Robert Martin, Amber Bottle, 2025, acrylic and oil on Lake Michigan driftwood (all photos by me)
I haven’t attended an art fair in about a decade. Okay, fine, I do attend the Outsider Art Fair most years. But other than sampling art made by true weirdos rather than those whose eye has been hammered into submission by crit classes and high-end commercial galleries’ demands to maintain a samey-samey aesthetic to sell to the unimaginative, I’ve avoided them all. No Frieze. No Armory Show. No NADA. Art fairs are trade shows and monotonous ones at that. When, long ago, I was asked to write about fairs, I always felt like discerning trends at the shows was akin to diagnosing culture based on visiting a mall. (Though nowadays, that might work, given most malls in the United States are dust and toxic mold-filled dead zones, with one remaining Spencer’s Gifts still in business. A black-lite weed-smoking alien poster shining amidst the rubble of millennium consumerism might just be the perfect symbol of our American dystopia.) Beyond struggling to have anything worthwhile to say about booths upon booths organized to do nothing else but sell, I also found fairs crowded, stressful, and above all, a deeply tedious waste of my time. No thanks! Not for me!
Yet, for some reason, I felt compelled to submit a request for a press pass this year rather than just deleting the email. Something told me 2025’s Armory Show might be worth attending. Mostly, with the combination of Destructo Don’s tariff mania, continued sanctions against Russian oligarchs, and our own billionaires turning towards pump-and-dump shitcoin schemes rather than investing in warehouses of art storage, things might be kinda strange and pathetic. Plus, I also read that since Frieze took over the Armory Show, some of the bigger blue-chippers waved off the latter fair, leaving room for other, potentially more interesting galleries that weren’t going to shove the same goddamn art in your face year after year.
And, you know what? I was right. The Armory Show was worth attending this year, but not out of giggling misanthropically at dealer desperation. I actually…didn’t hate it?! Or entirely hate it! I don’t want you, dearest readers, to think I’ve gone soft: I still hate art fairs as a concept, as grifting $40,000 for a booth while submitters to Jeffrey Epstein’s Birthday Book peruse your wares sounds like a big old scam to me. Part of the reason I didn’t feel so tortured was that I breezed through on the fair’s last day rather than the fancy-fuck VIP opening. This meant instead of generational wealth goblins, filler-faced Page Sixers, and crypto whales shoving their way through Javits Center, I only had to deal with a smattering of nobodies (like me!). Sure, these nobodies were also wandering around with champagne, attempting to look like they were somebodies, but I knew they bought their $50-or so ticket with the rest of the slobs.
While I can’t dismiss the influence of the lack of critical snoot mass, I did find much more art I liked than I anticipated. Granted, that doesn’t mean the art fair wasn’t filled to the brim with boring and downright bad art. In fact, one of the first pieces I laid eyes on was this bubble-wrapped pseudo-Warhol Elvis, like some art handler skipped a step:
I didn’t catch the name of this artist. Whoopsie!
But most of the unremarkable work was so inoffensively dull it zipped by my eyes like art white noise as I peeked in booth after booth. Messy abstraction…a smooth egg-like sculpture…two grey holey blocks stacked on top of one another…unexceptional neon-tinged figural paintings…hangy Plexi reflective sculpture that looks like a gigantic Christmas ornament…loopy metal writing…Next! There were also a few abstract works that I might put into the category of so-bad-it’s-good abstraction, like this heinous mess by Tim Garwood, which looks like someone ingested too much paint, errant pieces of string like a cat, and upchucked:
Hork!
It’s also worth mentioning the hay bales in that same gallery:
Let’s also not leave those sexy gams unremarked upon!
Not all my enjoyment, though, derived from cackling at unconventional booth décor. Robert Martin’s solo installation at Edji Gallery traded evoking a stable for a Midwestern gay dive bar, with a pub light hanging over mailing list sign-up sheets and a checklist QR code rather than a pool table. The dangling lamp boasted this faux-bar’s pitch-perfect backwoods name, Two Bucks, with a painting nearby of its logo, featuring two grown Bambis gaily prancing under a rainbow. From a rendering of the bar’s humble yet homey exterior—a dumpy rundown shack flocked with Party City banners—to a series of warm-hued paintings preserving fleeting moments, such as a bearded face drinking a cocktail, a nose ring wearer sipping on two-for-one vodka tonics, a comely lesbian smoking on a corner couch, and a chubby bartender standing in front of a display of Fritos to soak up all the paint-peelingly strong well liquor, Martin fully conjured the experience of a rural gay bar paradise, like a slideshow of barely recalled memories that burble up in the bleary hungover morning. I could smell the stale Budweiser and mildewy mopped floors. Hell, Martin’s installation even included a sticker-covered urinal stall, with a scrawled graffiti, “Utopia,” left by a fan of José Esteban Muñoz. Inside the stall was a painting of a glory hole. SWOOOONN!!! Though I’m an avowed sucker for toilet art, my favorite work may be the tiny, accurately sized bottle of poppers painted on a piece of Lake Michigan driftwood, surrounded by an adorable flowery frame.
Glory hole installation by Robert Martin at Edji Gallery’s booth at the Armory Show
It should be no surprise that Martin’s booth made me want to squeal with delight. I mean, this very website is named after an imagined gay bar! Like Filthy Dreams (at least so far), Two Bucks cannot be found on Google Maps. It’s a dream bar where the ghosts of the past and the present intersect and interact. According to the booth’s press release, Martin erected the installation partially in memory of their Uncle Marti, who died from complications from AIDS. Giving the installation even more emotional weight beyond a fondness for ratty bars, Marti appears in one of the portraits, alongside the other denizens of Two Bucks, like a meeting place between the living and the dead. I demand someone—anyone!—take on this installation for a full solo exhibition in New York!
