Frieze Art Fair comes to NYC

We love the arrival of this new art fair from London to Manhattan!  

The light is great at Frieze. It's in a huge canvas tent on Randalls Island which lets lots of light and fresh air in, a nice break from other art fairs with recycled TWA Airlines "oxygen."  So you don't get tired and the art is presented really well with lots of room to see it, not all jammed together in miserable little aisles.  And the Frieze staff was really nice to us with press passes and free catalogs and stuff. Many glittering famous people were there, most of whom we could not recognize by name, but you probably would from movies and tv shows. And the actual big name gallery owners were present in their booths to say hi in a friendly way. 

This is a refreshing breath of fresh air in the stale artworld of burned out fairs. Very much unlike the dour Armory which is marginally entertaining but very dreary. But to us, even the Armory is a joy compared to the others like Scope and Pulse where you feel you are walking through the dog pound, sad eyes glomming your every step, "pick me, pick me" telepathically beaming out to you. And someone had the brilliant idea of a multicultural cuisine roach coach in the middle of Scope so there was this horrid stink of curry flavored MSG encrusted tacos cooked in repugnant vegetable oil recycled from Burger King, spreading in oil covered clouds everywhere. Shame on you Scope organizers!  We will never try to sneak in with our bogus passes to your event.


Now for some of the art:  Paul McCarthy's dwarf sculpture is brilliant in a blue color with an arm disintegrating displayed nicely at Hauser and Wirth, There was a cool car that came apart at another gallery and some very good painters at others. A nice sculpture was at Team Gallery with a huge 88 which is probably related to a NASCAR car or some reference. Tracy Emin had some very nice neons of female naughty bits on a gallery wall. Unfortunately that is about it for us. We were collared and led to the door by a military looking security dude who wanted us all to get press passes, not just one of us. But guess what? We all got press passes then! They are very nice here.

Some other journalists asked how we could write about an entire art fair with so many booths when we spent most of the time at the beer garden, which was lovely by the way. "How could you possibly write a review of this important art fair after only one hour?" They asked? Well, we didn't say it would be a good review. Go yourself. It's really fun.