The most important feature about art fairs is not how they show, but what they show. I will venture that ‘projects’ and curatorial accouterments will continue to be a much bigger part of the Armorys, Friezes and Art Basel Miamis of the world than HK10s or Art Dubais. At least until the audience becomes as familiar with what these fairs in Asia are showing versus what is shown in Euro-America.

So I will qualify Andras’s reading somewhat. I think fairs don’t just act as filters, they also allow new stories and trajectories to emerge, in a world which is still far too narrow in what it thinks of as canonical art. Anyone not convinced — just look at the wall ‘documenting’ the history of the ‘modern’ at Tate Modern — and list artists and ‘movements’ outside Euro-America. It is a very short list. Fairs will make it longer well before scholarly exhibitions at museums.

On the larger point, though, I take a different view. While art fairs are of course trade shows and should ultimately be judged in terms of how much business they transact, the facts have changed around them in ways that make them impossible NOT to read, in part, as curatorial undertakings. They have become proxies for cultural events.

Institutional footprints change. We may not like that commentary and comedy have displaced objective reporting on TV–but audiences interpret that as the news. We may not like that celebrities have supplanted people of substance in the conduct of our civic life and the framing of our cultural and political debates–but they have done so. Likewise, no amount of anxiety by folks committed to serious forms of critical discourse will dispel the incontrovertible reality that for a large part of the art audience, fairs are THE place where a certain picture of today’s art is formed.

This is, in part, the result of astute and in some respects laudable innovations by dealers and fair organizers. The proliferation of project elements at all major fairs, along with the trend toward single-artist booths has upped the curatorial ante. One might voice alarm about the frayed and fuzzy borders between selling and curating. But on the whole (and speaking as an occasional moderator at fair-related panel discussions), I consider the intellectualizing of the fairs a positive phenomenon. It makes art fairs considerably more interesting than furniture fairs, for example.

The narrative of the evolution of the art fair is not much of a narrative when compared, say, to the narrative of painting. But it is a narrative of a certain sort, and one to which a great many people in the art world are committed. Some people seem to have become more adept at picking apart the minutiae of fair developments than talking about the art on view. (I must have heard more about the floor plan at Miami Art Basel than about any single object on view.) Like it or not, the evolution of fairs is today analyzed and interpreted in a certain critical light, analogous to the lively discourse around the meanings and implications of museum display. Whatever one’s view of the works at the Independent fair, the event certainly succeeded in its stated goal of getting people talking about what a fair can be. I mean, here we are.

What’s the bottom line? I actually do think that fairs have a critical function. It has to do with the editing down of the sprawling global enormity of the art world into some sort of coherent, intelligible, transparent subset of activity–the artists and galleries that are deemed noteworthy in the given tier of the market where the fair operates. This kind of editing has fallen victim to bloat, a reflexive opening of floodgates brought about by economic anxiety last year. And when things get too big, too sprawling, too agonizingly tiresome to navigate, attention really does get reduced to why it’s so hard to get an espresso at the VIP lounge.

Peter Schjeldahl pointed out in his recent New Yorker review of this Tino Sehgal work that his experience going through the piece left him with the sense of being caught up in a whirlwind of short stories that reverberated long after leaving the Guggenheim.

As one of the older generation of “interpreters” in this work, my insider’s opinion is that This Progress is a remarkable feat of management and organization and an excellent piece of stagecraft. Apart from the standard introduction the interpreters make, “Hello, my name is Ellen – the title of the piece is “This Progress”, there is no script. After the introduction the interpreter is free to say whatever comes to mind. There is no template – there is the conversation.

Now in my fifth week as an interpreter it is clear that Europeans (including Brits, Scots and Welsh), South Americans, Australians and Asians are generally willing to engage in the piece with an open earnestness. While many Americans displayed the same qualities of interest, engagement and good humor, a number of our fellow citizens were concerned with what the piece was “really about,” whether they were being recorded and why my colleagues and I were participating in This Progress.

The essence of the work are the stories, personal thoughts and opinions shared during the encounters. My fellow “interpreters” are in agreement that, as we continue to participate in the piece, a stream of thoughts and memories about our own lives and experiences has begun flowing in each of us, and it hasn’t stopped.

Not surprisingly, people often cite computers, technology, cyberspace et. al. as examples of progress. Being something of a bibliophile, when the occasion arose, I asked young adults, teenagers and younger children what they thought about the kindle. After four weeks, this unscientific sample indicates that many older teenagers and people in their early twenties think that kindle is cool and like having portable books without the hassle. Most young teenagers and kids under twelve prefer books because of their illustrated covers, the feel of the pages, and they generally agreed with the ten year-old girl who thought that if everyone bought a kindle then “there wouldn’t be anymore books or newspapers.”

For some younger people the kindle threatens the loss of the personal touch, of the experience of seeing books on a shelf and the sense of intimacy they associate with books. Making the point, one young woman remarked: “I like to give books as presents. What am I going to do in the future? Tell someone that I’ll burn them a disc?”

Other points frequently discussed about how technology affects our lives include: How younger people will use their imaginations, given the daily onslaught of visual material they take in? Whether anyone who was deeply concerned over the past thirty years about our personal and collective privacy being massively invaded by governments, corporations, credit bureaus, police departments, etc., envisioned millions of Americans willingly giving up their privacy, now and forever, via postings on Facebook, twitter and the like? As a young man who works for Microsoft said two days ago, “People have no idea of how bad it is – information discrimination is here.”

