Michael Workman

What a year. If Nova accomplished anything, it's having delivered a true art experience in this mess of a spring art-fair season. It's having managed to show the collectors and larger art-going public here that an art market can happen on this scale and yet still be driven by individuals. Questions about the future come from all directions: How does it move? How does it work? Can we translate an art culture into a market and back again, almost sculpturally--from marble to paper to brass--different materials, different populations, all mixing in this rundown hotel on Belmont where the working ladies once surely spent time, once an SRO maybe? It looks like it, though now renovated, an aura resonating a kind of desperate, licentious freedom with the people walking through the door, curious and inexperienced, never at an art fair before but actually now buying a small drawing for a few hundred dollars along with a conversation for free. Smokers crowd the sidewalk. People who have no idea that they're standing next to William PopeL., DJ Spooky or David Antin, talking about art. (You can listen to a few of them talking about art at Bad at Sports, www.badatsports.com, the official podcasters of this year's Nova show.)

There were many, many memorable events. Too many. Opening night is a flood of starter sales and bodies. Brief, and hectic. With me crashed out on a chair at Smartbar later, DJ Spooky has the room pounding with feet on the dance floor, crazy tight. Everybody looks energized, wild. Next morning, we actually have time to settle in and assess. Each and every room of the hotel has been transformed into a little gallery space and each of them is unique, startling, even bizarre. We have discussions about money. We have it, we spend it. More comes in. I'm checking the number of attendees every five minutes. What to expect? We exceed a thousand, then two. It continues to climb. Is that a bottle of Dom? This hotel show fragments the art-viewing experience, makes it intimate, accessible. Artists talking to bankers, talking to curators and collectors, media people, guys with dirty hands carrying packing materials. How many hours were spent in the videogame room destroying Chris Reilly's virtual gallery? Dealers sipping vodka (too much occasionally), chatting up a rep of the Argentinean Consulate, out-of-towners who hadn't hit Art Chicago just yet, or who'd just come from there. Art Chicago news updates every five seconds. They're saved! Finally, the phone calls from panicked dealers cease. Three after-parties every single night, for every taste: live performances at Town Hall Pub, nightclub parties and the pansexual madness of Berlin, enhanced one night by Jon Satrom's Nintendo game mixing. There's the Fashion Train, an idea I cooked up a few years back (I have a secret list of about thirty insane ideas and I'd like to eventually get around to trying them all out), and this was one of those "dream come true" moments of the show, where fashion and art got to have their moment. Beautiful clothes and audacious models, a packed car and we roll past the Loop not knowing where we are, not until we look up and hey, there's the Merchandise Mart!

Next morning (was that 5am we stayed out till?), and dealers are happy. Sales are brisk. We watch as big-time collector Howard Tullman trots out with a canvas under one arm and a shopping bag in the other hand, crammed full with bubble-wrapped pieces. Crowds over the weekend are huge. "Chicago's a weekend town," I hear myself saying over and over again. They nod in agreement. Look! More bubble-wrapped pieces, every five minutes it seems. One of our London dealers, in a flurry of activity, sells eight paintings at huge prices, and then the people from the Argentinean Consulate are buying. It's non-stop. Then it's over. Six o'clock and the show's closed. "Wow," we all say. Promptly out come the cardboard boxes. Crates from the basement, and a flood of Nova employees ready to reassemble a hotel that had the furniture ripped from the rooms and stored ceiling-high. It goes all night long. Our floor supervisor stumbles onto one of our staffers at four in the morning, naked and exhausted, crashed out in a pile of linens in a closet. People are struggling to stay awake, despite the eight flats of Red Bull in the basement. Too much has happened; we missed things. I missed the film screenings at Landmark, though reports were that the Miranda July retrospective was packed. It's okay.

Monday morning, crates fill the lobby. Two workers have fallen ill. People are using rooms at random for sleep, a place to get away. Housekeeping's putting linens back on the beds. The hotel has guests arriving in a few hours so we've got to abandon ship, but instead we're landlocked. Still more furniture to account for; they're shampooing the carpet in the lobby. Delays. We're all zombies, waiting, barely awake. Everybody's talking about Miami already. In a surreal moment, we sign up nearly half the hotel we've booked on Collins Avenue in South Beach. It passes. Then the hotel management shows us the phone bill from our exhibitor rooms, hundreds of dollars in phone calls around the globe. Drapes are missing from one room, the phones are gone from another, somebody's asking me if they know where the ice bucket from one room disappeared to and I say, "It was for champagne." And it was, but then it's time to go until we do it again next year, and next year seems like it's only a few weeks away.

(2006-05-02)

Also by Michael Workman

Eye Exam
Sitting in the lobby of the City Suites hotel Monday morning, the place is swarming. Not chaos--far from it--but we're all moving at a steady clip to keep up with all the last-minute details
(2006-04-25)

Breakout Artists
Against the backdrop of a Warhol show breaking attendance records at the MCA, the desire to break down any remaining distinctions between culture and fine art, to demolish any remaining boundaries on the making of art, have never been stronger. The very idea of art as only a visual medium is no longer a given, a notion that simultaneously invigorates the practice while challenging its remaining conventions and support systems. In that light, or darkness, we offer a look at a handful of yet-unsung Chicago artists who are doing their part
(2006-04-25)

Eye Exam
Last year, the staff at Bridge magazine (where I work as director) decided to put on an art show to raise money to build out the abandoned offices at 840 West Washington as artists' studios. We called it Nova, since the word itself means "new" in many languages, and also as an acronym for how we conceived of the studios: a "Network of Visual Art." We didn't know what we were getting into
(2006-04-18)

Eye Exam
It's hard not to like Oli Watt's art. My first art purchase was a dollar bill of his that he'd left on a railroad track for a train to flatten. A dollar bill, instead of a penny, to adjust for inflation. That sorely crumpled dollar bill, floating in a box frame, has hung on my wall for years now, a meek reminder of the half-life of ideas
(2006-04-11)

Eye Exam
(2006-04-04)

Tip of the Week
(2006-04-04)

Eye Exam
(2006-03-21)

Eye Exam
(2006-03-14)

Eye Exam
(2006-03-07)

Eye Exam
(2006-02-21)

Eye Exam
(2006-02-14)

Eye Exam
(2006-02-07)

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