Melike Kara "like a promise (two)" (2017) (detail)
They’ve all come to town, the dealers and the collectors and the curators and the freeloaders: It’s Armory Week in New York, a saturnalia of art and air kissing. So dive in! Art fairs are, at their core, commercial enterprises — and, as the market undergoes a violent course correction after years of helium-inflated prices, revenues from fairs constitute a growing fraction of galleries’ yearly takes. But fairs, even for those of us who don’t collect, have their uses. They condense the sprawling art world to just about manageable size, and bring to Manhattan dealers from locales as distant as Tokyo, Cape Town, São Paulo … and Brooklyn. They’re prime people-watching territory, too, and increasingly good places to snag a drink.