For those in our magazine’s community of interests, the new year got off to a pleasant start. Early in January, word came that the Historic Charleston Foundation had walked back from its plans to sell the landmark Nathaniel Russell House. That decision had provoked a sustained outcry from arts professionals and aficionados of American history, architecture, and historic preservation—a response so vigorous, yet articulate, that it may have taken the foundation by surprise. Let’s hear it for reasoned dissent.
Spirits thus buoyed, the antiques season in New York opened in style, with auctions at the major houses and the Winter Show fair presented at the Park Avenue Armory. As ever, the Winter Show featured exceptional offerings in art and antiques, elegantly and engagingly exhibited, in the always-entertaining environment of the august nineteenth-century armory. Sales were strong, according to reports from the organizers of the Winter Show, with numerous pieces fetching prices in the five- and six-figure range. So it was a most successful event all around.
The Winter Show was celebrating its seventieth anniversary, but across Manhattan and downtown in the borough’s Chelsea neighborhood, a new fair geared toward novice collectors, those perhaps intimidated by art galleries, or who had no experience of a fair, saw its debut: the Nameless Art and Design Show. Twenty-four dealers all presented works—paintings, sculptural objects and assemblages, drawings, and scores of unclassifiable art pieces—all made by creators whose names are unknown.
By setting aside traditional hallmarks of connoisseurship like artist’s history, the provenance of an artwork, and such, the show hoped to allow visitors to look at the works with unfiltered expectations—so they could appreciate a piece in and of itself. “Without any of the usual armature to fix things in particular places, with particular values (and often to strip them of life),” explains Kate Hackman, a co-organizer of the show and proprietor of the Ipswich, Massachusetts dealership Critical Eye Finds, “people were free to meet objects face to face, to look and think and respond for themselves.”
For an inaugural event, the show enjoyed rather robust attendance, with some twenty-five hundred visitors. More significantly, the great majority of them were under the age of fifty—refreshingly young for most art fairs. “It was the first show where I ever exhibited and I was quite pleased with the attendance,” says Warren Battle, who deals in what might loosely be called folk art at Battle Brown, his shop in Hudson, New York. “They were hip, very knowledgeable, enthusiastic, and they were buying, too. I know the show is hoping to get some of the more established galleries in the next edition.”
For the demographics alone, that might be food for thought.
