Felix Salmon quotes Jerry Saltz

In many ways the most honest and important part of Saltz’s Frieze review comes in the comments section, where Saltz admits that “IF I DID have to pay $40.00 to go to an art fair I would NEVER EVER EVER go”. Saltz’s job is to look at this kind of art, but even he admits that the value of seeing all this work in the same place at the same time is significantly less than $40 — at least if you’re not going to buy anything.

And while Frieze co-founder Matthew Slotover tells the NYT that he is “very much pro-democratization and a larger engagement” with the general public, the fair’s location on a desolate island, and its sky-high entry fee, and even its galleries all mitigate against that. It’s the galleries who asked for — and received — fewer visitors, remember, and on Friday night I met one gallerist who was complaining that while she met some very high-end collectors on Thursday, the Friday crowd had altogether far too many “lookie-loos”.

AiA on Prince v Cariou

The case also deals with whether Cariou's market was harmed by Prince's paintings. The judges seemed unsympathetic to Brooks's claims of a damaged market.

"Bringing up the market is a clear loser for you," Judge Parker said to Brooks, who confirmed that Cariou's prints sold for a few thousand Euro, while Prince's paintings sold for millions. "You sold to a totally different audience, you've admitted that not many of the books were sold, you sold them out of a warehouse in Dumbo, and that the book was out of print. Prince was selling to a wealthier crowd, and on this side of the river." The allusion to a more elevated marketplace in Manhattan brought laughs from the courtroom.

Prince designed handbags for Louis Vuitton. If he stole my designs would it matter that I sold my designs "out of a warehouse in Dumbo"? Snobbery now written in law.

..."I think the key moment today was when Judge Parker said that the injunction to destroy the works was something akin to a decision by the Huns or the Taliban," Amy Adler, a professor of art law at NYU, told A.i.A. (Adler has consulted with Boies, Schiller, Flexner but was speaking on her own behalf.) "The judges could see that the injunction is draconian. And they plainly understood the importance and the artistic significance of this case."

Downloading, Fair Use, IP, Plagiarism.

The art world as social system is taken to be ancillary to an impersonal idea of art, as the academic and technocratic worlds as social systems are taken to be ancillary to an impersonal idea of knowledge.