New York City is the capital of the art world and one week a year there is general election. The hotels run out of rooms, the foyers get filled with royal blue suits and the West Side is full of avid collectors.

Of course the main fair is The Armory Show, but there is a superabundance of satellite fairs all over the city. The Armory Show occupies the whole extension of the piers 92 and 94 of the Hudson River, parallel to the Intrepid aircraft carrier. It covers a total area of 20.000 square meters, where 199 galleries from around the world are distributed in generous booths. The galleries strive to present the best of their catalogues in fierce competition for sales and press coverage. Year after year the stakes have been rising until the fair fell into a stifling atmosphere. The Armory started to be perceived, not without a reason, as been attracting elitist crowds more interested in loud names and numbers than art and its artists. A reputation of snobbism harmed the fair which departed from young creators who are legion in this city. Fortunately a plethora of independent fairs arose around it to close this market gap benefiting from fresh and dynamic publics and artists that eventually also attract the snobs to their venues.

This edition, The Armory Show responded with a bunch of art related events in conjunction with cultural institutions such as MoMA or the Jewish Museum all over the city. It displayed big signs with hashtags along with art pieces strategically placed for easy photo and photo sharing. The reaction included student discounts and more social areas with its customary WiFi.

But let´s face it; we do not really care about it. We have found superb art pieces at the Armory and VOLTA (southern in the Pier 90), at the (Un)Scene a few blocks East, in the Art Dealers Association (ADAA), the Art on Paper, Independent, New City Art Fair, PULSE, SCOPE, Spring/Break Art Show, and the Clio Art Fair.

You won’t have any trouble in finding publications detailing all those fairs and some more that I forget; and publications are that would inform you of highborn pedigrees and genealogical trees: not here. Here you´ll find the most shocking pieces of art, most posted, shared and commented, whether or not they have noble linage or accredited provenance.

  • A Shout Within A Storm by Glenn Kaino was the public’s indisputable favorite. Preceptive selfi for every single bystander. It is accessible and impactful. 149 copper arrows suspended together pointing to a single point in space for just 130,000 American dollars in this limited edition at the Honor Graser Gallery in LA.

  • The Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch, well, not exactly. Garden of Emoji Delights by Carla Gannis (PULSE). If we search for the Garden of Earthly Delights in Google we’ll get 3,440,000 results while Micheangelo’s Sistine Chapel finds only 249,000 references. The fame and curiosity this piece generates is universal, however just a few people have seen it in person at the Prado Museum of Madrid, but in its digital online form. Garden of Emoji Delights bites with the teeth of the Flemish painter, but this is a flat experience, one of a digital age of mass consumption. Masses overfed with shallow experiences just as an emoji.

  • Here you have another flat art work, in a totally different sense. Humble and brave, Jaume Plensa captivates finding beauty without subterfuges, with radiant ingenuity. Laura in Huesca is a sculpture that transmits serenity and introspective contemplation. It is an antidote against superfluous agitations and persistent state of alert. It’s an exquisite example of the use of perplexity in art. Keltner and Haidt published in 2003 what is known as the most important cognitive study on “awe”. It is about what does exactly mean the sense of wonder, what activates this response and what its mental mechanisms are. They concluded that there are two precursors: perceptual vastness and need for accommodation. Laura drives to sheer awe because it triggers both precursors. It is an enormous head for an imaginary body, and even though we see the head well proportionated and round, there is something that feels funny while we are approaching it. It is two meters tall, but its depth is less than one feet. It’s difficult to believe even in front of it.

  • Nara Rosler’s gallery booth was full of light and lots of public orbiting around the big yellow star of acrylic pieces that Julio Le Parc proposed. Some of its charm came from the soft independent rotation of its little pieces while maintaining the geometrical order of lines columns and sphere. Through it we appreciate something like a slow bubbling that everybody liked.

  • Dustin Yellin, Founder and Director of Pioneer Works Center for Art and Innovation in Red Hook, exhibited a great selection of his sculptural paintings, his crystal sandwiches if you will. These psychograms consist of the addition of paint and collages in a succession of glass sheets that held together form a three-dimensional image. Dust-in Yell-in style is baroque as an exuberant tree.

  • Elisabeth Turk, an established sculptor, awarded with the MacArthur Fellowship, erected two hollowed marble columns with different polishments at the Hirschl & Adler Gallery booth. They express an effort of total control over nature – Turk confesses. An invulnerable marble beam is cut, hollowed, and polished to be reduced to sinuous fragility by the means of single decision.

  • Jocelyn Hobbie presented one of her women staring vacantly. Beyond the present, this Hellenic beauty, and a little bit prognathic, is featured over a flat environment that reminds us of the “new objectivity” of the Weimar Republic and the voyeuristic portraits of Tamara de Lempicka.

  • We wouldn’t like to leave you without mentioning the performance of the Iranian-American artists Darvish Fakhr. Darvish surfed the entire Armory Show in his magic carpet until the organization stopped him clamming “safety concerns”. Wearing a fez hat from Tunez, an Iranian caftan and a British tunic, Darvish Fakhr introduced a touch of humor and a sense of lightness in the fair that was thanked and appreciated by many. Don’t miss the flying carpet with Li-Ion battery.

Perhaps the Armory arts week deserves more decentralization. The effort may have been insufficient. But now it is time for you to vote with your dollars, your attention and your clicks, which is the same thing, for whatever you consider most important.