I vaguely remember my first experience at NADA (New Art Dealers Alliance), sometime back in December 2009. “How snotty and hipster and repellent,” I thought to myself as not one person (neither gallerist nor fairgoer) at the fair seemed to be in touch with the world beyond the booth.  Staring blankly into laptops and patronizing […]

My mother, she slew me, My father, he ate me, My sister, Marlene, Gathered my bones, Tied them in silk, For the juniper tree. Tweet, tweet, what a fine bird am I! – The Brothers Grimm, The Juniper Tree  There is no true way to measure the time Enrique Martínez Celaya spent studying and working tirelessly on The Sigh. […]

Nestled inside an industrial complex off a beaten path in Culver City, adjacent to lush sprawling grills hills of a cemetery lined with flowers from visiting loved ones, lies a sanctuary of artistic solace.  A modest black plaque rests on the exterior brick wall with a crest bearing the profile of a whale rising above […]

A large table sits in the middle of Richard Kraft’s Los Angeles based studio covered with a labyrinth of miniature pieces of paper, each perfectly cut and arranged in a systematic configuration that only the artist understands.  The pieces are so fragile they seem to require surgical tools to manipulate.  Kraft looks on to the […]

The past few years have seen the influence and quality of The Armory Show experience a steady decline.  Whether the fair suffers from a confusing layout, or constantly seeing the same artist with the same works presented by different galleries (what I like to call the “broken record syndrome”), or a mad rush for the […]

Art fairs are very sad affairs, as a whole. The reduction of an entire artist’s practice to a few square feet of temporary drywall, the three-second interactions between gallery and client that render works of art little more than mathematical utterances, the absolute lack of critical (not just negative) observation that is delivered after the […]