My feelings approaching last weekend's Armory Show were mostly those of dread and trepidation. So much art, so many hipsters. Were the inevitable sensory overload and physical exhaustion going to be worth the chance to see the biggest art fair of the year? Plus, there was a 20 dollar admission fee, which is usually enough reason to give me pause before going to any MoMA show. I hemmed and hawed for a long time, then finally bit the bullet. I grabbed my digital camera, a notebook, and carefully mismatched some vintage clothes. I was armed for the art world.

Over a dozen years ago, the Armory Show (in its current incarnation) was a rather rinky-dink affair. According to Holland Cotter of the New York Times, “Paintings were propped on pillows, drawings Scotch-taped to walls. One artist made love to a motorcycle; another took a three-day shower. The whole thing was kids playing Art Fair.”

And while there are still (twenty-something) kids on hand, nobody's playing anymore; too much money is involved. The Armory Show is now a serious, stream-lined, corporate operation. And this year the show, which in the past has straddled two West Side piers, was finally consolidated into one locale at Pier 94. A free shuttle service carried show-goers to and from the 8th Avenue subway station, and Danny Meyer (Blue Smoke, Gramercy Tavern) catered the affair. Lounges with designer, eco-friendly chairs punctuated the 150 galleries in their mall-like formation.

While there was no shortage of photography, sculpture, and installation, paintings seemed to dominate this year. London's Victoria Miro gallery showed Inka Essenhigh's jubilantly fluorescent “Picnic”, a painting with cartoonish figures vaguely reminiscent of John Currin. Essenhigh, whose sales have been skyrocketing since the mid-Nineties, paints hyper-slick narratives of estrangement and cross-cultural myth that flout the border between abstraction and figuration.

Over at the Canada gallery, there was the work of hot young artist Katherine Bernhardt whose nerve-y, loose portraits of celebs like Naomi Campbell and Jennifer Lopez savagely capture our love-hate relationship with celebrity. And Miami gallery Fredric Snitzer showed rising star Hernan Bas who paints naked boy-waifs in dreamy contexts. Bas and Bernhardt are both artists I like in spite of myself; they can’t get any trendier in terms of subject matter, but unlike Elizabeth Peyton, they both manage to skirt the pitfalls of fashion-illustration cool with the right balance of bravado and doubt.

At White Cube, two rather soporific Damien Hirsts were on display. A large glass case hanging on the wall exhibited crushed cigarette butts lined up in neat rows, and nearby there was a medium-sized white tank filled with formaldehyde--an almost self-parodic thumbnail Hirst for the modest art buyer. I was rather disappointed. I wanted to see cut-up animals and such, not a Hirst gesturing at a Hirst. Above these was a small, barely unnoticeable, Tracey Emin neon. Where was the gore and self-loathing? All that brutality-of-being-a-woman, leaky-vagina, STD-shock value? It was as if White Cube was trying to tamp down its most in-your-face artists for the sake of polite sales. Later, I saw another Emin at Lehmann Maupin; the New York gallery fared only slightly better on the confrontation-meter by parading out her larger neon “People Like You Should Fuck People Like Me.” Indeed.

Pierogi, the sole Brooklyn gallery at the fair, perhaps drew the biggest crowd for Kate Gilmore's video work “Anything”. Putting herself through a series of uncomfortable, and often painful, endeavors, such as cramming herself into tight spaces and standing atop a precarious pile of furniture to reach the camera, Gilmore's video baldly enacts the desperation and futility of the pursuit of fame. The piece feels like a one-liner at best, and one would be hard-pressed to top it for didacticism—especially given the portion of the video in which Gilmore, feigning frustration, tries to stuff her face into a wooden cut-out of a crude, splinter-y star. I overhead one woman exclaim loudly to her friends, “I love it! Anything to be a star! I love it!” It was like Cliffs Notes for Judy Blume.

It made me wonder how long artists (not to mention, writers and journalists) are going to get points for noting that ours is a generation of shameless, Myspace self-idolatry. Another year? Five? In the art world, the point is not just old news, it’s banal: The archetype of the starving, bohemian artist was replaced decades ago by that of rock star. Rachel Feinstein models for Marc Jacobs, lest we forget, and Kehinde Wiley was on the Today show.

Elsewhere, I discovered a painting by Berlin artist Eberhard Havekost, which I initially thought was sedately superb: A light-suffused, out-of-focus painting of a woman washing her hair in a sink with a hose, her back and rear to the viewer. She is dressed in a white shirt and black pants, an outfit that both abstracts her for.m and halves the foreground in a deliberately naive manner. In Havekost's signature style, the anti-gestural surface of the painting is glossy and sleek, mirroring its photo origin a la Gerhard Richter and Luc Tuymans.

Speaking of art school, I also really liked Christian Holstad. There was a beach towel of his hanging crudely from two nails. Threads had been carefully pulled from it to create, by deletion, a beach scene with a chair and shell. It was kitsch-y, playfully meta. What saved the piece from mere cleverness, though, was the choice of a white towel, which, set against the white gallery wall, underscored the hierarchical tension between art and craft. Holstad suggests that the line is increasingly porous, to the point of no longer being relevant. Here, texture and image are, in effect, results of acute sensitivity, and by re-imagining the everyday object via loss, he mythologizes its status--and the ephemerality of the ordinary--in contemporary life.

After the Holstad, I began feeling a tad dizzy. And I still hadn’t seen over half of the show. It was time to start walking through the galleries faster, so I adopted a window-shopping clip as a matter of practicality. See more, think less, essentially.

I whizzed past Liz Craft's sand-castle-like giant gnomes, Yayoi Kusama's gilded phalluses, and a self-inflating twin bed that was going for $28,000. More paintings, more installations; well-dressed people, overpriced food, art magazines. I bumped into a friend of mine who was trying to hide his giant digital camera beneath his arm; I ran into a former student of mine who thought my name was Helen.

Even the lounge was no respite from the onslaught of art. A young woman dressed all in black was rolling around the floor between chairs, wrapping herself furiously in purple yarn. Her head had been tightly wound into her body in what looked like an extremely uncomfortable contortion. People stopped to watch, take pictures, videos. And then, after a while, they walked away. About fifteen minutes later, a man on the sidelines discreetly handed the woman a pair of scissors, and she cut herself free.

A woman next to me applauded politely, then turned to me and said, “Well, whatever,” before she walked away.

My attitude exactly.

The fair was beginning to remind me of a Keith Tyson show I’d seen last year that was so ecstatically eclectic, it seemed like a group show. The message couldn't be clearer: the contemporary artist is a one-man act, and contemporary art aims to please our collectively short attention span. Indeed, the current art market seems to favor no school and no -ism (although, the school of naked-teens-at-a-slumber-party-or-in-the-woods art is probably a safe bet for the aspiring young painter). If anything, its anything-goes attitude resembles the fashion world more than itself. As Walter Robinson, editor of Artnet, so succinctly told TimeOutNY about the current market, “Criticality is out the window, market standards rule.”

It’s a far cry from the iconoclastic spirit of the original 1913 Armory Show, which astonished early 20th century New Yorkers with such Modern works as Duchamp’s “Nude Descending a Staircase” and Cezanne’s “Hill of the Poor.” As critics and viewers alike have noted, where the original Armory Show scandalized audiences and inspired cartoonists’ satirism, today’s Armory Show aligns itself more with commercial interests and entertainment value.

But who’s complaining? The new Armory show was about as giddy-making as any art fair I’ve been to in recent years. I have yet to have that much fun in a store where I couldn’t afford a single thing on sale.