I pull into the Jupiter Hotel parking lot going the wrong direction and back uncomfortably into a spot marked "Reserved for Feast of Love." It's Friday night, and the third annual Jupiter Affair, Portland's art fair, is opening at this retro-swank hotel where the rooms open onto balconies that wrap around a central courtyard. In the courtyard, the kickoff party is underway. The sky is dark in this quietish neighborhood across the Burnside Bridge from downtown, but the Jupiter is swimming in aqua and red light. The aqua lights are the hotel's; I find out later that the red lights are somebody's MFA project, something about using lights to alter mood. The guy at the check-in desk says that "Feast of Love" is a Morgan Freeman movie shooting in Portland and that Freeman is around, but the whole weekend I never do see him; he does not appear to be interested in contemporary art fairs.

An art fair is the worst possible viewing and thinking environment. There's the squeezing into tiny hotel rooms (and their bathrooms) crammed with art, and the sweaty excuse-me-pardon-me muttering—except in the rooms where you hate the art and find yourself existentially alone with the dealer. It's all worth it because, well, everybody's there, and if you aren't you'll miss out on those few things worth seeing. The out-of-town galleries at Jupiter have come mainly from Texas, Atlanta, San Francisco, and Seattle. Not every Seattle gallery is there; when I ask around, the enthusiasm level among Seattle dealers ranges from "Of course, wouldn't miss it" to "Portland can come to me." I get the same spectrum of answers to my questions about how much business the Jupiter actually generates for galleries, and whether this year's fair is better than last year's, so I stop asking. Misinformation is the currency of an art fair, probably simply because the view is different from every booth.

Most of the art at Jupiter feels painfully young, and too much of it is drawing intended to make the artist look like she is not trying too hard, or handicrafts whose intentions escape me entirely, such as a stuffed animal on a pillow representing Donald Trump's newborn. Few of the two-dimensional works have backgrounds or foregrounds; whatever is drawn and painted either sits alone on the page like a hitchhiker or is conjoined to some swirling mass of stuff. I try to figure out why I remember certain pieces, what about them is mnemonic, and this becomes my mission. In Robert Yoder's new charged-up abstractions, it's the solidity of the white space. In a tiny orange Hummer set on a stick against a window, it's the imagined sight of the Hummer parked on the leafy Oregon street. In Matt McCormick's bathroom, it's the commiseration. The walls and fixtures are covered with silvery paper and foil, and projected side by side on the shower wall are two videos of a beach at sunset and dark rippling water. It was considerate of McCormick to make an escape hatch.

jgraves@thestranger.com