12 art fairs in 74 hours is an out-of-body experience
And other lessons from surrendering myself to the art-fair industrial complex
Rad el Baluvar’s The Astral Leaves the Body. Courtesy of Wikimedia, via Creative Commons license.
Let me start here: I am never doing this again. Ever.1
Practically everyone working in the art industry believes the proliferation of art fairs has gone berserk. But sometimes you don’t know how true something is until you experience it directly. It’s the difference between, on one hand, reading in a biology textbook about why it’s dangerous to raise a lion cub in your home and, on the other hand, listening to some mangled maniac who actually tried to do it tell you about the day it finally went wrong with young Simba.
Well, today I am that maniac, in one extremely niche context.
Although New York’s May art calendar swelled to unsustainable proportions years ago, last week marked the first time when so many of the city’s spring art fairs opened in one gonzo week instead of spacing themselves out across two. Many art pros (myself included) had long argued it made more sense to cluster them all together before the big spring auctions hit. Otherwise, most out-of-towners would probably only pick one week or the other to travel in, limiting everyone’s opportunities. Even for locals, it was hard to hype yourself up enough to do back-to-back art-fair shuffles. So why not synergize everything?
That sounds great in theory. But in practice, maybe opening so many art fairs in the same week just concentrates the number of hard choices that need to be made by buyers, sellers, professionals, and die-hards about how to spend their time (and money). Stacking everything up might solve the problem of when in May the non-New York art pros and collectors should come to the Empire City, but it can’t change the finite number of hours in each day, and it probably won’t increase a person’s daily or weekly capacity to process art and networking interactions before their brain goes smooth and blank, either.
There was only one way to find out for sure, though, and that was for one ambitious idiot to try to barrel through every single fair in the few days before they closed.
Ultimately, two main questions drove this experiment: How hard would it be on a pure logistical level for a person (me) to even get to 12 fairs in the same week without completely abandoning everything else in their life? And if they (I) could pull off the practical elements, how long would it take before the experience transitioned from being an avenue of discovery to being a ruthless, joyless endurance test?
Here are the answers.2 Welcome to the Gray Market’s first—and last—New York Spring Art Fair Mukbang.3
Day One: Tuesday, May 6
Two fairs on the opening day’s itinerary…
1. Spring/Break Art Show
What is it?
There are a few key differences between Spring/Break and most fairs: its founders and directors, Andrew Gori and Ambre Kelly, are artists; it sets up shop in vacant spaces that aren’t usually used for cultural events; and it is often independent curators and artists, not dealers, who are showcasing and selling the work inside. As a result, Spring/Break is one of the loosest and quirkiest events in the fair sector, and it’s developed a cult following among no-bullshit art people because of that.
Where was it?
A former office space in an upper story of a Soho commercial high rise.
Exhibitor count?
100+4
2. Fridge Art Fair
What is it?
Another fair where the artists man the booths and interface directly with potential buyers rather than relying on dealers to do the dirty work. The name parodies Frieze, which Fridge has run concurrent with in New York since 2013. It also imposes a tangible limit: every artwork here is supposed to be able to fit inside a refrigerator. If you’re wondering about the vibe, the sizable amount of pet-based content is positioned as a virtue, not a sin.
Where was it?
The lobby and basement of the Hotel Alameda in Chelsea.
Exhibitor count?
31+5
How you feeling today, T?
I felt confident at Spring Break. It’s while walking to Fridge that a low-grade panic starts rising.
It occurs to me on a visceral, bodily level that the way I’ve made it through every other major art fair week of my professional life is by being super selective. But the problem with what I’m embracing instead this year isn’t just the scale. It’s also the fragility of the plan of attack.
The logistics that seemed manageable (barely, but still) the night before now seem absurd. For instance, the only way to make today’s schedule work was to cut bait on a fair with more than 100 exhibitors after about 90 minutes—so, less than one minute per exhibitor—so that we would still have time to tear ass further uptown and strafe another, much smaller fair before it closed. If we missed the latter, I might have to rejig not only the next day’s worth of events but quite possibly the rest of the week’s.
