Froth happens: Thoughts on the art fairs and "the market"

I was surprised by the number of people who had really negative things to say about the Scope fair. I found it to be a great deal of fun, and filled with a lot of interesting art. I particularly enjoyed a number of the German galleries. Check out the photos I took at Scope. I suspect some people found the wackier stuff, including the installations in the middle, not "serious" enough and therefore wrote off the whole fair as unserious and lacking in good work. The way Todd Gibson described it makes sense to me and is closer to my view of it.

Many of the anti-Scope crowd also complained that The Armory Show was too much about money. I don't see how we're going to get some magical middle ground, in which the market rewards precisely the correct people, and no more. I also find the attacks on Scope a bit humorless. I'm big on the idea of having a huge variety of work available for us to see, knowing some of it will be good and some will be bad. I like this part of Art Fag City's post on Armory:

No one can be impervious to the sales hype the fair brings out, and since so much of what is shown at this fair pushes a formalist aesthetic, it is hard to know the difference between those things that are legitimately good and what merely looks good. Everything looks like you should buy it.

Lately I feel I have encountered a lot of art that feels middlebrow, but is made with great skill.

While I find some aspects of the current market off-putting, I'm also happy to see a huge number of artists making money from their art. Under those conditions, froth happens. Yes, a lot of people that make crappy art will be deemed marketable, but I prefer that outcome to one where almost no one sells work unless its already certified as blue chip. We live in a country where there is very little public funding for art. Even if there were, given the Neanderthals in charge, we would probably end up with a lot of flag paintings, and I don't mean in the style of Jasper Johns.