Little Shop of Horrors?

Posted by Mary Murray on March 7th 2011 | 0 Comments

Tags: Museum

This past weekend I was in New York City looking at art at some of the several fairs that dotted the urban landscape for several days. Galleries from all over the world, no exaggeration – from Mexico, South America, Asia, and many cities in Europe – were in town to show paintings, sculptures, photographs, you name it.

The Armory Show, not at the Armory

Armory Show, not at the Armory, but at Piers 92 & 94

The Art Show, at the Armory

Moving in and out of booth after booth could be exhausting but every now and then I came upon something that made the tour exhilarating. There was the Parisian streetscape by Stuart Davis being shown by a Detroit-area dealer, and I coveted a Matissean Milton Avery painting of a window with delicate curtains that opened to a scene of a sailboat on the water outside. It’s very like the Museum of Art’s Marsden Hartley painting, and nothing like it, either. Completely different palette and touch.

James Welling, from The Glass House series

At the Donald Young Gallery, I was interested in James Welling’s dazzling photographs of Philip Johnson’s Glass House because, of course, that’s a subject that has been on my mind lately.

Sam Van Aken

One of the very best installations I saw the entire weekend was created for the Ronald Feldman Gallery by artist Sam Van Aken, who teaches at Syracuse University. Congratulations, Sam!

And here are some things I overheard (these were all spoken in English, sometimes accented English; I am certain there were equally provocative things said in Japanese, Swedish, Russian and the several other languages that were being spoken):

• She: The famous for 15 minutes? He: Oh, the Andy Warhol.

• I thought we were going to run into that lady. She paints and puts glass over it.

• Yea, I’m like, ‘ya know?’

• Let’s go someplace for sex.

• These are cool.

• “Little shop, little shop of horrors!” (Being sung, no less, by a child in a stroller, I am NOT making this up).

Tom Otterness sculpture

Of course, for a museum person, art-fair-going is nervous-making because people are constantly bumping into paintings with the sharp corners of their large shoulder bags or more blatantly poking at sculptures. It’s all a princess curator can do to keep from slapping wayward hands and scolding, “Don’t touch!”