art fairs

art fairs— crowe´s critique and analysis of the market in this month´s art forum seems to get closest to my feelings about art fairs…

but there is something nice about FEMACO this year, some hopeful hopelessness at the very least. Getting to see some really compelling local works, slammed up against and harnessing the industry´s consumptive energies, only serves to further build my hopes up about the possibilities of a levelling of the playing fields in the art markets. The capital that circulates seems to overdetermine so much of even the most localized production. But sometimes some works sneak through unscathed.

Or others choose to point to the M-C-M1 farce by harnessing it´s very spectacle.

The complexities of the market here seem to me to lean towards concepts of hybrid markets, turning much more to  Jan Nederveen Pieterse than more traditional notions of world systems theories from Balibar and Wallerstein. Like the armory, this is an art fair. But situated against such obvious combined and uneven development, critical works seem to have a lot more sway…or at least point to the fallacy of the art market.