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By Nayland Blake - 22 Feb., 2007
That certain feeling...By Nayland Blake
It's the time of year when the Armory Art Fair hits New York. Over the past few years this has come to be the height of the season for the art world here. The only other events are the semi annual contemporary auctions. So everyone piles into town, galleries get into a frenzy opening shows, my students are agitated and worried about their futures in the market. It's clear to me that the art world has changed in the past decade in fundamental ways. Now there are two poles of activity: Firstly, a series of major annual art fairs: Basel, Miami/Basel, Frieze (London), The Armory in New York and Arco in Spain. At these events dealers haul work from their home countries and try to make a name for themselves. They also are practicing a new type of "pump and dump" on artists: take their work to a couple of fairs, promote it heavily there, make your sales, and then let them fade away. The other pole is the Festival circuit: Biennials, events like “Documenta,” huge art happenings that are publicly funded where artists make massive spectacular pieces, or clever, anti-spectacular gestures. These are the equivalent of Summer movie blockbusters, relying as much on the over saturated environment of art-tourism for their impact as on any individual qualities of the work itself. In both cases the audience for this work is largely the same: a floating carnival of collectors, curators, dealers and critics, people who either have the professional need to attend these things or the leisure time and deep pockets to do so. From city to city they fly, always seeing each other when they arrive, each meeting confirming one's centrality and the validity of one's judgments. Such viewers are massively informed but often short on any judgment that would contradict the prevailing whims of their peer group. The problem with these two poles is the ways of working they encourage: At the art fairs dealers are pressed to make back their investment quickly. They only have three days to shift a lot of merchandise, and so they bring stuff they know they can move. At the festivals, one tends to see huge installations that often have little to do with the rest of the artists production: they are one time only special cases. The gallery show as the basic method for building understanding of an artists practice and trajectory seems to be on the wane, if not already dead. One could easily conduct a business as a dealer simply by hopping from fair to fair and never having a home space at all. This is the art world's version of globalization and it's pace shows no sign of slowing. Often, unfortunately, [emerging artists are seen] as cannon fodder, in so far as their dealer engages in the practices I've outlined above. That's not to say that there are no vital local scenes around the world that have not been caught up in this tumult, but artists should be actively working hard to preserve those scenes. I'm thinking about this because I just left a lunch with the director of the gallery I work with in San Francisco. He's in town for the fair. We were talking about the way that this new globetrotting eats away at the relationships between dealers and artists, galleries and their home towns, collectors and any notion of a sustained career. I'm sorry to see it all going. Nayland Blake is an artist in NYC who is “bookish, often cranky, gleefully fat, over extended, reveling in contingent definitions, disappointed with the self limitations being chosen by people in the arts and the sexual minority communities, multi-ethnic, riddled with class insecurity and guilt, occasionally laugh inducing, happiest when making things, some times fleshy, too often brainy, wrongly indifferent to nature, entranced by dogs, and lethargic except when shopping."
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