My first time at frieze was a bit of an eye opener. The old cliché of the artist reacting/rallying against the over commercialised art-as-commodity market is indeed a tired and naïve one, and not one I wish to expound here. However I was truly awakened to the mechanics of the galleries and art market for the contemporary art world, given the display of contemporary art that was on display. It seemed that ‘quality’ in the traditional sense- i.e. some identifiable inherent characteristic that was universally accepted to be present in a particular piece by a general consensus- was discernably absent. As such, it seemed that the galleries (the art market, manifest in Frieze) played out some emperors new clothes magic to an extent I have never been witness to before… at one point I pitied the man with broom and portable flapped dustbin on a pole whose job it was to collect rubbish from the floor- how could the poor chap possibly discern real art from discarded detritus- some discarded detritus could indeed have been put there by an artist (my mind races to an artist mindlessly tossing a chewing gum wrapper, and a gallery racing up behind him and putting a little cordon around it and a price tag) or convolutely, the chap with the broom could have been an artwork himself… Truman Show anyone? Anyhow, the artwork on display by many of the galleries seemed to defy any accepted standards of taste or quality. Note that I say ‘many’ of the galleries- some rubies did indeed exist within the dust. But I am an artist- I get contemporary, I get awkward intellectual challenges to status quo and to the cultural zeitgeist, so why was the selection of artworks so impossible to understand. Even the projects, especially commissioned by Frieze, at times appeared obtuse and clunky. And so we were left on the outside of a strange world, looking in and feeling like we were meant to be on the outside- we were not included on the joke. What we were party to were the obvious machinations of an industry where special children of the art world have been picked mindlessly and thrust into the limelight because of nothing in particular, while critics and journo’s slobber around dreaming up that magical reason that none of us can fathom, performing their essential role exactly as the machinations of the performance require. Then posh people run around trying to buy some of it, usually ending up with the cheaper work-on-paper editions or badly finished sculptures by unknowns who show promise. Artists who have not yet been plucked from anonymity also drift around looking interesting, sporting unfeasibly pointy shoes (the longer they are the further they are from success) and desperately trying to look nonchalant and not starvingly desperate (I of course put myself in this category – minus the pointiness). Even middle class parents were seen dragging helpless children around, while specially commissioned child friendly ‘advisers’ rammed palatable impish art sound bites down their tiny throats. “and why do you think he chose pink?” Bless.
This all sounds so critical- there was some really bloody good stuff there- and not necessarily by the Hauser and Wirth’s of this world. I saw humour, I saw poignancy, I was genuinely arrested by visual inspiration. I intend to analyse in greater detail some of the findings, and put my own unqualified and immature opinion to some of the pieces on display. For now I just wished to get down my initial impression of the circus that is the Frieze Art Fair.
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