Art Is Not Fair

June 19, 2025

Every year, like clockwork, the art world puts on its best shoes and flocks to the next city on the circuit—Basel, Miami, London, New York—for yet another art fair. Rows of booths stretch out like aisles in a luxury supermarket, each gallery vying for attention, collectors circling like hawks, and artists hoping their work lands on the right wall at the right time. There’s spectacle, money, champagne, and always the feeling that if you’re not here, you might be missing something important.

But here’s the thing: real art was never meant to be a spectacle.

It’s easy to be seduced by the glamour of it all. The fairs are expertly designed to feel like the beating heart of contemporary culture. And yet, more often than not, they feel like simulations—perfect lighting, polished work, safe aesthetics, and a persistent sameness that stretches from one city to the next. It becomes difficult to tell if you're looking at art, or just at very expensive decoration disguised as significance.

Real art doesn’t happen under a spotlight. It happens in the dark. It grows in obscurity, in silence, in the friction of real life. It isn’t concerned with trends, algorithms, or collector preferences. It doesn’t emerge from strategy meetings or brand collaborations. The best art is made when no one is watching, and often, when the artist isn’t even sure if it will ever be seen.

The explosion of art fairs around the world hasn’t just shifted the market—it’s changed what kind of art gets made. Artists who want to succeed in that ecosystem often end up behaving more like manufacturers than creators, producing work that can be quickly consumed, easily sold, and neatly packed up to ship across continents. It’s not surprising. When the demand is this constant, the response becomes mechanical. But what’s lost in the process is the strangeness, the risk, the vulnerability—the soul.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with an art fair. Some good work gets shown. Some important conversations happen. But to treat these events as the pinnacle of artistic success is to misunderstand the nature of art itself. Fairs are, at best, a surface. A snapshot. A marketplace.

If you really care about art, you have to go deeper.

Go to the outskirts. Visit someone’s makeshift studio in a crumbling warehouse. Follow the thread of something that feels a little confusing or unresolved. Look where no one’s pointing. The most vital work—the kind that can shake you, change you, stay with you—usually isn’t hanging in the center booth at Frieze. It’s being made quietly, stubbornly, by someone who couldn’t care less about what’s trending.

Art isn’t fair. And maybe that’s a good thing.

Because the moment it tries to be—tries to cater, conform, dazzle, and sell—it loses something essential. Something wild and necessary. The kind of thing that doesn’t belong in a booth or on a feed. The kind of thing you have to find for yourself.