Frieze
Posted on October 14, 2007
Filed Under What's New |
Punk! I just came away from frieze, the London art fair. In five years it’s become the major autumn art fair and created a lot of buzz for the autumn auctions. Problem? There was only a handful of works that made you think - wow! Frieze.
For example no artworks present dealt with virtual reality or the cross-over realities we are now experiencing. Nothing seemed to grapple with that area of void between real and virtual. There was no great play on what technology means to us.
Put all this another way. When I do stuff for newspapers and TV I often get the feeling that the environment I am in is closed off from the environment that I occupy for much of my time - the technological and imaginative.
Newspapers and TV show less and less awareness of the world beyond the limited confines of the news and TV community. It is self-referencing - and that’s why/how they can cheat viewers.
Here at frieze I felt like I was in a hermetic world which exhibited no understanding of the other worlds I occupy. Art surely should avoid the hermetic. It above all other professions should find many many ways to engage all of us in and around what we are experiencing. Sadly Frieze and the artists represented, to my mind, were not networking outside their own reference points.
Frieze is a huge commercial success and it allows collectors easy access to galleries that can afford the price of being there - but like I’ve been feeling for a while it doesn’t document the artists who are really striving for new representations of meaning. Partly it is the problem of art in London - commerce is an ironic reference point for artists. We do commerce.
But of course it is more than that - it reflects an unaware intellectual class that has little idea how things are changing in the wider world.
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