New Nordic
During the last year, several commercial spaces in the Nordic art scene have been linked to institutional and independent initiatives – not just to generate extra visitors and answer to collectors’ wishes, but also to create an energy that can redefine the art circuit. But it demands a common notion of the common good.
The questions; ‘what, how and for whom’ are no longer just curatorial statements (labeled by the Croatian curatorial group What, How and for Whom, since 1999), but a general concern in investigating and questioning the recipients, production and presentation of art today. By highlighting the economies and transactions of contemporary art so strikingly, the group can be seen as one of the very important contributors to a genuine public redefinition of the contemporary infrastructure of art.
It’s not a theoretical art scene analysis I am moving towards, but a local empirical recognition: it’s based on observations, conversations, thoughts and discussions on the dilemma of exclusiveness that seems to influence the way art scenes aim but fail to present themselves anno 2014.
So, this weekend I was attending the Market Art Fair in Stockholm, the biggest Nordic art fair presenting high profiled galleries within the region. Nothing new about that. Just a very professional, contemporary presentation of great contemporary artists from all over the world spiced up by a Nordic sensation for refined photography (Thomas Bangsted, Anneè Olofsson, Astrid Kruse Jensen, Peter Johansson, Pekka Luukkola, Charlotte Gyllenhammar among others) and works loud and appealing enough to please the big crowds moving through the halls of Liljevalchs Konsthall.
Stockholm – commercial or not
In an attempt to bridge the commercial fair with the rest of Stockholm, last year a small group of entrepreneurs (mainly communication professionals) initiated Stockholm Art Week (SAW), creating a new common ground in the Swedish art scene where commercial value is treated equal to artistic, yes, even social value. Criteria of success for such art week initiatives are obviously the unsuspected meeting with new publics and conjunctions of – at its best – oppositional platforms for contemporary art. All of this joining in a collective celebration and circulation of art. That was the case with Copenhagen Art Week last year, where both commercial, non-commercial, institutional and independent initiatives collided happily, feeding on and from one another.
Beside the Market Art Fair and part of the SAW Program, you could find the public and collective billboard gallery Stockholm Is Your Canvas (presenting uploads by the public in the city centre), a Gallery Night (with 28 galleries), Stockholm Art Book Fair, an exhibitions made especially for SAW: BIOTOP – an exhibition intervening in the displays of the beautiful (and quite old) Biological Museum, and finally the very commercial and didactical The Art of Not Making at Bukowskis (an auction house in Stockholm).
A selection of institutions chose to cooperate as well and place their openings or special events during SAW, with the splendid group show Reports from the New Sweden at Tensta Konsthall as a personal favorite. As a result, SAW could present a relevant program with a lot of great exhibitions and activities, but hardly any non-commercial initiatives or exhibition spaces. The non-commercial fair SUPERMARKET did not want to take part in SAW, as I was explained by SAW. SUPERMARKET wants to nurse the strict identity of the fair and be clearly distinguished from the commercial parties of the Stockholm art scene it seems.
These parties have truly forgotten the energy that came out of the common initiative Stockholm Stockholm Stockholm in 2011, bridging the obvious gaps of the scene, and creating enough energy for everyone involved, commercial or not, artist or public.
Who’s afraid of the public?
For an arts professional traveling occasionally to the Swedish capital, art weeks like these are wonderful stews of art geeks, unexpected art experiences and new introductions, and even though my focus is barely commercial, my experience of an art scene is central to both the professionals I meet and myself.
My critical analysis is aimed at the lack of common infrastructure and points at a classical dichotomy of identity in the art scene, that is unfortunately also a specific characteristic of the one in Stockholm, where the commercial parties strive at and feed from the exclusiveness, VIP-lists, VIP-this, VIP-that, enclosed structures with few public concerns, and where the non-commercial parties strive at and feed from structural, critical investigations, formalized activism and archive building while trying to neglect the need of a broad public to realize the social ends of their artistic strategies. This dichotomy is of course a caricature, but with a certain truth to it. It is exclusive either way, and by not recognizing the common goods of a common ground, Stockholm ended up lacking an actual identity. And for what purpose? None, I would argue.
Matthias Hvass Borello
is an independent Curator, editor and art critic at KUNSTEN.NU
