Is Frieze London putting pressure on emerging art?

Two days after London not-only-contemporary-anymore art week closed its doors the general consensus among galleries focused on emerging art that took part to Frieze is substantially negative, and that despite the impressive number of Ferrari and Bentley circulating in London at the moment and also despite the good performance achieved by the almost-1000 works of modern and contemporary art that went on auction last week, with special reference to Italian post-war art.

 

Victoria Syddall, general director of the Frieze fairs, was effectively right in her response to complaining dealers: “the market is strong” she is reported to have told them, and it must be said that the organization has done everything it could to give galleries the best context to sell their works of art. But sometimes it is not enough, and if the dissatisfied galleries count to more than three or four it must be acknowledged that there may be a problem.

 

“Even if we had sold all the pieces, and this is not the case, we would have covered just the costs” declared to cfa a gallerist just back from London last night. We met him at the opening of Paris International, a new fair dedicated to emerging art that takes place off the Fiac and, what matters more, in opposition to Officielle, the art fair launched last year to offer young galleries an alternative to the Fiac. But according to Gregor Steiger, who participated in the first edition, “Officielle was ridiculously expensive”, and so he and other four colleagues of him have taken the occasion to organize a new art fair, with similar targets, but with a more reasonable budget and an inspiring venue (with a warm délabré touch reminding of Liste in Basel, or Sunday in London, or also the nostalgic Parisian interior that hosted the rendezvous between Marlon Brando and Maria Schneider in Last Tango in Paris). That is to say a budget that would allow galleries to hope for some earnings, and not just to break even.

 

Back to Frieze’s problems, another art dealer who took part to the so called “Main” section and has experienced a quite bad performance asserted: “at the moment the fair is not at service of the galleries, but the galleries are serving the fair”, He is not the only one in that section who hasn’t sold any piece, and if you add how expensive London has become, even for those who can count on the super pound, it’s evident that for those art dealers who are selling works under 100,000$ it would rapidly become nonsense to keep on betting on Regent’s Park visitors.

 

“At this point they could also include the top contemporary galleries in Frieze Masters and forget about the old Frieze”. This was another comment by the same disappointed dealer, a remark that turns what Marc Foxx claimed about Frieze Masters last year into a sort of prophecy: “they have just arrived but they are already walking on the red carpet while we ended up with a cheap wood on the floor”. Also Frieze contemporary art section had carpet on the floor this year, but the better allure of Frieze Masters is out of discussion.

 

Now one may wonder if the market is just facing a decreasing interest in emerging artists following the speculative period it has recently experienced and the answer tends to be quite positive, considering that those who were eager-young art supporters until a few months ago are now hard competitors at auctions to get hold of contemporary masters like Lucio Fontana or Michelangelo Pistoletto (this latter one potentially speculative and overestimated too). That would be appropriate in the case you want to make some money in the short term, but the US quantitative easing has ended, and young art is as necessary to keep the art system healthy as fresh water is to any flower to blossom and old plants to survive. Now that the past seems to have been finally rescued it would be a serious mistake to neglect the present by excluding it from the main stage; as it is a mistake – of course we are talking about London – to permit real estate prices to soar to the point that only the super rich (namely the silver 0,01%) can afford a basic two-bedroom flat in most of London city centre. Smart people will start to move away from it quite soon.

 

However, not all galleries underperformed at Frieze Focus section. Freedman/Fitzpatrick sold all the paintings by Vittorio Brodman; Ibid. well sold emerging Brazilian artist Rodrigo Matheus. So did Jessica Silverman with Scottish artist Ruairiadh O’Connell and The Sunday Painter with Samara Scott. That is to say, Frieze may have become a very tough playground but at the end of the day the three rules for selling good art are the same for emerging artists too: quality, quality, quality.

October 21, 2015