Every New York Story Is a Real Estate Story
Art fairs, Ryan McNamara and Kim Brandt, K8 Hardy's clothes, and disinformation. Plus Steve Albini and a wine called Patience.
Last fall I wrote a piece about quote-unquote Armory Week because it seemed like a good moment for a snapshot. 2024 was sure to be miserable, and I wanted to capture what seemed to me likely to be one of the giddier moments in the New York art world for a while. While my instincts were correct, I had the wrong cause for the looming backdrop of dread: with more visceral horrors constantly at hand, in mind, the election that we have all so loathed has barely crossed anyone’s minds, and it’s practically June.
The week of Frieze seemed like it would make a good pendant to the Armory, and perhaps in a way it did. I try to avoid using words like boring, since it’s too easy for ennui to become one’s whole personality. But so-called New York Art Week—comprising Frieze plus a couple other fairs, plus openings scheduled to take advantage of the temporarily boosted collector and advisor population—was in fact boring. The whole notion of a New York Art Week is very mid-tier metropolitan, cementing the fact that NYC’s condo-ization has, like Target outlets, premature restaurant closing times, and panic about shoplifting, swamped the town with a second-city mindset.
Boring has its structural aspects, of course. On Saturday as I strolled to Chelsea from the Shed, the neighboring suicide platform, and Frieze’s tableaux of artworks witless or neutered—a James Lee Byers marble star looked particularly hunted in its aging vitrine—I passed the enormous Terminal Warehouse on Eleventh Avenue. Part of the redeveloped building is still covered in scaffolding, though much less than when Google Street View captured Scabby the Rat protesting presumably nonunion work going on at the $1.25 billion development.
Today, the Terminal Warehouse mixed retail/office construction has allegedly “topped out,” the thicket of crossbars and plastic netting cleared sufficiently to leave visible the façade of a bar I’d never noticed called Porchlight. The place’s logotype, along with a kitschy EAT AND DRINK totem and the nonsensically suggestive phrase OPEN FOR A GOOD TIME, is spray-stenciled on the brick exterior, which is the most rebarbative form of signage. It screams riverfront craft brewery, with a cornhole pitch in the parking lot and a guy playing “Creep” on an acoustic guitar.
I stored Spotlight away as a locale to suggest to fellow masochists one fittingly hopeless night—Chelsea has been a tough neighborhood to get a drink in for quite a while.
I caught two good dance pieces during NEW YORK ART WEEK, both safely integrated into the art context for the Terpsichore-phobic. At the beginning of the week, the Guggenheim had hosted a few nights of Ryan Ponder McNamara’s Kinetic Grace, whose humor was juiced by the clash of its gleeful vulgarity with its venue, the museum’s cool, carpeted, vaguely platonic Frank Lloyd Wright–designed theater. The musical mockery of televangelistic sex hokum could glide effortlessly into a summer residency on Fire Island.
On Saturday, meanwhile, I strolled into a work at Pace gallery that lay at the other end of the aesthetic spectrum. The piece by Kim Brandt comprised six floor-bound dancers twisting and crawling in tense quiet and exhausting slow motion amid Tara Donavan’s columnular sculptures—and occasionally the audience—for three solid hours. A Spigot fave, Brandt turned up last summer in a column I wrote when we were all filling our lungs with microscopic particles of Canadian timber.
After the performance, which thoroughly absorbed a large crowd, there was a little reception with drinks and snacks. It was at Porchlight.
We talk a lot about the financialization of art, but what about real estate? Why is Spotlight, a loss-leader simulation-of-a-simulation artisanal Applebee’s, the logical go-to for a gallery to have casual drinks and snacks in Chelsea on a Saturday night?
On Thursday evening, Hans Ulrich Obrist was giving a book talk at a modular furniture store—perfect for the Class A office suites at Terminal Warehouse, no doubt. There was also an opening for Jayaram, “a boundary-pushing firm with a creative-centric approach to legal counsel”—woof—“and a client roster featuring the leading names in fashion, technology, art & culture,” a list of vanguardists including Lowe’s and Colgate-Palmolive. They were shilling both an art and design residency and the release of The Innovator 014, which seems to be an installment of their painfully underdesigned blog. Jayaram’s next lawsuit needs to be against their web designer.
