"The Fair"

1. "... emergent art, a term that is indicative of changing times. In the 1980s, when people started to feel uncomfortable with the word avant-garde, they adopted the euphemism cutting edge. Now, with emergent art, anticipation of market potential replaces vanguard experiment." "Uncomfortable" is a euphemism. The various avant-garde made the "next," "new" "move" in an intellectually rich, disciplined, visual "discourse." Then market forces colluded with cynicism and simply bet on newness for newness' sake. Donald Kuspit argued a few years back that the only "move" left is to play one's own idiosyncrasy; i.e. artists no longer participate in a "discourse" or dialogue larger than themselves and their own doodlings. Or, said another way, wanting to participate in a discourse larger than oneself has now become some kind of idiosyncratic desire. I rather think this is the corroding effect of market capitalism on art rather than art's necessary endgame. The above comments pertain to the remaining highlights below as well. I refuse to give in to the depressing conclusions it would be easy to draw from the text's sustained attention to economic aspects of art -- I refuse!

2. "Unlike other industries, where buyers are anonymous and interchangeable, here artists' reputations are enhanced or contaminated by the people who own their work."

3. "More and more collectors are opening their own exhibition spaces. Their official reasons are philanthropic, but their covert motives have more to do with marketing. The work of living artists needs to be promoted to generate consensus."

4. "... there's still an ideological antithesis between art and commerce, even if the two are inextricably intertwined and even when artists make the market an overt or ironic part of their practice. In a world that has jettisoned craftsmanship as the dominant criterion by which to judge art, a higher premium is put on the character of the artist. If artists are seen to be creating art simply to cater to the market, it compromises their integrity and the market loses confidence in their work."

5. "The amount of art in the world is a bit depressing. The worst of it looks like art, but it's not. It is stuff cynically made for a certain kind of collector." -- Jeremy Deller.