On paper, it could be billed as the final touch of the fair’s glow-up, seeing as a few years ago, The Armory Show occupied a pier next to the stretch of West Side Highway, a location that forced visitors to enter as the Hustler Club floated ominously across the street. One year, the pier collapsed. Now, the fair is held in the shiny Javits Center, a few blocks from Chelsea. And the pregame is on Museum Mile.
This little shindig had a surprising number of Europeans who chose this art hoopla over the trip to Frieze Seoul, which is happening halfway across the world at the same exact time. Brussels-based art-world fixturea collector and investment banker known for his ever-present cravat affixed to his collar, shook his head thinking about the fact that an identical merry-go-round of gallery fêtes and fair vernissages was happening in South Korea.
“I’m just so interested in the industrialization of the art world,” he said. “I invented the phrase ‘Grow or Go’ years ago and now I use it every day. The art world cannot stop growing. One day it might be the NFL.” And now the Armory itself has become part of the ever-expanding industrialization—earlier this year, Frieze scooped up the fair for $24.4 million, and last month, also acquired Expo Chicago. In the face of an Art Basel that quite successfully expanded its empire to Paris, Frieze is now aggressively expanding its footprint in the States by acquiring two solid fairs that had been somewhat lacking the hip factor of, well, Frieze.
And after making my way through the reams of Europeans quaffing negronis under the rotunda, and enduring an Italian furniture designer who insisted I was an actor—“What is that show, with the attorneys?the director of Frieze New York and Frieze Los Angeles, who stayed in New York to oversee Frieze’s new acquisition while her colleagues manned the ship in Seoul.