People have come to distrust criticism because the zone of commentary is flooded with PR bullshit and no one can tell one from the other. It’s like that trope about Russian disinformation: you’re not supposed to be tricked into believing something false, you’re supposed to decide that sorting out true and false isn’t worth the effort, since everyone is tainted anyway. Then when you find out that new art-and-culture venue you so adore is part of a real-estate laundering operation, you’ll just shrug and queue up on the sidewalk to make a pretty picture with its plywood-chic facade.
Fashion
I went to Frieze on Saturday because my first attempt to visit the fair days earlier had been usurped by the single unmissable event of the week, artist K8 Hardy’s closet sale.
If you are at all familiar with Hardy, you are likely aware of her bold and various garb, famously displayed in her classic 2016 film Outfitumentary, which I’ve written about before. Doing a little late spring cleaning, Hardy consigned some of her wardrobe to Women’s History Museum, the designers/artists/entrepreneurs who put it on sale for the weekend at their vintage store on Canal Street. At the shop, WHM goes heavy on Vivienne Westwood, obscure Japanese designers, and the occasional piece of 1890s underwear.
Like those wares, Hardy’s style skews a little declarative to integrate into my own dun plumage. But her partner, Pati Hertling, senior director of Performance Space, is a consummate dresser in her own right, frequently spotted in dashing blazers of all sorts—and she’s just about my size. With an inkling that some of Hertling’s clothes might end up on the block and the sale launching just when I was booked to attend Frieze, I figured art could wait an extra hour.
My instincts were rewarded. I snagged two retired Hertling jackets, one a double-breasted wool blazer that fits me like a tailor cut it to hug my own curves, and a slinky black leather coat with three low buttons, asymmetrical cuffs, and a texture so soft that when you touch it, it’s as if you’re dipping your fingers into it rather than stroking its surface. It immediately became the most luxurious piece of clothing I own.
Burdened with two giant shopping bags, I could hardly proceed to an art fair. Thank you to K8, Pati, and Women’s History Museum not only for upgrading my wardrobe but for an excuse not to go to Frieze, for a few days at least.
Wine
La Patience Vin Rouge. A wine named for a virtue we could all stand to cultivate—chilling the fuck out. Which is the message of all alcohol, I suppose.
I never buy wine with a label that looks like an elementary-school art project. But a store clerk gave La Patience high marks for easy drinking, especially at its low low price. A chillable light red, La Patience is downright jammy, tipping over the edge of fruity into slippery-sweet. But then it pulls victory from the gullet of defeat with a gravelly backend that scours the overbearing fruit off your tongue. It’s feathered with carbonation, too, which makes it extra refreshing for a red. The bottle itself doesn’t offer much info, but La Patience Rouge turns out to be a blend of carignan, syrah, and grenache, which typically has bulkier results, and hails from the south of France.
The wine’s label does offer one tidbit of very practicable info, however; it’s distributed by Jenny and François. Despite the twee name, they’re a credible importer of natural wine to the US and especially New York. Look for their logo and you can be assured that the wines are from small, presumably conscientious producers. Which doesn’t mean you’ll like it; I don’t like a lot of natural wines, a category so big it can mean very little. But if you see the Jenny and François cluster of grapes on the label you can be assured of a basic standard of quality, and you could end up with something very good.
Music
In my sensitive adolescence I was truly scandalized by Big Black’s Songs about Fucking, not least by the cover. It took me years to develop the sense of humor and dyspepsia necessary to appreciate what Steve Albini was doing or to grasp his bedrock importance to an entire era of music. I was also admiring of his ability in more recent years to disavow the actually kind-of-lousy things he had said in the past, as opposed to the harmlessly, hilariously obnoxious ones, without losing his caustic edge. In a just world, bookstores would be stocking not The Tao of Rick Rubin but The Fuck You of Steve Albini—or a collection of his meticulous, charmingly wife-guy food writing.
Was Albini an influence on me, I was asked this week? Not in any direct way, but I hope we share some of the same DNA. Except for the genes that gave him a premature heart attack.
I like to think he’d laugh at that joke. RIP Steve, very sad to see you go.