AGAINST ART FAIRS
By J.D. Smith
I would like to like art fairs. I really would. By “art fair” I do not mean some swollen juried biennial, but the one-day and weekend events that take place at parking lots, church grounds, or on cordoned-off blocks, with no admission fee.
At first glance, what’s not to like? An art fair represents a small miracle of social organization. People of a wide variety of backgrounds and ages come together to share a harmless common interest as buyers and sellers—and often both. It is a commercial enterprise, to be sure, but one rescued from crassness by its small scale and personal contact: the vendor is usually the maker and promoter as well. The event stands in for an Old World village as we might have liked it to be, with the butcher, the baker, and the candlestick maker, but without a ghetto or public derision of the town whore, who is widely visited in private. Even the word “fair” is haloed with positive connotations. State and county fairs celebrate the bounty of the harvest and provide work for musicians between hits; as an adjective, “fair” is synonymous with “comely,” “just” and “equitable.”
There is only one problem with art fairs: the art. Some might say that’s what displayed isn’t really art at all, but narrowing the definition of art is a fool’s errand in an era where art is defined by context rather than execution, and where exhibits consist of pickled fauna and painted refuse. A more defensible question is whether the art on display is, in its concept or execution, any good.
The answer is frequently no. Effort is in evidence, and often skill, but effort doesn’t always pay off; many know this from seeing their dreams in sports or acting yield to reality. Art fairs thus provide a dense concentration of sincere failures—the works, not the makers, whom one has less right to judge. Unlike Tolstoy’s unhappy families, though, these works do not all fail in different ways. There are predictable patterns.
One is ethnokitsch, which partakes of the quality that Kundera assigned to kitsch at large, the denial of shit: not just excrement per se, but also unpleasantness, ambiguity, the need for explanation rather than mere affirmation. While vibrant ethnic and folk arts represent an ongoing engagement with experience, the human condition as viewed through a particular culture’s prism, ethnokitsch posits ethnic identity as the arbiter of all other values. It is the esthetic equivalent of those T-shirts and bumper stickers that read “Kiss me, I’m [insert ethnicity here].” Like foam fingers that proclaim “We’re number one,” such knickknacks gone bad don’t necessarily lay the groundwork for fascism, but they do little for art.
Ethnokitsch comes in particular flavors. Perhaps because the English and their descendants have largely run the United States, there is no Anglokitsch, or none we’re conditioned to see. From England’s neighbors, though, comes Celtikitsch, portrayals of Irish and Scottish iconography such as intensely green landscapes and shamrocks, real or invented proverbs, toasts and blessings; these wee pearls o’wisdom almost magically attach themselves to lacquered plaques. These pieces are to art what a box of Lucky Charms is to cuisine..
No less ubiquitous is Afrokitsch—more understandable than other types. As African-American history originates in the forcible erasure of identity in the slave trade, African-Americans have had no choice but to recover or construct identity by any means necessary, and one of uses of art is to see ourselves mirrored in the world around us and to have our experience validated by portrayal. Such portrayals, based on a sensibility somewhere between Marcus Garvey and Lord Stanley, include stylized paintings by numbers of African village life, polychromatic textiles, and a ubiquity of wooden statues in the style of previous eras. If these works are necessary to diminish the spectre of being Ellison’s invisible man in American life, this is a small price to pay; art isn’t everything. As Octavio Paz noted of his fellow Mexicans, a people must know itself before relating to humanity as a whole. A first step, though, cannot be confused with setting foot on a summit. *
While ethnokitsch finds a degree of justification, another category has no such excuse. I would call it, for lack of a better term, wizard schtick. Like ethnokitsch, this subgenre derives its appeal from the viewer’s associations with an object rather than the maker’s abilities.
Wizard schtick, though, raises basic questions of psychology. One might wonder why some surround themselves with, besides wizards, various witches, unicorns, fairies, trolls, goblins, both hob and non-, and other miscellaneous spirits, phantoms, and apparitions drawn from the dark and heavily forested world of Tolkien knockoff fiction and Led Zeppelin’s murkier periods.
For sculptures, wood is frequently the material of choice, especially driftwood, or gnarled branches, sometimes inlaid with marbles for eyes. The medium offers the appearance of both irregularity and smoothness, like a misshapen limb, and gives the appearance of figures swept up in a supernatural wind.
For painting, airbrush is often the preferred technique. This may prove strangely appropriate to the ethereal and in most cases non-existent nature of the subjects portrayed. On the surface, airbrush, like the current generation of computer art, provides little in the way of nuance: the illusion of spatial depth through vanishing-point perspective is usually achieved, but texture is not. Perhaps more subtle works could be made, but buyers don’t appear to demand them.
This still begs the question of what the audience sees in these objects. As far as a curious outsider can tell, wizard schtick appeals mainly through its otherness from the world as we know it. This parallels the long-standing critique of religion as wishful thinking, denial of death, or projection of norms onto the tabula rasa of the cosmos. Still, even the harshest critics nonetheless recognize how the religious impulse is often combined with a drive toward morality and justice.
