Fair Warning: If you think contemporary art is a crock to begin with, don’t bother reading this post.

I never thought that contemporary art could look out of date, but the art at this year’s New York Armory Show, which closed yesterday after a five-day run, proved me wrong.

Mind you, part of my feeling that the art in this year’s fair was flaccid and enervated comes from the background noise of the recession. Who, in these gloomy economic times, can look at anything without that cloud entering their field of vision? Despite the dreadful economy, however, art fairs dedicated to contemporary art are not giving up. There are nearly a hundred scheduled for the year, in just about every major city in the world. If you consider the smaller fairs that sprout up around the well-known fairs, you’re looking at a lot of contemporary art for sale at a lot of art fairs.

In the olden days (in the art world, that means last year, but I’m using the words to mean “anytime before the 90s”), the most common mode for buying and selling art was for an art dealer to “work with” a collector. Over time, they would develop a relationship based on contemplating works of art together. The dealer eventually achieved a sale, and the collector came back for more. The model for selling art at art fairs is entirely different. People buy art the way they buy sofas and chairs — quickly, efficiently, and without much thought.

If you’ve never seen an art fair, it’s quite a sight. Dealers display their “wares” in temporary, open booths that run in aisles for what seems like miles. Sales are made almost publicly (when you see someone in the corner of a booth talking on a cell phone, it’s a fair guess there’s a sale going down).

The environment is festive, with thousands of Looky Lous (like me) mingling with serious buyers (people with excess money in their accounts). People swap notes about who and what they’ve seen. There are several pit stops where you can buy liquor, wine, and coffee, or a salad topped with goat cheese and bean sprouts.

Fairs are fun, but they make art flat, like commodities. In the fog of the fair, the good, the bad, and the ugly mix together into one. The idea of collectors as people with a discriminating eye becomes a joke. All that’s needed is money. The art is humiliated by its context. Instead of hanging or sitting in clean, well-lit spaces, it hangs on flimsy walls or is plopped on cheap carpet. Without any mystique to it, art becomes vastly more accessible and its appeal more democratic. And dealers, having to make money working with the people who make up this new, wider audience, become traveling salesmen, moving their wares from one art fair to the next. The push to buy and sell overtakes everything else, destroying the old way of looking at and buying art.

A dealer friend of mine recently remarked that most contemporary art now consists of “rhinestones with attitude.” It’s a way of saying that most of the artists responded to the new hedge fund money that engendered the art fair situation by making art that’s superficial and glitzy — made to catch your eye — while at the same time making sure everyone knows this is all a big joke. At the Armory Show, shiny art could be seen everywhere. I also saw a startling amount of semi-ironic, fluffy soft-core porn (where the artist deliberately makes the borderline between art and porn very hazy), and a plethora of images of avatars (doesn’t anybody grow up any more?) On the conceptual art side were works directly referring to the current economy. One small painting consisted of the words, “Pay 1/2 Price”; a bigger one read, “Everyone Is Broke.”

At its worst, art made during the last couple of decades has been extravagant and soulless. (We’re not the only age to have produced art like this, but that’s another story.) At its best, however, the art has been great. In offering new forms of beauty (e.g., Richard Serra) or piercing commentary (e.g., William Kentridge), the best art spoke profoundly about our times.

The Armory Show failed to deliver much art that tries to do this — art that either comments with brilliant intensity about the moment, or uses beauty to try to lift us out of it. Worse, it doesn’t even work as a good mirror to our times. Most of the art I saw looked lame precisely because it seemed like it was out of synch with the times. It was the old-looking art made for a time when most “collectors” had a ton of extra money they found it fun to throw at art. Now that they can no longer do that, it’s time for art to change.