A few weeks ago when I was in the Big Apple, I went to the world-famous annual Armory Art Expo. This is the only for-sale art exhibit I went to where you had to pay money to go to, and it cost $24 dollars or so. But man, the stuff there blew my mind! The art being sold there were museum-quality pieces, all contemporary art, and were fetching such high prices (e.g. including six figures and up) that no price tags were to be seen. A lot of the stuff was humorously creative: Dr. Sigmund Freud's closet (a full-sized closet filled with things), Mahatma Ghandi painted on a corrugated steel covering of a store entrance, a neon sign flashing "HOLY F&%K", full-page newspaper obituaries for people still alive, etc. But the truly amazing thing was the size of the exhibit -- it literally went on for miles inside two waterfront pier warehouses. After spending three hours going through one of them, I was astonished to learn that there was yet another warehouse to go through. I got the distinct impression that only in New York (or maybe in Paris or London) would you ever see an exhibition like this.
The Armory Show has an interesting history. The first show was in 1913 and was a landmark event in American art history; it was the first major exposure of European Neo-Impressionist and early Modern Art in the U.S., and many works from the show are today famous museum pieces. Here is a webpage on the show:
http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MUSEUM/Armory/entrance.html
The recent series of shows have been held every year in February since 1994.
The other thing is that they let you take pictures, which I didn't expect since these were super-expensive art works for sale. But I hope the following pictures gives a sense of the quality and creativity in the art I saw. This stuff was cool!
Now here are some interesting works by themselves:
This is my favorite. A whimsical pastiche of Peanuts character motifs: Snoopy's ears, Sally's yellow bun, Charlie Brown's baseball, Snoopy's doghouse, Snoopy's nose and tongue, Linus' blanket, etc. All mashed up with the lawn and snow falling. I would've liked to have purchased this piece had it not cost a godzillion dollars!
This one is really cool. Here is a stripped down Windows computer, infected by a virus specifically created for this exhibit. The virus infects the computer, Norton Anti-Virus is activated to wipe the virus, which restarts the computer, and the virus reappears and the process begins anew. As long as the power is running, we are witnessing the eternal struggle of one against the other, neither of which would rest as long as life flows through the wires of the computer....
I couldn't get a good shot of these paintings, but I really liked the depiction of unleashed havoc, reminiscent of tornados but seemingly a bit worse. When you look up close, you can also see a lot of brand names.
I think that'll be it for now, but if there is interest I'll post some other cool or funny art pieces I saw....