Ideas that Changed Art Forever – Land Art

Art Fairs: Reflecting and Shaping the Market

What are They?

The major art fairs are huge dates in the international calendar of the Art World.  Prestigious occasions such as Art Basel, TEFAF (the European Fine Art Fair) Art Miami, dOCUMENTA and Frieze bring together artists, galleries, curators, critics, collectors and art enthusiasts from all around the world.

They are opportunities for galleries and art institutions to showcase the work of the artists that they represent, to sell the work, and for the world to take a look at the themes, ideologies, techniques and aesthetics that are shaping the current discourses of art. They show who is making what, why, and how it lines up against all the rest of the work that is being produced at that point in time.

Who Attends?

Art fairs are a convergence of everyone that has some kind of connection with the art market. Artists, gallery owners, curators, writers, critics, collectors, art fans and a wide spectrum of other groups and individuals all attend in a mix of styles, backgrounds, attitudes and motivations. This incredibly diverse crowd creates an eclectic and exciting atmosphere. Often talks, discussions and presentations take place, and they are a great place to network, learn and engage in the Art of the moment.

The History.

The history of Art fairs is long, varied and rich. Traditional 2 and 3 dimensional mediums such as painting, drawing and sculpture have always needed a setting to be showcased and sold.

The Académie des Beaux-Arts opened their first Salon exhibition in Paris, 1667. This displayed their chosen artists, the roster of individuals who were deemed by the institution to be the best at the time. If you were a painter or a sculptor that wished to exhibit work, there was a rigorous application procedure, and of course, nepotism and institutional motivations played their significant parts in the shadows behind the scene.

This event was one of the most important displays of visual culture of its day. From 1748 – 1890 it played a huge role in determining the developments of Western art, both in accordance and in opposition to its declared values and tastes on ‘good’ and ‘bad’ work. You will find that many of the artists that you love interacted with the Salon at some point during their careers: Painters such as Jacques David, Gustav Courbet and Edouard Manet for example.

In England, The Royal Academy (founded in 1768) also held regular exhibitions known as summer shows. These events became a way to display and sell artworks by the artists that were affiliated with the Academy. Like the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the Royal Academy held a supremely powerful position within English culture, and almost dictated public opinion on what Art should be, how it should be judged and the aesthetic values it should uphold.

In many ways the contemporary Art fairs owe a debt to this model. They are certainly influenced, in a historical sense, by the way that these institutions functioned within, and influenced, the cultural tastes and values of the societies that they were a part of.

What effect they have on the Art Market?

From this background, it is clear to see how the largest art fairs have become institutions in their own right. Art Basel recently titled their fair ‘Art Basel in Basel’, an odd and slightly pretentious act, but one that does demonstrate just how the event has grown to become a cultural symbol in its own right.

Art fairs exert a huge influence over what it bought, sold and seen in the international art market.

What do they Mean?

Art fairs are a reflection of the Art world at any one particular time. The themes that run through them in turn demonstrate the wider opinions and tastes of contemporary trends.

What is great about art fairs is that they are so varied. We have looked at a few of the most prestigious and famous examples, but they are many different varieties all across the world. Fairs that specialize in certain mediums or locations are popular, and every art fair is always an interesting affair. The Internet has rapidly changed the way that Art is discovered, shown and sold, but Art fairs remain hugely influential and important within the global Art sphere.

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10 reasons why you need creativity in your life

Creativity is a vital and essential aspect of progress, innovation and success. As Einstein said ‘Creativity is seeing what others see, and thinking what no-one else has ever thought.’ Here is why developing your creativity will benefit you in everyday life.

Cathartic qualities

A creative pursuit can become a great outlet for venting steam in a positive and cathartic manner. It is an important life skill to develop in yourself a way to exercise the negative and destructive emotions and forces that build up in each and every one of us. Finding a way to turn these potentially damaging sentiments into something positive can have a hugely productive influence in your life. Any creative pursuit can utilize these negative emotions, and use them to influence and inspire paintings, songs, poems, books and poems. From Proust to Goya, the list of creative individuals throughout history who have made use of this technique is endless.

