As some readers already know, I do not really look at art at art fairs. I can’t. I’m sorry. Fairs are places where the dealer is always only a few feet away from the art, and I need my own space to see it. As soon as a dealer comes up to me in a booth to explain this or that work, my skin starts crawling, I have wee panic attacks, I begin behaving badly, and I duck away. They think I am insane. And rude. Which I may be. (I avoid fairs after the first day, too. So my ideas about them are very limited.) But when I do go, I go through in a semi-trance, catching reflections and filing away things I see to think about later. At last week’s three big art fairs (the Art Show, the Armory Show, and the Independent), these twenty pieces left traces and impressions on my frontal lobe.
Additional reporting by Molly Langmuir.
*This article originally appeared in the March 25, 2013 issue of New York Magazine.