 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
 | |||||||
 | |||||||
 | |||||||
Snipe | |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
Snipe | |||||||
Dear Uncle Jackdaw, When the recession hit, my art world froze. We ceased selling art. We no longer bought art. What made it worse was it was suddenly crystal clear that most artists and galleries had stopped progressing at some point during the last century. A private view at our top contemporary gallery, White Cube, of Marcus Harvey’s White Riot (March) should have been cutting edge. Instead, the mediocre welcoming was so nineties. Outside a crowd of once-cool thirty-somethings sipped beer from bottles, crammed onto the pavement of Hoxton Square. A street corner... Is this what Jay Jopling really thinks of his supporters? Inside is an eighties, oh-so-imaginative portrait of Margaret Thatcher comprised of dildos and the like [see page 27]. Is this the future of art? Another art institution stagnating from lack of competition is The Grosvenor House Art and Antiques Fair. This is stuck even further back in the dark ages, possibly around 1934, despite now inviting major modern and contemporary galleries to partake. On planning day etiquette is that you curtsey to Alison Vaissiere, the director, who is surrounded by butlers, gold leaf and canapÈs in the hotel’s Burlington Suite, before being presented with a Siberian forest’s worth of bureaucracy – What is your banker called? Who was your great-grandfather? Despite art dealing having long ago fizzled out, it is amazing how many of the day-to-day art gallery processes continue irrespective, minus the invoicing. This week I religiously went to Sotheby’s to mark down prices at a morning sale. Once again, Richard Green’s man was sitting in the corner sleepily bumping up the prices of Mary Feddens. He was buying up less popular works by this prolific old lady who occasionally forgets to use more than one pigment in her twee still lives. Now, when a Lowry, or any work by someone classically fashionable, comes up, the half-empty auction room makes little reaction, but, as before at Sotheby’s, Henrietta, Drusilla, Cornelia, Octavia and Fred on the phone lines still become overly enthusiastic. Venetia from Fine European Furniture still calls down from upstairs in an attempt to drum up excitement. Back at my gallery the daily tasks of distracting the interns from Facebook, or arranging to replace another ailing printer, are surprisingly similar to work in more prosperous times, in fact to work in any office in London. Galleries I’ve spoken too are divided between shutting down and splurging. Stroll around the Cork Street area and most dealers, vociferous and upbeat as ever, are ignoring their rent and staff overheads and enthusiastically planning for new exhibitions, books and long-term investments in lower-priced art. As the art world transforms itself, it’s the dealers from home who suffer. Passers-by won’t see their stock on display. They need their old clients or new people searching to buy on the internet. But in this buyer’s market the potential client base is constantly changing and the internet alone is insufficient to keep a business ticking over. For the time being, that is whilst I still have a job, I feel a superior glow coming from the other end of the recession at the prospect of witnessing artistic establishments shaken and the yBas melted back down to earth. I hope for the survival of the strongest looking art; the aesthetic investment as opposed to the fashion statement; and to the 2010s when people no longer buy to keep up with the De Smith–Jones and are confident in their own taste and in a new art of their time. Love, Snipe | |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
| |||||||
Snipe All of this site is | |||||||
| | | | | | | |