There is no free champagne for the press at the Melbourne Art Fair media preview on Thursday morning. This seems like a dangerous miscalculation. But when I check the art press a couple of days later, the initial write-ups from art guide, Ocula, and Vogue are all positive. Sad. Journalists have come to expect so little.
The Fair is held inside a massive pavilion in the Melbourne Exhibition and Convention Centre, directly opposite Crown Casino, which is situated in South Wharf, one of the strangest suburbs in Melbourne. It’s strange because South Wharf consists almost entirely of the Casino, the Convention Centre, and shopping megapolis DFO—a whole suburb walled in by steel and concrete. The thing all three venues have in common is a lack of natural light. At the Casino, this is supposed to make punters disoriented enough to spend all day in there losing money. At the Art Fair, I assume, same.
*
The writer Helen Hughes once described the Fair’s layout as “Sexpo style,” and she’s not wrong. The 7500 square metres of the pavilion are carved up into booths for local and interstate galleries and Indigenous art centres, sixty in total. Each booth has some floor space and three walls for hanging art. Galleries pay to exhibit, except for the art centres, who have their costs covered by the Fair’s corporate and government partners. For a big commercial gallery, 25 square metres costs $12,250 (plus GST). Galleries established after 2016 pay $8,000 for the same space. They all bring their own chairs, tables, and perpetually smiling attendants.
The press hug the wall closest to the entrance while Maree Di Pasquale—the director of the Fair, who is wearing a face-cinching bun and sleek black pantsuit—stands behind a lectern, delivering her opening speech.
“While this is principally a commercial platform, it’s also a playground in which to be inspired…”
I write down: principally commercial platform.
Di Pasquale continues. “In this increasingly fractious world, the Fair reminds us of art’s ability to bring us together.”
I write down: increasingly fractious world.
*
Increasingly fractious world. An art scene euphemism de rigueur. The phrase calls to mind any number of controversies and rifts, none of which can be pinned down as the controversy or rift. It’s not that Di Pasquale is necessarily avoiding naming one fractious thing in particular—something she’s thinking and doesn’t want to say—but that her increasingly fractious world allows any and all fractious things to remain undifferentiated, just part of the large, fuzzy mass of the world’s misfortune. With fractious world the task of definition falls to the listener, and fractious world attaches to whatever is foremost in each person’s mind. Surely, right now, everyone’s thinking the same thing: Palestine. And if not about Palestine directly, then at least the way it’s come to bear on the industry here. Or maybe no-one’s even listening. A guy next to me is secretly photographing another guy’s sneakers.
*
A sculpture is unveiled for our benefit. Except there is no veil; we just shuffle over to it, where it’s already on display, and clap. The artist, Julie Rrap, a diminutive woman in her seventies with a no-nonsense air, stands in front of a life-size bronze cast of herself (naked), which is standing on the shoulders of a second life-size bronze cast of herself (also naked).
“I just thought, who is it that’s got me where I am today? And I thought, well, it’s me!”
*
Several artists hover at their own exhibitions. Apparently, you sell more work when the artist is present; collectors like a personal touch. As we’re led around the Fair by Di Pasquale, stopping in at selected booths, the artists front up. I’ve often winced when artists talk about their own work—they’ve done enough, don’t make them speak, and don’t make them sprinkle some Deleuze over their blobby ceramics or clown paintings. Today, though, I’m finding it charming. They are like school kids doing show-and-tell, shy and proud at the same time. Their gallerists, anxious parents, frequently interrupt to refine something they’ve said. At the COMA booth, which is exhibiting a solo show of Shan Turner-Carroll’s theatrical sci-fi photographs, Turner-Carroll speaks excitedly about extraterrestrials. A bee lands on a nearby sculpture.
“An ET!” he cries.
The gallerist interjects. “Across all of Shan’s work, it’s about communication.”
