This week, the world outside the Armory Show has been embroiled in turmoil.
Oil and food prices are soaring while mortgage rates topped 7%, which could compel the Federal Reserve to hike interest rates again next month. President Trump and other world leaders traded barbs at the United Nations over the Iran War as a resolution to call for the end of the conflict failed in the Senate. Yesterday, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu claimed the war in Gaza was the “opposite of a genocide” as protests erupted outside the UN.
Across town at the glass-encased Javits Center, the mood was almost too serene. A swarm of museum curators, art advisors, and members of New York’s top tax brackets browsed the booths of the city’s premier art fair on Thursday. The Armory Show, which runs through Sunday, opened the previous day to an even more exclusive tier of VIPs, who returned to splurge on what they coveted. A smattering of celebrities including Jodie Foster, David Alan Grier, Piper Perabo, Paul Rudd, and Karl-Anthony Towns made the trek too, according to a fair spokesman.
If collectors had any concerns about the wars or inflation, they did not share them.
“They don’t care,” Michael Borghi, a dealer with Hollis Taggart, told Hyperallergic while gripping an abstract Stuart Davis painting he sold for more than $100,000. “They’re really rich individuals, they don’t care.”
Sales on the first day of the fair appeared fairly steady. Michael Rosenfeld Gallery sold a Joan Mitchell painting for more than $2 million to a private collection, as well as collages by Louise Nevelson and Hannelore Baron, an Armory spokesman said. Over at Edwynn Houk Gallery, a László Moholy-Nagy gelatin silver print sold for $320,000. Gazelli Art House found a home for a Lilly Fenichel canvas with a European museum for $200,000, while Norr Cohan (formerly James Cohan Gallery) sold Yinka Shonibare’s “The Landscape Project (Cotton Plantation)” for more than $180,000, Nara Roesler sold Sheila Hicks’s “The soft side of my nature” (2025) for $260,000, and 303 Gallery placed two Rob Pruitt paintings for $155,000 each and a Doug Aitken lightbox for $150,000. Galerie Maximillian sold Rashid Johnson’s “Untitled (Large Mosaic)” (2025) for about $175,000 in the first hour of the fair, the Armory announced late Thursday evening. (Of course, it’s impossible to know whether these sales actually happened at the fair itself or via a PDF circulated months earlier.)
