Last weekend, I attended the Evanston Art Show here in NE Illinois. At about 100 artist’s showing, it was a mid-sized fair. A few booths were closed up due to the weather, which wasn’t bad on Sunday but was moderately rainy Saturday. I actually wanted to go Saturday to see how the vendors dealt with the weather, but circumstances conspired against me. I did see that many booths were closed on the west side and opened opposite, with a few still having artwork under the tarp. Everything seemed well handled.
At a rough guess, painting was well represented at about a quarter of the booths. Jewelry and photography each had as many, with the final quarter filled in by everything else. The average quality was good with a few artists being very good. Personally, my tastes are fairly narrow, but I can recognize quality in a work even if it doesn’t appeal to me.
One thing I do not respect are “enhanced photographs” being handed off as paintings. If the substrate is a printed photo or some other artwork, slopping on some paint does not make it a painted work of art. It denigrates the art of photography and besmirches the art of painting.