*
The critic Declan Fry is also on the press tour. He is wearing a brown thigh-length jacket (it’s 35 degrees outside) and a wry smile. After the walk-through is over, we choose our station carefully, positioning ourselves in front of a painting of a sidewalk cafe, facing outwards like the diners, joining them to people-watch and gossip. But we’ve forgotten this isn’t a gallery; it’s a showroom. Anyone in the vicinity of an artwork is a possible buyer and is treated as such. When an exhibitor approaches us to talk about the work, we move to a blank wall next to the entrance. We don’t want to be overheard. We’re talking about an increasingly fractious world…
An announcement booms over the speaker system: “The Melbourne Art Fair is now open.” Waiters in black have materialised at the entrance, holding quivering trays of champagne flutes, which they’ve pulled out for the art-buying public. People start streaming in, mostly in their fifties or older, mostly white; several of the men have popped their collars. It’s midday. An entire tray of champagne glasses falls to the floor and smashes.
*
I find the booth with the biggest crowd. At cbOne gallery, a duo are standing next to one of Reggie Uluru’s Wati Ngintaka (Perentie Lizard Man) paintings which, in Uluru’s telling in the catalogue, depict the Tjukurpa story of a lizard man who stole a coveted grindstone and high-tailed it west, discarding the remains of animals he ate on the way. “He had no awareness of his actions at all, he was just a glutton for meat,” says Uluru. The paintings are densely colourful, and, from a distance, look like fields of wildflowers.
“His work is stunning,” one half of the pair says to the other.
“Yes, but it’ll be interesting to see how many people come in and appreciate it like you and I do.”
“Have you been to Arnhem Land, by the way? Friends of ours run a tour group. We actually bought a work when we went there last time—it was a completely crazy thing to do!—and had it shipped back to Shepparton.”
“We contemplated putting ours behind glass but we didn’t want to.”
I collect my first and only free glass of sponsored champagne and move on.
*
The VIP section. This is a small structure made out of steel trusses, the kind that would buttress a house, except it’s wall-less so that—as several people advise me—you can be seen, and see yourself being seen. A VIP pass, which gives you access to this section, the opening night Vernissage, all four days of the fair, and so-called special events, costs $160. Not too bad, given that the cheapest VIP pass to Frieze London costs almost £1,000. Then again, an opening at the Nicholas Building is free, and you can smoke in the corridors there if you’re discreet about it.
Oigåll Projects is responsible for the cage. Inside it, they also have some works for sale. There are chairs ($1200 each) which only resemble chairs insofar as there are people sitting in them. There is a blobby metal wall sculpture ($78,000) and a floor sculpture at the entrance (also $78,000), which both the security guard and I accidentally lean on while chatting. In one part, curtains screen off a private gathering. This is the barrister’s spot. Barristers are the VIPs of the VIP world because they have money to burn and chambers to decorate as a tax write-off.
*
Two men in their early thirties are having an animated conversation in the corridor near the toilets.
“Rentvest!”
“Did you go with a broker, mate, to get that ING rate?”
“I mean, I was a dollarmite since day one! But nope, I’m done, I’m finished with Commonwealth Bank.”
“Same here man, dollarmite!”
I edge closer to try and get some free financial advice; I, too, was once a dollarmite. One says something about cryptocurrency that I don’t quite catch.
“At this rate, bro, all these investment properties are gonna have blank walls.”
“His business partner, great guy… but it’s better that he’s not attached long term.”
“Yep.”
“Yep. Yeah, well there was a rough patch there…”
“...losing money, losing money, losing money…”
*
The official whisky partner of the Melbourne Art Fair is Glenfiddich. The official champagne partner is Piper-Heidsieck. A single glass of the latter costs $26. The principal media partners are Broadsheet and The Saturday Paper. The Fair’s supporting partners include the Australian Government and Morgans, a stockbroking, financial planning, and wealth management firm. The Fair’s official partners include the Lucas restaurant group, Rationale skincare, and the Ritz-Carlton.
