Kate Taylor stops by Pulse to take their temperature:
Pulse, at Pier 40,was relatively quiet on Friday but dealers were optimistic, anticipating a busy weekend. Thomas Taubert of the gallery ftc., from Berlin, said, “We are all much happier than we expected. Everybody came with zero expectations because of the crisis, and then we started selling.” Mr. Taubert had sold two photographs by Frank Breuer, for 4,500 Euros each, and a large photograph by Sonja Braas, from a series on manmade and natural disasters, for 20,000 Euros, to an American museum.
“It costs me a lot to come here, but I wanted to do it to stay in touch with my clients,” Mr. Taubert said. “If I can cover my costs, and I’m close to covering my costs,” that’s all I want.”
The dealer Yancey Richardson has been dividing her time between Pier 40 and Pier 92, where she has a booth in the Armory Modern fair. At Pulse, she had sold out all of her works by the artist Rachel Perry Welty on the first da, then replaced them with more. “She was a big hit,” Ms. Richardson said of Ms. Welty, whose work includes installations of miniature designer shopping bags, collages made from fruit stickers, and tinfoiil sculptures of epigrams culled from spam emails, such as “You may already be a winner.”
Ms. Richardson is also showing a striking series of photographs, by the Japanese artist Masato Seto, of girls manning “Binran,” or kiosks that sell beetlenut, around Taiwan. The girls are coquettishly dressed and made up, and sit on display in their glass kiosks as though it were they, and not the beetlenut (chewed as a stimulant), that were on sale.
