WHAT BRAZEN SCAMP conceived the standing dinner? If we can trust Frieze New York to be a weathervane, this post-pandemic hedge against the formal repast is here to stay. Should we thank the galleries for saving us from resentful placement in the social Siberia of a seated dinner or slap them for depriving us of a square meal?
Opportunities for each abounded in a week so feverish that it felt like the art-world equivalent of a sorority rush, albeit one with a noncompete clause. Indeed, collegiality ruled throughout Manhattan in a striking, even defiant display of multinational community, while the administration of our self-aggrandizing president is attacking every institution we hold dear and treating nonaggressive visitors who cross our borders as a threat.
On an eight-day run that tripled my step count and sent my standing hours off the chart, there were reasons galore to be cheerful. What I saw was an art world unbowed by repressive politics hosting one exhilarating exhibition after another, the majority made by artists who either do not carry American passports or live here and represent a different heritage. Take that, America Firsters! Give me “radical left” thinking, aka the free exchange of ideas, anytime. To my mind, it’s the best form of resistance.
Every single show I saw was a thumb in the eye of the perpetually scowling Donald J. Trump, whose “correct ideology” seems to regard culture as alien. Not so in magnetic New York, a city made great by the power of attraction, not repulsion. With the election of the Vatican’s first American-born Peruvian pope—and the global outpouring of sympathy that followed the sudden passing of Koyo Kouoh, the admired Cameroonian director of Cape Town’s Zeitz MOCAA who was to lead the 2026 Venice Biennale—we had the world at our feet.
Just twenty minutes into the May Day opening of Salman Toor’s top-shelf suite of new paintings at Luhring Augustine’s Chelsea space, there was a line snaking out the door. Was TikTok to blame? I couldn’t ask the artist. According to his main squeeze, the Pakistani American singer and composer Ali Sethi, Toor was hiding in a back office. The author and film producer Tanya Selvaratnam had an idea. “It’s the South Asian diaspora,” she said. “Anytime one of us does anything, the whole community shows up.”
Not to be outdone, the Egyptian American Ghada Amer’s thread paintings were a few steps away at Marianne Boesky. I don’t know if the South African, anti-apartheid artist William Kentridge made it to his opening at Hauser & Wirth, because I was basking in the warm sun of paintings by the Trinidadian artist and surfer Che Lovelace at Nicola Vassell. When Lovelace arrived in New York, TSA guards left him alone—“this time,” he said. “But my family didn’t want to take the risk.”
Miguel Calderón was nearly hidden by the crush at kurimanzutto. He came from Mexico City, “no problem.” And the redoubtable Rosemarie Trockel made a very rare trip from Cologne for tandem shows: Sprüth Magers featured a generous selection of 1980s sculpture while Gladstone presented newer works—head-scratching, witty, corporeal, and almost Pop, Minimalist-adjacent sculptures, with a grouping of black-and-white portrait photographs of gender-neutral subjects—most of which were elegantly installed on its suddenly gray walls in Chelsea.
Coincidentally, two other Germans were in town. Thomas Demand utterly transformed Matthew Marks’s space on West Twenty-Fourth Street by enveloping it in rocky landscape wallpaper that backed new photographs of scenes he constructed in paper and cardboard, including the famous cache of classified documents platformed in the ballroom of Trump’s Mar-a-Lago. At David Zwirner, the serene Tomma Abts, who lives in London, greeted the dedicated admirers of her beautifully modulated geometric abstractions. Among the guests were nine of her students from the Kunstakademie Düsseldorf. “They came on their own steam,” said the surprised Abts, obviously pleased. As Clément Ecke, her very charming teaching assistant, allowed, “Our classes are subsidized by the state. So we could afford the trip.”
In the cross-cultural spirit of the day, let me tell you about the Institute of Arab and Islamic Art in the West Village. There, I discovered photographs of Ramallah by the Palestinian artist Ali Asfour, and delicate, cut-paper wall works and folding books by Bilgé Civelekoğlu Friedlaender, a Turkish American feminist unknown to me, though she was very much on the New York scene until her death in 2000. The curator for both shows is Mohammed Rashid Al-Thani, IAIA’s engaging Qatari founder, who became enamored of contemporary art on a tour of MOCA in Los Angeles led by its then-director, the everything-that’s-interesting-is-new Jeffrey Deitch. “He changed my life,” Al-Thani said. Now he is doing exactly what an independently funded nonprofit should do—promote a cultural alliance through collaborations that might otherwise fall by the wayside.