*
I’m standing at Roslyn Oxley9 in front of a Julie Rrap photo-collage from 1984—an elegantly scruffy work that features the artist as a kind of sexy Madonna figure—when I remember that Rrap is the artist Mike Parr’s sister. (Rrap=Parr backwards.) As any Fair attendee who hasn’t been living under a rock knows, Mike Parr and Anna Schwartz recently had a titanic clash over Parr’s performance piece Sunset Claws, Part 3: Going Home, in which he scrawled phrases critical of Israel, largely drawn from a Jacqueline Rose article, on her gallery wall: “apartheid,” “forced displacement of Palestinians,” “Israel…[and, nearby] Nazi.” The day after the performance, Schwartz dropped Parr from her roster, and the pair embarked on a bitter public feud.
Rrap’s sculpture is set just across from Anna Schwartz’s booth. I don’t know what to make of this. Two bronze Julie Rraps opposite one flesh-and-blood Anna Schwartz. Are the women friends? Will Mike Parr come check out his sister’s work? These questions produce lively speculation at the Fair, albeit in whispers.
*
“No gallery is ever having a bad Fair,” one attendant tells me, meaning, no one would ever admit to slow sales or disappointed expectations.
“How’s it been for you?” I ask, three days later, in the final hours.
“It’s been great!” she says.
*
Early Thursday evening and the sun looks positively evil. It’s glaring through a film of white clouds and casting a syrupy orange light on everything.
The Vernissage goes from 5-9pm. Troye Sivan is here, but I don’t see him. He’s hanging out with Tony Albert. Sivan compliments Julia Trybala on her paintings, which are like geometry made flesh—deep red and brown curves intersected by sharp lines.
There seems to be two kinds of people here: the collectors, and the art people. The collectors are dressed very boringly. The ladies have sculptural blonde hair, and are exclaiming and touching the wrists and shoulders of artists. Their hubbies are bald and talking prices with the gallerists.
You can imagine what the art people are wearing. They are wearing the most deranged outfits you’ve ever seen. Andy Kelly of Oigåll Projects is in a wetsuit printed to look like a tuxedo. I didn’t see this with my own eyes but I choose to believe it. I also hear that Kelly owns a latex couch that looks and feels like human skin.
A man in a red floral suit is wearing a choker at the base of his throat, from which a profusion of leather tendrils shoot out, falling around his chest and shoulders. He looks like a rare bird found only on the sixth floor of a Smith Street apartment block.
At the Glenfiddich bar, there is a woman wearing slouchy, bejewelled, elbow-length gloves, accompanied by one of the several young men here who have dressed down in singlets and baggy jeans.
A gallerist tells me: “Right now, it’s not the done thing to be overly ostentatious. Melbourne Art Fair is trying to be a bit more modest this year.”
*
Olsen Gallery is showing Jacqui Stockdale. Her paintings and sculptures feature skeletons wearing frilly, colourful dresses and running shoes—Death’s got somewhere to be. I’m actually quite into the paintings, but they’re framed by unfortunate Frankie mag-style wall decals that I can’t get past. Her booth is packed with gal-pals who are dressed to match the art in brightly patterned dresses. If one were trapped in a Camilla store after dark, this is what it would feel and smell like. Another tray of champagne tilts and the glasses slide off and shatter.
*
A few people bring up the LIVE thing. LIVE is, or was, the Fair's performance program. I get the details from a gallerist who’s eating a prosciutto danish. Apparently, several artists were slated to perform in a series entitled “Performing Care.” But, the gallerist says, after the Fair learned about one of the works, a piece by artist Kori Miles involving a keffiyeh and megaphones, they shuffled around the time and place of Miles’ performance in a process of bureaucratic stifling. Miles and their fellow performers withdrew. There is a short section on the Fair’s website stating that the series will not go ahead due to “scheduling challenges” and claiming they remain “supportive of all works commissioned for this program.”
“The Fair’s meant to be, like, this frictionless commercial space,” the gallerist concludes. “So I’m not that surprised.”
*
While signing a fan’s coffee table book, standing in the middle of his own exhibition of paintings, most of which have already sold, holding a glass of champagne, an artist says, in a tone of mild surprise, “I feel energised at the moment.”
