Art for Sale: Covering the Contemporary, Courting the Commercial

With writing, as with many creative endeavors, sometimes it's a false start that leads to something interesting. In this case it was a photography exhibition I saw in Lagos that struck a chord and, in my view, warranted reviewing. On returning to New York, I held forth on the topic enthusiastically to Dunja Hersak, the overseas exhibition review editor for this publication. Her expression was ambiguous. Probing a little, I discovered the reason: The exhibition I was proposing to review took place in a commercial space, and African Arts does not cover commercial projects. What's more, the space in question is located inside a hotel—a kind of dubious Russian doll of commercialism. For a moment I felt deflated and foolish—of course I couldn't write about art-for-sale in an academic journal. The problem is, in cities in Africa, a lot of up-and-coming contemporary art spaces have a commercial side. I made this point to Dunja. "Well, maybe you could write about that," she said. This got me thinking.

Much has been made of the Internet's powerful role in disseminating information about artistic happenings on the continent, and for many researchers, perhaps especially those of us who were still teenagers when the web became part of everyday life, the world of blogs and social media is a natural starting point. Spend a bit of time online and you quickly uncover a complex of digital magazines, social networks, and other websites providing information about contemporary art exhibitions and events taking place in cities across Africa. This of course does not provide a comprehensive view of everything going on, but it does give a general sense of the scene, which is ideally supplemented by personal tip-offs and leaflets picked up in hotel lobbies, restaurants, and shops. In this universe, it is almost a given that there will be some kind of money-making opportunity underlying much of what is happening, but this is not necessarily seen as cause for concern. Yes, work gets bought and sold, but engaging with art in spaces where this happens is a small price to pay for finding out about artists who would otherwise be left with no platform and no audience.

1.

Installation view of François-Xavier Gbré, Abroad, at Art Twenty One, Eko Hotel & Suites, Victoria Island, Lagos, November 15, 2014–January 10, 2015.
Photo: ©: Mark C

The role of journals is, of course, distinct from that of websites. One reads journals for in-depth scholarly essays and reviews; one does not expect to find up-to-the-minute information about exhibitions taking place in Accra or Addis Ababa, although occasionally one may be fortunate to find a relatively recent review from an African institution. Nevertheless, the argument I am testing here is that the exclusion of the commercial is increasingly resulting in journals portraying a partial sense of artistic activity on the continent. Is it still tenable to maintain that scholarly publications should entirely reject market-based activities as a topic of engagement? The case against their inclusion—market interference, conflict of interest, and so on—is well rehearsed, but what about some possible cases for?

2.

François-Xavier Gbré
Imprimerie nationale, Porto Novo, Bénin (2012) Archival pigment ink on fine art paper

Photo: © François-Xavier Gbré, courtesy Art Twenty One, and Galerie Cécile Fakhoury

To begin with, as mentioned earlier, projects with commercial goals (or at least entanglements, and who doesn't have those …) are arguably playing an increasingly important role in exposing audiences in Africa and overseas to contemporary art from the continent, especially in places where public support for the arts is minimal. On recent visits to Lagos and Abidjan, for example, I was struck by the professionalism of a few privately run, commercially oriented spaces that were putting on regularly rotating exhibits of work by interesting local and regional artists and were starting to plug into largely the same networks as galleries you would find anywhere in...