Adrian Searle at Art Toronto 2009 Courtesy The Power Plant / Photo Vanessa Kalisz
BM: You also mentioned in your Frieze report that there can be serious finds at fairs…
AS: Of course, a bit difficult though they might be to see properly. I don’t know, some gallery might put up a Bill Viola video and people might start crying or something, God forbid. But at Frieze, there in a corner was this terrific film by Manon de Boer and it was just a little Belgian gallery’s stand but they actually built a false wall and got a projector and you could watch it properly and it was terrific. So things do make waves beyond their market.
BM: Another thing that struck me was your comment about the impressive number of people at Frieze, and the variety. As you observed, it isn’t just a crowd of committed art people or professionals, it's really the general public that show up.
AS: The hunger is definitely there. It is in fact not all that new of a phenomenon. I remember happening to be in Madrid in the late 1980s and going to ARCO and it was like that then. Even though you have to pay to get in, maybe somehow people feel more willing to go to an art fair than a monographic show in a big museum. Those exhibitions obviously draw a lot of people too, but not quite in the same way. So it’s interesting. I haven’t got to the bottom of it at all.
BM: There’s an event that happens earlier in the fall in Toronto called Nuit Blanche, and according to the numbers they publicize it’s gone in three years from having an audience of 425,000 to near a million in one night. I don’t think anyone’s quite figured out how to explain it. For instance, the queues to get into certain installations were an hour and a half or an hour and 45 minutes…in the middle of the night. I can't imagine that the public would do such a thing at a museum or gallery. What’s the expectation?
AS: It’s what we would call “the buzz.” There is a sense in which you feel that art has become part of the mainstream entertainment industry and it runs the gamut from being massive spectacles and fan fair rides to freakshows. It’s extraordinary really. I suspect artists probably want to claw back some of the deeper sides of their work from that and I think everybody’s probably a bit uncomfortable. But then again, artists also become uncomfortable with the "museumification," if you like, of their work. When works get put in big shows in museums they come with the explanatory wall panel which tells you what to think and usually says something like “This work challenges your perceptions” or some other cliché like that. I think artists feel a bit gelded by it all. But this is an old story, isn’t it. I think Susan Sontag said somewhere that museums both accept the dissident and the radical and by doing so they tame them. Or as some American curators from the 1980s said, the galleries are both midwives and castrators, which is a terrifying compound.
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