The Gray Market Weekend Wrap #33

From algorithmic trolling gadgetry to sonic gentrification repellent

Welcome back to The Gray Market’s weekend wrap, where I put together an irreplaceable pack of recommendations covering exhibitions, podcasts, articles and more, with thoughts on what makes each one matter to the current state of art and business.

In this weekend’s edition, you’ll find:

• A boundary-pushing art-tech group show in lower Manhattan

• An insider’s gut check on video games’ place in the culture business

• A trio of articles covering protectionism’s economic lag in and beyond the art trade, the counterintuitive staffing trend sweeping small and large businesses alike, and a hacker-like bot siege on museums and other cultural institutions worldwide

If any of that sounds interesting—or if you just want to support The Gray Market in its ongoing mission to explore where the art business is headed and why—you can subscribe or upgrade your membership using the button below. Paid subscribers will receive all future editions of the weekend wrap, access to the full Substack archive (free posts are paywalled after two months), and much more. And if you’re already a paid subscriber, thank you.

Lastly, please be aware that I may receive a tiny commission if you buy any books through the links in this email.

Two plugs: one shameless, one not

An extended cut of my latest column for The Art Newspaper went online earlier this week. It uses the spring blow-up between the French gallery Air de Paris and Art Basel over the former’s booth placement at the latter’s flagship fair as an entry point into analyzing how exactly fairs decide which galleries show where in their floorplans, and which traits dealers care about most in terms of where they end up. Read it here.

Separately, ace features writer and friend of TGM Rachel Corbett has a new book coming out this October about the history of criminal profiling. If you don’t know Rachel by name, there’s a good chance you’ve read her deep dives into the backlash over MoMA’s new director hire, the decline of the market for Black portraiture, and more subjects inside and outside the art world. I have zero doubt her reporting and storytelling in The Monsters We Make will be just as elite-level, if not even more so.

Anyway, pre-orders are exponentially more valuable to authors than purchases once a book is actually released, so if the mix of writer and subject sounds intriguing, you can buy a copy of Rachel’s new one in advance from Bookshop, your local bookseller, or—if no other options are viable for some unholy reason—Amazon.

One exhibition worth seeing

• MIPSTERZ’s New Maqam City. Photo: Mikhail Mishin, courtesy Tribeca Immersive, Agog, Water Street Projects/WSA, and Onassis ONX

In Search of Us

Through Sunday, June 29 at WSA (161 Water St, New York)