The art business took over a neighborhood on the Far West Side of Manhattan previously known as Gasoline Alley. Then the city turned the area into a ‘monument to real estate developers.’
AUGUST WAS SLOW and dull and frustrating; I spent it trying to synthesize Craig Owens and Leo Strauss. The confluence of postmodernism and antimodernism would seem to explain our reactionary aesthetic substrate as well as anything at the moment. The transformation of the art object into a financial instrument: What does it look like? It remains terminally hard to say, since what it looks like doesn’t matter. We just feel like we’re being lied to all the time.An art fair, of course, is not the place to look for coherence or aesthetics. The Armory Show moved to autumn a mere two years ago and has