If stock-market tremors threaten a wobble in the contemporary-art market, the
business class of the London art world won’t let it show. This autumn has
more moving and shaking than ever before planned for the artfair season,
suggesting dealers and gallerists believe the boom in sales, which smashed
auction-house records on both sides of the Atlantic in June, can not only be
sustained but expanded. That sub-prime mortgage stuff is evidently
meaningless to Russian billionaires and Hollywood royalty, then.
Whether a correction is imminent or not, the prices of most famous artists are
still way beyond ordinary mortals. London’s appeal for mega-rich collectors
is mainly down to Frieze, an elite-level visual Glaston-bury, where the rest
of us can press our noses to the vitrines and, if nothing else, buy a
subscription to the magazine that spawned it.
“The best art is the most expensive,” Sotheby’s silver-tongued star
auctioneer, Tobias Meyer, once declared, “because the market is so smart.”
But how do those with smaller pockets gain some of that expertise? The
standard advice is, “Buy with your eyes, not your ears”, as purchasing art
is among the most subjective decisions you can make, and its value won’t
necessarily rise. If you want any kind of significant collection, however,
you’d be wise to heed another of Meyer’s bons mots and “Make the market
feeling your own”. That doesn’t mean slavishly following fashion – it’s
vital to develop your own taste – but understanding what sells, for how much
and why. Money is power in art circles, but knowledge is empowerment.
Websites such as Artnet.com and Arts daily.org are excellent for news and
prices, the internet being fertile ground for prints, limited editions and
student originals, too – if you’ve done your research. Identifying promising
graduates is time well spent, as acquiring pieces early in a career can pay
dividends later. Joining the Contemporary Art Society, which runs networking
groups for beginner, intermediate and advanced collectors, won’t guarantee
good fortune, but its studio visits, curator talks and tours of private
collections are bound to be instructive.
Okay, so a five-figure overdraft facility would be nice, and it is worth
having the charm of George Clooney, but how far does £500, £1,000 and £5,000
go at the leading fairs? And what will those sums buy you in the best online
galleries? Let’s do the rounds.
THE OLD GUARD
British Art Fair, Sept 11-16 (www.britishartfair.co.uk
); Art London, Oct 4-8 (www.artlondon.net
)
Twenty years after beginning in a hotel basement, the 20/21 British Art Fair
continues its patriotic duty at the Royal College of Art. Despite the
whizz-bang prefix, its strongest suits remain mid-20th-century figures, with
prices increasing for Jacob Epstein, Graham Sutherland and David Bomberg.
More affordable from that era is Bernard Menin- sky, whose drawings fetch
about £2,000. More recent work includes an Eduardo Paolozzi plaster cast,
Clenched Fist, 1995 (£650); John Hoyland’s Spanish Hat, 1996 (£2,500); and
David Hosie’s Lovers with Glider, 2007 (£3,200). At the nearby Royal
Hospital, Chelsea, Art London, erecting its marquee for the ninth time, is
also something of a veteran. Marlborough Fine Art joins this year, with
Frank Auerbach, Maggi Hambling and Picasso in its crates. Elsewhere, Steven
Marshall’s hologram-like painting, Deleted Scene, is less than £500, and a
Leonard Cohen sketch (yes, the song-writer draws as well) is yours for
£1,225. Fancy an ancient-looking fish? Pieter Vanden Daele’s piscine bronze,
Ignatius, is £5,000. Scandinavian and Inuit art are on the menu, too.
THE LEADER OF THE PACK
Frieze, Oct 11-14 (www.frieze.com )
People who wear sunglasses at night, even in affluent middle age, flock to
Frieze. It’s cool in the way that newly minted $1,000 bills are, with enough
of a festival atmosphere that regular folk don’t feel spooked. Deals will be
wheeled, and the 151 galleries should make a packet – £500 is peanuts here,
but it would snap up Spartacus Chetwynd’s requiem mask for Steve Irwin, her
Xeroxed tribute to the late crocodile guy. Genuine poignancy comes with a
Francesca Woodman photograph (£3,500); she took her own life at 22, but her
angelic gloom, an obvious influence on Sam Taylor-Wood, endures. Your best
bet, though, is to eavesdrop on whoever is splashing big bucks and copy
them.
