There are about a half dozen big art fairs going on around the city starting yesterday and running through the weekend, including the enormous, glitzy-as hell Armory Show at Piers 90 and 94. For years, though, Spring/Break has been the best — a proudly scruffy show that nevertheless has grown into a huge, important showcase for contemporary art at its most immediate.
Spring/Break always takes place in non-traditional venues for art-viewing, and this year that location is the one-time Ralph Lauren headquarters on Madison Avenue in Midtown. Taking over two whole floors of the once-swanky offices, well over a hundred different curators and curatorial teams have brought thousands of works from artists around the world to show (and sell) to all comers.
This is Spring/Break’s ninth iteration, and the theme is “In Excess,” as artists are encouraged to dive into the effects of materialism, capitalism, and consumerism, as well as “the pleasure of ‘more is more,’ explored through the joyously overindulged abundance of ideas and forms.”
Each curator is assigned an empty office, or a row of cubicles, or the elevator banks, or a supply closet, or a staff kitchen, and is basically given free rein to do whatever they want with space. The Spring/Break format lends itself well to wild installations and interactive pieces, which are always fun, and a lot of the teams showing work in a more traditional medium, like paintings, still deck out their "galleries" in eye-catching ways, to lure passersby to stop in and take a look.
There's a lot of energy here everywhere you turn, and it's easy to spend several hours taking it all in.
Spring/Break is located on the 10th and 11th floor at 625 Madison Avenue, between 59th and 58th Streets, and is now open to the public daily, through March 9th, from 11 a.m. to 8 p.m. Admission is $25.
