Franklin Sirmans on Miami

Franklin what did you see at the Miami fairs?
Hmmm... Lots of stuff! NADA Art Fair was a crush. A sprawling maze with decent galleries showing mediocre work. Scope felt like less well known galleries showing more interesting work in the cozy confines of hotel rooms, which I think is the best way to do a fair, unless you are the mall—that is the main event, as it was for Miami Basel. Why bother trying to reiterate that... Although, all the fairs were great for just bumping into people... Artists, curators, collectors, etc...

There are so many fairs now, Basel, Art Basel Miami, Frieze, Artissima, etc. and all the smaller spin-offs, as you mentioned in hotels, Liste, Scope, Flash Art and so on. What is the purpose of these fairs? Are there a lot of collectors creating the demand? What actually happens at the fairs?
The secret handshakes happen at the fairs. Deals are made and money exchanges hands. As long as you turn off your curatorial blinkers so that you have slim to little critical focus then everything will be fine. I think most people go in with an idea of certain artists and feel much more willing to take a chance in such a loose environment. To me the idealized white cube can be very confining. I like to see work in quirky places like friends’ homes or even hotels. In the end the saving grace of the big fairs is that you get to see so much stuff in person from all over the world and that ain’t bad. While biennials often perform a similar function, they are hopefully tidier, more focused and have a point. Here, you get to see some crap that you shouldn’t see but at least now you know about it.

There seem to be a lot of collectors and somehow art has attracted new collectors who might not know so much but they want to get in on the game. And, the fair lets them dictate the situation much better than in the galleries all over the world, that one couldn’t possibly hope to attend. For example, no matter what I think critically, it’s nice to be able to check out and talk to galleries from Turin, Tokyo, Johannesburg, etc... All within feet of each other.

The fair seems to give acceleration to the market for art. A hopeful example in another realm might be how the Sundance Film Festival made the independent film into a smaller feature film, not to be completely marginalized. People are more versed in the language of international cinema. You don’t have to go to the coffee house just to see something good from elsewhere...

So the fairs offer a fast connection to people, artists' work and a bigger picture of what's going on in different places. If you are a new collector you get to peruse the scene as it were. But has the fair commodified the market too much; one criticism I hear is that galleries put the pressure on artists to make works that will sell at the fair, in an environment where one work has to stand out and encapsulate the artists practice. Is this a positive for the artists and their work?
Yes, it is definitely a bad thing--if you are an artist susceptible to such a trap. Every gesture can at some point be commodified, e.g. Much art work in the 60s that was expressly made to combat commodification. A painting in the sky made by airplane exhaust will be turned into a photograph. It is not the exact essence of the art work but it is a vivid reminder of the gesture.

The market can never be commodified too much. Oh, let’s see, of course it can... But, I’m a populist, unlike a Peter Schjeldahl, I feel like art can be (and often already is, depending on your definition of “art”) a viable fabric of everyone’s life, not just an elite group who cares about such things. Does the fair help make artist’s make bad work, YES, but that too is up to the artist. For younger artists this can obviously be a tough problem. Rather than show to be showing, artists have to make considerations as to the people (gallerists) they want to work with.

After the Frieze Art Fair I was talking with a French critic who said that she had some concerns. She said she got the impression that some collectors thought that if the works had not sold by the next afternoon after the opening then they weren't good works. Did you get that impression at Miami?
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photo Paul Laster