“Oh, I looove her!” I hear a girl in a striped go well with gush about Belgian artist Ann Veronica Janssens, whose massive glass piece “Pinky Sunset R” (2021) is at present on view at Esther Schipper gallery’s sales space at Frieze New York.
“Ugh,” she grunts with elation. “This!” she factors again on the piece as she walks previous it, “this is the stuff!”
However the girl and her interlocutor zoom off, not stopping to get a greater have a look at the $90,000 glass art work, not to mention buy it.
A second later, two males in similar white gown shirts pause in entrance of the piece. “So lovely,” one in every of them feedback. “I feel this coloration is named ‘sunset pink,’” the other speculates. “That’s true!” the previous confirms giddily as he reads the wall label.
They offer the piece one other fast look and stroll away with out making any inquiries.
Ann Veronica Janssens, “Pinky Sunset R” (2021), dichroic laminated glass consisting of ribbed glass, float glass, and gelatin filter, 230 x 115 x 1,4 cm (90 1/2 x 45 1/4 x 1/2 in), version of 1
Leaning towards a wall within the chilly fluorescent mild of The Shed in Manhattan’s ultra-posh Hudson Yards, the ribbed glass art work certainly shimmered with the pink, purple, yellow, and orange hues of a pacifying sundown. It’s obtained its personal power area, refracting mild in surprising methods by some mysterious pure algorithm that comes from melding and layering several types of glass. However core to its attraction at this business artwork extravaganza is its sheer harmlessness. The work isn’t charged with any political or social messages. It’s not combating for or towards anybody. It’s freed from id politics. It’s as inoffensive as a summer season breeze, and the very best half: It’s what you need it to be.
Janssens’s glass slab is a becoming metaphor for this yr’s Frieze New York, which was not too long ago acquired by Hollywood billionaire Ari Emanuel as a part of a $200 million bundle. This yr, the upscale commerce truthful is true to itself, lastly abandoning the facade of being socially ahead whereas promoting artwork as a luxurious merchandise within the tens of hundreds of thousands. Ethnic cleaning, hunger of populations, disemboweled kids, raging inflation, persecuted migrants, vilified press, and depleted reproductive and LGBTQ rights — you’ll discover no point out of that right here. Goodbye wokeness. So lengthy, DEI.
View of Frieze New York from The Shed’s top-floor cafe
I see the hazy reflection of two shifting figures in Janssens’s radiant glass. It’s a younger, fashionable girl and her companion, each in denims. “My mom would totally love this one,” says the lady. She snaps a fast picture of the art work, one other of the label, and walks away. Just like the others, she doesn’t purchase it.
May this be anecdotal proof of an artwork market in disaster? From expertise, sellers will often inform the press that gross sales are swell, regardless of the actual figures. However this yr is completely different. Many remained tight-lipped after I requested them in regards to the influence of President Donald Trump’s tariffs and different erratic financial insurance policies on their companies. Decrease-ranking gallery attendants informed me they had been directed to not converse to journalists, as a substitute referring me to employed PR brokers.
The 2025 Frieze New York is as protected as a summer season breeze. 
Goodbye wokness. So lengthy, DEI.
One Berlin gallerist, who most popular to stay nameless, lastly discloses: “There’s been a bit of a slowdown, but we’re still optimistic.”
Ned Wooden, an artwork collector primarily based in Upstate New York, responds with a rhetorical query whereas inspecting a sculpture: “Does art really follow the economy to the extent that people might buy less?” He provides, “I don’t know anything about it. I buy what I like.” He then confesses that he hasn’t purchased something but.
Just a few steps later, I hear somebody say, “You have to see the Jeff Koons!”
Simply if you suppose Koons has hit all-time low together with his trashy, cash-grabbing pop artwork, he reminds you he can sink even decrease. At Gagosian’s sales space, he put in three quasi-inflatable bronzes of The Unbelievable Hulk, a Marvel character, fused with a functioning organ and brass tubas. “Jeff invited musicians to play on the instruments this morning,” an excited gallery attendant tells me. These hideous sculptures are a part of Koons’s Hulk Elvis collection, relationship again to 2004. Although no particular person above the age of 10 ought to discover any advantage in them, “Hulk (Tubas)” (2004–18) offered for $3 million.
One among Jeff Koons’s Hulk sculptures reportedly offered for $3 million.
Identical to the Hulk, the blue-chip artwork market inflates with anger and slams its fist on the ground if you happen to maintain pestering it with the nuisance of the skin world. The multimillion-dollar Koons sale is sort of a fuck-you message to the world: If we might come out of the 2008 monetary meltdown comparatively unscathed, then we will additionally deal with a president’s mercurial insurance policies.
However it’s not superstars like Koons who’ve to fret about an impending recession. It’s a lot smaller gamers like New York-based fiber artist Orly Cogan, who says she feels “less inspired to make art” underneath right this moment’s political and financial situations. There’s loads of material artwork on the truthful this yr, however Cogan isn’t among the many exhibiting artists.
“The economic crisis will mainly affect mid-size artists,” artwork collector and producer Valentine Uhovski tells me. “Blue-chip collectors are going to focus on familiar, safe artists.” His truthful companion, fellow collector Olga Rei, delivers a somber warning whereas basking within the glow of Janssens’s glass piece: “I think people are going to feel the economic crisis a lot more at the end of the year.”
When requested what she thinks of the art work, she replies in a downcast voice, “It’s magical because it reflects your mood.”
The altering colours of Ann Veronica Janssens’s “Pinky Sunset R” (2021) 
Sellers and guests at Frieze New York 
Is the artwork market in decline? Relies upon who you ask.
