Asking rich people to perform culture, and whatever the opposite of that is

A few months ago I visited the San Francisco Art Fair at Fort Mason, a four day event that drew mostly locals and included free la croix. Likely very few jets were involved, I heard no Italian accents and saw no Birkins. I could enjoy my perusing without the figure of 77 tonnes of carbon emissions rolling across my glasses like a Jenny Holzer display. This drew a steep contrast between the only other art fair I have attended, that being Art Basel Miami Beach, in Florida circa 2021.

Art Basel (bah-zl) is one of many major art fairs that take place all over the world, although Art Basel in Basel, Hong Kong, and Miami are highly esteemed, and contain probably some of the most highly valued work (like a Picasso that sold for 20 million the year that I went, 2021). Others, like Freize, Untitled, TEFAF, Armory, and Outsider (which I really want to go to) are high end, exciting, and important, but dont have the same international glitzy renown as the title of BASEL, the original art fair, which began in the 70’s in Basel, Switzerland, and now has two more satellite fairs. They even give awards that of course come with compensatory prizes. All told there are over 30 important art fairs that take place all over the world, and there are only 52 weeks in a year, and certain galleries like David Zwirner and Gagosian are at all of them. The expidenture (both in carbon emissions and hard cash) for attending, paying booth fees, and flying out staff, hotels, food, drinks, cocaine, packing artwork, and doing it all over again the next week is exhorbitant. The price of regular admission wasn’t much, around $50 a day, well worth the overheard conversations that taught me that I am unwilling or incapable of being part of ‘that world’, a place artists consider a sort of goal, but oft misunderstand the implications of. It’s a place we can’t safely enter without an arsenal of the hardened perspectives of those who have seen its underbelly: tax evasion purchases, opaque sales processes that divine a harem of monied simps, vulnerable artists fed money like foie gras geese; and then their counterparts, sardonic and nihilistic art giants making fun of the whole gambit. Many artists fall in the middle of this venn diagram, of course, serious midcareer artists with practices and aesthetics they have cultivated carefully over decades, enjoying a showing of their work that could afford them a house, a child, a year of working with minimal interruption, a museum acquisition. Not immune to fame nor craving it with obsessive delusion, they would paint or sculpt either way, and did before they got here. A place in this show guarantees that value would be attached to their name, and assures some fortitude in future ventures. It’s a big deal to show at Art Basel, and that kind of success can create an egotistical abcess for artists who arent properly mentally fortified.

I walked around Art Basel ready to be found out as a teacher intern in a SHEIN skirt. Sometimes I was, and sometimes I wasn’t, and really, people just didn’t care. These curators and assistants were exhausted and nonplussed, hung over, and had already sold everything in the booth during the VIP opening. Talking to the less than well educated (in the arts) uber rich about things they (the gallerists) have studied for years, striking that perfect balance of dignified disinterest, opaque numerical side stepping, and whatever else is part of the dance of making a sale to the right millionaire (or billionaire) left them with little to think, say or hear. Works priced in the 7-8 digit range hung before surging bodies of drunk international crowds, and their adrenal glands are shot from swatting away the constant probing fingers of viewers. There was nothing left to do but party in Miami, protect the artwork, and look at videos of their dogs back in New York in their phones.

SF Art Fair isnt that kind of fair. It is approachable, the works on display seemed to me sincere, and the gallerists didnt seem to mind people who had no intention of purchasing a piece. Gallerists sat calmly in their booths, having simply arrived from their apartments, unpreoccupied by earning back any massive investment made to simply be there. They were presumably pleased at the prospect of being there, and were enjoying looking at works on display. There are no Gagosians or Zwirners in sight, no Donald Judd chairs placed in the center of a walkway begging to be bumped into by drunk non-patrons, and probably more magic mushrooms than anything else, bulging the pupils of slow walking oglers. Walking away from Art Basel made me crave a nose job, while SF art fair made me crave a paintbrush.

Maybe comparing the two is like comparing the Seattle Art Museum to the MET, apples to oranges. But it seems to me relevant to know what these sorts of affairs can look like, how they measure up on a scale of show boat-ism, ego centrism, earned renown, and pratical application for real collectors, artists looking for inspiration, and existential implication.

