I have been wary of the term ‘emerging artist’ for a while but this year has confirmed my fears that the phrase has started to lose all meaning. This interview with finance-bro-cum-gallerist and Upsilon founder Marcelo Zimmer (who has just opened the gallery’s Mayfair branch) in which he proudly proclaims to be “champion[ing] historically overlooked artists, (…) nurturing new talent and amplifying marginalised voices within the art world” while exhibiting Kusamas and Koonings sums up the majority of my concerns: as the post-Covid wave of collectors enters the market dealers and fairs alike are scrambling to position themselves as harbingers of the new and the undiscovered. Frieze London certainly made the effort by putting all the goliath galleries at the back of the tent, and the newly-rebranded Art Basel Paris followed suit with their Emergence section. With the fairs held so close together and catechisations of rivalry-versus-relevance being thrown around, it’s worth comparing and contrasting how the two events have approached the question of showing cultural and economic support for new and emerging art.
Photography courtesy of Art Basel/Esther Schipper
I’ll say it outright; Basel Paris won in the emerging artworks category, even when considering institutions who participated in both fairs. Lisbon-based Madrigao is a prime example of this. Don’t get me wrong, I really enjoyed their booth at Frieze, but Steffani Jemison’s reception of the Lafayette Anticipations Grant is one of the rare cases of a big corporate sponsor award getting it right. Other standout Emergence galleries included Oslo’s VI, VII and the tactile, sensual curtains by Doris Guo, the deeply charming and surrealist furniture of Nuri Koerfer at Lars Friederick, the greenscreen paintings at Christian Anderson, the video art at Exo Exo… I could go on. Frieze simply didn’t stand a chance. There were some standout booths peppered amongst the opening galleries – Bani Adibii at Kolkota-based Experimenter, for example, or Adam Shiu-Yang Shaw at Wschód, but the Nat Faulker stuff was ugly and overkill (shoutout to spittle for spotting the Stone Island shirts already being pawned off on eBay). The Focus section too felt underwhelming, as well as the Artist-to-Artist section (minus Magda Stawarska at Yamamoto Keiko Rochaix, which is rapidly becoming one of my top London galleries).
Installation shots courtesy of VI, VII
It’s worth wondering how much of this had to do with the different layout of the fairs; Basel had various entrances available depending on your level of importance that introduce you to different sections as a starting point (press, naturally, is ushered in via the North-facing rectum of the Grand Palais, leading you past some good but tame Middle Eastern gallery booths including Jeddah-based Athr and Tel Aviv’s Dvir). I understand Frieze’s decision to put the goliaths at the far end of the fair, but it sort of feels that they’ve done it for the same reason grocery stores put essentials like eggs and milk at the back of the shop: how art fairs want to appear will always be extremely different from what they actually want to do.
That being said, if Frieze was underwhelming in the art department it certainly made up for it with its satellite events. I wrote rather harshly about Harlesden High Street in my London Gallery Weekend review, but Jonny Tanna’s monumentally successful Minor Attractions has made me reconsider my claim that the rising art world star is content to coast by on the coolness of his artists. The Mandrake is gorgeously maximalist (and has a proper smoking area!) and it’s always nice to see curators tackle the challenge of stepping outside the white cube – but the heart of the triumph lies in the fact that the art on display was really good, and a lot of it was really new. Palmer Gallery’s Ex-Voto was one of my favourite shows of the week and I was delighted to see the Mandrake’s entrance hallway adorned with one of Shaan Bevan and Owen Pratt’s resonant metal pieces; the duo’s joint sound and sculpture work is a stunning combination of topography, biology and chemistry the likes of which I genuinely haven’t seen in London. The works of Rike Droescher and Danielle Fretwell (a well-picked pairing courtesy of Alice Amati) approach the well-worn motif of light and shadow from totally opposite angles with a sharp and inquisitive elegance that contrasts nicely with the sensually dim lighting of their surroundings. Daine Singer’s booth was a deeply charming take on the resurgence of textile art, Benjamin Orlow and Joey Ramone's sculptures play extremely nicely with the nature of their own material, and Louis Barbe's figurative works are hauntingly good.
In fact, there was real thought put into every aspect of the fair: the workshops were sensible and unobtrusive, the music and performances were thematically charged without falling into the ‘so-artsy-you-can’t-dance’ trap, and the dialogue between the the literary works of Ra+Olly, Toe Rag’s journalism and their launch environs was as creatively playful as it was logistically impressive (any publication that gets a hot guy to pass out unsolicited copies outside of Regents Park during Frieze has my automatic respect). It helped, of course, that all the cool kids attended and documented these events, but I like to think that this sort of social synergy is a consequence rather than a cause of the success of these satellite events: from the likes of Saint Leonard at Hyperidean Press's soiree at L'Escargot to Bengi Unsal at Ginny on Frederick x Rose Easton x Wschod x 56 Henry's The Edition party, there was an overwhelming sense of joint sociability and cerebrality. We were looking inwards, not onwards, for once.
