Is "affordable art", a thing ?
London, New York, Hong Kong, Amsterdam, Singapore, Brussels, Hamburg, Stockholm, Sydney and Melbourne are the 10 cities where the British company The Affordable Art Fair Ltd. organises yearly art fairs meant to sell only artworks worth 7500€ or less. The physical audience is significant (180,000 people) and the overall sales volume amounts to £32m, annually. The project idea is firmly grounded on statistical data: transactions of less that 10k have represented the lion's share of the auction market in the past 5 years (see Artnet Stats below). So, according to Affordable Art Fair, price tags in the range between 2500€ and 7500€ represent the sweet spot for new art buyers. Let's not forget that this is the primary market, not the secondary one. For less than 7500€, you are likely to buy "reproducibility" here.
But is 'affordable art' a real currency for the chattering classes and to what extent is it popular? According to art dealer Michael Findlay there are only 3 classes of art that are really popular: Art that is very expensive (which is by far, claims the dealer, the most popular), followed by Art that is fake (Federico Zeri would certainly agree to that), and Art that is stolen.
Like currency, the commercial value of art is based on collective intentionality. And this is where it becomes problematic. Many find the price of artworks of ultracontemporary artists, insulting, for example. The identity of the artist and some colourful personal narrative seem to be important factors to generate buzz-worthy works which will increase their value in time. Despite this, data indicate that, for the most part, art is a poor investment, and the primary activity in the art world revolves around buying and selling affordable yet engaging works, as emphasized by Findlay.
Intrigued by the affordability debate, I have visited the 13th edition of the Brussels Affordable Artfair, searching for photographic works and trying to have a sense of the value of the 'collective intentionality' generated by the galleries that sponsor the Affordable ArtFair. I haven't been impressed. The photographic genres in an Affordable ArtFair are consensual, familiar, low risk, and deja-vu. In curatorial terms, this implies diluting the little good, with an overdose of popular.
ARTITLEDcontemporary (a NL gallery) proposes the Australian Tom Blachford, who works - with his MIDNIGHT MODERN series - on moonlight images of Palm Springs (CA) modernist villas. The visual storytelling is elegantly cinematographic. The long exposure technique - blending real shadows with night skies - generates subtly surreal landscapes. When I see this kind of work, I only feel the need to revisit archetypes like Slim Aarons' images of life inside the American 'shrines of hedonism'. Or I want to see Stephen Shore (1973 Palm Beach - Florida series) or the boy and the tricycle of Garry Winogrand's Albuquerque, New Mexico, 1957, or White Sands, New Mexico 1964. While not being fully on the side of Blachford, I recognize the aesthetics of the results. Above all, I am fascinated by the cohort of artists which feel necessary to revisit the same genre for the segment of the new art buyers. You have Patrick Lajoie - distributed by Envie D'Art ; Ludwig Favre(distributed by Yellow Corner); Dean West (this is his site), or Kate Ballis. Try to see how these works stand the comparison with Erwin Olaf 's 2018 Palm Springs series.
Lydia Vives ticks all the boxes of an advertising and fashion photographer of the social media age. Published by Esquire and Vogues Italy, she has more than 10k followers on twitter, has successfully participated to a bag of awards (13 awards won only in 2022, 23 in the COVID years!), she teaches 'fine art photography' and 'pictorial photography' classes at DOMESTIKA, retouching at the IDEP school in Barcelona, and one-to-one business or artistic classes to anyone who wants to sell artistic photography. Her online shop features works from 350€ to 3,500€ with editions from 5 to 30 units. In her work Lydia quotes Erwin Olaf, Annie Leibowitz, Nadav Kander, Sarah Moon, Ellen Von Umwerth, Bettina Rheims etc.. From an art history perspective, her imagery tries to dialogue with the academic painters of the last quarter of the XIX century (Rossetti, Alma-Tadema, Bouguereau, Leighton, Godward). In addition to being sold at Affordable, Lydia is represented by ARTOUI in Munich and promotes her work to respond to the needs of interior designers and architects.
Alain Trellu is Belgian. His site contains multiple types of photographic experimentations, but what we see here is distinctively Belgian. The series is called REPETITA. It is an interesting typology, inspired by the world of animation, by Magritte and Folon.
I respect the work of Gemmy Woud-Binnendijk and I encourage you to visit her site, as the works shown in Brussels were probably not the most representative. She alternates between the polished aesthetics of Erwin Olaf (getting closer to the archetype than Vives) and the revisitation of the Dutch golden age (Willem Claesz Heda), classics. Gemmy really masters the digital workflow, from studio lighting to digital retouch. Unsurprisingly she's an accomplished Phase One/ Profoto ambassador.
Mireille Roobaert is a Belgian photographer specialised in architecture, portraiture and editorial photography. She uses anamorphosis to create these 'Forest Iris' which she then prints on Chromaluxe or suspends in led light boxes. A large work based on multiple exposures was also on sale in the expo.
The Affordable ArtFair is an interesting sociological experience which, in a way contradicts Adorno's idea that democratization participates to the loss of aesthetic standards. Here, everything is done to precisely capitalise on a set of standards. The issue is to be able to philologically go back to the archetype....
Having too much fun in an Affordable ArtFair should be welcomed by rather brutal lessons on the hierarchy of artistic standards. The kind of lesson on Cerulean Blue Miranda Priestly gives in The Devil Wears Prada.
A Few (Non photographic) Talents Discovered at Brussels Affordable Art Fair 2022
IONNYK a young Belgian start up is proposing a new display technology based on 'e-paper ink capsules that mimic the appearance of ordinary ink on paper'. With a subscription mechanism you'll have your walls permanently populated by black and white artworks: you can 'create your personal playlists and change pictures along the setting or mood of the day', the company says. Frames are cordless and the paper simulation very convincing.
Finally, I'd like to mention 4 (non photographic) artists working either around photography or with shapes and devices which are being used by contemporary photography artists too (see my post 'way beyond photography'). First, look at the oil paintings of Jean Marc Amigues based on motion blur photography. Then check the tri dimensional paper works by the Korean Lucio Lim : when I saw it I cold not but think of the work of Nathalie Boutté. When I saw the vertical thread of Matijs Siemens I thought of the work of the finnish photographer Jussi Nahkuri. In conclusion, the 'boxed Velazquez' by Enrique Gonzalez exploits the same device used by Milja Laurila (Untitled Woman III) one the of PersonsProjects artists, exposed in Paris Photo 2022. The device is the same, but the significance of the result not comparable [a side by side will follow].