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Installation of Frieze Art Fair 2008
Photo: Sophie Risner |
The month of October looms large on the art world calendar every year, with the Frieze art fair in London at the centre of the frenzy, and with the many ubiquitous satellite fairs encouraging the throngs to visit, absorb and consume the newest editions each year.
Frieze, now in its sixth year, classed as one of the two most important contemporary art fairs in the world with Art Basel, is also a brand powerhouse; much more than just an art fair. It is exemplary and symptomatic of the current conditions in which large art fairs around the world strive to be seen as more than nakedly transactional affairs.
Deciding which day/s to visit Frieze now requires considered thought: will I manage to dart around to see well over 100 galleries, go to specific talks at different times of the day, and see the film programme and the artist's projects? The prospect is daunting. Yet this is more than simply a case of providing something for everyone. The art fair as event is now a firmly rooted category of description for an occurrence that is more akin to an artistic definition of the word for what occurs during the duration of the fair. Each component is especially conceived or curated for the current year's fair, one off performances, film screenings and talks, all recorded and archived in the must-have Frieze annual yearbook. These components work to dim the emphasis on the purely transactional nature of the art fair and have instead fostered a new type of cultural spectatorship and ownership that is enabled without having to buy any of the artworks on show, but simply by purchasing a ticket to the fair, buying the yearbook or by downloading the talks series on the internet after the fair's end.
The contemporary art fair is not however an altogether different cultural experience to that of its very first incarnation at the KUNSTMARKT Köln, Cologne, Germany in 1967. Unlike the constant sprouting up of art fairs around the world as a marker of national economic prosperity, KUNSTMARKT 67 was an attempt to stimulate the stagnant German art economy. The spectacular increase in visibility and the newfound audience for the invited galleries proved to be decisive in re-focusing attention from North American art centres to the European centres of the art world, through an explicitly mercantile means. Apart from its size, (KUNSTMARKT 67 had only eighteen participating galleries) the booths at the Cologne fair included curated "monographic" exhibitions, and provided the impetus for other exhibitions to take place around the city at the time of the fair; elements which contributed to the aesthetic quality of the fair and which are all still visible features of today's art fairs.
What can be considered as the salient feature of difference in terms of the cultural objectives and experience of the art fair of today and that of its 1960s precedent is the creation and difference of tempo and duration that can be found within the infrastructure of the art fair itself. During this year's Zoo Art Fair for example, in a semi-closed off space on the ground floor was a looped 50 minute programme of new video work commissioned by Film and Video Umbrella. As with the creation of other immersive spaces within the art fair such as the panel discussions, the stress that is placed on the "discursivity and sociability"1 of the art fair often takes its cue from the artworks. The writer and critic Claire Bishop has even remarked recently, during a panel discussion at the 2006 Frieze art fair that "the live panel discussion had, in recent years, replaced performance art as the home of authenticity."2 In this sense the art fair's appropriation of the panel discussion in order to discuss and contextualise current concerns within contemporary art has generated another form of artistic discourse that is now commonplace outside of the cultural institution proper and within the market place for art.
When asked recently about the meteoric rise of the Frieze art fair as an infallible barometer of the state of the art market and on its cultural significance, Matthew Slotover, co-founder of the fair responded with enthusiasm that "I do remember thinking that when you get all these interesting people together in one place, you could make the whole experience less trade-fair like and more art-like, more festival-like. Not to say there aren't great distinctions between these endeavours, but we saw ignored opportunities for making fairs more interesting places."3 This attitude has come to characterise the art fair as event, a metamorphosing entity. One that has defined the reception and experience of the contemporary art fair as we know it.
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