The Art Fair?

Long before I even thought of the possibility of being an Artist I had been introduced to the environment of selling commodities through buying an end of lease Musical Instrument store in Otahuhu. It was about 1990, or thereabouts, and the owner was over it and uninterested and with a loan from my parents I bought the shop usage.

Then came a short period of realising that I had to buy stock, and which to actually buy, as I got used to the day to day running of a business. Prior to '87 I had a landscaping business I built up from nothing and in both instances, within the Music world I'd been teaching myself how to repair and maintain guitars, mainly electric, it was about having a skill I could market and then finding a way to engage with the publics needs. The music shop was really interesting as it was my first foray into garden variety retailing where you buy stock and resell it within certain accepted percentages. That's to say that the margins for profit where reselling at half again what stuff cost to buy.

I realised almost straight away that I sold more if I lowered those margins but that's another story. The point was that as a seller of articles I bought the merchandise and sold it on and the only thing that really mattered was choosing the right articles to sell.

So what struck me as obscene as I found my way into the Art World was that the seller not only didn't have to buy the article but they didn't even pay the rent to show the article as all this was passed onto the artist as costs for the show.

I can understand this, to a certain degree, if an artist is unknown, as the Gallery owners are taking a risk in showing unseen art and this then gives the art world it's defining gesture which is that it is a speculative field and therefore the understanding is that the artist supplies the work and pays for the chance to do so and the dealer puts up their reputation.

But when you go to the art fair it is patently obvious that this isn't so. Well, on the surface we have this speculative gesture, this parading of the new and the vanguards of progress, but it's only a veneer and a veneer that is getting thinner and thinner as costs rise to the dealer to have their chosen stock brought before the public.

And it seems to be that while there is a limited availability on money to be spent on the purchase of art, and one supposedly dwindling as the global economy crunches down into survival mode, there is absolutely no shortage of minds and hearts wanting, by guilt of association, to be a part of this commercialisation of the intelligentsia, and so this gives all the credence the dealer network needs not to be held morally accountable for the way in which it defines it's economic viability.

To me it is very much alike the corporate piracy of the recent few decades where the factories that supply small hand to mouth towns with their survival are bought out and sold off by ripping out the machines and on selling to the highest bidder. Short term profits by the capital holders are held higher than the long term survival of the non capital holders who rely on the industry to allow them trading their labour for existence.

So while we walk into the "Art Fair" we might wish that we see as much art as we can and that it be a fair representation of what art actually is but we see nothing of the sort. What we do see is a small select portion of what is art that has been hand picked to provide the survival of the dealers of that product.

Case in point is that the little side show provided for aftershow entertaiment at the letting space which shows 16 little vids of interviews, only 2 are with artists. That's 12%... which isn't much. The other 88% of commentary is provided by the hangers on who define the content after it is created which is alike Fonterra is to farmers and imagine if the ownership of Fonterra was split the same way!

And this reason all of this happens is just the same as why the corporate raiders are able to denude countries economic bases with such gay abandon. The resource is always expanding. The natural resource that is art production is always there with willing confederates who will jump at the chance to force feed the mill with it's produce. The mill is the gallery network and it's stands at the river mouth of the great natural resource that is art and it pollutes and defiles it. It does absolutely nothing to conserve and keep for posterity the magnificence of natural creative intent.

Ok, I'm being overly dramatic but it's only to make a point and I don't blame the dealers for making use of the resource... they know not what they do, and I don't blame the artists either. I don't actually blame anyone because non one is to blame. Finding a scapegoat to burn on the pyre of righteousness is just silly and it never solved anything in the past nor will it change our futures for such moralistic depictions are actually symptomatic of the causes that create these types of problems in the first place.

So then it behooves me as the depicter of a problem to then offer a solution. Maybe when a far greater amount of people see it as a problem then it might be time to think about possible solutions but at the moment when the problem parades as the solution it seems somewhat moot.