| Having visited SCOPE Art Fair at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park the morning after it opened, I found a much more sedate crowd than the one that had probably patronized the place during the previous night’s party. Since the Markt wing of the show was strategically placed by the coat check, I, along with much of the crowd, started there. The eclecticism of the fashion/video/painting/installation here was a pretty good introduction to the rest of the fair—a somewhat oversexed and hapless collision of commerce, design, and sculpture. There was a lot going on in the room, from a video installation in one corner to intricate garments hanging from the ceiling. |  |
Éva Pelczer
Having visited SCOPE Art Fair at Lincoln Center’s Damrosch Park the morning after it opened, I found a much more sedate crowd than the one that had probably patronized the place during the previous night’s party. Since the Markt wing of the show was strategically placed by the coat check, I, along with much of the crowd, started there. The eclecticism of the fashion/video/painting/installation here was a pretty good introduction to the rest of the fair—a somewhat oversexed and hapless collision of commerce, design, and sculpture. There was a lot going on in the room, from a video installation in one corner to intricate garments hanging from the ceiling. The craft was appreciable—one garment was woven completely of hair—and the theme decipherable, but perhaps I do not “ache” enough for fashion, as its curator Diane Pernet might, to get that immersed in an artistically glorified boutique. I moved on.
The rest of the fair covered the usual ground in terms of variety, and there were the predictable amounts of bauble and kitch. Perhaps because of the volume of profitable schlock—lots of paintings and photographs of women in various states of arousal, portraits and sculptures of candy for the most magpied of art buyers—the quieter work stood out. One of the first things I saw were Hendrik Kerstens’ serene, commanding photographs of his daughter at the Witzenhausen Gallery booth. At the back of the fair, Carol Jazzar Contemporary Art’s small booth displayed Jorge Pantoja’s elegant, primary-color-heavy drawings. His pared-down scenes are cartoonish but surprisingly expressive, especially in close succession, as they were displayed. Larger booths and works included a splashy showing by Kim Dorland, whose messy, chunky aesthetic didn’t fail to impress at the Mike Weiss Gallery booth. Liao Yi-Bai’s chrome monstrosities of giant objects were an amusing centerpiece of a fair developed with such an eye on generating revenue, but the Personal Development Auction, a key part of 2010’s program as artist Lilah Freedland’s project, was a quirky and wry take on the exchange of money in the commercial art world—small mentorships with all kinds of professionals were auctioned off throughout the weekend. Nearby, Berlin Art Projects exhibited some lighthearted work in the form of a knitted fire extinguisher, spitting a pile of cotton fire retardant, somewhat out of place amidst the loud pieces vying for attention.
