This past weekend, you had your choice, in Seattle, of how you’d like your visual art. You could stay up late with it, at SAM’s Remix, or convene with it, at the Affordable Art Fair, making its debut appearance in Seattle. You could only walk home with it from the latter, which offered pieces ranging from $100 to $10,000, and a free wrapping service.
But you could see work by Victoria Haven at both (her Proposed Land Use Action installation is part of SAM’s Seattle response to the Pompidou Elles exhibit). And Dan Tague’s rumpled bills will appear at Bellevue Arts Museum in their Love Me Tender exhibit, opening February 22, 2013.
Twelve of the 50 booths at the Affordable Art Fair were staffed by “nearby” Northwest (Seattle and Portland) galleries, which means that the $12 admission parceled out to just $1 per local gallery (if you were inclined to amortize that way). You could spend all day there if you wanted. Seattle Center’s Exhibition Hall has never looked more soignée, and there was a café for the hungry or thirsty.
It is true that SAM has fewer examples of what might be called “condo wall” art. This genre includes anything with a ballerina, and especially art pieces with a black-and-white ballerina wearing red pointe shoes. (It’s hard to argue with Jen Graves when she says that Northwest artists looked very good in comparison to those featured in galleries from elsewhere at the fair.)
The director of Seattle’s fair, Jennifer Jacobs, gave me a tour at a preview night, telling me that the draw (besides affordability) was really the variety of art in one space. Most of us have not visited twelve galleries in one day, let alone fifty. The fair boasted many different kinds of paintings, sculpture, ceramics, photography, prints (you could even watch prints being made Sheila Coppola of Sidereal Fine Art Press). The pieces jostled each other as in a market.
That’s the difference you might have felt at SAM: curation. As it happens, Elles is as wide-ranging in media and subject matter, even moreso, but there’s not much for the condo wall. (Well, it would have to be a very, very nice condo.) But in contrast to the dressed-up Exhibition Hall, SAM’s Remix was a chance for the museum to let its hair down, while guests wear theirs however they like. If you wore polka dots, you got in free; one young woman showed up wrapped up in a Twister game.
On the main floor, there was a dj and, later, dancing; a few bars; a few bands, down in the South Hall. You could be interviewed for your perspective on “having it all.” You could create some art yourself, or go for a tour with a Seattle figure of some kind of renown. For the most part, Remix visitors take SAM up on the offer to wander the exhibits. Two disoriented men stumbled out of Nan Goldin’s slideshow (for mature audiences, it features intimacies), elbowing each other and chortling. “But women love that kind of stuff,” one said. Not regular museum-goers, you might guess, but here they were.
