We found the perfect spot for stealing paintings from the art fair. Just drop a hook from the restaurant on the mezzanine straight into the storage space for Everard Read… if there's anything at Everard Read you'd want to steal. We doubt it. Although it's early days yet to see what the cheese factor of this fair's going to be. We can see it all from up here though, a bit like an airport lounge without the planes. Everyone's running around with ladders and the place stinks of wet PVA.

Let's face it, there is always a cheese factor at art fairs. They are the kinds of things that make you feel ill as they remind you of the full horror of what actually sells in this crass, crass world. But this art fair, so far, has my vote of approval. This could have been so wrong, but it's not, it's good.

People don't usually discuss what their allegiances are to those shadowy figures who are paying their bills, but frankly it is a subject I'm quite interested in talking about in our case: how did a couple of semi-employed layabouts from Artheat find the money to put out a daily paper at the Joburg Art Fair, or even to get to Joburg in the first place? Here's the facts: Artlogic (the Joburg Art Fair organisers) paid. Robert Sloon proposed the idea, and they said yes, and here we are.

What has really blown me away, in the sense of inspiring me in a very good way, is that that was the end of the discussion. Nobody from Artlogic has said a word to us again, except for organising loads of press passes. They're never once asked us what we are going to write about, or whether we are going to trash them or say anything that might compromise their corporate image. And weirdly enough, I don't even have to ask them to know that even if we said terrible things (and of course we will) they wouldn't give a damn. In fact they'd welcome it. Why? They understand the point of having a critical culture.

Now this may not seem like rocket science to you. Allowing there to be discussion is surely the route to a healthy and substantial art world. The strange thing is how pitifully few people realise this around here. We live in a culture strangled by the power of toadying corporate freaks. They are the funders, and they put their company stamp on everything they touch, till it reeks of office park cheese. They absolutely cannot see beyond the crap "team-building" that tries to force the entire nation into the kind of sport-jock mindset that makes stupid square-chinned boys into school prefects and ultimately leaders of men. They have striped shirts and blow-waved rugs and everything they ever say is a sporting platitude. "Playing ball, levelling the playing fields, shifting the goal posts, S.A.B." Oh fuck off fuck off please please please fuck off we are so-o-o-o-o tired of you.

I don't know if, bitching as we always do about everything, we have any idea how good it is that something like this is happening. The kinds of people who wouldn't give a shit if Spier Contemporary existed or not are going to come to this fair with their gold cards. And when they get here, there will be some really good art.

One of the ways the Art Fair is achieving this is by wheeling out two carefully-selected big guns, Simon Njami and Robin Rhode, to set the tone. Rhode is the art fair's featured artist, and has his own dedicated exhibition space, where he will be doing some very interesting stuff, if the press release is to be believed. It is all to do with billiard balls, and it's deep. More on this later.

Simon Njami is curating a biggish show in the centre of the art fair, featuring artists from the rest of Africa and some locals. At the press conference he talked a bit about the show, which should introduce some crucial debates into the art fair. He described this show as aiming to foreground and question the mechanisms of the market, by installing what he describes as a studio, in which the works on show have not been priced yet.

He said that this is an opportunity to rethink what art fairs are, because the possibility for doing this is inherent in the South African situation precisely because it is so dysfunctional.
This is where I thought uh-oh, here we go again. Another over-endowed European comes out here, thinks that this place is "fresh" because it's so goddamn chaotic. Then it begins to dawn on them how endemic and unsolvable the chaos really is and they throw their hands in the air yelling "I can't work like this!" and fuck off back where they came from.

So far, though, things are looking good. The feeling in the air is that this event is going to work, and if it does our artworld will never be as quite so debilitatingly sluggish ever again.

Labels: Joburg art fair