For this Big Picture column, our favorite social diarist—writer and critic Domenick Ammirati of the newsletter Spigot—chronicles the highs, lows, and psychic dissonance of a very busy week in New York. Mingling, making the rounds, and collecting autographs, he surveys the offerings at the Shed, visits the season's biggest group painting show, attends a concert, and winds up at a debauched West Village house party. (For a how it started/how it’s going side-by-side, consult Ammirati's Election Night report, which deftly presaged the art world's present unease.)
A semi-apocryphal quote by the former archbishop of Chicago, the late Cardinal George (d. 2015), goes something like this: There will never be an American pope until the U.S. is a country in decline. Well, here we are, and it’s Frieze Week. Or it was—over in a flash, like the American Century.
The exaltation of Pope Leo XIV was announced just after Frieze had opened on Wednesday. When art fairs come to town, it’s a mistake to spend too much time on the premises, so I arrived at the Shed in the late afternoon. It afforded me enough time to take in the three remarkable—notice that I did not say good—sculptures by Jeff Koons involving the Incredible Hulk at Gagosian’s booth. How many corkscrews on the roller coaster of irony are we expected to take without turning green, either with nausea or like Bruce Banner? In the booth opposite, as if to settle my stomach, James Cohan picked up a mallet and pounded a Calder-like mobile by Tuan Andrew Nguyen made of metal from recovered artillery shells. Its plates are tuned to various frequencies for sound-healing purposes, as soothing as a room-temp ginger ale.
