ISSUE 20: Is the Art World in a Rut, or Am I?

We take a break from our previously scheduled programming for a minor existential art-crisis.

There’s a question I seem to find myself asking every September: Has the art gotten worse, or have I just been looking too long? After another Armory Week spent pacing over concrete floors and weaving between booths, I still don’t have an answer. What I do have is a growing folder of iPhone photos of things that felt important for a second—until they didn’t.

It's not that the work is bad. Much of it is, in fact, technically impressive—deeply considered, labor-intensive, beautifully made. Some of it is even moving. But over time, even the most vivid gestures start to blur: another oversized textile painting with a cryptic phrase stitched in script, another half-melted figurative sculpture with limbs arranged just so. Another piece that looks like it’s mid-apology for being there in the first place.

This isn’t unique to the Armory Show. It’s true of all the satellite fairs, the galleries in Tribeca, the ones uptown too. What you start to feel, when you look at a lot of art all at once, is less a sense of innovation and more of repetition. Not this again, I catch myself thinking, not another dripping clown face, not another resin-coated tongue-in-cheek relic.

And then, of course, I panic—Am I becoming cynical? Jaded? Have I hit my expiration date on feeling awe in a white-walled room?

But just when I’ve resigned myself to becoming the kind of person who only cares about mid-century ceramics and original cyanotype prints, I come across something that stops me cold. Something that has clearly taken time—not just to make, but to think through. Something that hasn’t been over-designed for social media, or built with a curator's checklist in mind. It doesn’t even have to be loud. In fact, this year, the pieces that felt most vital were often the quietest: a series of obsessive ink drawings, a small painting with a color so precise it felt invented, a tapestry that seemed to hum at the edges.

There’s a mood right now—across Armory and its adjacent art ecosystems—that’s both chaotic and controlled. A kind of beautiful messiness is surfacing: layers, textures, edits, imperfections. But it’s not lazy. The best work is mess with intention—images that show their scaffolding, their doubt, their rigor.

Maybe that’s why I’m not entirely hopeless about where we’re at. Maybe the repetition I’m seeing isn’t just trend fatigue, but a recalibration in real time. A turning inward. Maybe we’re just at a point in the cycle where sincerity looks suspiciously like sameness—until it doesn’t.

So no, the art world isn’t dead. But it is, like most of us, tired. And trying.

This week’s goodies: some of the pieces that struck a chord amid the early September doldrums.

Next week: we return to featuring those making beautiful things that make me feel decidedly un-jaded.