Beyond the money is the meat of the affair, of course: the art.

Art Basel is a fun house of the maddest and dreamiest objets d’art imaginable. Diamonds, bones, impractically heavy and uncomfortable caulk furniture, headless female forms covered in fur, delicate white plaster bandage sculptures of black girls skipping rope, huge screens displaying NFTs on the beach, art world giants discussing NFTs hesitantly, 20 feet from your nose, incomprehensible.

I attended Art Basel with a $700 grant and was working as a teacher at the time. I was trying to make a choice between getting a teaching credential or enrolling in an MFA program, and Art Basel was my litmus test. I had a strong distaste for anything laying outside an ethos of social betterment, and was eager to dismiss anyone whose work garnered attention but couldnt deliver a meaningful explanation of what they were doing. This was an attitude that had no business at anything as wildly and morosely indulgent as Art Basel, which could be perhaps described as spring break for art nerds and their rich cucks.

Something I learned from Art Basel is that the art world doesn’t care about socialists, and it doesnt care about purists. Centering social justice, climate action, or geopolitical concerns at an event flauting anything materially progressive was laughable, and any attempts at it were made meekly and met with what felt to me like a mixure of pity, disinterest, and presumptions of the speakers naievite. There might even be an overarching belief that art is so empirically important, so definitively essential, that these concerns are ancillary compared to the bottom line (disregarding the divorce of much modern art from anything practical or applicable). This is not to say that there were not ARTISTS whose body of work was reflective of, like, you know, values. Powerful paintings and sculptures haunted the corners of booths in the giant convention center and were hailed with proper respect. Speakers, interviews, and claims made by gallerists and organizers of the event, however, gave lipservice half heartedly and with sheepish inarticulation (at least that is what I saw from lectures at the event and podcasts/publications afterwards).

SF Art Fair is a pared down event, and its not really representive of the monster I keep coming back to describing here. It packs a punch of being pretty big, temporary, and full of works by living breathing creatures, which would be, in my mind, the value of attending these fairs, as a plebe. It hails many wonderful galleries with sharp taste, who seem to have healthy and positive relationships with their artists. There were works on display from the 80’s and 90’s, and I didnt see many hijinks like Art Basel has gotten some negative press for over the last 5 years (see: the Mauritzio Cattelan banana duct taped to the wall at Gagosian circa 2019). The price points for many works on display were under 10k. They displayed works with innovative techniques of sculpting, interactive elements, works that involve coding, reflect on a post post modern world, or perhaps best of all, work that ignored all of that completely to meditate on forest animals. The work was imaginative, playful, and socially conscious, without hitting you over the head, or confounding comprehension as to how fabrication costs were dealt with.

The crux of these two experiences were that sometimes, career defining moments lend to a feeling of belonging, and at other times, these moments can bust open the floor and force you to look down a chasm of wonders and horrors alike and think, should I jump? Where my gaucheness is involved, my lack of sophistication, my distractability, and my bad education, I knew there was nothing for me at the bottom of that chasm, though I would have liked to have belonged there, in some ways. Of course I would love the money. I am a Leo, I would lavish in the attention. I am a Virgo, I would relish the validation that I have mastered something. I am a person, and I am a millenial, and I want something I havent earned, and most of all, I want a ticket out of working a 9 to 5, and I want an undeserved recognition of a genius I do not yet possess. I am not free of these desires, who rear their ugly heads now and again to distract me from discipline, practice, and clear perception. Attending Art Basel taught me that illusions and luck arent anything to hold your breath over, and even if you play the long game, theres a weird element of chance, absurdity, and sometimes undeserved nepotism that creates the hysterical, nauseating circus that is the Art World. Without it, no one would care; the nature of our attention is predicated on some level of infuriating, untouchable mystery.

