The Daily Pic: The front of a welded-steel sideboard, crafted by Paul Evans in 1967 and now in the Todd Merrill booth at the Pavilion of Art and Design, a new Manhattan art fair that closes around dinnertime tonight.  Evans’s piece is one of the few objects in the  fair that can stand up against an overwhelming sense of glitz and conspicuous consumption. The booths mix art and design in settings that are supposed to be domestic – which I suppose they are, if your idea of domesticity is a Park Avenue apartment from hell, or a home that feels like the inside of Imelda Marcos’s jewel box. Instead of elevating design by showing it with art, most of the halogen-lit booths at this fair make both art works and design objects feel like empty baubles of the idyl rich – like polo ponies that happen to stay put. And yet the Evans holds its own, by somehow accepting the decorative side of abstract fine art, while also insisting on the unprecedented notion that a sideboard can be tough as any David Smith. 

The Daily Pic, along with more global art news, can also be found on the  Art Beast page at TheDailyBeast.com.