A disclaimer about the title of this post: I’m not ‘anti’ the Frieze Art Fair, which concludes today here in Londontown. I’ve never actually been to Frieze and won’t be going today, although I have any number of friends who seem happy enough to shell out the £27 required to gaze at the latest and supposedly greatest that the contemporary art world has to offer.
But not attending Frieze (or even being particularly interested in it) isn’t the same as escaping it altogether, in much the way that not watching the Premier League isn’t an antidote for being endlessly bombarded with minutiae about Wayne Rooney. Like Mr. Rooney, Frieze somehow leeches into the cultural atmosphere whether we like it or not.
In that spirit, I have not been able to dislodge from my head the most startlingly raw appraisal of Frieze and all that it represents, offered last week on Radio 4′s FrontRow programme by Godfrey Barker. An excerpt:
“The word ‘art’ is bankrupt, and thank god for that. It’s no longer about soul. It’s about money. And Frieze is unmistakably a festival of money.”
I realise that Mr. Barker’s comments are largely reflective of the state of play in the contemporary art world, where cynicism is the raw material for creating art that evokes yet more cynicism (Exhibit A is surely Damien Hirst’s diamond skull.) And it’s not as if artists are just recently waking up to getting rich off their work, as anyone who has visited Rubens’ Antwerp manse can attest. At this year’s Frieze, I gather there’s a yacht that costs one price if you buy it as a yacht and another if you buy it as an artwork. Exactly the same yacht, different price to call it ‘art’…and in doing so to buy in, literally, to more meta-level commentary on the commodification of art itself.
So what is it that niggles, then? Is it the broad idea that Frieze-as-moneyfest is still considered acceptable, even cool, in a world where extreme wealth is perhaps at its historic zenith as a weapon of mass social destruction? Is it that so much contemporary art feels far more interested in being winkingly clever than conveying actual meaning? Is it the fact that being concerned about such questions, let alone commenting on them, may inevitably come across as naive, laughable or perhaps even contemptible?
There was one happy piece of art news this week, at least for me. The influential magazine ArtReview named Chinese artist Ai Weiwei as the most powerful person in the art world, ahead of buyers, gallery owners and other prominent artists. Ai, who earlier this year was detained by Chinese authorities for nearly three months, said in response that he “doesn’t feel powerful.” And yet by many measures the work he creates–and the fact that he’s brave enough to create it–puts him on the frontline of the tumultuous changes underway in his society…so much so that his own government finds him a serious and ongoing threat.
It was, in fact, the news about Ai and not Frieze itself that gave me the title of this post. Art isn’t bankrupt; art is still, often enough, about soul. It isn’t always about money, and thank god for that.