NEW KIDS ON THE BLOCK
Bridge Art Fair (www.bridgeartfair.com
) and Pulse (www.pulse-art.com ),
both Oct 11-14
Frieze exerts a huge gravitational pull on stellar collectors, and two US
shows intend to use some of that force. The Bridge Art Fair is taking over
the Trafalgar Hotel for the purpose, but Pulse, setting up shop in
Bloomsbury, looks more exciting. Catering for “mid-career” artists, it draws
in galleries from Bologna to Beijing and aims to step between established
and alternative fairs. Standout work includes Jim Torok’s intense portrait
of the artist Ed Ruscha, Kevin Francis Gray’s haunting resin statue, Voodoo
Girl, and Tatsumi Orimoto’s nightmarish Bread Man Son, who resembles the
Elephant Man after he mistook a baker for a plastic surgeon. Allison
Schulnik’s heavily impasted paintings are on sale for £500, a darkly vivid
Adam Thompson photograph is available for £1,000, and Tim Bavington’s stripy
optics and Bjorn Schulke’s kinetic, Alexander Calderesque sculptures weigh
in at about £5,000.
YOUNG TURKS
The Future Can Wait, Oct 9-14; Zoo, Oct 12-15 (www.zooartfair.com
)
Fifty new artists seize the now at the Atlantis gallery with The Future Can
Wait (website launching next month), a group show, not a fair. Prices start
at £500 for Jennifer Allen’s Happy Christmas, Mom and Dad, a DVD postcard
along the lines of “I went to London and became a lap dancer”; Dafur, a
compelling portrait by Sam Jackson, costs £1,000; and £5,000 buys admittance
to Gordon Cheung’s dystopian landscapes. Now lodging behind the Royal
Academy, Zoo, the fair for galleries less than six years old, is maturing in
style. Your £500 is best spent here on the print and multiple editions
chosen by David Thorp, a respected curator. DVDs of Venu-sia, a film by
Aline Bouvy and John Gillis, are £1,000; conceptualism fans can splurge that
amount on Susan Collis’s 18ct gold screws, while £5,000 immerses you in the
murk of Maryon Park, by Nils Nova. With all work selected by Thorp, the
critic Ossian Ward and the Whitechapel gallery director Iwona Blazwick, Zoo
has cred in spades.
THE BARGAIN HUNTERS
Affordable Art Fair, Oct 18-21 (www.affordableartfair.com
); Salon, Sept 13-Oct 5 (www.salongallery.co.uk
); BraveArt, Sept 20-23 (www.braveart.co.uk
)
Hoxtonites and Mayfair insiders are horribly sniffy about the Affordable Art
Fair, probably because the brand is so successful. Its top price is £3,000,
yet last year the combined sales total for its spring and autumn shows was
£7.3m. While there is pedestrian work, little gems turn up by, say,
Elizabeth Blackadder, Howard Hodgkin and Robert Indiana. The event founder
Will Ramsay’s own pitch, Will’s Art Warehouse, is a good place to unearth
new names. And it’s not as if every unheralded painter at AAF lacks
art-historical nous: take Philip Gurrey’s Velazquez homage, Prince Baltasar
Carlos as Hunter (£1,000). Buyers on tight budgets will also visit the Salon
gallery for its pick of the postgraduates, including Hannah Knox (from about
£500) and Geoffrey Stein (£4,000 on average), and its Scottish equivalent,
BraveArt, at the Atlantis.
THE DOT COMMIES
Eyestorm (www.eyestorm.com );
New Blood Art (www.new-blood-art.com
); Degreeart.com; Counter Editions (www.countereditions.com
); Artshole (www.artshole.co.uk
)
Eyestorm, among the first online galleries, has been revamped under new
management. Clinical sculptures by Marc Quinn (of Trafalgar Square plinth
fame) and pop-art pieces by Richard Trupp (a former Jerwood prize nominee)
are £500-£1,500, while Vic Reeves’s avian scrawls, celeb-hunters should
note, are less than £300. A neat colour-matching facility at New Blood Art
allows you to check how David Wightman’s target paintings (£600-£1,000) or
Robert Pereira Hind’s free-fall snapshots (£700) might look on your wall.
Works by new and recent graduates, including the comely Kate Marshall and
optically intriguing Andy Owen, both for £2,500 or less, are on view at
Degreeart.com. Prints and multiples by the likes of Peter Doig, Tracey Emin
and Gillian Wearing are great value at Counter Editions, from £500. Last,
keep your finger on the pulse of the emerging scene at Artshole, which
claims 500,000 hits a month. Artists upload their portfolios, and you can
buy from them direct (often for less than £100) as well as monitoring
exhibition and other art news.
