Last November, a banana duct-taped to a wall sold for US $6.24 million. The piece, Comedian (2019) by Maurizio Cattelan, runs in a limited edition of three, the second of which having been sold for much more than its estimated value to Justin Sun, a collector and the founder of the cryptocurrency platform TRON.[1] Sun later ate the banana at a press conference claiming that, like in crypto, the ‘real value is in the concept itself’. He retains the right to recreate Comedian at any time, although he has not yet done so.
Comedian and its sale elicited a tsunami of discourse about the value of art, discourse which has been gaining a sharper edge in recent years with the spate of reporting revealing how the super-rich use ‘freeports’ to speculate in the art market. First buying a piece and immediately sending it to a tax-free freeport where its value increases by virtue of its scarcity, then selling it (naturally, without paying capital gains tax) to the next billionaire who will do much the same.
Against this backdrop, and promising that ‘art is for everyone’, The Other Art Fair (TOAF) returned to Naarm/Melbourne after a two-year hiatus with over a hundred emerging and independent artists selling pieces ranging from as little as $75 (for a study) to $10,000 (an upper limit met by Chris Riley whose summery pool-side pastels sold quickly).
The Melbourne TOAF is one of two Australian iterations of seven international ‘Other Art Fairs’ taking place this year. Along with ‘The Affordable Art Fair’ (which holds fairs in Asia, Europe, the US and Australia), it is part of a movement of what might be described as ‘counter art fairs’, which style themselves as art fairs for the 99% and in opposition to more established institutions like the Melbourne Art Fair which sells works priced in the tens of thousands of dollars. Unlike other art fairs, TOAF has one major backer, Saatchi — an online art gallery previously owned by London’s Charles Saatchi and sold to Demand Media in 2014 — who is not only the fair’s ‘presenting partner’ but also its owner. Its success hinges on how many people walk through its doors, which ultimately determines whether it comes back next year. And to that end, TOAF was giving all it had.
There was something for most tastes: the Instagram artist and writer Nightmarish Meatballs lured passersby into their stall full of AI-generated sugary pinks and vivid greens with the promise of free A4-prints in exchange for follows. Wiradjuri/Birpai artist Alejandro Lauren’s floral canvases were an exuberant explosion of colour and carnival of queer Indigenous joy, while Rachelle Grace’s gentle ocean scenes offered a moment of stillness and respite, all the while quietly reframing immensity. Nkosi Ndlovu’s surreal collages overlayed Black women’s bodies, plants and architectural features in muted tones to strangely tranquil effect, and elsewhere Anahita Amouzegar’s vibrant expressionist scenes of people caught in moments together popped and hummed with their unheard conversations. Peter Fransisco showed sumptuous realistic oils of Filipino dishes and watercolour portraits, such as one of a chicken so realistic it could've been a photograph.
In terms of sculpture, TOAF showcased Morgan Shimeld’s clean-lined wire cubes and Ri Van Veen’s mesmerising hand-built Raku forms. Especially exciting was the complimentary exhibition space (part of TOAF’s ‘New Futures’ program) awarded to Pedro Guarracino. Blending vibrant, shiny ceramics with soft black and white crochet, his ‘Narrow Identities’ sculptures were some of the fair’s most challenging works, resisting the commercial impetus underlying an art fair by leaning entirely into their conceptual movements, namely, a commentary on the ‘tension between our authentic, multifaceted nature and the diluted images we cultivate and internalise in digital spaces’.[2]
In a talk entitled ‘Art Today’ given to the Accademia di Brera in 2006, Jean-Luc Nancy said that art ‘makes us feel […] a certain formation of the contemporary world, a certain shaping, a certain perception of self in the world’, where the ‘world’ he is referring to is ‘certain possibility of meaning, of circulation of meaning’.[3] Some of the pieces at TOAF moved me and, in moving me, opened a wider aperture onto the world, its possibilities of meaning. A postcard of Donina Asera’s ‘Love’, depicting two armless, sharp-toothed and red-eyed monsters with their legs interlocked, is now pinned to my bedroom wall because of a nebulous sense of kinship I felt for the yearning creatures, and I bought two prints by self-taught artist Peter Francisco for their richness and vibrancy.