RF. Alvarez, Piss Break, 2025
While I hesitate to make grand sweeping proclamations, given there was also a lot of bland corporate art, this year’s Armory felt very gay. Not queer, gay. From a denimed backside pissing in a bar bathroom with a brown bottle of beer sitting on the sink to a ten-gallon-hatted man slumped in his tightie-whities, RF. Alvarez’s cowboys at Martha’s appeared as if they rode in straight from an Orville Peck music video, before he swapped outlaw country for Broadway. With their dark, rugged color palette, Alvarez’s Levis and Lone Star macho men look like they should be painted on black velvet, which is a compliment in my book. Beyond romanticized Western fantasies, I was also drawn to Yang-Tsung Fan’s sunbathing all-male layabouts at Aki Gallery, getting a tan or, in many cases, a raging red sunburn while lounging and sweating poolside or on the beach. And while I’ve always found Doron Langberg’s ruddy portraits of friends and loved ones kind of dull, I was surprised by how much I admired his simple leaf-dominated landscapes of cruising zones like the Meat Rack at Victoria Miro. While not the subject of Cauleen Smith’s whole booth at Corbett vs. Dempsey, I fell all over myself at the sheer sight of Sylvester’s sunglasses and beguiling grin from the cover of one of my most cherished albums, Stars. More art about Sylvester, please!
Steffen Kern, House, 2025
Not everything had to be figural. Devoid of any people or evidence of human life other than a flickering TV, illuminating the dimness of a strangely ominous living room, Steffen Kern’s small, unnerving pastel and color pencil drawings at Brandt Gallery resembled snapshots from a nightmare or a lull in the bloodshed of a horror movie. An empty, glimmering hot tub. A picnic table at a rest stop. A house, done in black and white, with only one light left on in the second creepiest room in a home—the attic. While a hot tub and a picnic table are not inherently foreboding, Kern portrayed them as inhabiting a shroud of darkness, creating an overarching sense of alienation and unease, similar to Dana Powell’s Lynchian paintings. This tension exploded in certain works, like the inferno in Impact, Night, and the hurricane winds bending and whipping palm trees in Two Palm Trees. Sticking with the eerie theme, I was also struck by the spooky, shadowy figures dangling eyeballs in Samantha Yun’s drawings at Timothy Hawkinson Gallery, as well as the porcelain corpse, laid out like a recently unearthed skeleton from a serial killer’s chosen burial ground in Bones, by Alejandro García Contreras at Swivel Gallery.
Xu Yang, Touch 1, 2025
The polar opposite of autopsy ceramics, the Armory Show also had a pleasant dash of candy-colored camp. Between Xu Yang’s paintings of pink-hued Marie Antoinette wigs and pointy, ornate claw rings on delicate fingers at Gallery Rosenfeld and Maron Portales’s levitating exposed ass under a froofy skirt with straight legs adorned in red boots, like a Fragonard version of Dorothy, at Spinello Projects, Rococo kitsch disrupted the rest of the art fair’s lobby art with a gaudy vengeance. Similarly, the exact opposite of Alvarez’s hypermasculine cowboys was Will Cotton’s The Cowgirl at Templeton. The Cowgirl sparked conversation, inspiring several attendees to attempt to conflate her with a variety of disparate pop stars. One guy turned to his friend and compared her to Kylie Minogue (how much champagne have you guzzled, dude?), while another called out Chappell Roan. Neither of which seemed all that accurate to me. You decide:
Kylie? REALLY?!
While less fanciful, Danielle Roberts’s fluorescent painting Never Ending Chorus at Fredericks & Freiser captured the dizzying, funnel cake-reeking sights of trashy local fairs, with their blindingly bright booths of cotton candy and other treats laden with ingredients banned in other countries. With a Ferris wheel twirling in the background, emblazoned with the U.S. flag, clashing with the garbage can heaped with soda cups and popcorn buckets in the foreground, this is an apt representation of summer in America: Fried Oreos, ocular meltdowns, and your only prizes, a stomachache and a blow-up alien. Speaking of carnies, Skarstedt hung a truly alarming Cindy Sherman, a ginormous photograph depicting a bone-shaking trio of leering night terror clown faces, an It-level horror show that gathered such a crowd I couldn’t get a proper picture.
Danielle Roberts, Never Ending Chorus
Sticking with carnival mania, I’ll rope in Ally Rosenberg’s waterlogged seashell and crustacean claw paintings at Dio Horia Gallery here too, since they reminded me of artwork that would have been made by mermaid sideshow act (and possible actual mermaid) Mora (Linda Lawson) in Curtis Harrington’s 1961 Night Tide, which I watched the evening before attending the Armory. A truly bizarre film featuring a baby Dennis Hopper as a sailor who falls in love with Mora, the fishy queen, who is trailed by a mysterious woman with penetrating eyes, played by beguiling occultist Cameron, this movie whirled through my brain as I wandered aimlessly through the Armory. In truth, this likely strongly influenced how much I was drawn to Rosenberg’s beachy works, making me want to fall to my knees and recite Mora’s watery monologue: “Because I feel the seawater in my veins. Because I listen to the roar of the sea, and it speaks to me like a mother’s voice. The tide pulls at my heart. And the face of the moon fills my soul with longing.” Me too, Mora!
Evidence of Night Tide psychosis
Now, will next year’s Armory Show pull at my heart and fill my soul with longing? Probably not. Will other forthcoming fairs speak to me like a mother’s voice? No. But, at least this year, it was worth gritting my teeth through Hudson Yards’ aggressive architecture and contemplating death near the Vessel. Just this once.