hong kong art fair: a feint whiff (of business and ai weiwei)

Judd Tully provided excellent HK art fair coverage for artinfo.com. He noted that In the first few hours of the preview, one dealer sold to a European collector she already knew. Another gallery that featured a Chinese star “fielded significant interest” at $2 million and then sold a print for $15,000. A New York gallery sold Asian art to a US museum and NY collector, well worth the trip, I am sure. But there was an actual sale to an actual Chinese: a watercolor for $5,000. So the good news is that there truly is a burgeoning Asian art scene…if your goods are $5,000 or less. In the coming years though, it seems all but certain the machine will gear up to join the international parade assimilating wave after wave of art. I was surprised Judd didn’t mention Ai Weiwei which must have been like a stale cloud hanging over the fair; or maybe, with business as usual there was nothing more than a feint whiff.

Internet Dating Art World Style: Final thoughts on VIP Art Fair.

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!

Boffo Basel. Basel Art Fair 2010

There's been a tectonic shift in the market to conservative Impressionist, Modern and classic Contemporary art evident at the 41st Basel Art Fair, but I must admit it seemed as though everything was flying off the shelf indiscriminately. There was an orgiastic frenzy of activity from art transactions to hyper-networking, the boom is back. The fair layout reflects a hierarchy of more established, blue chip art on the ground floor and contemporary on the second. Nowadays, I would rather wait till it drops down a floor so there's more wheat, less chaff-its worth the extra hay.


Some of best art in Basel was the graffiti seen through the train window entering town. Seriously, the overall quality of material on display was staggering and would rival the best international institutions. The art market is like a fast train but with no destination. Can it sustain itself? Save for nuclear Armageddon, I fear to say it will, look for continued strong, record-breaking, headline making, art activity in the near future.


There should be a World Cup for hustling invites and passes at fairs. One morning after prodigious Basel party-hopping, I sent my suit to the cleaners and housekeeping returned with my passport, cash, and a large taxi receipt from Basel to Zurich. Rough night; no one ever said the art world was for the feint of heart.


Museums are akin to books, fairs more like magazines: a quick fix for those with short attention spans and a need for immediate gratification. For a while, a 30% discount on art was the new 10%; now, 10% is the new 20%. The walls they were a changing, with passing time the fair replicates itself in new form like a snake shedding it’s skin, as inventory is shifted when shifted and constantly hung anew.


After hours up and down the aisles I was left with a hammering pain in my toe more than any recollection of specific art works—now I know why I had observed so many on crutches. I never realized how anal the Swiss are until being scolded for public phoning on various occasions by locals who practically made citizens arrests. Also, while arguing with hotel security about entering a crowded bar, 15 simultaneously walked past. But the Jean Michel Basquiat retrospective at the Beyeler Foundation...what a site to behold, warranting the astronomical figures the paintings are now fetching. And going some length to explain their ubiquitousness at the fair. When an artist achieves a big museum retrospective or makes an unusually high number at auction, the works flood from the woodwork into the booths and public sales.


Another “new” 9-foot-wide Damien Hirst jewel- cabinet, entitled “Memories of Love,” sold at Basel for $3.5m. The price reflected a 50% decline from an exact work sold at the £111.5m Sotheby’s Sept 08 sale: “Beautiful Inside My Head Forever”, the day my headline would have read: “Merrill sold, Lehman fold”. In stocks, such market dumping is known as churn and burn, with Hirst, it should be known as churn and earn.


In 2008 I curated an exhibit with Pritzker Prize winning Iraqi architect Zaha Hadid at Sonnabend Gallery in New York upon which NY Times critic Ken Johnson reflected: “No architect has ever made good art and this is no exception.” Such sweeping generalization is at best dumb and worst dangerous. I wonder if he’s ever bothered to view a Le Corbousier painting. I helped to facilitate another Zaha Hadid show at Gmurzynska Gallery in Zurich during the fair (which fact seems to have eluded the gallery) that is an installation incorporating Constructivist masterworks by Malevich, Rodchenko, and Lissitzsky and Hadid herself. The installation uses the Public Square and façade of the building as a framing device transforming what originated as a 2D rendering into a walk-in line drawing with magical effect. Ken Johnson could cure his myopia if the NYT would splurge on a trip to Zurich sometime before the exhibit ends in September. Architecture as art is an up and coming new collecting category located between design and sculpture and a great new way to domesticate progressive architecture in a home setting. Look for values to progressively rise.