Related Articles
Every October, one of the world’s major art fairs takes place in a huge tent on the edge of Regent’s Park. For five days, the park’s year-round population — joggers, parents pushing buggies, teenagers playing soccer — is augmented by thousands of people at Frieze London seeking an encounter with contemporary art — or at least an encounter with the contemporary art world, which is just as much of a spectacle, in its way.
Some of these people wear all black, some dress like the rich villains in “The Hunger Games” and some carry battered LL Bean tote bags that say “GAGOSIAN.” Striding into the tent on the preview day this Wednesday, they were talking with varying degrees of enthusiasm about what and who they were going to see. I overheard two women use the words “fresh hell,” and saw a young man so excited he was practically in tears.
Even for veterans of the art fair circuit, there is a frightening amount to see at Frieze London: over 160 booths this year from 43 countries in the main tent and a sister event, Frieze Masters, devoted to pre-21st century artworks, across the park. For an outsider, the challenge is compounded. In addition to looking at as much as art as possible and attempting to form a handful of defensible opinions, there is the difficulty of decoding the system itself, its rules and what makes it tick.
An hour after the fair had opened on Wednesday morning to a restricted audience of high-paying collectors, curators, reporters and art-world cognoscenti, a lesson about how hype develops was playing out in the Focus section, which highlights young galleries and emerging artists.
A small group of people had begun to gather near the booth for Brunette Coleman, a London gallery showing at the fair for the first time, with works by Nat Faulkner, a young English artist who makes experimental photographs. Faulkner had just been announced as the winner of a prize: the Camden Art Center Emerging Artist Award, which offers an artist from the Focus section the opportunity to realize a solo show at the London art space, supported by its curatorial team. As more people drifted over without quite seeming to know why, Martin Clark, the center’s director, began to give a presumably heartfelt, but almost inaudible, speech (sound travels strangely in a tent) about the need to give young artists space for risk and experimentation.
Champagne was opened, and more people materialized, crowding around the inner circle and fishing phones from handbags and pockets. “What’s going on?” a woman dressed head to toe in yellow asked urgently, as she snapped photo after photo of Faulkner, whose smile now seemed wider than his ears. “Who is that?” the woman asked. “What’s happening?”
She wasn’t the only one wondering. When somebody told her, her expression cleared, as she seemed to recall one of the art world’s most inflexible policies, which is that it is deeply embarrassing, and also somehow rude, to admit that you haven’t heard of someone. “Of course,” she said, and took another picture.
The crackle emanating from the Focus section seemed to be spreading through Frieze as a whole, in stark contrast to the almost gleefully grim pronouncements in the days leading up to the fair: that the bottom is falling out of the art market; that collectors were skipping Frieze to go straight onto Art Basel Paris next week; that London itself is somehow finished.
If not actual giddiness in the air, there was at least palpable relief and a sense that things might be OK. There was Benedict Cumberbatch at the Hot Wheels Gallery. Bianca Jagger was around here somewhere. If sales at Frieze were down, at auctions at Sotheby’s and Christie’s on Wednesday night, they had exceeded expectations.
Lerato Bereng, a curator and partner at Stevenson, a South African gallery, said on Thursday, “we came in being told how bad the market is and that it’s certainly less than likely that Frieze will be a success.” But, she added, “we were pleasantly surprised yesterday.” She gestured toward the other galleries in her section: Gagosian, David Zwirner, Hauser & Wirth. “That’s everyone’s headline so far, I think: Better Than Expected.”
Nick Koenigsknecht, a gallery partner at Peres Projects, in Berlin, said, “we’ve all been here before. This is not the first time there was a crisis of confidence financially, but I do not think there is a crisis of confidence in the vitality of art.”
The London gallerist Sadie Coles concurred: “I’ve been doing this for 35 years or something, and I’ve seen several spooked moments,” she said. There was “a sort of do-it-yourself thing that is really possible” in London, she said, that went back to the Young British Artists of the 1990s. “They just got empty shops, empty spaces and did shows for themselves,” she said. “And actually, that ethos has remained.”
Something else that had remained is the art world’s capacity to present an amazingly on-the-nose parody of itself. I saw a Dutch collector with glazed eyes turn his back on the Carol Bove sculptures at the Gagosian booth to devote his full attention to a plug socket on a nearby wall, bending right down to look inside it.
I saw a booth sponsored by the luxury watch brand Breguet where “River of Stars,” a work by the Indigenous Australian artist Naminapu Maymuru-White, was accompanied by a wall text informing me that “the exhibition speaks to Breguet’s emphasis on history, exploration and astronomy.” I tried and failed to gain entry to the Deutsche Bank Wealth Management Lounge, so I don’t know what goes on in there. But everywhere I went, I heard people intoning numbers as if they were reading from an eye chart: 450k, 650k, a million, two.
It was difficult to imagine how anyone could keep a clear head — especially the artists displaying work at the fair. When I spoke by phone to Rose Wylie, the 90-year-old painter whose work had the prime spot at David Zwirner, she had some advice. “I just think, ‘Go for it,’” she said. “‘Do the work.’” Wylie’s wild success came when she was in her 70s, and I asked her what had changed since the Frieze crowd started paying attention.
Nothing, she said.
“It hasn’t changed the way I work, the way I live, my studio,” Wylie added. “My life hasn’t changed, it’s just the outside world that’s different. It’s more exciting now.”
<