What’s more, this same time pressure applied to every other event on the docket for the next several days, too. One major train delay, one urgent work call, one maintenance issue at our apartment, and the whole project might collapse. As a stunt, it had potential. As a way to reasonably evaluate art, it was objectively stupid.
But since I already told a bunch of people I’m doing it anyway, there’s no way out but through….
What did we learn today?
Probably everyone reading this knows the truism that “there are many art worlds, not just one.” But what today’s slate of fairs underscored is that those different layers of prestige and social standing can almost literally sit on top of one another without ever intersecting.
The Hotel Alameda, Fridge’s venue, is only a few hundred feet away from several of the top-selling and most respected galleries in the world, and also almost directly beneath the High Line, the international ideal of a public art and culture project anchored by a rotating program of major public artworks by seriously ascendant and unquestionably canonical contemporary artists alike.
I saw at least a few people tangentially wrapped up in that milieu (including some friends) at Spring/Break, which came as no surprise. But I knew going in to Fridge that there was a 0.0% chance anyone from that set would be there, just like I wouldn’t normally have been either. And yet, we all probably literally walked past the event multiple times a day without a second thought. Never the twain shall meet and all that, I guess…
Day Two: Wednesday, May 7
Four fairs on today’s itinerary…
3. Esther II
What is it?
An upstart event launched in 2024 by the dealers Margot Samel (of her namesake Tribeca gallery) and Olga Temnikova (of Temnikova & Kasela Gallery in Tallinn, Estonia). Esther’s compact group of rising exhibitors installs their work in an as-is Beaux-Arts townhouse, often with no separators to indicate what was brought by whom. It feels more like a smart, admirably improvisatory group show than a fair per se. The entire operation is also subsidized by the Estonian government (Samel and Temnikova have Estonian heritage), meaning participating dealers paid a flat fee of $2,500 each—basically a rounding error on the bill the exhibitors get from high-end fairs.
Where was it?
The Estonian House in Murray Hill, making it quite possibly the only good reason to come to this neighborhood unless you’re a first-year analyst at an investment bank in need of housing.
Exhibitor count?
25
4. Frieze New York
What is it?
The Empire City branch of one of the two top art fair brands out there, along with one of the only two fairs of the week where you’ll find art-market heavyweights like Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth, et al. Whether this qualifies as a pro or a con is a matter of personal taste.
Where was it?
The Shed in Hudson Yards, a venue I will defend forever partly because it has the most luxurious free restrooms you’re going to find in this part of town.
Exhibitor count?
67
5. Future Fair
What is it?
A collaborative expo for emerging galleries that launched behind a unique profit-sharing model in 2020. It has since iterated to include a fund that channels 15% of the fair’s profits into grants for dealers to take part in upcoming editions of the fair; dealers can opt to contribute a share of their profits from sales as well.
Where was it?
Chelsea Industrial in Chelsea (duh), a short walk for anyone except some sleep-deprived jackass trying to do 12 fairs in four days (I went to the wrong block and had to double back lol)
Exhibitor count?
67
6. Conductor
What is it?
A fair whose first official edition will open in May 2026, with the mandate to champion artists and galleries from what the organizers are calling “the global majority” (meaning Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, South and Southeast Asia, the Middle East, Oceania, and Indigenous populations worldwide). This year’s event was a soft launch / proof of concept.
Where was it?
The Powerhouse Arts complex in lovely, fragrant Gowanus, Brooklyn 6
Exhibitor count?
16
How you feeling today, T?
On the crosstown bus from Esther to Frieze, I watch in horror as a perfectly mobile middle-aged woman thoughtlessly barrels into the heavily braced leg of an elderly man sitting near the driver. As he cries out and clutches his shin, the woman who hit him doesn’t apologize. Instead, she starts scolding him: “You should use the subway! Or have you heard of mobile care? You just call them and they’ll pick you up and drive you places! Why are you on this bus?”
It suddenly hits me that this exchange is a way-too-real metaphor for my week: the indignant woman is my commitment to this dumb expedition no one asked me to embark on, and the old man is my quality of life until it’s over.
