If you’re into mythic archetypes, like so many lore-pilled, forever Jung essentialists—reject modernity, embrace the Cloaca Maxima—then you’re surely familiar with the concept of the Stranger Come to Town. A mysterious stranger, very often with a past, invariably a man, enters a static society. His presence induces turmoil, desire, a reshuffling of deck chairs, evildoers punished and secrets revealed, all of which result in an improved, enlightened social equilibrium before the stranger either settles down or resumes his rambling ways.
Or sometimes shit goes wrong, you never know.
At the cost of much stress to my loved ones and subscribers to my Substack, I left New York last June for nigh on a year to sequester myself in writing residences at Amant, in Siena (thank you, Lonti!) and the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown (thank you, Stanley Kunitz in heaven). Immediately upon my return this month, after some deft psycho-emotional editorial manipulation (thank you, Johanna!), I made the prideful decision to ECT my newly pastoralized sensibility and cover the spring art fairs, etc., for my friends at CULTURED. Not being of the heroic archetype embodied by so many of today’s leading critics, I found myself less Stranger Come to Town than Fish Out of Water.
My first surprise was that the week surrounding Frieze New York this year lacked a piranhaesque feeding frenzy. The calendar was calm as a kettle pond. At a dinner for a pair of Matthew Marks openings (check out the Joan Brown), an esteemed abstractionist pointed out to me that the key players were all exhausted; there was no big-topping because the fair came too close on the heels of the Venice Biennale. This conjunction has happened only once before in Frieze New York’s history, back in 2015. In those days, the fair still had enough zazz that there was a Dior-sponsored fundraising dinner for something called the Tate Americas Foundation. In 2026, for “Frieze Week” (I’m leaning into the quote marks like Emerald Fennell), Dior was in Los Angeles presenting its first Cruise collection by Jonathan Anderson at the new LACMA. We did, however, get an impressive Rei Kawakubo installation at Independent, and on Friday, Gucci took its own Cruise into Times Square, in a notional salute to the huddled masses. (Jeffrey Deitch sat front row and Salon 94’s Jeanne Greenberg Rohatyn walked the runway.)
New York was also lucky enough to be getting a 50th anniversary gala for one of the city’s most important institutions, MoMA PS1. Being out of shape for New York art convos—which, as a Stranger/Fish, I observed devolving swiftly into discussions of how art is dead and people aren’t feeling so great themselves—I fretted. At the door, I was somehow startled to run into a friend, the curator Jody Graf, even though she works at PS1 and helped organize the museum’s current Greater New York exhibition. After a hug, I realized that I had no idea what to say next. What’s up? How’s it going? Can I have a drag off your cigarette? Reader, I don’t even like to smoke.
In the end, it all turned out fine because it was a big party in a big dark room with DJs and cocktails and balloons and party hats—de rigueur for any 50th birthday—and I didn’t run into so many people I knew anyway. The crowd was enjoying itself without being annoying about it. One friend whom I’ve missed asked if I had subscribed to their food account on Instagram. (“It’s very important.”) Another confronted me about my Mars placement. (Sagittarius. Is that good?) My friend Iris and I spent a long time arguing about the relative heights of Hans Ulrich Obrist and Klaus Biesenbach, and who should appear just then but Klaus himself?
My estimate confirmed, Iris and I were standing near the entrance, haggling over my contention that HUO stands six foot two, when I noticed that someone was crawling past us on the floor behind her. This was actually not that surprising, for a Fish late of the Cape or anyone else who’s been downstairs at Gifford House on Halloween weekend. The quadruped was a woman in a fanciful top like a pair of inverted orange carnations, a fiberoptic-thin G-string, and taupe heels with well-scuffed bubblegum pink soles prominently displayed by her posture. She was followed by six more women, similarly clad by GNY artists Women’s History Museum, and thus ensued an intricately choreographed performance of 15 minutes that seemed, as they danced and disrobed, much longer. As for the quality of the burlesque itself, I would say that in its brazen gynephilia, it luxuriated in the violence that so-called high art and its histories conceal.
