Spectacle at the Armory

Every year at about this time fancy-pantses from around the world pay 1000 bucks or so for the right to roam around the Armory and buy art. As Holland Cotter from the New York Times tells us, the youngsters are in this year.

Once upon a time, when the Armory Show - then called the Gramercy Art Fair - fit into a bunch of bedroom suites in a midsize hotel, artists of extreme youth were a novelty. "He's barely out of art school, you know. And he's so unusual. He's into painting! Can you imagine?"

Well, now we can imagine. Today, in an Armory Show that is big enough to sink the Queen Mary 2, young artists are something of a glut on the market. A fair number are still in art school. Almost all of them paint, or paint and draw, or paint and draw and make collages, and do so well and quickly. . . .

For sure, the days of look-alike videos and everyone talking about "identity" and acting worried that there aren't enough artists of color around are over. Now people are making things you can buy and sell and put on the wall of your loft. Art you can live with, for heaven's sake. A whole new generation of bond-market collectors is being turned on by drawings the size of stock certificates.