IT seems that over the last few years there
has been a resurgence internationally of new or emerging privately owned
galleries. This is curious, since it also seems that just yesterday the
eclipse of the commercial gallery ‘system’ was widely predicted as being an
inevitable consequence of (among other things) a general retrenchment in
museum funding, collapse of the dot-com economy, conceptual art, internet
purchasing, virtual reality – or whatever. Things looked bleak.
Now listen to Jerry Salz in Modern Painters this January: ‘…the market is
now simply a condition, as much part of the art world as galleries and
museums…Regardless, the market is now so all-permeating and encompassing
that it’s not possible to evaluate it effectively. For now the market is
generating competition, as is its wont, and that is resulting in more art –
as well as more everything else.’
What especially strikes one is that this resurgence is not localised to the
usual suspects in New York, Cologne, London or Madrid. It is global, and
this makes for a sense of the surreal when one recognises the parts but
fails to grasp the totality, where nothing is unfamiliar yet everything is
strange.
But perhaps the explanation is not so complicated. Think economic recovery,
thanks to globalisation – and think China. Think technology and the
explosion of internet access. Think the perversity of human desire and the
relationship of catastrophe to shopping and entertainment. Think the art
fairs. Think this, just in from Scope New York, the six-year-old alternative
art fair: ‘Visitors to the fair will be embraced and initiated by roving
performers, sound and video pieces interspersed throughout the fair. Nestled
atop a snow blown “mountain”, viewers can seek sanctuary in a veritable
hunting lodge, where art stars, icons and iconoclasts interview each other
and warm to a crackling fire.’
That’s it. It’s the art fairs, stupid! Listen to Peter Schjeldahl, writing
in The New Yorker last January: ‘In contemporary art, this is the decade of
the fair, as the nineties were the decade of the biennial... Fairs give the
little stores conglomerate muscle.’ And thinking of art fairs, don’t just
think Basel (somewhere in Switzerland). Think Basel Miami. And while you’re
at it, think Novosibirsk, Russia, or the contemporary Istanbul International
(it coincides with Christmas, ‘which makes a trip to this fascinating city
of all faiths more attractive than ever’, according to their website). Think
Dubai. Think anywhere. Did you know there are an astonishing 62,200,000
items registered under international art fairs on Google? What we have here
is hardly a failure to communicate. What we have amounts to a new paradigm.
Or is it? Maybe it’s a very old paradigm. Maybe the equation of global
capital mobility, consequent high-speed technology and high anxiety’s need
for entertainment equals shopping with a vengeance? Maybe we have the
conditions of the spectacle. Maybe we have the medieval fair (or is that
vanity fair?), with sweetmeats for all. Maybe we have the (continuing)
triumph of the ever-emerging middle classes and the elixir of cultural
status. Make no mistake: in our culture of speed they’re in a hurry. The
fair is a hothouse, according to Toronto gallery dealer and long-term
respected curator Jessica Bradley, with reputations at stake and historical
amnesia the chaser. A heightened one-stop shopping, no need to hunt: just
cruise the fairs and, not so incidentally, be seen at the scene. Be part of
the elite. And that elite includes the taste-makers and power-brokers – the
critics, curators and powerful collectors (or their agents), who also
wouldn’t miss the show. We seem to be in one of those ‘moments of
relaxation’, as Lyotard calls it, when slumming is the way to go. It isn’t
that Venice or Documenta are past it; it’s just that it’s more fun at the
fair.
In the end, it is a natural symbiotic affair. Satisfying a need, the gallery
opens its doors, not just down the street, but to the world – to the crowds
who could never come to the door, who can only come to the fair. In the end,
in fact, the interesting question may be: what is it that makes art so
sought after now? In an age of galloping ecological concern (and, dare one
say, a rather familiar puritanical severity?), what is it about the material
artwork that it defies gravity? We come back to something, again, quite
simple: the need to hold on to something. To hold, after all, is to prosper.
Ask any financial advisor. Ask any collector.
YVONNE LAMMERICH IS AN ARTIST BASED IN MONTREAL