Professional Documents
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Frieze Magazine | Archive | A Serious Business 10/11/02 11:04
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Frieze Magazine | Archive | A Serious Business 10/11/02 11:04
Then there is the issue of cakes being had and cakes being
eaten, of living in thrall to the great bohemian dream of the
art world but also having to lock down and be in ‘complete
control’ of every element produced under the sign of
glamorous dissolution. As any bleary-eyed gallery assistant
who has been up half the night with a demanding artist
trying to find a bar that’s still open at 4am will tell you, these
elements are often hard to reconcile. Today bohemian
libertinism exists largely as a myth, albeit a useful one when
it comes to marketing – take Dan Colen or Dash Snow, for
example, two mediocre artists who have recently benefited
professionally from sanctioned excess. The art historian Hal
Foster argues that the artist’s ‘free expression implies our
unfree inhibition, which is also to say that his freedom is
mostly a franchise on which he represents freedom more
than he enacts it’.3 Or rather, as Simon Martin observes in
his film essay Carlton (2006), these days ‘artists look like
everyone else, worry about their weight, book foreign
holidays’. Some artists love the cut-and-thrust of art world
politicking; they thrive on intrigue and attention. Others
despise it, finding it upsettingly at odds with their ideals.
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the micro – two students, for instance, who might each clock
the fact that the other is wearing the current male art school
uniform of deck shoes, waxed Barbour jacket and 1940s-
goes-1980s short-back-and-sides haircut – to the macro,
such as the way an art magazine squares up to its readers.
Interviewed in Thornton’s book, the former Artforum editor
Jack Bankowsky observes that ‘You have to understand the
pieties […] Seriousness at Artforum and in the art world in
general is a commodity. Certain kinds of gallerists may want
the magazine to be serious even if they have no real co-
ordinates for distinguishing a serious article from the empty
signifier of seriousness abused.’10 You have to understand
the pieties: the weight of an artist’s monograph or how many
times their name crops up on e-flux announcements;
someone’s preference for reading October rather than frieze;
the internationalism of the contemporary art world – some
romantic residue of the idea that, if you travel regularly by
plane, you must be high-powered because your business
reaches far outside your locality; artist names exchanged as
collateral by those jockeying for position in the marketplace
of curating or criticism. These are the little curlicues that
adorn the edifice of the professional arts establishment.
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venues to show it in, tell people about it, try and support
artists? There is no single answer: each situation demands a
different solution. Perhaps, as we are hit daily with dire
economic news, what is needed is to remain sensitive to the
details, those small elements in the art world that
cumulatively exert their own pressures on the ways in which
people behave or relate to the making of art. As Raban
writes, ‘we are necessarily dependent on surfaces and
appearances a great deal of the time, and […] it is to surfaces
that we must learn to attend with greater sympathy and
seriousness.’18 It depends on whether we wish, one day, to
find ourselves contentedly walking to dinner each evening
‘smartly dressed, well-groomed, relaxed, friendly, polite and
in complete control’.
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Dan Fox
Frieze
3-4 Hardwick Street, London EC1R 4RB, 020 7833 7270
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