1 post tagged “friday the thireenth”
I my London whirlwind, I completely forgot to blog about perhaps the coolest thing I did in London, going to the Frieze Art Fair. It's a yearly event at which nearly all of the major commercial galleries have booths showing (and selling) contemporary art. If the names Gagosian or Gladstone mean anything to you, you've probably heard of the fair; I hadn't until I arrived in London, but it's apparently a Very Big Deal. It was fascinating to walk through rows and rows of cutting-edge art, nearly all of which was about to enter a private or museum collection. Rumor was almost everything sold on the first day of the fair; about a half-dozen pieces I saw had a little "just acquired by the Tate Modern" tag next to them. Some of them were crap.
There was a lot of bad art, or at least impenetrable and seemingly pointless art; I can accept that I just don't have the background to grok some of it, but some of it´was just not very good. A lot of it, though, was spectacular. I took a few notes on the pieces that I really enjoyed, or that would make really great copyright exam hypos. A few examples:
Becoming Juila, by Candice Breitz, is a two-channel video installation, with the screens mounted back-to-back. One channel, and the audio track, features short clips of Julia Roberts delivering a monologue in a movie (Pretty Woman, I think). The other channel shows Breitz lip-synching the dialogue and mimicking Roberts' movements. It's part of a series (Cameron Diaz, Jennifer Lopez, Meg Ryan, etc.). Here's some curatorial text on the series, with stills.
3 Marked Decks, by Janice Kerbel. These are big prints of the backs of three sets of playing cards, all of which have been "marked,", so they can be used to cheat. I enjoyed the way that a performance was encapsulated in a static piece of visual art -- these thief's tools had a use so obvious that they didn't even need to be used. I also liked the puzzle-solving aspect, at least in the installation of the piece I saw at the fair. There was no title, just the artist's name, and the viewer had to figure out what was special or noteworthy about the cards. Here's some curatorial text on the piece.
Every Victim and Manner of Death in the Friday the Thirteenth Film Series, by Jamie Shovlin. Pretty self-explanatory, including why it's a great copyright hypo. Pictures of the piece are here and here .
Those pictures (taken by a fairgoer and posted on Flickr) lead me to another interesting point about the fair. Photography was allowed. These artists, and these galleries, are making money from the sale of original art objects, not from the sale of copies. A photograph of the art does nothing to dilute the market for the original. The art world had to deal with inexpensive reproduction technology long ago, and its business model makes the rise of personal digital media technology totally irrelevant.
