There is a distinct juxtaposition between the reason why art fairs began and the utility inflicted upon their existence by a steadily growing contingent of socialites. These events mimic the function of tech conferences, siphoning every desirable element of an industry into one large venue to facilitate connections, showcase emerging developments, and host launches for new products. For art, the proposition was extremely sensible: Gather as many contemporary art pieces in one place so collectors can easily survey and purchase, bypassing the inconvenience of visiting dozens of galleries.
The conference model has been bastardized by many different industries into the "convention," a compromise between industry confluence and social celebration. From Our Lady’s Pand, erected as a marketplace for paintings upon cobbled pathways in front of the Church of Antwerp in 1406, to the self-awarded title of the “first” placed upon Art Cologne in 1967, the art fair model held similar functionality as a marketplace preceding the steady evolution into festive bacchanalia which would one day see the likes of Frieze or Art Basel resembling something akin to a miniature Coachella.
Frieze Los Angeles makes this context apparent upon the outskirts of its entrance. Once hosted in Beverly Hills or the lots behind Paramount Studios, Frieze Los Angeles has established itself within the spare fields adjacent to Santa Monica Airport. Its sprawling parking lot shepherds entrants via light cone-wielding attendants through a labyrinthian diminution of an amusement park. A several minute walk leads to a grand erected tent preceded by scaffolded stairwells, conveying a watered down pilgrimage trek to a sacred temple or khan’s yurt.
Frieze greets its conveyor belt of displaced pedestrians with stark magenta walls, a darkened bubblegum pop pink with little white minimalist text betraying the well established millennial aesthetic. The banners, signs, logos, and walls are coated in thick squares of this pale plum, towering above cutesy neon food trucks peddling typical California-fare fusion street food and nonthreatening corporate cartoon graphics with just the right hint of graffiti inspiration. The atmosphere of Frieze can be described as boutique brutalism, as if the bare fringes of what will one day be a cyberpunk supercity were seeded through an aesthetic sensibility defined by the inside of a T-Mobile store.
As an art fair, Frieze instills the microcosm of a music festival through its organization and its patrons. The fairgoers embody a simulacra of the “art appreciator” archetype, the most decorative individuals dressing up as their personal interpretation of what an artist or gallerist should look like.
A more pedestrian cynical viewpoint would dismiss this clash of subtle designer chic and technicolor patchwork cosplay as pretentiously gaudy, but there’s a pleasant sincerity to the attire. It is an earnest presentation of internal aesthetic desire, akin to the outfits students will wear to their first day of art school.
The internal presentation of Frieze is a near perfect simulation of the gallery. Grids of perfect white walls hold paintings, sculptures, and displays to be casually observed by visitors wielding plastic wine glasses of rosé. The curated atmosphere would be archetypically complete if not disturbed by its cacophonous crowd and the tentpole canvas ceiling betraying infrequent sounds of planes taking off. Tickets are sold per 30-minute window of entry, half-enforced through an attempt to mitigate overcrowding. The circus tent setting of Frieze this year is a symptom of momentous expansion.
Each year, Frieze accrues more demand for visitation. While one could optimistically construe this as growing appreciation for art among the populace, the denizens of art fairs like Frieze or Art Basel clarify the engine behind this growth. The art fair has become a trophy of displayed participation, a tadpole of achievement devoured amongst hordes of likewise vistas, meals, activities, and experiences to be consumed by the goliath world-eating devourer of archivist social media.
Frieze’s logistic foundation was once upheld by the steady premise of presenting art to collectors, but now it rests firmly within the clutches of Instagram selfies. It is a pocket universe of aesthetic backdrop to pair with an outfit to be photographed in, a place to be recognized as having visited, a pretext for verifiable intersection.
To a majority of its participants, Frieze and the art it contains is all reduced to the simplicity of its own name, a verbal weapon to wield as a totem for justifying an itinerary. Frieze exists purely for the utility of mentioning one is in LA for Frieze, a vehicle for afterparties and perhaps a pilfered line of blow if the evening pans out. This arrangement barely requires one’s presence at Frieze, yet without this pretext, the entire experience would shatter like a Prince Rupert’s Drop, broken by the fragility of its glass tail upon which the word “art” has been microscopically carved as a binding contract.
And of the art itself? Despite my better judgement, I opted for two guided tours. Bored, anxious interns were tasked with shepherding disparate ticket-holders through an abridged foray into the best art Frieze had to offer, Emergent Trends and Highlights respectively. Their complexion, body language, and mannerisms revealed that same muted tension present in museum guides, librarians, college volunteers, and any other occupation of specific interest which seems to be monopolized by a theater kid archetype of internal neuroticism, a blasé composure of anxiety instilled by a youth spent navigating a constantly expanding series of political landmines and virtue signals.
Both tours ended up covering the exact same art pieces, which allowed me to cheekily repeat the factoids revealed by the first guide upon my second tour, much to the impressed remarks of fellow participants. The other tour guests were a Greek chorus presenting the distillation of Frieze’s entrants, flaming queer bon vivants gushing about charcoal splatters and taking selfies in front of LaVeyan pentagram blood scrawl paintings, while churlish aging urbanites grimaced through hairpieces and defiant botox sneers to interrupt the tour guide every thirty seconds with demanding inquiries about prices or to haggle for bathroom visits in their best Woody Allen impression.