Oops, wait—I plagiarized Artforum’s risible glazing of Florentina Holzinger, whose ludicrous Venice star turn likely would have fared well in any fan-voted fascist-adjacent contest for Leoni (those plebiscites, that’s how they get you), judging from how absolutely the piss-diver, the upside-down bell ringer, and the nude jet-skier dominated social media during the vernissage. Holzinger did, like about half the Biennale artists, withdraw from Visitor Lion consideration. Nevertheless, her passing ubiquity was a perfect example of how the numb population of feeds with cheap spectacle creates an air of positive consensus as pernicious as the bot- and clipper-driven hype rides of Geese and Clavicular. Meanwhile, RIP VALIE EXPORT.
Afterward, I went home and plunged into a night terror about a very large black cat. It was under no circumstances to be let out of a particular bedroom, but the person sitting next to the swung-open door ignored my pleadings to shut it, and I was paralyzed, unable even to speak.
As for Frieze itself, I stopped by the preview mid-afternoon, in keeping with my preference for arriving after the king-tide rush of money money money has sluiced like a flushed tank of Holzinger’s urine spritz across the Shed’s concrete channels and washed over the booths’ partition walls; when the dealers’ eyes seem syringed of humor and their faces have flared up like they’ve been doing poppers all night. The fair featured exactly two beautiful objects, both of which I encountered in Karma’s booth. One was a delicate, postcard-size Gertrude Abercrombie landscape from 1938, three clouds luxuriating in the violence they concealed and three positively brazen trees against a desolate vista like an ancient seabed. The other was a luminous olive jewel on the elegant finger of the gallerist, curator, and photographer Janice Guy. It was the green oval top of a ring forged as a single piece of Bakelite, the band a rich and mutable blood-clot brown.
I know people read magazines to keep up with what’s hot and must-cop, so here’s one trend my run-in with Janice helpfully led me to, you hounds: Inscrutable orbs. We’ve got Janice’s jewel, we’ve got the cool Chi-town pope and his globus cruciger, we’ve got the space-warping collapsed star that passes across the frames of Doris Guo’s video at 15 Orient, and we have Seth Price’s exhibition at Petzel Gallery, which I salmoned against the stream of tourists on the High Line to reach post-fair. It’s a classic performance by Price, with the artist swirling together reflections on surveillance, revelation, alchemy, and power into variously materialist and trompe l’oeil works that include several seductive renderings of enigmatic spheres. At the dinner, I talked excitedly with a TV comedy director about the vogue for clowns, until she began coughing, choking, and sputtering in an allergic fit that I assumed was some UCB-style improv designed to get her out of the conversation. I also begged a friend for Knicks playoff tickets, trying to parlay my Fishy grasp of manners during the brief period it might be excused.
That night, I went home and had an erotic dream about Rachel Kushner. All we did was brush knees, perverts. Mostly we were happy to have some quality time together.
I visited Independent the following day, also in the late afternoon, missing my editor Johanna’s appearance (sorry, Johanna!) on “Free Champagne with Jarrett Earnest,” a three-hour FM-radio noontime rock block of yakity-yak with artists, gallerists, writers, and other similar sacks, wondering as I do around this time every year why none of these motherfuckers organizing panels, Q&As, and podcasts ever invite me to pick up the mic, despite all the charms I offer you so clearly every time I pick up the pen. Am I too funny, am I not famous enough? Are my balls too big, or is my swinging dick too small?
As usual, as with life, the week of fairs was ultimately a tale of misses. I missed the screenings of work by everyone’s favorite dramaturgs, the New Theater’s Calla Henkel and Max Pitegoff, who Fish-swam their way into Los Angeles a couple of years ago and now run the town. I missed both the presentation of Anicka Yi’s first big outdoor sculpture at Storm King and its accompanying guided meditation, which I could sorely have used (sorry Anicka!). I missed Tod Lippy and Owain Kelly’s piece on data centers at Printed Matter, which was part of both “Frieze Week” and New York’s first A.I. Week, which I bet you didn’t even know was going on. I missed the third (and final) edition of the Estonian House–hosted fair Esther; I missed Eurovision. I missed NADA entirely, where a psychic ceramicist acquaintance of mine offered me free entry, which I also could sorely have used, though more so a quick consultation.
Finally, I missed the coyly scheduled reading of On Kawara’s One Million Years at Foreign and Domestic gallery, which I had wanted to participate in, as a ballast to close a week dense with the ephemeral. But, as I’m sure Kawara would have pointed out to me, isn’t one million years just a flash in the pan too?
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Air de Paris, a Radical Stalwart of the French Gallery Scene, Is Closing
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