The Internet based VIP (View-In-Person) art fair was launched with great fanfare, supposedly the new format was said to forever redefine the notion of how we encounter and collect art. After initially registering, the only encounter I had was with 15 error messages without managing to see a single work of art. Viva la revolution! Maybe the net should stick to what it does best: porn.
After finally gaining access I found it slow, plodding and dull. Good for professionals and hardcore collectors to feed their addiction, but listless and unrewarding for the eye nevertheless. Personally, I often buy art based on jpeg or catalogue representations, as long as provenance and condition are trusted, but let’s be clear, buying and appreciating art are two different animals. The VIP art fair when you boil it down is like getting caches of jpegs from galleries that wouldn’t ordinarily send you any material.
Once I got the rhythm of browsing on the site, I must say it became contagious—a distraction, yet another means of procrastination. The experience is nowhere close to seeing the stuff, but certainly a good way to kill an hour. I even bid on something and thought the system had progressed quite well after the early glitches, working better and better over the days. The result is new, less dimensional way to communicate and consume art, but something new and effective like facebook, all the same. The artwork I tried to buy was on hold and later sold.
A group of 10 ceramic Ai Weiwei pieces were depicted at both Faurschou Gallery and Hyundai Gallery, thankfully none of their cars were exhibited. The artist haphazardly splashed hot, vibrant colors across the tops of the clay colored ancient vases. When I viewed the first group I contacted the gallery and queried if there might be some similar artworks about, as I am aware he’s made tons—not as much as the sunflower seeds, but plenty. The dealer replied that each piece was unique in the sense that the groups of10 vases were comprised of all slightly different Neolithic ones. Twenty minutes later I stumbled on what appeared the identical work. When I asked the first gallerist if she was aware of the other she replied: “Nope, which gallery? I did not have much time to look around due to chatting with clients.” I guess there are more net similarities with real life that one would have imagined. And Ai Weiwei is beginning to sound like the Asian equivalent of Warhol courting political controversy Instead of celebs.
I also liked a beautiful, austere Paul Thek painting on newspaper at Alexander & Bonin, with the same title and composition: “1 to 1”; Ray Johnson works at Feigen; Bruno Bischofsberger: I’m a sucker for pretty much everything he does; Henry Taylor’s crude figurations with blotches of abstraction at Blum & Poe and Untitled; Gustons at McKee; and a Jim Shaw sculpture of disembodied legs and half eaten feet entitled “Dream Object (Hanging legs made out of fiberglass with toes bitten off to demonstrate effect of animal traps), 2007 “ at Metro Pictures.
Frustrations did linger finding oneself playing cat and mouse with endlessly dropping, always unintended, menus. And please don’t mention trying to communicate with the participating galleries, supposedly via “Instant Messenger”; the result, far from instant, was never more than another more annoying and less functional dropdown menu. Digital Kafka.
But of course my kids figured out how to instantaneously communicate with gallery personnel online, though scarily in my name. It’s not enough to waste the entire family resources on Internet music, fashion and everything else they covertly attempt to cyber-consume on a practically daily basis.
There were times I was scanning my screen so fast left to right, my head resembled a Wimbledon spectator. Some exhibitors’ image format was so incompatible with my computer that pictures came out microscopic. With my rapidly deteriorating eyesight it’s hard enough to coherently recognize regular size nowadays, not to mention print.
When fairs are normally recapped and reported they are accompanied by photographs of the on site happenings; perhaps VIP visitors should submit pictures of themselves in front of their respective computers/i-pads/i-phones/blackberrys in whatever garb they were sporting at the time. Now that would be interesting Internet art!
No comments:
Post a Comment