Other works I found inane or absurd without the grace of an existential question. Without any question. There was, of course, a typical scattering of mild-mannered abstracts in limp colours, pieces which could easily adorn any wall without drawing attention to it. Other pieces seemed content simply to depict beloved objects or characters, flatly. They were competently rendered, but lacking in heart, copies of copies. One stall was dedicated almost entirely to hyperreal black-and-white pencil drawings of nude women with idealised figures — perfect and gratuitous depictions which evoked little more than a feeling of voyeurism. Another did a roaring trade in technicolour anthropomorphic animals against graffiti backdrops.
Nancy believed that ‘[art today] is an art that asks how it is possible and how it is desirable to give form to the world, […] in a world that is in a way at a loss for world, at a loss for meaning…’[4] To which Cattelan offers us a banana, Jens Haaning a blank canvas, and the Space Cowboy an anthropomorphic bunny — objects whose very meaninglessness index our growing unease with questions of value under capitalism. In a post-NFT world, the rapid disarticulation of art, meaning and value is not surprising, nor is the prominence of art that trolls viewers into a confrontation with this disconnection. To some extent, under neoliberal capitalism, all art forces us into this confrontation.
At the fair, most pieces were selling for somewhere between $500 and $3000, depending on the popularity of the artist, and there were few original pieces under the $500 mark. Art is expensive: labour and material intensive. It can only be so affordable. Recognising this, and underscoring its commitment to accessible art, TOAF displayed two (admittedly small) walls advertising seventeen ‘curated works under $500’. Some artists also sold studies or prints for under $150 and there were a number of light-hearted ‘immersive experiences’ on offer for those not looking to buy.
The challenge of art fairs is that the purpose they serve is primarily a monetary one. In the noblest reading, they introduce artists to would-be-buyers and through this brokered financial exchange, support continued artistic production. But such capitalist imperatives also mean that much of what sees floor space is inoffensive, unchallenging or deliberately crowd-pleasing. To be profitable, the works need to have a good chance of selling and hence they cannot risk being alienating to audiences.
Undoubtedly, TOAF brought a vast array of diverse artists to the stage, yet much of the work exhibited was politically neutral, perhaps politically neutered, and there was little more confronting than a baby orangutang holding a can of Coke. Racism, sexism, transphobia, war, genocide, poverty — on the floor of TOAF, these contemporary realities were kept mostly out of sight.
Though TOAF showed an admirable commitment to making art accessible, it perhaps mistook being accessible with being undemanding. Such a misunderstanding is hard to avoid when the measure of success is monetary: on a limited budget, people tend to make safe, inoffensive choices. But TOAF’s privileging of ‘safe’ art for the masses, flattens them and risks foreclosing certain possibilities of meaning, of self in the world, while reproducing a sanitised artistic vision whose inoffensiveness is prone to slip into vacuity.
This is the danger of art fairs, even those aiming to address the discrepancy of access that capitalism has fostered. The pressure points between capitalism and art are acutely felt and much hinges on the bottom line. Whether or not TOAF returns next year is an open question, one — like many in the art world — of money.
[1] Chen, Jiayin (2022, Jan 24) ‘“Idols Are Dead”: TRON Founder Justin Sun on the Opportunities That Crypto Art Presents for His Rising Generation,’ Artnet, URL: https://news.artnet.com/market/justin-sun-interview-apenft-2062888 (accessed 18/03/2025).
[2] Wall text accompanying New Identities, 2025, exhibition at The Other Art Fair, Melbourne, 30 Jan-01 Feb 2025.
[3] Nancy, Jean-Luc, (2010), ‘Art Today’, Journal of Visual Culture, 9(1), 91-99, p. 92.