Case in point, here’s all that I managed to eat or drink between waking up at 7:30am and getting back to our apartment around 9pm:
½ cup of black tea
1 matcha latte with pistachio milk
1 turkey sandwich with lettuce, tomato, and mayo at the Shed
1 margarita at the Dobel Tequila Lounge at the Shed
2 French fries (yes, literally two) at Porchlight Tavern, an atrocious gastropub Danny Meyer should be ashamed of creating
Two crackers and a slice of sopressata from Conductor’s complimentary snack pack (aka “grazing box”), which was a legit godsend and would definitely be brought back for the real deal next year if I had any sway
What did we learn today?
When you’re walking through one sizable art fair, you’ll inevitably encounter dozens and dozens of artists iterating on similar styles or templates with varying levels of skill or ingenuity: faux-naive sculpture, 21st century quasi-Surrealism, new queer portraiture… the list goes on. For any given type, the gap between the most successful examples in the convention center and the least successful examples in the convention center feels enormous.
But my art fair blitz was a reminder that the same process of iterating on the same dominant themes is also happening among thousands and thousands more artists outside the rarefied air of top art expos and galleries—only everywhere else, the distance between the most and least successful versions is so cosmic in scale that it makes everything at the big fairs seem within inches of each other.
In other words, It’s (mostly) not a matter of the less heralded tiers of the market thinking it’s viable to paint tourist-trap seascapes when they should be making memoiristic found-object collages about trauma. It’s that, because both the in-group and the out-group are working with such similar concepts and visuals, it becomes so much more apparent who’s really doing something distinctive with the inputs and who isn’t.
Anything else?
I overheard this, my favorite piece of random conversation, delivered with complete sincerity at Frieze: “Interesting, have you ever tried examining your dreams with a therapist before?”7
Day Three: Thursday, May 8
Two fairs on today’s itinerary…
7. Independent
What is it?
An invitation-only fair premised on contextualizing a range of galleries and artists into a coherent presentation, with a special interest in serving as the New York debut for many of them. Counterintuitively, it’s around one-third larger by exhibitor total than Frieze New York, whose Gotham event is limited by the Shed’s capacity.
Where was it?
Multiple floors of Spring Studios in Tribeca, mercifully close to both my main train line and a Sunrise Mart I can duck out to for lunch.
Exhibitor count?
85
8. 1-54 New York
What is it?
An expo designed to advance the contemporary art of Africa and its diaspora. (The name is an allusion to Africa, its scale, and its importance: one continent, 54 countries.) That said, the participating galleries hail from around the globe to provide a cross-section of diasporic perspectives.
Where was it?
The Halo in the Financial District, a building I otherwise knew only as the location of an Alamo Drafthouse buried so deep underground that I suspect it would suffice as a nuclear warhead shelter.
Exhibitor count?
30
How you feeling today, T?
Walking through the tunnel to the 7 train beneath Hudson Yards, I remember something in a William Gibson novel I read during the pandemic. After landing in London on a flight from New York, the narrator recounts a theory from someone that planes fly faster than the human soul can travel over long distances, meaning the twilight state you experience for the first day after an international flight comes from the fact that your body is basically functioning autonomously until your spirit manages to catch up with it.
All of which is a roundabout way of saying that this was the day when I decided I needed to include the following apology to the organizers of the six fairs I still had to see, along with all of the dealers and artists showing in them:
I’m sorry, everyone. I’ve hit the saturation point. I’m still going to events, and I’m still nominally seeing artwork. But I’m afraid I’m doing the viewing version of what I recently heard the economist Tyler Cowen say in response to an interviewer who asked him whether he’d read Heidegger’s Being and Time: I’ve looked at every page, but I’m not sure I’ve read it.
That doesn’t mean nothing interesting breaks through. It just gets harder and harder for that to happen.
And Jesus Christ, I was only halfway done…
What did we learn?
Some people are still talking about a ceramics trend, but actually the hottest material in the art world right now is stone. It’s everywhere! From Spring/Break to Frieze to Independent and beyond, it’s been unavoidable this week. We can theorize all day about why that might be (A foil to our increasingly digital lives? Ecologically motivated desire for reconnection to the earth? Neanderthal fetishism?), but if you own a quarry, you love to see the art world coming in 2025.
