For some reason San Francisco Art Fair thinks we’re high roller art buyers (even though we’ve never brought a painting home for more than $500) and offers us “VIP” tickets. (Though this reminds me of the “Las Vegas” episoded of the Modern Family sitcom in which Jay Pritchett is conceited to get a room on the “Excelsior” penthouse floor of a Las Vegas hotel, until he realizes there’s a floor above him for “Excelsior Plus” black card members.)
There’s so much art on display by galleries that Sturgeon’s law ensures a lot of great fine art amongst a deluge of art trying so, so hard to have commercial appeal. The AI summary of the latter would be “A circular lenticular artwork made out of feathers, of a tasteful nude diving into a Los Angeles swimming pool.”
The clothes that some people wore for the opening evening were beautiful. It’s rare to see anyone well-dressed in a city where the official uniform is black vaguely-sporty wear. And not just women in dynomite dresses and fabrics; I saw several artsy men wearing pink sportcoats with their Bluebirds, also someone wearing an enormous couture puffy jacket and another wearing an Afghan coat that look liked a custom carpet.
There’s no way I could discern all the artworks that were in Sturgeon’s 10%, let alone give them the attention they deserve, but here are images of some that I noted. Given time, dozens more could and would have seeped in and affected me.
Overall favorite: “Laundromat” Liu Tianlian
Favorite sculpture: “Big Bang” Robert Brady
Favorite abstract: “Just Let Them” Isabelle Beaubien
Honorable mentions: John Belingheri, Georgia Hart, Trenity Thomas.
Liu Tianlan’s big ink and color on silk “Laundromat” at the booth of Yiwei Gallery (Instagram link, she’s not on the gallery’s own web site yet) was KA-POW. It’s the movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once” squeezed into the movie’s laundromat. Wowzer. No picture does it justice, the 9-foot long painting’s polyptych wood framing (missing from this image) is great. This artwork alone is worth a visit.
Robert Brady’s “Big Bang” at Donna Seager Fine Arts was my favorite sculpture. I love the yellow and black spots, they remind of John Baldessari.
Robert Brady’s Instagram feed has a 2-year-old pic of “Big Bang” before it got the ash treatment. They grow up so fast.
Isabelle Beaubien’s “Just Let Them” at Spence Gallery (F07) was my favorite abstract painting. A lot of art at the fair was circular to be different and commercial, but this enormous (120 cm/48 inch diameter) acrylic and resin record has to be that shape. I have no idea how hard it is to execute.
John Belingheri at Andrea Schwartz Gallery had “Jade”, a striking painting of a green loopy grid. It’s reminiscent of the calligraphic loops of Brice Marden (1938 – 2023) but more a city of undulating connections – like San Francisco. It doesn’t work at all on a screen, this 5-foot square canvas has to be human-sized in the room with you.
Trenity Thomas at Ferrara Showman Gallery had some strangely flat humorous paintings, this is “Take Me With You”, 2024. What’s with the lemons?
Also by Trenity Thomas, “To Be Held”, 2023. Another lemon, and look at the dog’s mouth!
Georgia Hart at Quantum Contemporary Art paints great thick impasto skies, e.g. “Sligachan, Scotland.” You can’t get that from an AI-generated 2D array of pixels.
Ones that got away
One artist had a great seascape executed in graphite, another had them by etching colored paper. “Majestic indifferent oceanic grandeur” is an easy subject to add some heft to your work, but both were very well executed.
AI art is coming
In endless online debates about whether AIs are creative (yes, they are) I point out that a pixel grid that presents an image of an artwork is not a fine artwork that exists in the world! Go buy real art to put in your room and hang on the wall. But robots are coming for “the thing” as well. The 2rt booth (in addition to the commonplace lenticular art) had “Aiden Noir” robotically painted photos, that you can also scan with an app to turn into short panning videos. Also there was a wall with some Augmented Reality Art “paintings” on it. There wasn’t much information about these, maybe they were snuck into the fair to avoid pearl-clutching condemnation from real human artists and the galleries that represent them.
If you’re trying to make commercial art that people want to hang on the wall, an AI that’s ingested billions of images and gigabytes of art theory and critical writing is going to meet your customers’ wants. I love supporting the creativity of human artists – #respectArtists! – but I would also love someone or something to execute the wonderfully inventive set of pixels that Craiyon AI came up with three years ago (when it was just a callow adolescent autoregressive transformer) in actual oil paint on a large canvas.