Between both tours, extra time was dedicated to April Bey’s display of female faces of color, each carrying the well-worn Hollywood-defined expression of racial indignation in an ongoing oeuvre dedicated to “Atlantica”, an imagined world inspired by her father’s lectures of his experiences with discrimination filtered through a childhood sci-fi fictionalization.
The tapestry is hung against a wall of green plush, bringing to mind the one million faux grass walls and fake leaf backdrops for neon signs which heralded entry into juice bars, nightclubs, and workspaces erected within the past fifteen years to hallmark the millennial “third place.” Many aspects of works featured at Frieze are indistinguishable from the designated “selfie zones” inserted into social venues for a culture primarily defined by its candid presence on social media.
The selfie station, a monument to often literal self reflection, was present at Frieze with the considerate proliferation of water fountains or public bathrooms. Passerbys would line up to take pictures in decorated mirrors as a frequent reprieve from the imposition of processing external reality. Self service becomes gratified through the pretense of statement as visitors indulge in the art fair’s complete embrace of generational internal focus.
It is quite tempting to dismiss this as vapid narcissism, a cliche denouncement of modern art as charlatan simplicity built to dupe the nouveau riche into purchasing the affirmation of their own taste. Equally so, it is just as tempting to wrap it into a pseudointellectual conclusion that these carnival funhouse mirrors in fact do make a statement about society. Neither polarity is quite accurate, there is a bitter taste of incompletion through the execution of these displays. They reek of a student’s undeserved satisfied pretension, a lack of boundary pushing indicating the trapped cyclical state of art today. These half measures are upheld either through nepotistic firmament or simply the impression of scale and material execution.
Art is defined by crystallizing the state of society through the most relevant medium available at the time of creation. The gallery format has degraded into a stale perpetual reconfiguration of well tread territory which pales in comparison to the ongoing evolution of culture in the online medium. Chasing shock value and emotional impact is the most immediate reflex of the modern artist, yet this falls flat in relative flaccidity when considering what one is exposed to online. The only alternative is to attempt profundity through the complexity of physical medium, which, too, is ineffectual when lacking any message relevant to the human condition of a generation exposed to and raised by the Network.
Take, for example, Xin Liu’s "The Theater of Metamorphoses" which purports a statement on aging, cosmetology, and human biology through a triptych resembling blood vessels and spinal vertebrae stretched upon an industrial aluminum framework. As a further commentary on cryogenics, the lips are a bronze mold, turned white by a layer of frost which crystallizes perpetually by a Peltier nodule, a cooling mechanism keeping the bronze perpetually at -4 degrees celsius.
I found Liu’s exhibit to be the most interesting Frieze had to offer, simply for the mechanical gimmicks she infused into her works, due in no small part to her engineering background studying at MIT. Noctua coolers generated a perpetual puddle of condensation on a platform holding a bronze sculpture of a warmed human hand. Oo’s and ah’s were exchanged by various patrons as they held their hands closely to the frozen lips, remarking how they could really feel the chill of the frost.
While amusing, all of this amounted to the same splendor and depth that any attraction would hold at a science museum for children to visit on field trips. Someone could likely have gotten away with installing a “tornado machine” to step into for a fan to blow at their feet for thirty seconds, and it likely would have been a highly popular staple for Frieze attendants to line up for.
The entire experience of the art fair as a shallow facade of identity politics pandering and meandering material tinkering is a synechdoche of contemporary art’s relative stagnation. Art is experiencing the fetal stages of its resurrection through net art, finally embracing the internet as a medium beyond the trite displays of putting digital work on TV screens in galleries.
Frieze is now a tombstone eulogizing the passing of both the aimless cursory material puttering and the burgeoning imposition of DEI tiptoeing which has defined artistic stagnation in the previous decade. You will have to excuse the pun, but there is a somewhat humorous connotation in the stagnation of culture being put on display at an art fair called “freeze.”
Indeed, art has been “frozen” for some time. But this Pleistocene state is finally thawing to reveal a great exhalation of new ideas, radical thought, and liberation from social imposition. This sentiment was earmarked by circumstantial serendipity. Upon intercoms announcing the final few minutes before closing, I escaped the steady exodus of patrons to look at Liu’s exhibit one final time.
The exhibitors had turned off the coolers. Every bronze mouth was now muffled by a crumpled pad of brown paper towels, a metaphor so fitting it could only be written by God. The nearby exhibitor revealed a mouth’s shining bronze surface beneath the damp towel, wiping off the half melted frost. My amusement was met by the exhibitor’s indifferent smirk, likely the exhausted reaction of a man who spent his entire day placating the imitations of thoughtful profundity assembled by hundreds of pedestrians playing art critic for a day.
I could appreciate the overwhelming cliche of this context, the gallery patron mistaking literal discardable garbage as a profound artistic statement. Yet, the circumstances did not deter what I felt to be a clear message: The revelation of a symbolic medium dating beyond antiquity through a melting of frost beckoning forth the warm Spring of revitalization.
This was a synchronous assurance, reminding me what I already knew: Society is shifting into a new era, and art will follow.