I am not cool enough to go to degree shows. I look awful in footless tights, the only time I ever tried to get an asymmetric haircut I looked like I had been dragged through a bush and square glasses just don’t suit me. But degree shows are achingly cool. Even snotty concierge service Quintessentially held a party to celebrate graduate fashion week, the Saturday Times magazine had a fashion spread of “art school chic” and the Royal College of Art have moved their show to an enormous custom-made marquee in South Kensington.
Last year I attended the Chelsea College of Art graduate show. It was busy with dreamy looking art students drinking warm beer and earnestly explaining their work to freelance curators and fans. There were a few signs that they were becoming big business. Degree Art, a company set up by two young women to help unsigned artists sell their work, had a few posters and cards strewn about but it was still basically a casual and fun operation.
This year was an entirely different story. The large quad on Millbank resembled the later stages of Glastonbury if it had been attended by Paris fashion week. The usual square spectacled, converse clad crowd were shown up by Marni and Balenciaga toting vixens, one girl opting for floor length chiffon. Perhaps they thought they were the next Saatchi, blessed with the ability to turn a nascent talent into an international name or perhaps they were just, well, cool.
The art itself seemed to see a return to traditional media, sculpture and painting featured largely – as opposed to installation and video work. Some of the artists seemed more business savvy, handing out business cards and reproductions of their work to the crowd.
Isobel Beauchamp, co-founder of Degree Art, confirms this shift from baggy trousers and beer to fashion spectacle. Established four years ago to help promote graduate artists, Degree Art has seen their business and cliental grow exponentially. Both their artists and their buyers have grown and changed.
Beauchamp is called in to lecture to students on professional development – preparing unformed talents for the cruelty of life as a jobbing artist. The University of the Arts now employs “Professional Practice Officers” to advise graduates on how to market themselves, hence the abundance of business cards and reproductions available for visitors.
Critic Robert Hughes recently said that young British artists were over-indulged by the celebrity culture that surrounds them and perhaps this has prompted a trickle down effect to the student level. An auction house insider recently commented that since Damien Hirst organised Freeze, being an art student has been conceived of as far more glamorous with many creatives being drawn by the bright lights and potential for notoriety. Everyone wants to be the next “enfant terrible” and make some cash too.
Beauchamp is not quite as cynical but she does believe that artists and buyers are getting savvier. The clients are not necessarily always art lovers but more frequently see themselves as investors. The city provides their biggest client base with the twenty-something men preferring to purchase the odd nude while older investors opting to begin a collection, which Degree Art will consult and manage for them.
It is a direct consequence of the Saatchi-effect. With the recent news that the advertising giant swiped another graduate’s oeuvre, in this case James Howard of the Royal College, graduate art is now seen as a feasible investment and the gambling attitude of the hedge-funders is stirred by the possibility of large returns when their taste makes it big.
While the world around them may have got more lucrative and their audience more fashionable, most students are still keen to establish themselves as serious artists rather than jumping on the “celebrity” bandwagon.
Freya Gabie’s work stood out at this year’s Chelsea show. Her monumental sculptural pieces, built from stacked, corrugated cardboard and sculpted to represent a moving curtain owe a little to Thomas Demand but more to American artist Tara Donovan.
For Gabie the curtains are “a simple pursuit of capturing a moment of fluid movement and perhaps a sense of ‘hollowness’ from what is a heavily formal structure and the use of the cardboard reinforced an essence of temporality within the work, which I liked in context with the movement of billowing fabric that I was trying to evoke”. The work has an extraordinary spatial effect, beautifully curated so the viewer can walk around them while the grey, rugged texture of the cardboard looks almost like rock or clay.
Gabie is eloquent and inspiring when she’s discussing the nature of her work and she’s obviously benefited from the professional development lectures with her glossy promotional material but she takes it with a pinch of salt. She values her contemporaries’ initiative more highly than outside help.
Gabie maintains that their self-sponsored shows, while not necessarily hugely publicised, were more satisfying and productive than gallery chasing. “The year I was in was full of great fellow students who each cultivated contacts and had information about gallery spaces that were likely places for us to show, so it was quite a supportive environment to graduate in”.
She concedes that the art scene has become a lot trendier and competitive but claims that “when you are occupied with your own practice and own curiosities as an artist then trend doesn’t really come in to the equation and to a certain extent neither does Saatchi!”.
The glitz largely seems to oscillate around a majority of the artists – the Saatchi effect is a buyers not an artist’s phenomenon. Gabie does not feel like she’s in a position to approach commercial galleries yet, preferring to concentrate on getting a studio and producing as much as possible before she starts to look for representation.
So despite the furore of the private view, the insanely expensive clothes and the front page splashes when Saatchi buys out yet another graduate’s work, the eye of the storm is calm and the artists at the centre of it are as earnest, thoughtful and baggy as ever.
There might be big money to be made and there are some smart people like Beauchamp and her colleagues looking out for young artists but thankfully the work and impulse behind it remains fresh. Maybe next year footless tights will suit me…
