There was a lemonade stand on the roof for yesterday’s preview of the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) fair and its youthful entrepreneurs were hustling the sour stuff in customized ‘I Heart NY’ cups. It was the Children’s Museum of the Arts’s third such fundraiser, and alongside refreshments there was art for sale too: a drawing of a dog in a field (labeled “dog”), an abstract collage of felt and colored paper, and a sculpture of a lemon-faced figure.
After meandering through four floors of tightly packed booths, the seems in keeping with the back-to-fundamentals vibe of the fair. Lest we forget, children are instinctive artists, the organization’s Genevieve Martin said, and both Rothko and Picasso were avid collectors of children’s work.
Nearby on the roof, there’s a mesmeric video work by Morehshin Allahyari, a composite of A.I.-generated images that counter the gendered gaze of 18th-century Persian portraiture. It stands out as a genuinely compelling use of A.I. in art, but also as something of an outlier at NADA.
Morehshin Allahyari, Moon-faced…