Informed By The Fine Arts

Despite the so many ways to view and obtain art online with simply a click of the mouse, the 2012 Armory Show in Manhattan was packed as tight as a tin of stuffed anchovies.

This highly vetted and respected exhibition is the largest in New York. Though hardly as vast as Art Basel Miami, it is infinitely more manageable and palatable.

This year’s event showcased a remarkable variety of extraordinary, banal, silly, provoking and erotic works of art. Interactive art was in full gear with shimmering white spandex pods encasing pairs of youths roiling about the rubber matted exhibits. With swarms of attendees ogling Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, it was quite common to see someone tumbling accidentally over the gyrating cocoons of spandex—a sort of irritating form of interactive art.

There were several scruffy types, sequestered on cots, lying in the corners of art booths with vacuous, sullen eyes staring at onlookers drawing some interactive interest. An ordinary plainly clothed woman lay prostrate on a floating concrete dais with balls and layers of concrete suspended above her—far more interesting actually than the naked artist at Art Basel, living for days with sows in a glass booth eating from a trough and eliminating in front of you. For the curious, the name of the artist was Miru Kim and the title of the installation was “The Pig That Therefore I Am.”

This show also proved that as technology progresses, artists have more tools in their creative arsenal, with vibrant photography and digital images ruling the show. Saturated color and crisp and super-focused images were ubiquitous. Photography often superseded all other forms; the manipulated images were bold in scale as well as spectacular in detail.

There is always a welcome mix of sculptures, conceptual video and digital art at the Armory Show. But there is now a distinct dearth of painting and printmaking.

It was also exciting to see the participation of major dealers from Tokyo, Stockholm, Hong Kong, London and Berlin. And, of course, what they chose to bring this distance was fascinating.

Along with this remarkable event comes the sidebar advantage of great people watching. Every outré fashion update is out on parade—and the more out there, the more respect one garners.

Mining the cultures of erotica, African and Indonesian tribal dress—in ikat-patterned leathers, feathers and even raffia—was in abundance. Bohemian costumes with tribal references were de rigueur, begging the question “Are these attendees or fortune tellers?” Of course, animal prints and skins were drawn out of the woodwork with ocelot, zebra and python skins in muddy tones sashaying about.

Mixed in of course were the tailored Wall Streeters, sleuthing for acquisitions in their tight-fitting Brioni suits, murmuring with jeans-clad dealers in thick neon glasses. Ladies decked out in seriously beautiful forest greens and buttercup yellow were dazzling. All I missed to round out the spring runways were the Ladurée pastels that have taken Manhattan by storm.

It is always revitalizing to let these art exhibitions wash through you, clearing away stubborn cobwebs and opening your vision to interesting possibilities and new ways of looking at color, texture, light and form. It may not be beautiful, it may not even be appealing, but it can shake the tree a bit and maybe even provoke.

A great decorator told me that every room needed something “off,” something even “ugly,” to excite the already properly assembled space. The tension between provocative and polite, grand and common, tasteful and vulgar, guarantees a second look, a questioning, and an involvement.

An example: I returned from a client’s home in the Berkshires where lacquered peacock blue walls, rich silk damasks, plush upholstery and Kerman rugs play background to huge contemporary paintings, rough earthly sculptures, 1950s marbleized mirrors, and a shell-encrusted Neptune rising phoenix-like from a classic pedestal. Though bordering on lunacy, the mix triumphs and exceeds the sum of the parts. It both relaxes one’s nerves yet stimulates one’s senses.

Like great artists who tread this line constantly, great clothing designers—such as Junya Watanabe for Comme des Garçons—play with antithetical concepts and tensions. Mr. Watanabe has created a woman’s zippered motorcycle bolero jacket in leather with organdy shoulder ruffles—completing the traditional silhouette, however producing a dramatic tension and an exciting juxtaposition of textural opposites.

Then there’s Stella McCartney, who takes a concept such as hemline and re-creates a rococo reveal that seemingly caresses a woman’s upper thigh and scrolls it down one side of a jacket, leaving the other side plain. The result is that surprising magic that comes from unexpected juxtaposition of contrasting ingredients.

Imagine curtains in a rich camel burlap but trimmed in a pale mint silk tassel. Picture a Damien Hirst spot painting above an ancient elm altar table. Visualize a gnarled, bleached oak armoire on a shimmering white glass floor. See a polished Philadelphia highboy in front of a crumbling Tribeca brick wall. Or why not have a refined silk Tabriz carpet on a Sagaponack potato barn floor or a Calder mobile in a Regency-style paneled salon?

There are rules in art to be found, as there are rules in fashion and interior design, that can help bring about some success. And there are fairs, such as the Armory show, and designers, like Watanabe and McCartney, which offer new paths to expose and open up even more opportunity to re-envision and reinvigorate.