How to Make It in the Art World
he art world made it through the real-world crash relatively unscathed, but not unchanged. And even as money still courses thick and blue-chip through its veins, the system is beginning to reexamine itself. Last month during Armory Week, there was not just the big Establishment fair but a handful of smaller and less-Establishment fairs; a couple of anti-money, anti-Establishment fairs; and at least one anti-anti-Establishment fair, which was both a tribute to the Armory Show’s origins and a flip of the bird to its corporate values, and might also just have been one big art-punk hotel party (we’re still figuring that one out). And now, for the first time, London’s Frieze fair is coming to town; when it arrives next week, it’ll challenge incumbent kingpin Armory for supremacy in the city. Our art critic Jerry Saltz, for one, is excited by this, as he is by quite a bit of the new art he sees burbling out there, art that seems to be getting smaller rather than bigger, intimate rather than corporate, and intangible and performative rather than industrial and perfectly resolved—the stranger and more mercurial, the better.