Dahling , when I was at Art School it was fashionable to be a Trotskyite. You produced dry, political pieces of work normally with as minimal content as possible and in as brown a colour as possible, supplied with a huge political discourse. It was all very depressing. It certainly put me off for a long while and sought solace in the Hip young New Yorker Neo Geo group, producing witty upbeat bits of zietgeist.
Even with the collapse of the markets it’s seems it’s cool to make more engaging art. Walking through the Frieze Art Fair makes me feel we have come a long way. Even some of the irrelevant Cork Street galleries were showing some works that caught the eye.
Let’s get one thing straight. There is so much art on display you will not be able to take it all in. Remember the first time you stepped into an American Supermarket, pointed at the wall of shiny baby headsized apples, laughed. In delight when the atomised spray puffed at the apples? Took a photo at the cereal section as it WAS a homage to Warhol? Well Frieze is so fast it’s almost too much. There’s a lot of Art being made out there by the possessed and obsessed. Row after row, space after space, what new delight or horror is in the next gallery? Put together at first you think it’s insulting to be rammed so close, then you realize, ‘talk to me, stand out for me’. Some pieces do, lots of pieces don’t.
One things for sure this collection of wheeler dealer new York meets Milan moneyed boho crowd are proof that Frieze is kicking ass and defining the state the play of the Art market.
Keld van Schreven
