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Lower East Side Gets Its Own Art Fair


January 17, 2013 | Marina Galperina

Art fairs are a strange place to see art. Usually, it’s a fixed-up warehouse setting and you saunter briskly from one cubicle to the next, cruising expensively-shipped art from wherever and wherever-else, weaseling through crowds of journo-types and maybe accidentally stepping John Waters’ foot. The sheer quantity off ART STUFF is overwhelming!!! [Insert existential groan here.] But it’s cool, it’s cool. And now… the Lower East Side is getting the first art far of its own!

From Cutlog, the LES fair will run May 10 to 13 and will be one of a growing cluster of art fairs to coincide with the 2nd annual Frieze New York at Randall’s Island. And you won’t even have to go to Randall’s Island. By canoe is it? I think they go there by canoe.

Suffolk Street’s Clemente Soto Vélez Center — a converted 19th-century school — will host the event, and its 13,000-square-foot parking lot where there will be video art projections and food vendors and oh man, this is going to be awesome.

Cutlog is accepting applications until February 28. Co-director and architect Guy Reziciner says, “Our goal is not to be the fair of the Lower East Side galleries, but to be a fair in the Lower East Side.” So it’s like… temporary international gentrification via “emerging art.”

That’s what we call new experimental-ish art now, “emerging art.” Not to be confused with Modern Art and Contemporary Art, because those are different old new things. Coming in 2020… Hot ‘n’ Fresh Art?