May 20 – 22 was the big troika art fair weekend here in SF, and we were eager participants in ArtPadSF, the smaller “boutique” fair at the Phoenix Hotel organized by local hotelier Chip Conley and managed/curated/vetted by local art maven Maria Jenson.
Much has been written, opined, egested and digested about what it all meant for the City, for its art scene, for the Bay Area “art market” (or “artMRKT” if you prefer – as if the phrase had been transliterated into Czech) - reviews, blog posts by the dozen, plus all the dishy stories about the turf war/family feud/lawsuits between the two, formerly partnered New York-based organizers of the other fairs taking place at the same time – the S.F. Fine Art Fair and, yes, artMRKT San Francisco. One week on, here is a brief distillation of our thoughts and impressions.
We confess we didn’t make it to the Ft. Mason fair. Too far from the Tenderloin, and no free shuttle. We did, however, get over to artMRKT, at the Concourse Design Center. Organized by a New York gallery scion who is staging similar fairs in the Hamptons, Houston, and elsewhere, here was an honest-to-God mainstream contemporary art fair, just like what you get in Chicago, New York, Toronto, and LA (Miami in December is, of course, in a class by itself). Many of our favorite galleries in SF and beyond had booths at artMRKT. We loved what they were showing, and we left with the earnest hope that this enterprise was a success for all of them.
That said, Thank God for ArtPadSF. In our view, the importance of having a truly home-grown art fair taking place in tandem with the two "blue chip" fairs that parachuted in from NY cannot be overstated. The fact that ArtPad was masterminded by a local hotel impresario in a decidedly downmarket venue in the Tenderloin (with heavy Burning Man overtones), rather than art world cognoscenti, underscores its significance as an indigenous expression of San Francisco’s unique visual culture.
You see, when it comes to technology, social networking websites, food, or locally sourced, community based activism, the Bay Area has an ample supply of that solipsistic swagger that comes with being the true innovator, the authentic cultural leader. Such confidence is lacking when it comes to the visual arts, where New York, London, Hong Kong, even LA, are where the cultural leadership has opted to roost. Perhaps understandably, the SF art world seems often to be glancing Eastward for validation. Sure, a SECA award is great, so is a Kenneth Baker review, but we still look to ArtForum, to the Whitney Biennial, to MOMA, to Art Basel as the grand anointing powers of our art world.
We appreciate this reality, and certainly recognize the inherent and necessary cosmopolitanism of contemporary art. But we also see a real risk to SF of losing an opportunity to evolve into a truly innovative force in the production of visual culture, just as it has been in the production of technology-based culture. Art that is created, curated, exhibited, and/or marketed with a supplicant eye toward New York, LA, or the global art market is necessarily infected by an impurity of purpose.
So we salute the artists, galleries, and performers – most of them wonderful, some of them genuinely brilliant, a few unabashedly mediocre – who came together in the Tenderloin for those three wonderful days in a chilly San Francisco May. Here’s to keeping it local. See you at ArtPadSF 2012.