The Kenyan British artist Michael Armitage inaugurated Zwirner’s Annabelle Seldorf–designed “new” gallery on West Nineteenth Street, which looks almost exactly like the one on West Twentieth. “We call it branding,” the droll Bellatrix Hubert, a Zwirner partner, remarked. Armitage told me to come back in daylight to see how the skylights affect his arresting new paintings. I was good with them as is, but also wondered what artists look for when they see other people’s work—and why any of us feel compelled to see so much art. “I look for a vocabulary I can take from [it],” he replied. Right. Good artists borrow; great artists steal.
Homegrown stars had not gone underground. Sean Kelly had Sam Moyer (marble flagstone-like abstractions); Anton Kern had Anne Collier (heretofore unseen portraits); Jack Shainman had big paintings by the Nigerian-born Brooklynite Toyin Ojih Odutola; and Greene Naftali opted for Rachel Harrison and Richard Hawkins—all not to be missed, if you know what’s good for you. I asked Harrison about her show’s title, “The Friedmann Equations,” but she is not a let-me-tell-you-all-about-it kind of artist. “Try Google,” she retorted. You want meaning? Do your own thinking.
The first day at Frieze was a madhouse. Gagosian had three sculptures of the Hulk from a twenty-year-old series that Jeff Koons has never exhibited in toto. These were his artist proofs; one of two that are functioning musical instruments found a buyer paying a reported $3 million. Though the display launched a thousand selfies, it also provided an opportunity to examine the formal details and material presence lost to any photographic representation. As per usual, just as many people hated the work as loved it. But for those seeking other fare, beside it at Zwirner were the bespoke paintings and sculptural appropriations by the determinedly postmodern Sherrie Levine.
Because of these distractions it took time to realize that, except for a couple of groups on junkets from Seoul, the majority of collectors and advisers on the hunt were American. No Europeans to speak of, not counting the visiting dealers. Asked why New York dealers bother with the Shed when the art they’re selling (and sell they did) has greater impact in the context of a gallery, Ales Ortuzar said, “People, even curators, don’t come to the galleries in these numbers.” Yet at TEFAF, which attracted a similarly sized but more gray-headed mob, Alex Logsdail told me that collectors from Europe, South America, and Asia had been to Lisson’s Chelsea spaces all week, eschewing the fairs.
“We never see advisers in Europe,” said Sprüth Magers–Los Angeles director Marta Fontolan during the jam-packed seated dinner for Trockel at Café Altro Paradiso, where the advisers and collectors at our table pretty much ignored us. “It’s an American phenomenon,” she insisted.
Back in Chelsea, Paula Cooper put together a beautiful show featuring older pieces by Yayoi Kusama and both early and late works by Atsuko Tanaka, creator of the Electric Dress and one of the first female members of the avant-garde Gutai movement. “They were contemporaries,” Cooper told me, “but they never met.” What would they have made of the conceptually grounded, Hiroshige-style paintings next door at Gagosian by Takashi Murakami? I liked them a lot, but couldn’t find the artist, who was, a gallery director told me, fast asleep on the office floor.
The French-born Pierre Huyghe, currently a resident of Chile, returned for his first solo show at Marian Goodman’s New York gallery in fourteen years—a multiparter that included a retrofitted version of Camata, the hypnotic and constantly evolving film that appeared in “Liminal,” his exhibition at the Punta della Dogana during the 2024 Venice Biennale. (It is now on view at the Leeum Museum in Seoul). Huyghe conjured the film as the performance of a funeral rite for a still-shod human skeleton of indeterminate age that archaeologists found, unburied, in the Atacama Desert, the driest place on earth, one thousand miles from Santiago.
Shot continuously over five days and nights by onscreen cameras taking direction from onscreen robots, Camata—described on the checklist as “robotics driven by machine learning, self-directed film, edited in real time by self-learning algorithms, sound, sensors”—has the pathos and unblinking realism that Huyghe consistently evokes by coupling nature with technology. The film is not on a loop but edits itself in response to stimuli from people in the room. “I wasn’t sure if I was catching the beginning or the end,” a perplexed Louise Lawler told newlyweds Kara Walker and Ari Marcopoulos, just two of the many artists who attended the opening. Marcopoulos had the answer: “It begins when you come in and ends when you leave.”
So goes the story of art today. It could all change tomorrow, and probably will, but for now we can all feel proud. The LED sculpture wizard Leo Villareal compares the moment to the effect of noise-canceling headphones. “If artists could neutralize the noise and respond to all this hatred and negativity with love and inclusion and belonging, I think they have a very good chance of creating a very positive change. That’s what art does. Every gesture is important.”
