VIPs days are highly guarded, ticket prices very limited and expensive. Frieze does this by, on the one hand, promoting the brand far and wide, but on the other, making it as difficult as possible for anyone from the public to actually attend the event. Frieze therefore has to dress itself up as more than art fair, with its projects and a public programmes (the former this year included an installation by Rachel Rose, who is incidentally having a show at the Serpentine Gallery in London simultaneously), but, at the same time, not actually be the kind of public free-for-all that would alienate the collectors it needs through the turnstiles to pacify the galleries. – more so than other fairs, Art Basel for example is quite content with the fact that it is an industry affair (perhaps it has reason to be, it is after all the far more important, economically speaking, for most participating galleries). It’s the strange, tricky dichotomy, that lies at the heart of the whole endeavour Frieze is after all an event with an unclear identity. Frieze wants to portray itself, in the media at least, as a cultural event blessed upon the city of London (a recent press release from the company’s press agents reads "A new cultural attraction for London: Frieze Sculpture Park 2015 extended") which sits uncomfortably with its apparent primary purpose (often lost on the mainstream media) that it is a merely a trade platform to sell art from. (Eagle-eyed readers might at this point might accuse myself of also trying to dress up a fair report as something else – mea culpa). The slightly fuzzy, unclear, identity of this kind of writing is however rather apt for writing about the Frieze Art Fair in particular though. They sit uncomfortably next to Frieze’s wider PR strategy of Instagrammer previews and access for fashion bloggers (who knew that Artforum publisher Knight Landesman has his ties tailor made? We all do since t he Guardian published its article on "the art fair’s best dressed"). Langley and Charlesworth are both excellent writers, and their texts are readable and informative, but they are also a kind of unintentional manna to Frieze’s marketing of the fair as a cultural event. Or perhaps we can refer to JJ Charlesworth in ArtReview (an organ I’m an editor at), dancing between criticality and tongue-and-cheek, in his roundup of the fair. Here’s Patrick Langley, sometime of The White Review, quoting sociologist Victor Gruen for his recent Art Agenda report of the Frieze Art Fair. The strangest endeavours however, are the embarrassed pseudo-critical reports, often written by writers who are more often found tackling weighty biennales or such like. From which Tully speeds into noting a Damien Hirst work sold "right away for £750,000 to a US collector." Or there are the likes of Artforum’s long running Scene and Herd column, an exercise in inducing feelings of FOMO in its readers (it’s the bit where Linda Yablonsky et al oft report speeding around town in a taxi between the parties that oddly always strikes me as the most glamorous part of these texts). "Steady" were sales at Frieze this year the aisle-stalking fox whispers in his most recent online column. The king of which is Judd Tully over at. What action or reaction are they asking from their reader? The most honest of these (if the most cringe worthy and depressing for me personally to read) are the number crunchers. They are varied in form but all as equally as unclear in their purpose. The "fair report" is a funny thing in the parlance of art writing.
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