Note: I wrote the below before the turmoil of Art Chicago 2006 that still hasn’t completely played out at the time of this article’s posting. I hope everything works out, but I have to admit, I wasn’t planning to attend the opening night no matter when or where it takes place. Just too many memories….
Dave asked that we all put forth our best stuff this week, as Sharkforum is participating, due to the generosity of Tom Blackman, in Art Chicago. I thought for a moment, wondering what my best stuff might be, and with a cut of dread realized it is probably Nostalgia.
Last week I was a guest speaker for a undergraduate class at UIC. I was there to talk about the inner workings of museums. In introducing myself, I was appalled to hear myself say “I’ve been at the MCA probably longer than most of you have been on this earth.”

Of course I wasn’t appalled because I was exaggerating or anything like that. I was appalled because when I was ‘their age’ I would have squirmed to hear anyone saying such a thing. How old-fogey can you get. (Now that’s a term you don’t hear much these days.) How does saying such a thing do anything except point out the obvious while using a really really embarrassing cliché? But the truth of the matter is I have been around a while now, and yes, I remember the ‘old days.’ In the course of my speechifying and exhorting of the ten or twelve earnest young people, including a girl who brushed her hair during class, which of course catapulted me far enough back to realize, with a start, that my self-conscious, how-do-I-look, hairbrushing-in-public days were so long past as to be terrifying obscure to me, I even mentioned the old days of the art fair. Yes, the art fair, for it wasn’t always Art Chicago, having started out at the Chicago International Art Exposition. Tom Blackman’s Art Chicago was in fact the upstart, much like Nova is to Art Chicago, begun with great excitement and anticipation cheek-by-jowl with the Navy Pier’s CIAE, in a tent on a parcel of real estate on Ogden Slip that surely now sports at least one, maybe even two, sixty-story shiny condo highrises. For this class, interested as they were in the inner workings of museums, especially the one I work for, I pointed out that in the 1980s and well into the 1990s the MCA routinely scheduled its ‘best stuff’ in May, when the international art world came town for the Fair. (The late April dates being a function of the “new” incarnation of Art Chicago, returning to its roots to a tent as it did last year).