Day Four: Friday, May 9
The home stretch…
9. NADA New York
What is it?
The spring fair staged by the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA), a nonprofit org for contemporary art that brings together galleries, nonprofit spaces, independent curators, gallery directors, and more. Emerging and (very) modestly sized galleries are the nucleus here, with the average exhibitor probably landing on a tier above their counterpart at Future Fair but below their counterpart at Independent.
Where was it?
The Starrett-Lehigh Building, also in Chelsea
Exhibitor count?
120
10. Clio Art Fair
What is it?
Another fair built around “self-represented” artists, aka those who double as their own salespeople. Although there aren’t booths per se, Clio did give its artists more space to work with than Fridge.8 The interior space is mostly concrete and hard surfaces that make me feel vaguely like the place might become a Fight Club after hours.
Where was it?
The ground floor of 520 West 24th Street in—you guessed it—Chelsea, a neighborhood where, in the nightmare I had early Friday morning, every single mixed-use building contained an art fair I had to go to.
Exhibitor count?
35+
11. TEFAF New York
What is it?
The stateside expo put together by The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), whose flagship fair in Maastricht has earned its reputation as the most upper-crust and connoisseurial of all, partly owing to the hardcore vetting committee that works to ensure its exhibitors’ Old Master artworks, antiquities, and vintage design objects are all 100% authentic and ethically sourced. Unlike the Dutch original, however, TEFAF New York is first and foremost a platform for Modern and contemporary works of art and design. But it still hosts some dealers of antiquities and other old, expensive stuff alongside the international blue-chip galleries.
Where was it?
The Park Avenue Armory on the Upper East Side. The plush carpeted floors, array of fine upholstered furniture, and library-level quiet inside felt like entrapment when the urge to lie down and sleep on the nearest flat surface became almost unbearable.
Exhibitor count?
91
12. The Other Art Fair
What is it?
Aside from my personal finish line in a self-created Hell, it’s the last, largest, and seemingly best-funded of the week’s fairs where artists sell direct to buyers. (The Other Art Fair is affiliated with the online art sales and discovery platform Saatchi Art.) The event aims to be as much a hangout as an approachable venue for commerce, with an ongoing program of DJ sets, art workshops, and game-ified bonus activities. It is also the only fair of the week where you can get a tattoo.
Where was it?
ZeroSpace, a warehouse and events venue on the Gowanus / Flatbush border
Exhibitor count?
125
How you feeling at the end, T? And what did we learn?
Let’s hear it from me the moment I got home…
Final metrics
Fairs visited: 12
Time elapsed: 74 hours
Exhibitors viewed: 794+
Steps taken: 46,771
Miles walked: 17.9
Flights of stairs climbed: 57
Regrets: 1,000,000
Supercut of the experience: under 3 minutes
No one else should, either. If you or anyone you know ever begins seriously considering it, message me and I will respond like the person in question just caught on fire or got their arm trapped beneath a boulder during a hiking trip. It’s that bad.
Incalculable thanks and a silver medal in the endurance challenge to my unbelievable wife, Cabelle Ahn, who not only supported me emotionally and culinarily throughout this process but also made all the video content AND saw ten(!) of the 12 fairs herself—more than anyone else besides me, as far as I know.
For the well-adjusted, mukbang (“eating broadcast”) is the term for a type of video content in which someone—often a thin, conventionally attractive woman or man—gorges themselves on an unholy amount of food while interacting with their audience throughout. The format originated in South Korea around 2010 and has since gone global.
“More than 100 curatorial exhibitions, special projects, and our new section, Artist Spotlight” is the way it’s defined on Spring/Break’s website, maybe in part because the founders said they were still adding people right up to the opening.
The Fridge website lists 31 individual artists on its page plus the cliffhanger “and more…”
I’m not hating, I got married in this neighborhood—in an open-air venue, no less—and I wouldn’t have changed a thing!
For the record, this was not directed at me.
Clio also put on two editions in consecutive weeks, each with a somewhat different lineup of artists and performances. I saw the second week.
it is he, the maniac
Congrats (?)