As I wandered around Frieze art fair for the third year running my brain couldn’t block out the alarming insistence that maybe this particular side of the art world just isn’t me.
I make art myself, I paint, I draw, doodle, cut things up, turn things inside out, build things, muck things up, stitch, sew, throw and splatter, hell, I even occasionally write things. You’d think all this would go hand in hand with seeing works at an art fair. But I’m afraid I couldn’t see the art for the people or the outfits. I watch people circle around the art like predators approaching mercilessly ready to capture something that means something (though we’re not sure what).
Crocodile skin pointy boots and mustard yellow fitted trousers are out in the dozens, and blimey there are a lot of those circular black glasses around. And tweed. Good lord the tweed. I also quite like the jackets with suede elbow patches - Vice Magazine would have a field day here.
The point is I don’t fit in here. I don’t look like a collector, or speak like one, I don’t get excited by the arty lingo or the fancy words. Therefore it seems I can’t talk to the galleries or other collectors because I don’t fit the profile. I’m here to support ‘the work’ and perhaps that’s the gap. People are no longer LOOKING at the work. They’re taking pictures of it, or tweeting about it.
We walk around the art fair with our heads in a big foggy bloggy cloud, riddled with opinions that are 140 characters in length, retweeted if they’re witty, followed if you’re lucky, with our tweets meeting the eyes of strangers wandering around the same tent just a few feet away. Grab the FRIEZE hashtag on twitter and there’s simply no need to look at the art anymore because it’s far more fascinating to see what the people at the fair are saying about it.
I watch as people approach artworks camera first snapping away at them, hungry to clip a piece of the art for themselves and ignore any shred of momentary contemplation, eager to reduce them to the graveyard of photographs lying stagnant on a hard drive, or post them online to replicate what hundreds of others have already posted online. This is why this particular blog has no images. They aren’t necessary.
At the end of the day I flopped onto the train back home and stared at my blood shot eyes inflamed from all the looking in the dirty train window. I preferred reading the frieze art fair newspapers in the comfort of my own thought space on the carriage than I did being amongst the chaos of the fair and its okay to say that. It’s okay to say frieze just isn’t for me. It doesn’t float my boat. (Oh don’t get me started on the boat).
Next year I’ll just read the reviews and spend the time in my studio where I feel I do belong.