Helps the way you think

Being creative forces you to adopt new ways of thinking. You have to challenge what you think you know, experiment with what you already do, and the results are often incredible. Through one creative task, such as taking a single photograph of a tree every day for a month, you may realize that you have developed a new idea or perspective on a subject, such as a rekindled love of the natural world. Creativity is a tool that allows you to look at the world with fresh eyes, something that we all need to do from time to time.

More energy and better moods

When you become entwined in a creative project, it draws you in and you will suddenly find new reserves of energy to work with. The story you are writing, or the short film you are making, become projects that make you wish for more hours in the day, just so you can work on your creative pursuit. When was the last time you woke up genuinely excited about what you were going to make / create / build that day? Well then, time to start a new project!

Linked to innovation

Innovation comes from turning away from the accepted norms of the time. Copernicus, Newton, More, Einstein, Da Vinci, Smithson, Warhol, Courbet and Picasso are all names that have been immortalized by history. They were all individual and creative thinkers, and used their abilities to help make huge innovative leaps in human progression. Perhaps you yourself might not reinvent the way we understand the universe, but becoming more creative will improve your personal ability to come up with innovative and exciting solutions to problems.

Desirable attribute in modern business

Innovation is a vital aspect within any business. In your career, odds are that an ability to think with creative intelligence will serve you well. It is a characteristic that can be difficult to convey through a resume or an interview, but even the act of making a concerted effort to develop your creative abilities will make this task easier in itself. Creativity can be applied within any profession, looking for new opportunity, seeing processes from different angles in order to improve them, or even the ability to empathise with other people are a few examples of the positive impacts that creativity can improve.

Helps you to see opportunity

Failure is a large part of any creative process. The rules of any creative process are never set in stone, and it is part of their appeal, they are often ambiguous and changeable. Musicians, artists, writers and anyone with a sincere involvement with creativity must understand that failure is part of the game. To be creative, you have to accept that your experimentations will often not work out, but that you must keep on experimenting until you find that perfect colour or ideal sentence.

You start to realize that this is applicable to life. That when events don’t work out in your favour, you can instead draw out the new opportunities that have been presented to you. As James Joyce said ‘mistakes are the portals of discovery’.

Always learning

You can never ‘complete’ creativity. You can always get better, change direction or try something new, and this way of thinking encourages a thirst for knowledge and learning. Teaching yourself a new creative skill will affect your whole life, as well as being highly rewarding. Photography forces you to learn technical skills, and look at the world through a lens for example. Learning to carve teaches you about the properties of materials. Reading books about the way that other people think will reveal new insights about your own thoughts and feelings. In short, creativity encourages your personal desire to learn and discover new things in the world.

Helps you to focus

Creativity will focus your mind. When painting or drawing, you must block out everything and concentrate solely on what you are doing. It is a skill that requires patience and time, and one that most of us don’t practice that much of the time, as the demands of contemporary life and work normally require us to multitask. To cultivate this skill will help to improve your concentration and ability to focus intently, to commit you completely to the present.

Teaches dedication

Natural talent of course plays a role, but it is not a case of either being creative or not. Creative thinking, like everything else, needs to be cultivated through dedicated effort. This takes time, it is not easy, but it rewards the people who endure in many ways.

Tangible results

If you decide to start painting for example, after working, learning, experimenting, failing, repeating and struggling, you will eventually create a tangible image. The painting will exist as the result of all your hard work and newly developed skills. This is incredibly satisfying, and a cycle that becomes self-perpetuating: as you paint the next few paintings, your technical expertise and ability to express your ideas and emotions will improve, and your creativity will augment itself.

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How to See More in an Artwork

Understand the Context

Art is always a reflection of its times. Taking time to think about the political, social and economic events of the period when it was produced will give you a wider scope to comprehend what the artwork is trying to achieve, and why it was made in the way that is was.
Historical context will give you a greater understanding of the purpose of a painting. Picasso’s Guernica for example: A gigantic modernist masterpiece containing huge semi abstracted figures and writhing animals cannot fail to impress when you see it for the first time. Once you know that it is a depiction of the brutal aerial bombing of the Basque town of the same name in 1937, during the Spanish civil war, our understanding will change. As we know this, we gain insight into the artwork, and can comprehend how and why this canvas has toured the world, and earned its reputation as one of the most significant and iconic anti-war images within human history.

