I’d been an art dealer in Los Angeles for three years when I decided I’d had enough and got a job working the bar at Hop Louie, a neighborhood establishment in Chinatown. After Sinky, the 72-year-old Chinese bartender, suffered his second hernia, I started working there seven days a week. I char… Read More

Who needs soccer when you’ve got fairs, galleries, and a flood of international collectors animating the country’s art scene? Read More

In George Friedrich Handel’s 1743 opera Semele, which is based on a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, a young woman named Semele runs away from a would-be marriage to have an affair with Jupiter. She finds herself in trouble when Juno grows angry because her husband is sleeping with a mortal. Nat… Read More

Recently The New York Times cited Skate’s Art Market Research in an article on the slowdown in the growth of art fairs worldwide. In an analysis of attendance figures, Skate’s found “that 1,032,792 people attended the world’s top 20 art fairs in 2014, a 7.4 percent decline from the previous year… Read More

It's hard to believe that the Independent is now in its sixth year. It feels like just yesterday that it opened up for the first time (in 2010) at the old Dia Art Foundation building in Manhattan's West Chelsea gallery district, offering a modestly scaled alternative to the Armory Show for ventureso… Read More

Armory Week has returned! Here's a rundown on next week's most important fairs.  Armory Show March 5–8 With an entire week of fairs dedicated to its name, the Armory Show is the largest of them all, with more than 200 exhibitors showing artwork from the 20th and 21st centuries at Piers 92 a… Read More

Michael E. Smith’s sculptures look like things you might see tangled in a chain-link fence, or gathering around the edges of a Walmart parking lot: a duffel bag, scraps of foam, a satellite dish, sweatpants. But rather than simply presenting them as found objects, Smith variously blankets them in oa… Read More