable medium. It also has ambition. A pair of portrait photos stood six feet tall, and a painting ran ten feet across. A silkscreen by Robert Rauschenberg would have set you back $75,000. An earlier generation put in its appearance, too, with Joan Mitchell and ink stains by Robert Motherwell that somehow acquire color as they bleed past pitch black.
Not bad, but also tokens of the fair's limits. The portraits, the painting, and their artists are instantly forgettable, and whatever is oil on canvas doing in Art on Paper? None of the exhibitors has a connection to the estate of the older artists, and Rauschenberg churned out more of these than I can say. The fair comes down to second-tier New York dealers trotting out their roster and suburban or regional dealers on the secondary market. It also runs to no end of prints, bordering on reproductions, with far too few traces of the artist's hand. I felt grateful for a small mezzanine (called, misleadingly, Flat Files) for a display of fine photos at Dieu Donné and a gallery dedicated to book art, Central Booking.
Diversity hardly appears as well, in a show of almost exclusively American art, and surprises are rare indeed. Art on Paper does have a feature that perks up the Armory Show, installations, although only four this year. Edgar Heap of Birds has his hand-lettered protest signs from his perspective as a Native American, and Maser has a chamber of stacked boxes divided diagonally by color. Karen Margolis and Lyndi Sales use cuts to take paper into the third dimension. Sales lets her assemblage fan out like clouds, and her title sums up the potential for others that never quite comes to be: Each Fragment You Collect Is a Piece Closer to Your Whole.
Of course, this paper tiger meets a need, and who am I to ask buyers or sellers to change? Its East River pier also brings one close enough to downtown galleries to make a trip worthwhile for that alone. Still, I wish it took another leaf from the Armory Show or Frieze, with special sections. One feature might gather works by, say, older African Americans or Latin American women. Another might restrict itself to New York stories, single artists, or artist books. Here abstraction and representation alike are pleasant enough, even soothing, but they could be so much more.
Frieze Online ran May 8–15, 2020, with NADA and Scope online due to commence two weeks later, and Art on Paper March 5–8. Frieze Sculpture ran from late August through October 2. Magdalena Sawon posted with Postmasters shortly before. Related reviews look at Covid New York, art after Covid-19, galleries after Covid-19, museums after Covid-19, the March New York art fairs, and "virtual exhibitions."