And the Collectors... Where Were They?

Photo courtesy Mathieu Borysevics

Li Wei, "Freedegree over 29th Story" (July 24, 2003)

Photo by James Painter Belvin

SCOPE Hamptons interior

Send a letter to the Editor

Save to Del.icio.us Digg this

ARTINFO regulars will know that I’m a big fan of SCOPE. I was particularly impressed by their latest manifestation in Basel this year. But even though there are only 100 miles between my home in Manhattan and Industrial Road, East Hampton, Friday’s ordeal made me wonder what I’d been so enthusiastic about in the past.

Things started out well enough. SCOPE had arranged a special bus to take us press folks out there. It was scheduled to leave from in front of MoMA at 10 a.m. Friday morning, and of course it didn’t. When the bus finally arrived on a steamy 53rd Street, it was well after 10, and by 11 we had only begun to make our way out of Midtown. The VIP/Press Preview Brunch complete with “special performances and screenings” was scheduled to run from noon to 2 p.m.; though nobody onboard expected the bus to do the trip in the predicted two hours, neither did anyone anticipate how absurdly our journey would conclude. After a mostly clear drive down the Long Island Expressway, traffic snarled up once we left the expressway, like it always does, but it was the driver’s repeated attempts to find a route to the SCOPE site without encountering an impassably low bridge that really tested our patience. He seemed to have pretty much given up when we parked by the side of a local soccer field for people to pile off the bus for bathroom and cigarette breaks. But there we encountered a groundskeeper, who, giving a “What’s the problem?” shrug, volunteered to show us the way.

We followed his truck, and suddenly there it was: SCOPE Hamptons nestled between the trees, with kids running around and a big tent off to one side and pop music pounding out of it. What we did not see, however, was any sign of our preview brunch, or of the VIPs who were supposed to join us there, or, so far as I could tell, any performances or screenings. Bottles of strong beer were thrust into our hands, but the large, surly catering guy behind the sandwich counter let us know that if we wanted to eat we were going to have to pay for it. It was at this point that it occurred to me that few sights are sadder than middle-aged professionals begging for food.… Thankfully, a SCOPE staffer appeared just in time with a supply of wristbands with the word “brunch” scribbled in pink ink. I drank my beer and ate an uninspiring artichoke salad. I wanted to follow this up with a cup of coffee, but when I discovered that the pot on the sandwich counter was empty and informed the catering guy, all he did was take the lid off to confirm that it was indeed empty and say, “Yes, it’s empty.”

The fun was fast going out of all of this by now, but I hesitated to leave the rather airless tent (Friday was warm and humid even out at the eastern end of Long Island), as I still expected something to happen, perhaps a speech or some other warm welcome. Instead, I was merely given a black-on-black press pass on a lanyard to hang around my neck.

So I went to the fair, where things, alas, weren’t exactly banging either. Yes, it was a SCOPE fair, and very obviously so. All of the galleries that I’ve seen and enjoyed at SCOPE before were present—Mike Weiss, Morgan Lehman, Rare, Marc de Puechredon, Curator’s Office, Regis Krampf, Jenkins Johnson, and Daneyal Mahmood, among others—and so were the galleries that I’ve seen at SCOPE before and wondered what they were doing there. The unfortunate truth is that I’ve written about all of the good galleries before, and in many cases about the very same artists that they were showing here. As for the bad galleries … well, when I’m in as foul a mood as I was by that point on Friday afternoon, they bring out the single instinct in me that leaves me quoting Mrs. Thatcher: I’d rather not give them “the oxygen of publicity.”

And the collectors... where were they? The opening-night benefit had been the previous evening, so the place was definitely open for business, and there was actually meant to be an Emerging Collectors Reception going on at that very moment (in fact, I realized later that it was an Emerging Collector’s bottle of beer that I’d been offered a few minutes earlier) but the whole place had a stale air about it, with people standing around waiting for something to happen. Mike Weiss had sold a single Yigal Ozeri painting, and someone from SCOPE came and whispered in my ear that Galerie Brigitte Schenk had just sold a Marilyn Manson watercolor of a hermaphroditic Hitler (or was it Charlie Chaplin?) for $105,000. But in the main, people that I spoke to tried to reassure me (and probably themselves) that this is how SCOPE Hamptons is: It doesn’t really get going until the weekend proper. Well, I hope it did, because as of late Friday afternoon, I suspect that a lot of people were doing the math on how much it had cost them to get out there.