Basel’s satellite events had no such luck. I really enjoyed the Miu Miu Tales and Tellers installation and had an absolute blast at the Vanity Fair opening party (shoutout to the drunk waiter who believed us when we told him we were Donald Newhouse’s grandchildren) but there was an unshakable air of corporatism to both affairs. This is not to mention both required either immensely expensive preview tickets, privately-issued invitations or, my personal favourite, an extensively-rehearsed and outraged blag routine at the door — in stark contrast to Minor Attraction, whose tickets were completely free and whose attendees were usually greeted by an impossibly beautiful blonde in some form of latex. I don’t think it’s impossible for big institutional productions to showcase good art, but they do stand in the shadow of garbage like BMW’s sponsorship of Alex Israel at Basel Hong Kong. The tension between large corporate sponsorship and more intimate, authentic art experiences is partly to be expected, particularly given the unique cultural role Basel Paris played this time around, as Janelle Zara notes. “Art Basel Paris was the event that everyone was looking forward to.” she tells me. “It was like the one exciting thing during an exceptionally dour year. I think the beauty of Paris itself did a lot of the heavy lifting. One dealer described the Grand Palais as the most beautiful convention centre in the world. (...) Between the Olympics, the latest season of Emily in Paris, and the new Art Basel, Paris has been serving the world a bit of cheerful respite during a particularly dark time in history.”
It’s natural, therefore, that so many big companies wanted in on the action before Paris Syndrome settled in. But it still feels a little stilted, a little inorganic: what does a Basel-branded perfume by Guerlain add to the affair? Even the artist talks that I did attend were all laborious slogs or unwelcoming bull sessions with the aim of promoting so-and-so’s book deal or sponsorship with LG Electronics. Claire Le Restif and Valentin Noujaim’s conversation with Quentin Dubois was painfully peppered with Americanisms (the French pronounction of the word 'queer' will never fail to make my cringe-laugh) and Jamian Juliono–Villani and Diego Marcon’s discussion of the “grotesque, the bad and the ugly of the art world” failed to realise the irony of its own setting.
Outside of these moderated sessions in Paris I barely meet any artists, or even that many gallerists or curators: there were local and international collectors and dealers galore, loudly proclaiming how wonderful all this new talent is – but at Frieze I was sharing lipsticks and cigarettes with the people making rather than profiteering the art. Pilar Corrias was the only Basel booth to feature a live session by one of their artists, whereas at Frieze liaison officers were falling over themselves to introduce me to their prodigies and invite me back to their studios (for the art, of course, and not to spend the evening sitting around a coffee table made of broken canvases to smoke cigarettes and bitch about curators). It’s all well and good watching hot Parisians march down the Champs Elysée with their Gagosian tote bags but I’d much rather run into somebody wearing one of Plaster’s MILF shirts in the bathroom of Guts. Where is the Basel crowd’s connection — more importantly, where is the money?
Nuri Koerfer at Lars Friedrich. Photography courtesy of Art Basel.
My real worry is how long it will take for the upper end of the art market to catch up. There will always be a fundamental difference in the ways that auction houses and art fairs approach how and what sort of art they sell but this season’s auction results have been discouraging. The global market is exiting an extremely delicate contraction that naturally follows any period of flight-to-quality (almost as bad as 2009, according to Vogue Business); the fact that the only works to meet (yet alone beat) price estimates are by the usual suspects like Freud and Koons is telling. Earlier this year I predicted the bubble-burst of female figurative artworks (there were refreshingly few gratuitous female nudes at both fairs, bar the disappointing pop feminism of galleries like Allison Jaques and Mendes Wood) and fretted that auction results of both established and emerging female artists would culminate a cultural and financial backlash. Many of the works at both Frieze and Basel were selling for under £100,000 - this is far from a bad thing, but one might worry that it sends the wrong message about the viability of this kind of art’s positioning.
Indeed, I noticed how both fairs suffered this year from an approximate 3:1 ratio of sales rep to… well, anybody else, including curators or press agents. Most of the people manning the booths could tell me exactly how much it cost to ship so-and-so’s artwork all the way from Osaka, but not many could tell me about so-and-so’s gesso technique. I understand that fairs are ultimately about selling stuff, but it’s just as important to have somebody who can write up an invoice as somebody who can name the artist’s influences.
I will surprise nobody by placing the burden of this expectation on the shoulders of dealers (and, to a lesser extent, collectors) rather than on gallerists or curators: do not let auction results threaten your aesthetic and financial enthusiasm. Stay alert and keep your noses to the ground, stop telling your clients to stick to the path well travelled. If both fairs have shown us anything, it’s that everybody else is putting in momentous efforts into giving buyers the option to invest in genuinely good and new artworks — and for great prices. All that’s left to do is see if people will put their money where other people’s mouths are.
Victoria Comstock-Kershaw is a London-based critic and contemporary arts journalist.
