Going, Going, Gone To The Great Art Fair

A large metallic white tent in a rich green setting. Self-conscious queues and heftily priced tickets. ‘It used to be so fresh,’ says a well known film producer. ‘I'm not so sure now.’ One of the first things I see is a Japanese booth. It displays studied Tokyo manners and detailed western-style art. I float through crowds streaming down long corridors like packs of svelte-like greyhounds. Young female art students with notepads and lipstick hunt for the unusual. ‘I like this,’ says one, fingering the work like a bag. I stare at someone’s framed urology appointment slip. (Dry, I think.) I bump into an old friend, the man who was to meet the artist, with his beautiful baby and partner. ‘Unsurpassable,’ I say, staring at the baby's face. I move on, past large heavily graded nude photographs by David LaChapelle, and more from a younger gallery nearby. A post-ruralist David Hockney painting stands alone, like a peephole into a California-tinted English countryside. ‘Is it for sale?’ someone asks. ‘Ninety thousand,’ they are told: politely. I am enamoured by a pair of colour photographs of a mob of deer in curiously unromantic and neatly clipped flat fields. Over in the distance I see a female member of the world’s most famous royal family squeezed by an Italian male she neither seems to like nor know that well. The stud is reprimanded by his wife and his face drops like lead. A pretty Swedish woman with hair in plaits sits leafing through a newspaper. Behind her is a small painted bronze sculpture, entitled ‘Memory from the North,’ consisting of a six-inch nude woman - another - on her back with her legs apart, and a man with a hamster on a lead and ‘EU’ written on his cap walking towards her, while two upright citizens watch from the plinth's sidelines. I see a photograph of a well known female artist and wince as one of the saleswomen deliberately screeches her chair. Ah, over there is the work of an artist who shared the same studio building as the artist. I see a large acrylic by one of her ex-boyfriends. (All this is like stepping through friendly mud in comfortable boots.) Ahead is the stand of maybe the most powerful dealer of all. In the first image I see - his wife’s - a nude young woman (yes, another) with a stuffed swan aiming ridiculously – and with deliberate visual kleptomania: François Boucher's 'Leda and the Swan' (circa 1740) – for the woman’s vagina. Before recovering fully, I see a vast photograph taken I am assuming of one of the pyramids. (No awareness of the slaves working in deadly temperatures there then: let other people do your work for you.) I stumble out. I'm at a Moscow gallery with intelligent, sad drinker-faces looking up from a small table. There is a black curtain behind which great secrets or measures of vodka are passed. Then there’s the Beirut gallery next to the one from Tel Aviv. (Whose idea was that?) I can hear it now: ‘It all began at an art fair,’ people will say, in years to come, when peace – not that you felt many people at the fair would notice – breaks out completely in the Middle East.

Short interview with the Artist

The Artist sits on the bright red sofa. She has finished her last piece and has not started a new one yet. She may be thinking about the mural she has volunteered to do at the local school. Or she may already be thinking about the nights slowly getting darker.
What got you started?
I just always liked drawing people.
What was your big breakthrough?
I don't know if I had a breakthrough. I don't know if I've found it yet. I'm still waiting for it. Actually, realising that drawing was just as important as painting.
Who or what have you sacrificed for your art?
It's not really a sacrifice.
Have you done anything cultural lately?
I popped into an arts centre yesterday. But I only had time to look at the books. I've just read a really good book, though. Patrick Gale's 'Notes on an Exhibition'.
Are you fashionable?
I know what I like wearing. I know what suits me.
Do you suffer for your art?
Some days. Sometimes I just wish I could switch off for a minute.
What's your favourite film?
'Fanny and Alexander' by Bergman.
What's the greatest threat to art today?
Fashion.
What advice would you give a young artist just starting out?
Keep your vision.
The Artist flicks some dust from her skirt.

Draught(wo)manship

The art world today is a confusing place. Usually when a high-profile figure is bathing in the news - they never feature; they always bathe - the story is freckled with words like 'fame', 'money', 'bad boy', or 'bad girl'. Seldom is an epic sweep of creative majesty acknowledged instead, or life as hard labour made good by art discussed as one of the creative world's mainstays. For years I thought I was simply missing something, that in the ideas of people like Derrida and Baudrillard there was a kind of lofty, intellectual justification for the abandonment of skill in the name of semiotics, and I just did not get it. Painting or drawing for example was absurd apparently, surplus to requirement, certainly in a world peppered with easily accessed imagery. In time, more and more well-known artists grabbed the limelight doing exactly that - work without any personal investment of their skill, or even labour. No, art became something only other people did for you, which is not to decry some of the more genuinely gifted moments of conceptualism. In some cases, a kind of master and slave mentality developed. Artists became neo-colonialists. 'Oh, I've an idea,' they might quip, then get a load of frustrated other artists to do the work for them. Years ago, I made a film, an ugly documentary, about this fact. I never thought then it would continue to burn with such relevance. Now, however, when hands-off artists are interviewed on TV, each, one by one, comes out with the fact they only moved from doing the work themselves - from painting, or drawing - not because they were drunk, say, on the power of alternatives, not because of forward-thinking ideas, post-modernism and the like: but, no, simply because they could not paint, could not draw, or did not have faith in their draught(wo)manship. They are negativity's children.