SHContemporary (better late than never?): The art experience as flea market

The SHContemporary fair came and went like a wave of refreshing artness in this otherwise culturally deprived megalopolis. Apologies for not writing anything sooner but I figured the real media kept you abreast of all the hoopla and my cynical comments would just be an unwelcome diatribe next to the hard driving fluff that makes good reporting on art fairs. If you haven’t yet heard the fair news please check out Phil Tanari in artforum.com, and Karen Smith for Bloomberg (where she says the richest people in the world will get their only dose of art news), artnet, Art in America (courtesy of our lovely Lisa Movius) etc., also reported. All in all SHContemporary was a fine event: good parties, mix of people, art, weather, nicely dressed security guards, great pretenses to charitable giving, one or two actually interesting installations, BUT not so many sales (except James Cohan's whopping Nam June Paik and Bill Viola sale- we won’t mention any names but we will say it was an Asian collector which is a good indication that there is a market out here for Western contemporary (and hopefully reason for J.Cohan to stick around in Asia), and maybe that Damien Hirst purchase by the same restaurant mogul that captured the world’s attention with her 2.3 million $ purchase earlier this year for Liu Xiaodong’s very large and mediocre painting of a bunch of very poor migrant workers (ala Courbet), then there was Thomas Erben who sold 40% of his booth on opening night to a bunch of Floridians, even Erna Hecey Gallery sold some small Johan Grimonprez drawings to Huang Liaoyuan and Aura Gallery’s William Zhang both under the table to avoid the ridiculous 33% tax imposed on sales at the sale)

But everything has to do with sales. Does it or does it? Can an art fair be like a game of chess where all the moves override the result? Probably not. Art is a business and this is a sales convention. Our foreign guests- galleries from Europe, India, America, Korea, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, Australia, New Zealand, etc. seemed to have a splendid time and (besides talk of dire sales) they will come back if they know what’s good for them because you need to invest as a business.

Overall what we learned from the fair is that today we look at art in fairs and auctions (if not mammoth Biennales which are like fairs in museums) – the experience of art going has been reduced to a the flea market effect- a labyrinth of stalls toting art goods to be consumed in the 30sec-2min time it will take to browse each of the 130 booths (somehow K.Smith listed it as 100 – it was originally to be 100 (100 of the best and brightest galleries) but somewhere along the way Pierre Huber (who made speeches at every occasion and at every occasion lost the battle with his English – think an intoxicated Kermit the Frog with a thick Swiss accent) and Zhou Tiehai (artist businessman turned artfair businessman) gave in to the huge demand and opened up the upstairs level of the building).

A note on art and architecture: The sophisticated mood and look of the fair had everything to do with the grand architecture of the Shanghai exhibition Center – apparently a gift of Stalin back in the heyday of cross Siberian pinko love ins. It was originally known as the Hall of Sino-Soviet Friendship and was built with Soviet help in the late 1950s to commemorate the 10th anniversary of the Chinese communist victory in 1949. At night, the spire is often lit up with garish pink and lime green lights. A nice departure from the cubbied, wholesale halls of the usual art fairs, and here a nice example of art and architecture being happily married.

Further note: Liu Jianhua’s mammoth exhibition of 10 tons of illegally imported foreign electronic garbage at 3 on the Bund, which opened during the fair, is a mutherload of post-colonial, late-capital, global-market, environmentally abusive shit and will be the subject of my first review for Art Forum (which was banned from the fair because an Ai Weiwei photo offended the authorities- see artforum.com) … but you have to wait till November. Just like this report - tardy to the max.