(October 2009 at Regent’s Park, London)
Although one of my job descriptions is “artist”, I’d actually managed to avoid visiting London’s annual showcase for the major [sic] commercial art galleries. They call it an art fair, I’m more comfortable calling it a bourgeois crapfest. Many ironies are evident, but the most ironic irony of all is that most of the galleries who reliably fork out to be present at these things don’t seem to even know- or won’t admit- that capitalism is actually all about selling things. Frieze represents capitalism at its most baroque, with all the flourishes and frills and mannerisms of a commodity culture but devoid of any actual commodities or any significant commerce taking place because there’s nothing worth buying and everybody involved is still coyly cloaking themselves in the conceit that it isn’t about money at all. The whole affair is totally weird and irrational, like cargo cultists making fake airports in the jungle, or radios and fridges from bits of old wood, all in the hope of somehow provoking the manna of capitalism to fall from the sky. All they really understand is that they’ve seen it happen to other people and that they want to partake of that kind of plenitude. In fact they feel entitled to it.
I know that art and artists are almost beside the point for most of the to-the-manor-born elite who’ve got their fingers in the skanky old mechanically-recovered meat pie that is the international art industry, but I do want to talk about the art on show. It’s no surprise that for the most part it falls into distinct categories which can also be regularly seen in contemporary art galleries throughout the world. You could turn this into a game the next time you visit such a place. I must say that I enjoyed Frieze Art Fair immensely once I started looking at it as an overblown and three dimensional art world version of Top Trumps.
At Frieze, or other major art events and biennales, you will see:
[a] Broken up furniture, bits of dirty old wood, piles of twigs, or some combination of the aforementioned. Usually stacked against the wall or slung casually in a corner…. BUT IT’S IN A WHITE GALLERY SPACE. This is only mindblowing if you’re from the 19th century and/or if you still haven’t got to grips with the implications of Marcel Duchamp’s urinal which was about ninety years ago. A shrewd buyer could probably go around Regent’s Park and scrounge up enough furniture legs and lumber to make a coffee table and a few dining chairs, but I find it hard to believe this stuff is commercial, popular, or could sustain any artist’s career. Ergo, it’s hard to imagine why commercial galleries or major institutions have such a persistent interest in it. A clear subcategory was also apparent: patronising “recontextualisations” of china ornaments or other working class ephemera. You know, like you might see in a prole’s “front room”.
[b] Multiple (and in many cases utterly blatant) copies of work by well-known artists, the kind of thing that any respectable art teacher would castigate as plagiarism and lazy thinking. How many paintings of vertical stripes does one planet need? Why is the adolescent sloganeering of unimaginative artists still almost exclusively executed either in badly painted placards or wall-mounted neon tubes? In a few cases, closer inspection reveals that these works were in fact made by the brand name artists you first guessed at… except that they’re scraping-the-bottom-of-the-barrel stuff that wouldn’t be exposed in public by an artist who had any integrity whatsoever, done by artists who I doubt even need the money.
[c] Wrongly scaled photography. The natural size and format of photography is in no way comparable to that of a huge, academic painting from the nineteenth century, but it seems to be where everyone’s aiming by default. Apparently this nearly two hundred year old art form still isn’t entirely legitimate or Fine Art in some peoples’ eyes, there’s still an inferiority complex and they think that photography needs to be presented like a big old oil painting. Occasionally photography benefits from being on a large scale. A great example of this is Andreas Gursky’s work, which usually consists of incredibly detailed and busy human environments. In his case, the large format not only works visually but is indeed necessary to proper appreciation of the work. To most of the other artists and galleries at Frieze: your image does not need to be two meters tall and mounted on the latest super-expensive substrate. Who knows, maybe one of the main criteria for art buyers really is sheer surface area, otherwise they don’t think they’re getting value for money; it’s the only explanation I can think of for many of these photography works being so enormous, because neither the subject matter nor the quality of the work warrants such elephantine prints.
[d] Just plain bad paintings. More or less objectively bad, bad as in shoddy technique, bad as in poor observation, bad as in tired subject matter. There were a bunch that actually looked like vandalised portraits of characters from Spongebob Squarepants, and there was a striking female nude apparently painted by somebody who only had half an hour to spare and was entirely ignorant of what a naked human being’s body actually looks like. Not being able to do hands is a common problem, and understandable if you’re fifteen and doing art at GCSE level. If you’re selling in a professional gallery and doing naturalistic figurative work, you should probably learn to convincingly paint a person. You’ll sell more paintings that way, incidentally. Also present, a large quantity of girly, kawaii and decora fluff from Japanese and Korean galleries and artists. It’s getting a bit tiresome now, and it’s so shallow that it’s barely there at all. But these Asian offerings at least show some indications of knowing their own market and being saleable, albeit to someone with horrifically bad taste and more money than sense. Which, to be honest, probably describes most art buyers in the world.
[e] Galleries showing very little of anything at all. Most of them foreign, from diverse parts of the world but all united in the sense that their stands provoked exactly the same question from me: “You paid vast sums of money to Frieze and you came all the way from {Bulgaria/Portugal/China/etc} and this is what you decided to show?” This being in most cases a situationist banner or two, a miniscule and really bad abstract painting, an old film projector, a tiny and intellectually opaque conceptual installation, or something of that ilk. This, of course, brings us full circle to my cargo cult analogy; these galleries can only be at Frieze in the knowledge that most of the people they normally deal with will not have been present in London, so the galleries can say they have the imprimatur of Frieze and they’re in that Frieze world, like truant schoolkids turning up for morning registration at a posh private school and then bunking off for the rest of the day to do coke behind the refectory. When they leave, of course, the posh private school is all anybody sees on the CV.
I had fun at Frieze, but it was mainly because the unrelenting barrage of bad art pushed me into a kind of hysterical trance where I was able to find this aspect of the art world hilarious and absurd rather than merely depressing and ugly, as I normally do.
So, does anyone else want to do a massive Salon des Refusés (or Salon des Ignorés) next year?