Is this fair?

Earth, Ink and Fire installation by Young-Jae Lee and Chen Guangwu

I don't go to commercial art fairs very much anymore. I found they got rather repetitive both within and between fairs, plus I get frustrated at being unable to buy anything myself. But, this weekend saw the launch of a brand new art fair Art13 London at Kensington Olympia, so I thought I should have another go.

I'm sorry to say that the experience largely confirmed my expectations, while also giving me some food for thought. Art13 has billed itself as 'London's most exciting art fair launch in a decade', featuring 129 galleries from 30 countries to allow a truly global conversation. The problem for me was that this merely emphasised how banal so much modern commercial art is, and how the repetitive qualities stretch across the globe. Much of the work was derivative (a few wannabe Anish Kapoors for example), or crude (think 70s porn meets the Chapman brothers), or merely pleasantly decorative. As you might also expect, the already feted galleries were the ones that stood out with some beautiful work, notably the October Gallery with a photograph Fragment No.1 by Huang Xu which really caught me (think Bill Viola meets Dutch still life here).

While looking at one of the special art projects for the fair - a gently intricate installation of ceramics and ink drawings Earth, Ink & Fire by two Korean artists Young-Jae Lee and Chen Guangwu - I realised that I was enjoying it because of the relationship between the ink drawings, the structured glass roof of the Olympia building and the shadow of the lighting rig on the wall. What I think is lacking in all such fairs, therefore, is the relationship between art and space. Each gallery here has merely one makeshift white cube among many others, which very few succeed in personalising and curating as a coherent, independent space. No wonder, then, that it gets repetitive, as the works and spaces blur into one. I noticed, also, that other visitors were instantly more interested in works that required you to enter an installation, darkened film room, or large interactive piece.

I have written before about my doubts for the future of the white box space, Art13 showed me today that the white box had become black-boxed in how we interact with commercial art.