Material for thought

Last weekend was the weekend of the year for art admirers in London, with numerous events and fairs being held in the megalopolis. The Frieze art fair is the leading and biggest one. What draw my attention were the projects commissioned by the fair and some examples of this years’ trend to photography and sculpture.

A big contemporary art fair is like a hangar full of toys. The quantity and diversity of the pieces shown is vertiginous. The objective is to catch the attention of potential buyers, so art galleries tend to highlight distinctive, easy to love pieces of art. The result for a mere visitor like me is a dense and very enjoyable experience.

Yue Minjun at the 798 art district of Beijing, the trademark of Chinese contemporary art.

It was a pleasure for me to see the New Art from China Exhibition at the Saatchi gallery. It reminded me the 798 art district I visited a year ago in Beijing. Chinese contemporary art is easily accessible. I think because it summarizes so well Western contemporary art in its attempts to adapt it to the Chinese culture. A benefit of cross cultural dialogue is that only relatively accessible, understandable language is replicated. You lose in the process some refinements of the original artistic vocabulary of course but you also gain a common basis for new evolutions.  I’m not sure the Chinese contemporary art discovered its own aesthetical identity though, maybe it doesn’t need any more in a globalized art world…