(Centro Citibanamex, 12 February 2022)
This annual celebration of pretty things is, once again, a success, thanks, once again, to the absence of a curator with an agenda other than to sell tickets and to sell art.
Big city north of the border galleries stand out as being out of touch, perhaps for two reasons. The first might be that the denizens of these cities do not get around much any more, with New Yorkers at best peddling works in what outsiders would recognise---a New Yorker artist might hope---as the coveted "New York genre." London appears to have been spared this fate of irrelevance.
The second reason for the failure of big northern cities might be their past success. Young people want to create art. But you can't create competitive art while the old people are so objectively good. You can starve and learn until you are 40 and objectively good, or you can bend the reality, and declare bad art good. It seems like the northern cities are in the stage of flirting with the idea that bad art is good. It won't work.
Beautiful things attract beautiful people. Beautiful things make beautiful people. ZONAMACO's attraction is watching people as much as watching art. ZONAMACO is a microcosm of what makes a city tick.
