Top of the wish list? That the Armory show would just go away. Alas, you dreamer it will not. At 12 years of age it is a snotty adolescent poised to outlive many of us. Indeed with 243 galleries and many thousands of art works smeared over two piers (with an asthma inducing climb from one pier to the other) the stamina it requires may just do some of us in. And, just so the world knows, if it does for me I want my ashes scattered off the end of pier 94. The question remains whose ashes do I want scattered before mine? We’ll get to that later.

So the Ugly brute is here to stay. Given that what can we say about it? Ken Johnson has already said many a wise thing apropos this year’s iteration. With good humor and grace he identifies Peter Coffin’s giant (9ft high?), shiny pirate as the event’s should-be logo. I couldn’t agree more. Have all the interns drag Coffin’s piece out to the parking lot to greet the hedge fund collectors gliding in for the preview. Pirate ahoy! Catches the parasitical zeitgeist of many walks (or limo rides) of our current cultural life.

And yet it must be acknowledged that there is a great deal of good work to be seen in the trawl through two piers. There is Louise Bourgeois at Carolina Nitsch with a series of spirals. There is Chris Marker revisiting his 1950’s photographs of North Korea at Peter Blum. Olafur Eliasson at i8 gallery with the least over-dazzle I have ever seen from him. A photograph by Alan Sekulla of the Guggenheim Bilbao that refuses to genuflect to Gehry. A Marina Abramovitch video posing as a painting at Sean Kelley. A small Lesley Wayne painting come sculpture at Jack Shainman. A couple of expectedly creepy Loretta Lux photographs at Yosi Milo and Tony Fehr’s full room installation of nick knacks and trash at Pace Wildenstein, to name just the most cursory list of personal favorites. And perhaps most beguilingly attractive, –because its blinding opacity surely induced a pause between first sighting and flutter of check book– was Adam Mcewan’s installation at Nicole Klagsbrun. Where a yellow swastika flag shared space with an obituary, hued in Yellow, for Caster Semenya the not dead South African athlete whose gender (or lack of) caused much anguish in the sporting world last year. For more musings upon the work in the show I urge a return to Johnson (http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/05/arts/design/05armory.html?scp=3&sq=&st=nyt ) who gives as comprehensive an accounting as can be hoped for in ‘reviewing’ a show of approximately eight thousand works of art.

Myself? Sucker! I became intrigued by the event itself.

If one Googles the Armory show one is led to two Wikipedia entries. One for the “legendary” 1913 show at the Lexington Avenue armory whereat a reasonably thorough encyclopedia entry gives the orthodox tale and provides a useful list –Wikipedia being so good at lists– of all the participants. (I for one did not know that Jack Yeats, W.B.’s brother, had been in the Armory Show, the legendary one I mean).

The other Wikipedia “Armory show” entry is for the art fair. It is a much shorter entry. In a bullet point, lets-not-waste-time-with-reading tone it does provide a history lesson of the show’s beginnings at the Gramercy hotel and its evolution from there. The entry says naught about the ad hoc, home made feel of those early years. And if my memory serves me it skips a year when the show moved from the Gramercy, before it ended up in the Lexington Avenue armory. The entry also passes over the year –or two? Memory again– when the show was housed in back of the Javits center. Instead the entry rushes eagerly toward the crucial nugget which is that “The fair quickly outgrew its location and became The Armory Show in February 1999. It was first held at the 69th Regiment Armory, the site of the legendary Armory Show of 1913 that introduced Modern art to America” –sounds like they read the other Wikipedia entry for Armory show– “and for which it was named, and is now held annually in Pier 94 on New York City’s west side. In 2007, The Armory Show was bought by Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc.”

In one of those endearing, slightly coy Wikipedia moments of reflexive earnestness the entire entry for this not so legendary armory show is prefaced by a boxed text addressed to the Wikipedia community of writers and editors:

“This article is written like an advertisement. Please help rewrite this article from a neutral point of view. For blatant advertising that would require a fundamental rewrite to become encyclopedic,”

Now please, lets not carp about the shaky grammar of the boxed text. (One can picture the mise-en-abyme of endless boxed texts commenting upon preceding boxed texts.)

Call me a fool, but I took the bait, bit the hook. I was reeled in and I and went Googling for who was behind the “blatant advertising”. Merchandise Mart Properties, Inc. is already well enough known because they own the Merchandise Mart (sic) building in Chicago where Art Chicago venues. So MMPI, as it seems colloquially to be known, has a portfolio of art fairs and kindred events. Indeed at MMPI’s web site, written, I could not help but feel, in a strangely similar tone of abundant superlatives as the Wikipedia entry, we learn that they organize more than 300 trade shows. They specialize In “eleven key industries”, including “home furnishings, casual furnishings, gift and home, and contemporary art”. In this mart, marketing field the company has an impressive footprint nationally controlling in addition to the Merchandise Mart building in Chicago, the Boston Design Center and the LA Mart, as well Piers 92 and 94 where, under an agreement with the New York City Economic Development Corporation, MMPI has officially taken over management.

