Twenty-five years ago, a group of young dealers, including Pat Hearn, Colin de Land, and Matthew, Marks started the first contemporary art fair in New York at the Gramercy Park Hotel. Titled the Gramercy International Art Fair, it spanned floors 12, 14, and 15 (there is no 13, of course) of the hotel, with each gallery taking over a room or suite. In the first iteration in 1994, Tracey Emin slept in the bed in the room where her work was displayed (by Jay Jopling/White Cube). In 1997, Holly Solomon installed two TV screens as part of a work by Nam June Paik in her room’s bathtub. After outgrowing the hotel, in 1999, the fair moved to the original site of the infamous 1913 Armory Show and changed its name. Now it fills two West Side piers and includes a modern/twentieth-century art portion alongside the contemporary. There are more fairs that share the week with the Armory—the Independent, which celebrated its 10th anniversary, Volta (more on that later), and Spring Break, among others. Amid talks and other initiatives marking the quarter-century celebrations, at the fair there was a room several booths wide that included documentation and restaging of works from the …

It could happen as follows. You are perhaps 25 years old, in another 25 years you will be 50, and in that future possibility you will be on a dance-floor, where you will see, dancing in the corner, Marc Jacobs. He is as taut in the face as he is tight and flexible in the limbs. He radiates cheerleader warmth and slutty positivity, while the air wafting from under his tartan skirt is fresh and packed with ozone. You shake your head and calculate his age to be nearly 120, though he moves like a minnow shot out of the egg. He’s had work done, for sure, but a limit has been surpassed. It’s no longer about cosmetic distortions that try to blur the ravages of the years. Instead it’s upgrades, updates, and new hardware so he can just keep looking better and better. And you, a becoming-cadaver, who cannot afford a visit to the hair salon, and who can barely pay the rent on your closet in the metropolis that grants you such dazzling visions: you shall whither and die, pathetically excluded from this glamorous, ex-human world. The above is an It girl’s take on Ray Kurzweil’s coming singularity. For …