Liz Magic Laser’s Armory Show Souvenirs
Published in The New York Times T Magazine, March 5, 2013
T-shirts and tote bags designed by the artist Liz Magic Laser for the 2013 Armory Show
Excerpt
The European avant-garde crashed onto American shores with the 1913 Armory Show, introducing New York’s art-going public to many of today’s most revered modern painters, among them Cézanne, Kandinsky, Matisse and Picasso. With radical works like Marcel Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase,” the exhibition both fascinated and disturbed; many visitors regarded the paintings, with their brash colors, warped perspectives and semi-abstract figures, as assaults on the virtues of classical beauty.
Fast-forward a century to the current Armory, a sprawling contemporary art fair that will mark the centennial of its namesake this week. Unlikely to generate the shock its forebear did, it still serves up a dose of provocation in an unexpected form: official paraphernalia. Armory staff T-shirts baldly brandish the average household income of visitors ($334,000). Tote bags state the cost of an average booth ($24,000). V.I.P. cards expose their holders’ less-than-peerless status (“…… of 12,365″). These are the works of Liz Magic Laser, whom the Armory commissioned to produce the “visual identity” of this year’s fair.