Money doesn’t necessarily corrupt artists, or the value of the art sold, bought, acquired, drudged up from the post modern zeitgeist by some egotistical, brilliant and discliplined quasi-ape. Money made art what it is, and the catholic church (that gave us everything we had before the Medici’s) recognised in us what we recognised in art; a manifestation of the spiritual, against the odds of the fickle material world, forged spitefully by the hand, to grace our lives in an otherwise wretched existence defined by strife, disease, and the rules of a cold universe. To make and enjoy art is to hold on to a sentimentality for our own souls, and each others. I would venture to say that this is empirically true for artists; we forge work against self doubt, societal rejection, and financial, psychological and spiritual hardship for the betterment of your lives. This is the inherent value in what we do, egos aside. There is no way to create an appropraite price tag for that. Artists want to do it again and again and again, and if one thing at least begets the next thing, and perhaps a nice vacation in the interim, and this happens in perpetuity, that seems just enough.

But … theres thing fucking THING now, this stupid, shitty THING that hangs heavily in the gut as you try to lay paint down in the shape of your agony and dreams; fame. Stupid, fickle, capital incentive, mesmerising people through the halls of institutions past the truth, past real feminism, queer imagery, reinvigorated ancestral processes of aincient wisdom forged back into the iconosphere despite cultural erasure; Yet, here we are, taking a fucking SELFIE in front of a fucking BALLOON DOG again.

Whether this is the fault of the viewer or not is debatable; can we blame a baby for eating cheerios if we put a bowl of cherios in front of him? The problem is our trust of popularity, our insatiable desire to be told what is good instead of cultivating a sense of it for ourselves. What is popularity in a world with 9 billion people, all (potentially) connected through the internet and the things amplified within it? It is a thing beyond comprehension. It is a monolith in the mind, a spectre in the studio, a sysiphean summit determined as worthy by… what?

I believe so deeply that artists are the alchemists of reality, bringing our thoughts and ideas to a head in these little manifestations. Their (our) work has value, but that value isn’t infinitely incalculaby high(what could be, besides water, air, and life?).Pieces of art are moments distilled, and should be treated as: magical, talismans, sacred. The ego of one person fluctuates, and is as important an ingredient as an insight, a parable, and culture creating tools and language to be interpreted. Thats okay. We are corrupted as a creative community, though, by an economy that combs us out of the throng and into individualism by telling us what is worth $10 million, and what $10 million is worth. Making it a goal to be told by the world that you are, in fact, the person making the thing worth $10 million is crazy. Not the good kind of crazy. Not the kind of crazy that drove Marina Abarmovic to live in a van in eastern Europe and do weird stuff in public for ten years before anyone even knew what performance art was. More like the kind of crazy that makes inequality possibly, the insistence that one person as an individual, is worthy of priviledges beyond sustainable, ethical or enjoyable parameters. Riding a hitachi wand train of jets and michelin star restaurants and designer drugs, celebrity artists are an infection, especially the dead ones, the insincere ones, and the factory foremen.

Julia Mehretu was a living artist at Art Basel MB who actually sold a peice for 1 million dollars, the most of any living artist displayed at the fair that year. I couldnt find any information about what works sold or for how much from SF art faire, and thats probably because it doesnt matter. A painting I came back to multiple times was priced at 5k, but the dealer told me she would take a significantly discounted offer(I did not offer the $500 I had left in my savings, not wanting to insult the art). Knowing that there are two sides to art fairs, I am interested in the artists who dont want their work to be a sex money laundering scandals trojan horse. I don’t profess to know if morality matters in the art world, or it it makes art better or worse. But, I don’t beleive that fascinations with popularity or fame, or the acquisition of it, reveals genius.

I dont have starpower, and I dont like the idea of a version of myself who craves it (a version I have been at times, at my most insufferable). I dont know that walking around Art Basel free of the hare shirt of invisibility is worth the sacrifices that come with becoming free of it (though I don’t beleive any artist can’t, if they are obsessed enough). What I do have is myself, and a desire to make something sincere, and I have my own sanity and creative practice to protect. When did this become about me?

Anyway, with that I would like to show you some work I saw that really moved me, and give you a chance to think for yourself.

Here are the works I loved most from SF Art Fair:

Here are works I loved at Art Basel