Where art thou
When launching your art career, as with shoplifting or French kissing, it’s really all about the timing. This year’s Frieze Art Fair, the eighth edition of the leading contemporary art bazaar, comes amid talk that the market has somewhat cooled and that the frenzy brought about by all the buying, selling and usual weirdness has become noticeably less obvious. As it was my first time to Frieze, I felt nothing but awe upon setting foot in London’s Regent’s Park; I was more than happy to let one of the most buzzed about events in the cutting-edge European art scene — along with Art Basel in Switzerland and FIAC in Paris — pop my cherry.
With so much going on, I needed to get my bearings first; 173 galleries from 29 countries were presenting new work and it was easy to feel overwhelmed. I later found out that the tent — a bespoke, stripped-back affair designed by London firm Caruso St. John — was a bit like a high school cafeteria: VIPS got prime, high-visibility space while the smaller players populated the fringes. There were no dots to indicate that a sale had been made — that would’ve been too crass. And yet you could still smell the money in the air. It was heady and very intoxicating. I loved it.
Harriet Godwin, my expert guide, first led our group to Damien Hirst’s “The True Artist Helps The World By Revealing Mystic Truths.” I had never seen a Hirst outside of Google and to finally behold one was a bit surreal. The installation of fish in formaldehyde seemed to reference his older work and, to some extent, stuff you’d find in a biology lab. However, the latter will never sell for $5.6 million, as the British artist’s gallery reported, which makes me realize that the superstar art world runs itself like a stock exchange — conjecture and perception matter more than anything.
Blinded by the lights: A woman walks past “Butterfly,” a disco-peacock-like sculpture by France’s Daniel Firman.Still, there were showstoppers from emerging talents. Simon Fujiwara’s “Frozen,” an installation based on the fictional premise that a lost city had been discovered beneath the site of the fair, won the Cartier Award. The under-30 British-Japanese artist, who likes to blur the lines between fantasy and fact, installed displays of found artefacts throughout the venue, even hiring people to mill around his faux archaelogical digs. He proposes that “today’s art market is just one manifestation of an ancient and intrinsic need — to create, preserve, sanctify, and fetishize objects.” That said, I wonder how future generations will react to overpriced embalmed sea creatures.
Aside from physical art, Frieze also featured specially commissioned projects. My favorite was Annika Ström’s “Ten Embarrassed Men,” a performance piece that exposes the Swedish artist’s sentiments about the representation of women in art fairs. Ten guys, all dressed like Jehovah’s Witnesses and identifiable as a group, made the rounds and, well, acted ashamed. This was only one site-specific work that was created to interrupt the flow of the environment, presumably to give the notion that contemporary art is not sterile and is in fact alive despite the downturn.
Across the universe: Mexican artist Damian Ortega is known for taking things apart and putting them back together. “Alma Matter” is his response to the Big Bang Theory. The night before, I was fortunate to have caught the first night of Frieze Music, a series of curated concerts spanning a spectrum of genres. New York disco collective Hercules & Love Affair, now with a new line-up, performed at Debut, which is situated under the arches of London Bridge Station. Berlin-based duo Hype Williams and Brooklyn act Telepathe, meanwhile, provided support and added to the all-hell-breaks-loose strangeness of Frieze week.
Overall, the atmosphere at Frieze Art Fair was one that I liked and somehow missed. Art is one of my first loves and it was what I wanted to get into before I got sucked into media. Seeing all the oddball characters in action — from curators and gallerists to casual tourists and Scottish visual artist David Shrigley (OMG!) — was just one highlight of my day. Leaving with so much inspiration — in particular, that nothing should stop me from pursuing art-related endeavors — was clearly another.
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