Tumble weeds tumbling down the corridors of the 42nd Art Cologne fair, the oldest fair, even predating Basel on the first public day of attendance. Time used to have it where life expectancies weren’t anticipated beyond the early forties and history has repeated itself. If you query any art dealer the world over as to their performance at a given fair, especially if you are press, you will be met with the same cheery response and wide-eyed grin: things are ducky, going swimmingly, wonderful. Sold everything. Yes, I have been guilty of such disingenuousness myself on more than one occasion; I suppose I will be asked to administer to the new portable lie detector test prior to my next press inquiry. Let it be known, after the marathon 10-hour opening and nearly week-long fair (probably the longest of them all) we have sold absolutely nothing. Not a work, not a drawing, not a photo, not a thing. Back at the hotel, church bells of the almighty gothic Dom church resounded just in front of my room and I grieved for, lamented the absence of something that used to be, though now merely a faint memory: the viable fair that was once Cologne. The cycle of life, like the present abysmal economic cycle, has once more repeated itself. I suppose it should have been of no surprise.
In 1991 the Dom itself emblazoned the cover of the New York Times Magazine section with the headline, more or less, What is the Center of the Art World: Cologne or New York? Then a few things transpired on the way to work that forever changed the landscape of art and how it is transacted, namely a deep US recession followed on its heels by a German cyclical downturn; and then, lo and behold, unforeseen by anyone, the upstarts Damien Hirst, Charles Saatchi and Jay Jopling forever changed the course of art commerce and content, for now anyway. Things happen for better and worse, sometimes in paradigmatic shifts like cell phones, the Internet, Goggle and YouTube, and sometimes in art and what swirls around it. Never before had there been such an art boom—more practicing artists, collectors, writers, museums both public and private—and general interest and glamour. If you can call anything associated with the art world attractive in that sense. Fitting that the only English language station on the hotel TV was CNBC as that is the new CNN and Bloomberg the new Artforum. But after ten years that had experienced more growth than in the previous 100 years in art market expansion we are on the verge of a setback and a possibly monumental one at that. Perhaps this is a good thing regarding art fairs, but these events appear to be the first sector in the increasingly global and bloated art world to correct. We have recently witnessed the demise of the Dusseldorf Contemporary fair, the Frankfurt fair, the Mallorca version of the Cologne fair (an anemically attended fair in a Spanish airport in the dead of summer—hello?) and others, and surely a few more will cease in the coming months. Moving the Cologne fair last from the heels of Frieze to the spring, directly clashing with the Brussels fair was also no stroke of genius.
And how has all this affected Cologne? Lest I forget to reference the coup, in all probability the first literal overthrow of an art fair director by popular press not seen since the pamphlets of Thomas Paine campaigned for American independence. However the cause in the Cologne mutiny was not quite so noble or pure. Bemoaning the tragic loss of status of Cologne a group of disaffected local galleriists signed a national newspaper advertisement calling for the resignation of the fair’s director along with a list of some other petty demands. I witnessed these antics from the eye of the selection committee, having been appointed to the position after being rejected or accepted then rejected from just about most every major fair. That these idiots contended by publicly stoning-to-death the outgoing director (all demands were summarily granted by the management of the fair owner) would restore the fair to its former glory is not only laughable but also meaningless in a wider context.
In the end, the ploy was seen as an act of pathetic, petulant children who couldn’t get their way through normal channels, publicly acting out in a world where no one really cares about or pays much heed to such insignificant issues. The problem began with the fact it’s been some years since Cologne has been perceived as the equivalent of the day sales of art fairs to Basel’s night sale. With upcoming spring auctions fast approaching, the long anticipated cracks in the market should finally begin to appear by way of the thick contemporary sales catalogues, much of them filled with works of mediocre quality. Such is the fate of Art Cologne in the present state of the world economy. With the proliferation of fairs in the recent past including the ascension of London, Miami, and even Berlin (stuffed with galleries starved of collectors) and now the inevitable winnowing in the fair marketplace, we could very well see the demise of Cologne, not so much in the near future as in now. And to think, it was the extraordinary public declaration calling for the head of Cologne’s director, an instance worse than typical art world pettiness, a public tarring and feathering no less, that put even the most calloused of the art world ill at ease, and that ultimately backfired. What was left was an aura around Art Cologne of a stinking pile of…
Ok, I am not wholly blameless in the downward trajectory of my own Cologne (mis)fortunes. Due to a rescheduling in my new director’s travel itinerary I was left without wall labels for individual works or visible identification of the artists hanging at the opening, and as a result of a lack of pre-planning we neglected to accurately gauge the booth configuration, failing to account for two inordinately sized exterior walls, which a neighbor so kindly offered to fill for me with their lovely photographs. In the world of art fairs its strictly a matter of horror vacui: the fear of empty spaces and white walls, as the little patches of fair real estate come at a high premium. Yet, you can’t pin it on my lack of aesthetic insight as my booth contained stalwarts of history books and art market favorites alike: Polke, Acconci, Artschwager, Peter Saul, Franz West and industrial designers like Tom Dixon. Admittedly a bit retrograde to the fair fare I normally exhibit, but what better time to do traditional.
The ad hoc plan hatched for the mammoth, naked outside walls adjacent to the pubic passageways was a guerilla installation by William Pope. L, the noted performance artist, that comprised potted house plants on shelves that were heavily, viscously covered in multi-coats of black and blue spray paint till it dripped off the leaves and oozed down the walls. It didn’t take long for the complaints to materialize. Though it didn’t particularly smell all that much in the immediate area of the transgression, when I subsequently went for a coffee I discovered the intra convention center wind pattern had pointed due west, with a wafting toxic cloud of ozone busting fumes—keep it from Al.
The Art Cologne staff acted swiftly and decisively: for hours on end, a three strong security team stood guard watching the paint dry on the leaves, who would not depart till they were utterly convinced the offending spray paint no longer posed a security threat to the barely there public at large, and as it was gloss finish, it was admittedly going to be a long vigilance. What a handy way to repel the few collectors trundling down the quiet aisles. In fact one of the guards ended up attempting to explicate the art to some visitors—I’d love to have been a German-speaking fly on the wall to have witnessed that conversation; to think, we were provided our very own docent, how utterly courteous. An instance of the enlightened discourse on this work, rather than how much is that wonderful art piece, was the comment: “I don’t like to be this plant”.
With fairs such as Cologne, there is an undeniable sense of community at these and other like-minded events that will admittedly be missed, along with the chance to travel to the multitude of destinations that now host them, but soon the surfeit of fairs will exist only in nostalgia. Sitting in the Art Cologne booth there was an eerie stillness, a feeling of listlessness in the air, like being part of a display in a vitrine at a museum of natural history. Though there were occasional big-ticket sales of Richter’s and the like, at the same time I witnessed more than one disaffected participant that stated their intention not to return. Nevertheless the regional fairs remain strategic places to source material such as the 1973 Polke work on paper I picked up from his series of erotic drawings. But acquisitions in the face of a no business climate are a dangerous undertaking, like Russian roulette. What the Cologne gallery instigators woefully failed to recognize in their misguided newspaper petition to publicly discharge the director of the fair was that you cannot simply determine to restore the luster of a city or its importance in a global community that is constantly transforming and mutating. No declaration on the part of anyone, be it a politician, or even worse, a group of inconsequential galley owners can sway the march of time and the shifting balance of power. What the Cologne management was after was rather aptly characterized by the title of the 1973 Sidney Pollack film with Barbara Streisand and Robert Redford: The Way We Were.
Kenny Schachter