The b-uncut blog

Smile, you’ve just been Friezed!

// October 23rd, 2009 // b-scene // Kara

“Don’t blame it on the sunshine, don’t blame it on the moonlight”, blame it on the recession! This year’s Frieze Art Fair wasn’t as rock n’ roll as it used to be.

Frieze has unfortunately become institutionalized, and dare I say, business-oriented. Galleries are clearly taking it easy on the craziness of contemporary art, and are being more mundane. Everyone at Frieze seemed to be there “to see, and to be seen” at the vanity Frieze fair. From the uber-hip woman to the “I intentionally look gross but I’m worth your salary in socks” bohemian bourgeois, the entire super rich ecosystem was there, and ready to spend their cash after discount of course.

But if you could drag your eyes from the fall-winter 2009-2010 YSL collection, then there was plenty to see. Although the fair’s works have lost their vitality, they remain “pleasant”, in a nothing too crazy, just contemporary, art popping from everywhere, kinda way.

It felt like every inch of wall, ceiling and floor had something to whisper to you. Not sure if it was a simple and straight to the point “buy me” or a sweet “I am here to please you.” Some pieces are average, others standard, very few are interesting, but most of the pieces are disappointing. Even the new edgy collection section called Frame, displaying the work of younger galleries with more solo focused exhibitions didn’t rock my world.

Marathoning around the 150 galleries and the zillions of works felt like chasing the white rabbit in Alice in Wonderland, and we felt a little dizzy looking at pieces constantly going from “wow” to “ughh”.

The White Cube Gallery had the old crooners out on display including Gilbert and George, and Hirst. Artists from older generations such as Ida Applebroog for instance, had a great success selling all her works proving just how important it was to focus on older, and “safer values”. The same thing applies to Wim Peeters of Office Baroque Gallery, who showed a 1965 work from Owen Land.

So what?

Cliché works and it works pretty well at Frieze; with Louise Bourgeois’ sculpture “The Couple”, going under the hammer for $3.5 million, and John Baldessari’s Beethoven’s Trumpet (with Ear) Opus 133 was sold for $400,000. Rumor has it that Eva Presenhuber sold its Ugo Rondinone work “A Day Like This Made of Nothing and Nothing Else” for €270,000. Looks like some galleries made some dough at least.

John Davis’ installation was probably one of the most intriguing and interesting pieces; the life-size models had something that screamed power and humiliation: brilliant work. We also heart K8 Hardy’s Photographs of slightly pathetic but somehow edgy lonely women, and loved Yang Shaobin’s moving life-size model of a freakishly flashing miner man.

But the most random and fun thing we came across in the Frame section, was an installation called the “Club Nutz of Milwakee”, a mini night-club where you got a free drink if you had the guts to stand up and crack up a joke in front of an audience.

Now that the bonus culture is back in, we’ll be waiting for the next Frieze to shoot some bigger, riskier art at us.