Parallax Art Fair I

I meet a lot of people all over the world in person and online through Parallax Art Fair. Sometimes these interactions are prosaic, but more often I end up having quite deep and thoughtful conversations about the problem of art and the industry from insightful artists. Although I have noticed a decrease, some artists still equate a lack of professional integrity with fee-based exhibitions. There are definitely myths surrounding commission-based selling, but the disconnection of money and creative integrity runs deeper and is possibly the influence of certain political and philosophical ideas absorbed through pedagogical systems, which, more often than not, are still quite marxisant, especially here in the UK, but I have detected it in the US as well. These systems have gradually lost, in my opinion, their core, perhaps even their purpose. What we get then is something quite superficial, something that functions more like a "tradition" even a "style" of thinking. I was always fascinated to trace the set of ideas inherited by recently employed academics in universities. It was like watching pigments slowly increasing in fluidity as water is added. What had once been real and active in previous decades had gradually morphed into little more than a position of style in the concatenation of pupils. There is also still confusion between "vanity galleries" and other forms of spatial rental in the artistic community. I have written elsewhere about "vanity galleries" and the politics of display, so I refer you to my essay Twelve and Proem 1812 Dialogue on the Parallax Art Fair archival section. These sets of ideas in the artistic community will have an origin of some kind that can possibly be described. Tracing and locating it is a way to demonstrate that it is one glass box resting amongst many, and not between or amongst the glass boxes; a circle within a circle. Educating ourselves of that possibility and our circumstances is possibly to start the challenging process of emancipation towards the ideological networks within ourselves.