Research the Artist

We all know the expression that ‘knowledge is power’, so if you want to see more in an artwork, then it makes sense to research about the artist that produced the artwork you are looking at. This will help you to think about their personality, motivations and the events within their lives that may have shaped the way that they felt about certain subjects.
Joseph Beuys, the German Artist, was shot down in an Airplane during the Second World War on the Crimean Front. The story goes, that a local Tartar tribe, who found him close to death in the snowy woodland, took him back to their settlement and saved his life. Supposedly, they smothered him in fat and wrapped him in felt to keep him warm. These unconventional materials became influential within his own sculptures, and unless you knew their story and relevance to his life, then they would be shrouded in mystery.

Empathise with the conditions of the time

There is a phenomenon called shifting baseline syndrome, which basically means that as humans, we automatically assume that the conditions of our live are the norm, because it is what we are used to. Although we attempt to comprehend how it must have been for the general population 100 or 200 years ago, it is very difficult for us to imagine with any validity. For example, a large portion of the world now owns a mobile phone. 10 year old children in the developed world will grow up with the idea that this is the accepted norm, and if they have used and owned a mobile since this age, then the idea of not having one and not being connected to the internet all the time will seem foreign to them. For anyone older than 25, we can all perfectly well remember a time when mobile phone use was not ubiquitous.
In the same vein, try to think about this when you look at Artworks. Oil paint for example, is now sold readily and easily in tubes. This was not always the case, these paints used to be sold as raw material that had to be ground by the artists, or the assistants, and mixed in a hugely time consuming process. The next time you look at a Dutch still life painting, think about how the artist will have spent days just creating the paint, a task that nowadays takes an artist a second to simply squeeze out of the tube.

Listen to your Heart

Art means many different things to many different people, and its motivations and aims vary tremendously. The vast majority of artworks begin as a way to express an idea, feeling, or as some kind of social commentary. Cezanne said ‘that a work of Art that does not begin in emotion is not a work of art’, and this is a good quote to keep in mind when you observe and experience an artwork.

There always exists a wealth of academic ideas, interpretations and individual opinions on almost all aspects of art, but it is important to remember to trust your gut and listen to your heart. If you feel something when you look at an artwork, if it stirs any kind of strong emotional reaction in you, then you must listen to that feeling and follow it to wherever it takes you. Your personal impression of an artwork, the way that it connects with you, is just as important as any lofty and widely accepted view of the most cultured art critics around. It is also ok to be unable to articulate this feeling, so don’t worry about it.

Suspend your own judgment

We all have preconceptions and we all judge. Unfortunately it is part of being human, but when you see an artwork for the first time, it is a good idea if you can try to suspend any opinions that you may already hold. A great artwork will show you the world in a new way. If you have already decided in advance that you are going to hate a certain artwork, or that everything created by another artist is complete genius, then you will miss the idiosyncrasies that make artworks special. Even the greatest artists occasionally made bad paintings, if they didn’t, then they were not trying to be innovative and continually develop their style.
It is very difficult to try to forget what we already know, or to ignore opinions that have already been formed, but if you can, it makes looking at artworks much more rewarding.

Listen to your Head

What do you think the artist is trying to achieve? We all have preferences and different tastes. What may constitute excellence in one field of art could be the mark of bad taste in another. Take the contrast between photorealism and abstract expressionism for example. When you look at an artwork, it is very important to think, for yourself, about what you feel the artist is trying to achieve. If a portrait does not ‘look’ exactly the way that that person would appear physically according to a photograph, it is not because the artist was unable to create such a rendition, but because they chose to depict that person in a new way, and emphasise a certain aspect of their character. This is well explained by James Baldwin, and should always be kept in mind if you want to see more in an artwork.
“The artistic image is not intended to represent the thing itself, but, rather, the reality of the force the thing contains.”
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