Nick Cave Sound Suits at Armory Show

Link to Bloomberg story here.

By Lindsay Pollock and Katya Kazakina

March 4 (Bloomberg) — Wealthy and determined art collectors stormed David Kordansky’s booth yesterday afternoon during the opening hours of New York’s Armory Show.

The slender Los Angeles dealer held off a stampede of would-be buyers at the art fair, at one point calling out, politely but firmly, “Just let me get a handle on what has sold!”

The objects of desire: colorful geometric paintings by artist Will Fowler, tagged at $6,800-$7,000 a piece. Kordansky moved 13 of them in under two hours.

“I am super happy,” Kordansky said.

MoMA trustee David Teiger said he had snagged three of them.

Other relatively wallet-friendly offerings included $4,000 Polaroid photos by Philip-Lorca diCorcia at David Zwirner’s stand. The gallery sold 30 of 100 on display in the opening hours. At a higher price point, Paul Kasmin Gallery sold three paintings, priced around $85,000, by James Nares. The large canvases featured abstracted brushstrokes and hovered somewhere between painting and photography in sensibility.

The 12th annual Armory Show brings together 289 international dealers through March 7 on Manhattan’s West Side piers, hoping to shore up what has been a rocky period for art sales.

While few dealers enjoyed Kordansky’s feeding frenzy, the fair was livelier than 2009.

Art Lives!

“Last year the economy was in a freefall. Last year it was sheer fear,” said Christopher Kennedy, president of MMPI, the trade-show group that owns the fair. “People now realize that even if things don’t change, they can live and live with art.”

Kennedy said the organizers had received twice the number of pre-fair requests for VIP tickets than in the previous year – - a sign that collectors weren’t willing to skip the New York fair circuit this year.

The Armory Show is the week’s main event, along with a flurry of other fairs, museum shows and parties helping to lure collectors to the city.

The smaller but top quality Art Dealers Association of America fair, The Art Show, runs at the Park Avenue Armory until March 7. Tuesday night’s opening attracted big bucks collectors, including CIT Chairman and CEO John Thain and MoMA board president Marie-Josee Kravis. Show highlights include a two- artist hanging at Galerie St. Etienne of delicate drawings by Gustav Klimt and Egon Schiele.

Withering Glares

Back at the Armory Show, the fair is large enough to embrace the experimental and quirky. A mime hired by performance artist Julien Bismuth slunk around an empty booth, delivering withering glares at empty nails where no art hung. An authenticated DVD of the piece was for sale for $7,000 through Austrian gallery Layr Wuestenhagen.

Nearby, artist Reed Seifer, wearing a bright red apron, spritzed a crisp, clear scent dubbed “Forget” into the air. Seifer hawked plastic bottles of his “Spray to Forget” perfume, available in an edition of 500. They were $25 and promised to “edit one’s consciousness” and remove “undesired memories” — the perfect elixir for an art collector in the mood to shop.