An Israeli woman, mother of two teenage boys, was genuinely concerned and mystified that her sons, who will begin their compulsory military service soon, don’t understand that anyone in the Israeli Army can see their Facebook entries, and this could have a deleterious affect on their military experience. When asked how his children, having grown up with technology as a staple of life, made use of their imaginations, a father expressed great concern regarding how his fourteen year-old would develop empathy for other people.

Many younger people agreed that they will have several ”careers” during their working life, and that they should focus on gaining experience as quickly as possible. As one bright and energetic young woman, just twenty-six and in her third job since college, remarked, “The traditional career path is broken. No one believes that a job will be long-term, or that corporations will show any loyalty to their employees. So make yourself as knowledgeable as possible”.

The state of the current worldwide economy; whether American-style capitalism had hit the wall; government and private corruption as quintessentially human; whether human beings exist in a fourth dimension; why Americans regard health care as socialism, but don’t use that label for the bank bailouts; why many art schools don’t require drawing classes; how the Australian tradition of young people taking a “walk about” informs their attitudes later in life; whether people are actually capable of learning from the past — these are among the many topics being discussed daily under Mr. Wright’s dome.

The art and magic of Sehgal’s work are the encounters in real time and the recollection of them in the future by all involved.

Remember that when an artwork drops in value it can simply retreat back into a basement or stay hanging on the wall, with no transaction taking place to show that the market value has fallen. It can also be sold privately at a marked down price, where no-one can monitor or comment on the drop in value. This cannot happen with public company shares where all transactions must take place on the open market. So the markets for Art and Shares are not directly comparable. Public equity markets report every transaction for every share. Art markets are multi-layered with some transactions private and some public.

A better indication for overall health of the Art Market might come from this chart in the January edition of The Art Report. It certainly reflects the mood within the dealerships and the drop in both volume and prices felt at the auction houses.

Komar was talking about the fallacy of one-person shows. Those exhibitions are predicated on the notion that the curatorial arrangement of works, usually in chronological order, “tells the story” of the artist. But as Komar pointed out, the artist’s history does not reside in the pictures. It lies between the pictures. The empty space between the pictures is replete with more meaning and possibility than the official narrative of the exhibit.

Sehgal’s show expands this idea to the entirety of the museum. It is analogous to the old chestnut that the most important exchanges at conferences happen not in the auditorium but in the hallways.

As a matter of fact, I recently attended a conference at the Guggenheim–organized by the education department, no less–which attempted to capture the hallway conversations only. There were no formal presentations; just hallway talk. So maybe the Guggenheim’s education department was on to something about open spaces even before Sehgal stripped the rotunda of art and put the spotlight on human interaction.

Finally, a question: Can our conversation here, beyond the museum’s walls, be interpreted as a part of Sehgal’s exhibit? If not, why not?

Does it have a place in modern museums? Yes if it helps people think differently about the walls around them and what is usually on those walls. But it isn’t a work that will grow on me. Nor is it something I would want to experience more than once. For me, therefore, it is a pleasant, thought provoking, one liner. Nothing more.

In the first instance it is an indication of the appetite for works from an increasingly wealthy global middle class population who have acquired the habit of paying more for objects to fill their houses. This is a demand side phenomenon and says little about the quality of what they are buying.

As the money available to purchase has risen, so has the quantity of product seeking to satisfy the market. But how much of what we have seen produced over this same period has any intrinsic merit and how are we to measure this?

A market is not necessarily ‘healthy’ simply because much is being bought and sold. For the long term stability and growth of a market, the works being created and purchased need to have value that is recognisable and tangible. Otherwise, at some stage, someone cries out “the emperor has no clothes”, and it all comes tumbling down.

The ‘relevance’ of work to a given context, the ‘cultural value’ of an object created to express a point of view, the ability of a work to ‘move’ people to an emotion, are all intangible characteristics often assigned to Art that are hard to measure objectively. And even the collective, ostensibly objective, measures of history are arbitrary to a degree, since there is fashion even in history.

So all our qualitative measures are based on personal, and potentially arbitrary, viewpoints, and are not objective at all.

Perhaps that is as it should be. Since Art should, if it has ANY value, be a relationship between itself and its observer. And nothing else should matter.

Read the full article at: http://www.theartnewspaper.com/articles/What-is-the-sin-MoCA-and-Jeffrey-Deitch-have-committed?/20079

I’m quite surprised that we’re not seeing this more among the ranks of the larger art world system. I think Jeffrey’s appointment will allow for more support for these discussions. When I founded X Initiative a year ago to respond to shifts that were so prevalent in art world circles, I was immediately questioned less on the relativity of such a concept and endeavor but more from the perspective of what it meant to add that to my role as a commercial gallerist. Edward’s point discussing how we as gallerists also serve as solo producers of artistic production and dissemination, not only in our own spaces we fund, but also in museum spaces that cannot find the funding to do projects with artists they want to program, does often yield every gallerist to question why these boundaries exist in the first place.

Jeffrey is a pioneer who has worked within the art world as one larger system, interconnected as it has always been and yet, in many ways, he was the first to fully represent every aspect of that system with formalized appointments. As he brings every previous experience to the table, (extensive knowledge of all periods of art, professional relationships with trustee level collectors and their collections, a sophisticated view of artistic production over three decades, a track record for writing and organizing exhibitions with artists and a sound and intelligent financial acumen) I am excited to see him turn MOCA around and elevate it to an international platform.

Perhaps after that, we will bring more of these characteristics of cultural practice to the forefront and embrace the indeterminate quality of our professional practices as they are in flux. I’m looking forward to seeing things less defined and determined and more fluid.