“They’re hanging flowers.” That was a friend/art advisor’s texted review of this year’s Armory Show. That kind of succinct dismissiveness, which comes naturally to the Ongo Gablogians of the art world, warrants a bit of unpacking. Here goes: This weekend’s Armory Show, hung amid a broad art market pullback, was scheduled for the convenience of executives in town for New York Fashion Week or the U.S. Open and curated to their tastes as well as their budgets.

In concrete terms, gallerists with access to historical sales data were hanging paintings that would look good above a Togo sofa in a Palos Verdes or West Palm manse they thought they could move for between $10K and $70K. They seemed to have similar ideas about what that meant.

Accessible, inoffensive work sells better at lower price points. Abstract flower paintings – especially if they are really, really big –make it clear their owners have taste without requiring that taste be specific. It’s telling that Mrs. Gallery won an award for displaying Alexandra Barth’s affectless snapshots of consumer goods, which look like what would happen if Polar Express illustrator Chris Van Allsburg got locked in an Arhaus. The carpet is not a flower, but also… it’s a flower. Anything can be a flower.  

NEON CALLBACKS

The show was splattered with technicolor regurgitations of collector-favored artists’ work. These glowing canvases, soon to be lit by those ubiquitous Serge Mouille chandeliers, felt a bit like Deadpool jokes: interesting only as vehicles for a reference. There were at least five “tributes” to Philip Guston’s KKK cartoons, but rather than belittling bigots, the behooded beings on display were treated as expressionless emoji scattered against colorfields. Given that Guston’s “Painter at Night” sold for $20M on VIP day at Art Basel Miami last year, the intent wasn’t hard to read, but the works felt like very accomplished portraits of Minions. To the degree these paintings were interesting, they were interesting as design objects, which is to say… flowers.

If the art market continues to struggle as it has been, demand for new work is going to have to come from outside the inner sphere. The problem isn’t that more above-the-couch-art means less transgression. Honestly, that’s totally fine. Art-as-provocation can become just as dull as art-as-commodity. The problem is that gallerists think very little of the broader market. First-time buyers and new collectors – the Upper Middle art consumer – need to demand better than what’s currently on offer. The best work on display at the show, paintings and prints by Jacqueline de Jong, Hayley Barker, and Glenn Brown, required a second look. Nothing wrong with that.