New York Fair Week, a “Feast During a Plague”

The best part of art week in New York was at the end, when there was a sunny celebration at the Storm King Art Center. Among several news works unveiled was Anicka Yi’s Message from the Mud, a sculpture comprising a series of columns filled with water and soil from the centre’s ponds and arranged within a concentric mound that recalls a mining pit or archaeological dig. 

Yi held a guided meditation in front of the work, engaging with what she calls “prehistoric biofiction,” before most of the audience shuffled into a tent where a table with incense burning was stacked with butter and crackers embedded with edible flowers, crudités in a green sauce and drinks infused with weeds. Adjacent to the work, which is near Maya Lin’s iconic 2009 Storm King Wavefield, there was a station serving soup made from Koginut squash, foraged burdock root and chives served on coconut husks that soon overflowed from a compost bin.

It was the first time all week that everyone seemed to be in a good mood. We were touching grass. An ambient musician had picked me up from the Beacon train station with a big smile. It felt like the planets had aligned after a week of such heightened frenzy. Everyone’s burnout was palpable. Most people had just returned from the Venice Biennale and some were crashing out over the drama that had unfolded there. After a lengthy breakdown of one particular crisis, someone thanked me for listening and “being a friend.” I reassured them that their faux pas on the Venice canals was justified and likely wouldn’t cost them their career.

Most art writers who haven’t been primed to write about the market tend to struggle to write about fairs. I’m probably one of them. It has always felt like a suboptimal way of experiencing art, especially from the point of view of the collector, who could certainly have a more relaxed buying experience if they wanted to. But “experiencing” art is subjective; not everyone gets over-stimulated at the fairs or requires the sterility of the white cube or needs to frolic in a field upstate to really appreciate it. 

Over a gallery dinner in Tribeca, I asked a collector what they buy. She told me: “I just like beautiful things” that “fit in the house.” It felt so honest, signalling that trying to find meaning in the market circuit might be self-defeating. On the other side of the table, the vibe was more tense; the collector’s art advisor kept winking at me, as if to emphasise I was talking to a very rich person and should ask the right questions. The dinner, held by Night Gallery, honoured the artist Hayley Barker, who had a solo presentation at Frieze of paintings she made after a week-long equine therapy retreat in New Mexico, where people meditate and nap with horses. The works speak to the serenity of animals and nature – concepts far removed from here. Most of the booth had sold before the fair opened the next day. 

Amid all the burnout, there was some good art. In Chelsea, I joined an exhibition walkthrough at Hauser & Wirth with curator Candice Hopkins and Dominican artist Firelei Báez for Feet Squelching on Wet Grass Nourished by Uncertainty. The centrepiece of the show is an eight-panel, large-scale painting titled View of Nature (2026) that the artist made in the Catskills using a 70 ft. platform over the course of the summer and fall. Báez spent some time picking out crickets and sticks from the canvases before the work went on view. An artist who went to art school with her tells me it could easily live in a hotel lobby. I thought it was beautiful. 

In Midtown, the Esther fair held its third and final edition at the Estonian House, a highlight of which was Management’s presentation of paintings by the German artist Willehad Eilers. The paintings show scenes that “effectively synthesise critique of a Western society that has no problems—that has transcended poverty and shelter, reached its apex and is now in perpetual decline,” the dealer, Anton Svyatsky, told me. Much like an art fair, the works suggest “a sort of feast during a plague.” 

Uptown, El Museo del Barrio and Aspen Conexión hosted conversations on the rise of the Latin American art market with artists, advisors, writers and curators as part of the programme Frieze New York: In the City. It was structured around the familiar platitude that being a successful artist is not something one can achieve alone; it takes institutions, auction houses and representatives to make it happen. The advisor Gabriela Palmieri began the event with some numbers: Leonara Carrington’s record was $3.2m in 2022 but $28m by 2024; a Remedios Varo sold for $9.6m in 2020 while her previous record was around $1m; Firelei Báez’s work sold for $1m in 2022 against an estimate of $150,000-$200,000. All these artists had strong institutions and salespeople behind them, a “key context” in understanding their growth, Palmieri said.

The 154 African Art Fair had a focus on Afro-Brazilian artists. It’s always one of my favourite fairs, maybe because its smaller scale means you can retain more. I spoke to the Brazilian artist Rommulo Vieira Conceição, who makes works that combine water imagery with materials like tiles and bricks common in the construction of homes in the favelas. They have a glossy resin finish but the gritty structure itself remains visible. “What interests me is the combination of something very organic and improvised with something more controlled and ordered,” he said. “It reflects this movement away from exchange and hybridity toward separation and ownership.”

At the Frieze New York VIP preview, I asked people if they went to Venice around twenty times. There are some great works and the fair opens with “strong sales,” as they always do, according to the publicists. But the one thing that sticks out in my mind is a Deutsche Bank mirror splashed with the text: “Reflections of Commitment.” It made me wonder how many marketing meetings must have happened to create something that could promote banking and “be art” at the same time. Its mirrored surface means that the quote was posted widely on social media, so the campaign was a measurable success even if what we’re committing to remains unclear. Then there was Ruinart champagne for the press. 

Lisson Gallery held a dinner recognising the artist Kelly Akashi, whose exhibition Heirloom showcases a new body of work exploring renewal and regeneration, continuing a theme she was exploring before losing her home and studio in the Los Angeles fires. A memorable work is Root Inversion (Mallow) (2026), a borosilicate glass sculpture recreating a weed that tends to grow in soil disturbed by things like construction and natural disasters, helping to renew it. She was compelled to create it not only because the mallow is an “amazing sculpture in itself,” she said, but because of the complexity of what it represents. At the dinner, most of the press and art advisors were at the same table, closest to the door. An art advisor began explaining their cryptoart platform. No one seemed to understand what the app did but it was very loud in the room.

The only time I heard about prices without having to ask was at the Independent Art Fair. The centrepiece was a series of seventeen bulbous Comme des Garçons dresses displayed within an interlocking pipe structure designed by Rei Kawakubo. The dresses ranged in price from $9,000 to $30,000 and three had sold already, a representative told me. Kawakubo’s designs are heralded as not just dresses but “wearable art.” Yet the disclosure of their worth felt unusually transparent compared to the nebulous pricing of the art around it. It felt less crass to talk about the cost, maybe because clothing still registers as a utilitarian object. It’s not something that claims transcendence while being conspicuously entangled with commerce. The transaction was more visible and so the presentation felt unexpectedly grounding.