According to the art world the Melbourne Art Fair is a good thing, a festive gathering of gallery people from around the country, who put up their best stuff and have fun at cocktail parties attended by international art celebrities. But the art world also says that the Melbourne Art Fair is a bad thing, a pointless gab fest and opportunity to pose in front of art, piss on and it’s an event that has all the artistic credibility of a boat show. And then there are the art world people who don’t really have an opinion about The Melbourne Art Fair, they’re just kind of, ‘hey, we’re heading down to Melbourne this year to see how it goes and if it’s fun, maybe we’ll go back…’
Then we hear that painting is either ‘dead’ or ‘overlooked’ but every show we go to in commercial gallery is painting, and not just abstract paintings either, but landscapes and horses and portraits and figurative paintings, some out of focus, others in focus, some very colourful and others a bit drab, but it’s painting, people, painting, painting, painting! And guess what? Joe Furlonger does better “surfaces” than Dale Frank. We don’t know what that means either but before we have time to figure it out, we hear that Tracey Moffatt sold USD$500,000 of work from her Oxley show and, if she sells out the rest of the edition of 25 of her Adventure Series through her international dealers, she stands to make, before commissions and deductions, USD$2.5 million or about AUD $4.8 million. Does Moffatt give a toss what people think of her? Pffft.
But you know what? It doesn’t matter. The sun is shining and the sky is blue and the late afternoon sunlight makes Sydney sandstone glow a beautiful orange. We may be embittered cynics without a penny between us, but we’re living the art life, and that’s just another way of saying the good life…