*
The rich and famous artist Dale Frank’s house is filled with antique taxidermied big game: buffalo, giraffes, two fighting polar bears. At Neon Parc, I watch several people chortle over the rude flash-fiction titles on his bulging resin paintings. One of them reads: Sue’s partner Tracy, together now for 16 years, was fond of telling their friends, Sue’s head was too small for her body, her nipples were hairy, her clitoris was the size of a cockatoo, in bed she smelt like Flinders Street Station public toilets, and she spat food when she ate (2023). Every time someone buys one of these works, they are funding Dale Frank’s stuffed animal addiction.
*
The Vernissage afterparty is at The Kelvin Club. This is a member’s club in the city, run by a woman known only as “Miss Pearls.” There is no one on the door, which is a shame: it robs one of the sense of achievement that comes with getting in without a ticket. The interior looks like the slightly-decayed drawing room of a minor English aristocrat, with timber-panelled walls, leather-bound books, and thick red carpet. At the centre of one of the rooms are four pushed-together pool tables, covered in pristine white sheets. Lining the walls are bench seats. This gives the room the feeling of a tiny arena; everyone is sitting in single file against the walls, like virginal teens at a dance. The groups aren’t mingling, and it’s too loud to eavesdrop. There is a tall, thin woman wearing a gingham crop top who has the words “CEASEFIRE NOW” painted on her immaculately toned stomach. People keep pushing on patches of wall, hoping a panel will open to reveal toilets.
*
Standing outside in light rain, an artist offers to do something, anything, to give me a good story.
“What do you need? I’ll do it. Do you want me to climb onto the pool table? Rip my shirt off? Fight someone?”
A second artist, who wasn’t present for the first offer, also offers to do something to give me a good story. Both are gay. I’m moved. Is this what the art theorists are calling “queer care”?
*
The toilets have run out of toilet paper. A girl waiting in the queue by the stalls looks around in vague annoyance. A woman bursts in, her arms full of rolls.
“Coming through! Toilet paper!”
“Wow, you’re art mummy!” the girl exclaims. “There’s always an art mummy at these things.”
“I am art mummy! And Art Money!”
Art Money is a business that offers interest-free payment plans specifically for buying art.
“Wow, you’re Art Money?”
“I’m Art Money!”
*
Does anyone truly, fervently, passionately love an art fair? Everyone’s at least ambivalent, though reasons differ. It’s a necessary evil, a networking opportunity, an overwhelming spectacle, a reputation laundering service, a money laundering service. Social capital runs into real capital and they air kiss. I’m not the first person to get the ick about it. Some of the work is good—and some of it I’m really into—but it would still be good without the Fair. It would probably be better. It feels weird to swoon over a Jenny Watson painting in front of the mergers and acquisitions guy who will buy it and put it in his lounge room.
*
On Sunday afternoon, in the final hour of the Fair, I’m asking everyone for any last pieces of gossip but no one has anything truly newsworthy left to say. Everyone’s tired, hungover, and some of them are getting ready to do it again…and again…and again…at the other capital city art fairs, which come around every couple of months.
*
A team of people in high-vis vests stream into the pavilion as the punters exit. I do as the Melbourne Art Fair Instagram page suggests and, “after a day of exploring…head to @theritzcarltonmelbourne to enjoy panoramic views.” The bars and restaurants are on the 80th floor. My ears pop in the elevator. I go to Cameo, a small, one-room bar that sells cocktails made with vintage spirits—bottles bought at auction and from specialist booze brokers—for hundreds of dollars per drink. Should I do as art money does and cough up $400 for a Manhattan made with Barclay Old Rye from 1931? They also sell average priced beers. I buy one of those instead.
I am alone in the bar except for a couple, who I don’t think were at the Fair. Cameo faces west, overlooking the Bay: there’s Marvel Stadium, the yachts at Docklands, near-empty high-rise apartment blocks, car parks, scarred, greasy industrial lots, the permanently-closed ferris wheel, Port Melbourne with its lego-block containers and immense cargo ships, and a wide expanse of water beyond that. So, this is the view from the top.