New York
There were five fairs held at the same time as the Armory fair, from the punky “Fountain” opposite the Armory itself to the cacophonous Scope a few blocks east.
Pulse, at the 25th Street Armory, was calm with 60 galleries and a small number of high calibre collectors. Likewise the LA Art Fair was hard to find and limited to just 16 galleries, but had a sophisticated, if slower, pace which led to positive responses from most participants. Marc Selwyn’s attractive stock swiftly sold out, including 1960s drawings by James Turrell to a museum. If these two fairs were further from the main action, nobody seemed to care, with sales to major collectors such as Patricia Marshall, the advisor to the French luxury-goods mogul Bernard Arnault, the Jumex Collection and the Servais family from Brussels.
At Pulse a very young gallery, Virgil de Voldere, sold a difficult computer video game by Brody Condon for $20,000 to new media collectors Robert and Jerann Chaney from Texas.
The only satellite event that seemed to suffer by its unusual location in Battery Park was the all-video DIVA fair which took place, as Scope used to, in a hotel. Apart from a packed opening night, traffic was very slow.
Without a doubt Scope was the biggest and most fun, with 100 galleries in 30,000 sq. ft and numerous extras such as a “Performance Lounge”, every sort of multi-media and a curated zone of over 500 videos by 300 artists. This was called the “Perpetual Art Machine”, a title that could have applied to all of Manhattan during this four-day, six-fair madness.