On MMPI’s website, snuggled away in mid side bar menu, is the seductively stormy, single word: “Vornado”. Did I click on it? Yup, I clicked on it. Less stormy than one might imagine but here is what I got. ” MMPI is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Vornado Realty Trust. Vornado Realty Trust (VNO) is a fully integrated, publicly owned, real estate investment trust. Headquartered in New York City, Vornado is one of the largest owners and managers of real estate in the United States with a portfolio of approximately 60 million square feet in its major platforms, primarily located in the New York and Washington, D.C. metro areas.”

And then chairman of the Vornado board is the “colorful” Steven Roth who paid $9.4 million for Bernie Madoff’s four-bedroom, three-bath Montauk home (much less than Warhol’s much larger Montauk real estate moved for I would curiously note). Vornado also built the Cesar Peli designed, Bloomberg tower on the site of the old Alexander’s department store. I do not know if Mr. Roth attended the opening of the Armory show. If so he had a busy Wednesday evening because that same night he shed some light on how real estate development works in New York when he delivered a lecture at Columbia’s Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation (the last word is ironic, right?):

“Mr. Roth, who bought Alexander’s in large part for its real estate holdings, offered his take on his reticence to build, and why he let the site sit empty for so long: The New York newspapers, he complained, said “I couldn’t make a decision; I didn’t know what I wanted to do. “Bullshit. I knew exactly what I wanted to do. I wanted the price to go up. A lot. And I was willing to wait because I had almost no basis in the land.” There was another plus to waiting, he noted, offering a refreshingly candid developer’s take on one way to pursue government subsidies: “My mother called me and said [of the site], ‘It’s dirty. There are bums sleeping in the sidewalks of this now closed, decrepit building. They’re urinating in the corners. It’s terrible. You have to fix it.’ “And what did I do? Nothing. “Why did I do nothing? Because I was thinking in my own awkward way, that the more the building was a blight, the more the governments would want this to be redeveloped; the more help they would give us when the time came. “And they did.” Laughter followed.” (New York Observer March, 4, 2010)

I have a hunch that Mr Roth, and probably the people who laugh at his jokes, vote for smaller governemnt. But, that aside, what can you say about a man who won’t listen to his own mother? I am not sure. I am not sure where any of this leads us. There are no secrets here. No blackmail material. Michael Corleone does not seem to be involved. Perhaps there are areas of willful not-knowing, or willful not speculating (poor word choice) on what it means when you hold hands with someone. A sort of not wanting to know what it might mean that “one of the largest owners and managers of real estate in the United States” holds some quarter of New York cultural life in its embrace. But this not wanting to know leads us where? To despair? To the far end of pier 94 some dark evening perhaps. Worse I fear. We might end up with synergy. Synergy the catch word where real estate developers, Ivy League Universities, mothers and weekly newspapers all “work together toward the same goal”. Though you have to admit an interesting problem could crop up if we did not all have the same the goal?

But wait, wait! Stop! I’m having a flashback. There was this really good Vito Acconci piece. The one where he arranged to be at the end of pier 17 from 1am each night. Remember this? It was back in the early 1970’s. Back when going to a New York pier after dark was, in the short run, more dangerous than holding Vornado’s hand might be in the long run. Back when a Columbia audience might not have laughed at Mr Roth’s anecdotes. (Hey, who knows?). In Aconcci’s piece the point was that he would tell you a secret if you came to see him at the far end of the pier. So, make your way across West St, weave through the drug dealers, the undercover cops, those bums urinating in the corners, the rats, the muggers, underneath the collapsing remains of the West Side highway as it then was and Vito would tell you a secret. He’d tell you something you could, if you wanted, “blackmail” him with. And the point was perhaps in the risk, very real as it was, of walking out the pier in the darkness to find his secrets. A sort of poem about the New York of the moment evolved, a poem sung between Scorseses’ Taxi Driver and Aconcci’s prowling a pier in lower Manhattan. But the real point behind that point was what artists made art with and about. Real estate had a different cultural value we could say. Acres of derelict New York begging to be rescued but if not –and it was very much not– turned into a figuration of the time. Deployed in an artwork it –real estate– came to be about the urban collapse and the economic disaster of 1970’s capitalism. Aconcci was asking us to really take a chance. To really take a risk by going out on the pier for culture. To sort of lie down with the dogs and risk getting up with who knows what. Oh? What do you know? Maybe not so much has changed on the waterfront.