The convention-hall fair asks you to look at paintings under the same light as a dental conference, and the standard objection to this is aesthetic when it is actually physiological — nobody can look at anything for four hours in that light. Neighbors, which ran April 8th through 12th at 1355 North Astor Street, proposed the opposite condition: a historic apartment, four rooms, about twelve hundred square feet, seven minutes from Navy Pier.

One must occasionally concede that a format is improved by shrinking it. It was the inaugural edition, founded by the arts patron Mirka Serrato, and it was covered in its first year by ArtNews and The Art Newspaper, which almost never happens to a debut.

Rooms, Not Booths

Black velvet. Fabric petals in red, pink, orange and yellow. Framed prints. A crystal chandelier that belongs to the building rather than to anyone's practice.

A velvet panel saturated with cut fabric petals sat on a cream window sill with a garden blurred behind it — a work that would be invisible in Festival Hall and in a domestic window is almost unbearably specific. The hallway hang put two prints either side of the chandelier, which flatters the prints and tells you something about whose house this is.

That is also the unresolved thing. A fair staged in a Gold Coast apartment on Astor Street, a block from the Charnley-Persky House, is making an argument about intimacy inside a form of domestic wealth that very few of the exhibiting artists have access to. The organisers did not pretend otherwise and did not address it either.

Jenny Lam wrote it up as a bite-sized fair with surprises in every room, which is the right register. I spent eleven minutes in the first room feeling pleased with myself for slowing down, which is a different activity from looking.

How People Behaved In Someone's Home

They lowered their voices. Several took their shoes off without being asked. Nobody ate, although there was food, because eating in a stranger's apartment while considering a purchase is a social problem no fair has solved. The circulation was the giveaway: in four rooms you cannot pass a work twice without it becoming a decision, and people doubled back constantly.

Neighbors is not a small art fair. It is a correctly sized one, and the others are inflated.

Cover image: Charnley-Persky House, Astor Street / Wikimedia Commons