Yet the otherness of wizard shit has no self-evident ethical dimension, only a basis in personal discontents. The buyers and sellers appear to be drawn from the ranks of the emotionally maladjusted or the socially outcast. For whatever reason, these individuals frequently lack self-confidence and a sense of personal or professional daring. Like science-fiction fans, a group with which they partially intersect, these fantasy aficionados form a congress of the intimidated, the powerless, and the largely self-absorbed, holding fast their multi-sided gaming dice against a wedgie-dealing world.
From a sociological point of view, the adepts of wizard schtick are drawn predominantly from members of the lower middle class and working class who lack either the skills or the networks to change their circumstances. (The milieu of Napoleon Dynamite comes to mind.) Faced with a life of blue or white-collar serfdom to the shareholder class, spending as little time as possible with hard facts represents an adaptive strategy. Not everyone takes to alcohol or drugs, and many never get the chance to be as distracted with sex as they might choose. In those cases, daydreaming about an alternative world of wizards, or being one, represents the best option available.
Most common, though, and thus perhaps most troubling, is what might be called “artsy crap.” This consists in largely of embroidered towels, needlepoint pictures, and soft drink bottles with necks melted and stretched out to cygnine lengths, filled with liquids of colors seldom found in nature. They are accompanied by functional objects such as doorstops, paperweights, trivets and spice racks that are in some way modified, or objects that could be useful, or once might have been, such as perfectly good plates painted and hanging on a wall.
What these objects share is not a subject, but rather an approach: the impulse to modify objects that don’t need to be modified. This is not without precedent. Archaeologists routinely marvel at the beauty of the Clovis point. Its balance and delicately worked leaf shape, as well as its polished surfaces suggest a concern with form as well as function. The development of more advanced stone carving, and ceramics, demonstrates the development of ornamentally painted surfaces as well as vessels and tools made to resemble plants and animals.
The modifications involved in artsy crap, though, actually detract from the esthetics of the objects. The underlying impulse is understandable—since many mass-produced items range from the merely plain to the downright brutal in their original state—but the results are disastrous. The original lines are lost in the rococo frippery of covers for facial tissue boxes, or obscured in outlandish colors or patterns, such as a scene painted on the otherwise pleasing symmetry of a circular saw blade. The impulse toward the “cute” and the zoomorphic is also prominent: virtually any household object can be given a face with button eyes.
Stranger still, this practice does not explicitly express any particular worldview or belief system. A Mayan vessel shaped like an ear of maize connected its user with an entire cosmology in which man was both made from corn and solemnly charged with propagating it. In a worldview of greater compassion, if less grandeur, a Swedish backscrubber designed for the disabled (and there is such a thing) embodies a practical humanism.
It is harder, though, to say what’s expressed by a cloth snake, filled with sand or plastic pellets, that seals a doorway against drafts. Cartoonish and useful, the snake on the floor does not seem to stand in for the serpent in the Garden of Eden. And profit hardly explains what the maker of these objects is doing. Almost no one gets rich from art fairs.
The maker’s impulse might in fact stem from a desire for non-alienated labor, or what MBA programs now have us calling ownership of one’s work. The specialization of labor and education, particularly the division between liberal and vocational education, prevents many individuals from developing the taste or skills that would let them realize their creative impulses. The result is debased “art,” but debased less from intrinsic vulgarity (for which many highly trained artists have no excuse) than a lack of opportunity. For many, the thermal snake or painted saw blade represents the only art they know firsthand, made by the only artists they’ll ever meet.
In other words, the makers and buyers of artsy crap are playing a bad hand to the best of their ability. Even if none of them possesses a great skill or vision, or the degree of esthetic appreciation that is in itself a gift, they demonstrate that art represents an essential aspect of existence. But commerce hobbles these aspirations, and what ends up on sale is an interchangeable widget that happens to be made by hand.
This may represent the key difference between art show offerings and self-styled high art. Commerce has always influenced art, yet all but the crassest in the palaces of Florence or the galleries of New York have realized that from all the egos and accounting might arise some by-product that could enrich the human heritage.
No such hope, or illusion, attends the work on display at art fairs. In a convention hall or the open air, the ceilings are low from the perspective of ambition. Hiding this, or perhaps in order to hide this, is the constant motion of buying and selling, the scheduling and attending of one after another art fair. Again and again friendly, good-natured and fundamentally decent people gather and shop for something that is not there.
* For reasons of disclosure, I should note that the Greek strand in my own tangled ancestry does not even produce its own ethnokitsch, unless the definition is expanded to include culinary clichés such as the Greek omelet with feta (difficult if not impossible to find in Greece) and other forms of short-order syncretism like spanakopita with a side of fries. The self-affirming, artistically suspect adornments and tchotchkes of Greek-American décor are pseudo-classical vases of no practical utility (such as one I own) and faux-marble figurines, which are largely mass-produced imports from Asia. As such, they do not appear at art fairs but can be found at flea markets and garage sales.
