Verge

So the weekend got so busy I haven't been updating much. We will catch up today.

A quick overview of Verge: it's young and cheap and unlikely to rise to the prominence of the one-word fairs it tries desperately to emulate. Its problems are exacerbated by being held in a midtown hotel, which does not exactly have the best lighting. There are bottlenecks in the doors of the hotel rooms. Rather than adapting to the context and the claims of these smaller fairs to embrace "emerging" and "overlooked" art, this one resembled a particularly cramped craft market.

I left a terrific opening of sculptures by Sudarshan Shetty at Jack Tilton Gallery on the Upper East Side to go to this thing. I probably shouldn't have - Steve needed me and Jack serves food. I was hungry. Verge in the Dylan Hotel was above Benjamin Steak House and the flesh made me crazy.

There seemed to be a lot of little Japanese outfits at Verge. There was at least a comfortable middle-class feel to the thing - watching Alex at Mighty Tanaka made opening a little art-selling business look fun.

Van Uxem projects, at first glance, was a sparse and intimate vanity project, but in retrospect, Heather's was the best use of the hotel setting, and the least commercially desperate. She projected an abstract mouthlike video on a screen beside sex toys coated in wax. On the other side of the screen, of course, she sat exhausted while her son tried to sleep and strangers walked through looking uncomfortable.

Whereas Rebecca Leyche's Vagina Doorknobs (exactly what they sound like) were slightly deflated by their sales pitch label.