The Artsy Podcast, No. 5: Frieze New York Turns 5 and Detroit Looks Forward

 

Take a deep breath, folks: Frieze Week 2016 is in the books. After a scintillating few art-filled days and sales that ranged from brisk for younger emerging artists to more cautious at the top of the market, we sat down to look back at the fifth edition of Frieze New York, as well as the fair more broadly. From an artist giving away Soylent, to the Spotlight section, to a gallery booth-turned-stable (replete with a donkey), this year’s edition of Frieze offered both favorites and surprises. But how has it changed in the last five years? What does it offer that other fairs don’t?

Then from the white tent of Frieze, we turn our attention to Detroit, a city that has been the site of numerous competing and flawed narratives (from Detroit the ruin to Detroit the center of renewal). For five days, the city played host to the New Museum’s Ideas City initiative. A relatively small “studio laboratory,” the project brought together some 40 artists, designers, writers, and more from across the globe, but most importantly from Detroit, to propose creative ideas for its future. Expanding on our recent feature, we look at the state of the arts in Detroit three years after the city declared bankruptcy and came close to selling off its cultural collections, and think about the possibilities and limitations of something like Ideas City.