Can’t Do Tomorrow Festival

Can’t Do Tomorrow is a 10 day long urban and street art festival in Melbourne.

Well, it is somewhere between an art fair and a festival, but called a festival because the words ‘art fairs’ is becoming unpopular. And Can’t Do Tomorrow would not want be unpopular. Like an art fair there are entry tickets, booths with art for sale and even a print store with on-demand printing. Like a festival there are exhibitions, a talks program, murals, sculptures, and installations, a line-up of live music acts and DJs. I’ve seen worse art fairs and a single venue festival seems limited even if it is a very large multi-level warehouse; The Facility, in Kensington.

Wall after wall in the former wool warehouse has been painted with mural after mural along with large 3D constructions. There has been good detailing with collections of stickers and little pieces by Junkie Projects, Gigi and Tinky in odd locations.

Tinky

There is a mix of local and international artists.

Badiuca

There was another version of this piece about the writer Liu Xiaobo in Hosier Lane in 2018. The paste-up became a shrine for people to leave flowers and photos. It is the work of Chinese-Australian political artist and cartoonist Badiuca. This slick neon version was intended to match the neon lights of Hong Kong.

Can’t Do Tomorrow states that it is the ‘inaugural festival’ and plans to return. There is no doubt that Melbourne needs a street art festival, a regular annual event for both the artists and the public. Since the Stencil Festival/Sweet Streets folded there have been some attempts to fill that gap, like the international event, the Meeting of Styles. Whether an indoor festival/art fair can do that remains to be seen. How it effects Melbourne’s street art scene also remains to be seen.

Will Can’t Do Tomorrow simply be an indoor urban art experience, a commercial and marketing opportunity or will there be something greater?

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The Smart Way to Buy Art

The first question to ask is why are you buying art? Enjoyment? Investment? Or, a bit of both, basically meaning the enjoyment of speculating on a potential investment like buying lottery tickets or bitcoins? Dream on because it most likely won’t happen. If it is purely a matter of investment then there are professional art investment advisors who can help you but you will have to pay for that.

If you want enjoyment you will want to train your eye by looking at a lot of art books and magazines. Speaking of magazines, next, buy a copy of Art Almanac for a few months and go to galleries. The cost of a single issue it will be a lot cheaper than the ticket price to one of these mega-exhibitions like Supergraph or The Other Art Fair.

You can see several galleries in Melbourne by just by walking along Gertrude St. in Fitzroy or Flinders Lane in the CBD. Visiting galleries can becomes a game of urban orienteering in finding some of the smaller galleries. So meet up with friends and have a cup of coffee in a café near the galleries. Go to art opening, art auction previews and art fairs. Like all shopping buying art is a matter of finding the right store (gallery) that has items/labels (artists) that you like in your price range.

You may not have bought any art yet but you are having a good time, learning and training your eyes. Keep doing this for at least six months before you buy anything. Talk to the gallery staff about the art, they are happy to talk and are the best source of information. In the smaller galleries it is frequently one of the exhibiting artists gallery sitting.

Art openings are when the best works in the exhibition sells. When buying art is concerned is a matter of first come first served. You can also look at the huge list of openings in Melbourne Gallery Openings on Facebook or Somepainter lists the openings for that night (there will be similar one in your area). Then you can drink wine and talk with the artist at the opening.

Think about where you would put the art in your home, where you are going to put it, how will it look when you see it everyday. When you are confident in your taste and have seen art that you really like buy it.

If you want to buy very affordable art look for fine art students final year or graduation shows at the end of the academic year. Here you can buy art at very affordable prices. Buy unframed works on paper and get them framed at any good framing shop will save you money and you can have all your art in matching frames to suit your décor.

Remember art galleries are basically shops and you can arrange all kinds of purchase plans with the gallery. All you need is a deposit to secure your purchase, there are even interest free loans available to help you buy art from Art Money.

Finally when you have bought the art have a party to celebrate your new art hanging in your home. Show it off. Invite your friends and the artist around to look at your new art and enjoy some more wine and nibbles. And then you can enjoy it for the rest of your life. Have fun.

The Other Art Fair

What other art fair? Melbourne doesn’t have an art fair anymore as the Melbourne Art Fair was cancelled last year. There is the Not Fair. There has also been the Affordable Art Fair, Supergraph and probably a something else, like a craft fair.

On Thursday night I was at the opening of The Other Art Fair, the start of a four day event. Presented by Saatchi Art; it is very well run with a food, coffee, a bar, music, space to sit down, lots of portable gas heaters glowing red, an art wrapping service, performance art and other events.

Kensington, on the other side of the Moonee Ponds Creek, is not a suburb associated with art exhibitions. Between two railway lines and near a tram line it is a surprisingly accessible location. The venue, The Facility is another surprise a converted wool-shed with some new interior additions.

“Keep your eyes open, you never know what you might see.”

Reads the note that I selected at random from the performance artist’s bag, a work devised by by Rioko Tega.

Unlike most art fair the 98 booths at the Other Art Fair have artists and not galleries. The art ranges in styles from the painterly abstract, hard edge abstracts, large format art photography, realist landscapes, paintings of animals, surreal fantasies and erotic tapestries.

Most of the artists are not represented by a major commercial gallery but I recognised a couple of names, emerging artists that I have seen in various smaller galleries. The interior and exterior walls of the venue reminded me what was missing from the variety of artist exhibiting there were no street artists.

Meeting the artist is what every art buyer wants, to meet the person who created the art. It is a tough gig for the artist, four days of fronting their art, hoping to sell enough to pay their expenses. The artists were picked by a selection committee that included the artist Patricia Piccinini, Director of Mossgreen Gallery Lisa Fehily and Senior Curator at Australian Centre for Contemporary Art Annika Kristensen. The committee has done its job in ensuring a consistent quality of artists. There is a lot of attractive, fashionable art that would compliment contemporary decor, along with, depending on your taste, some beautiful art direct from the artist.

Melbourne Art Fair Cancelled

In 1988 the “First Australian Contemporary Art Fair” was held at the Royal Exhibition Building. It was the year of the bicentennial and the new art fair was presented by the Australian Commercial Galleries Association and the Bicentennial Authority. Since then, every two years, the Melbourne Art Fair (MAF) has been held in the Royal Exhibition Building. Now it is over, not with a bang but a whimper of an announcement.

Melbourne Art Fair 2014 at the Exhibition Building

The announcement of the cancellation from Anna Pappas, chair of the not-for-profit  MAF came on Friday 19 2016. Art Guide and The Age scrambled to publish this major story that day. The Guardian waited until it had discovered who the “high-profile galleries” that Pappas referred to in her statement. The Age had made an informed guess that this might include Diane Tanzer Gallery, but this proved not to be the case. Melbourne may not have an art fair any more but it does have more than one major commercial art gallery.

There are still many unanswered questions about the cancelled art fair. Is this the beginning of a trend or just one of the common variety of administrative debacle?

Suggesting that the cancelation of art was due to an administrative debacle is the fact that in August 2015 the MAF had severed its contract to manage the fair with Art Fairs Australia. If that is the case then we can expect that MAF will be re-established in a couple of years.

However, there are reasons to think that it is the start of a trend away from the art fair model. Barry Keldoulis told the media at the opening of the MAF 2014 that “art fairs may not be the best way to see art but they are the best way to see hell of lot of art.” If art fairs are not be the best way to see art why would they be the best way to buy art or sell art. Although art fairs were promoted as the mega-art market there are serious commercial art galleries in Melbourne who have done the math and decided that the MAF is not worth it.

Considering the last MAF two years ago in hindsight I should have been spending more time at the Not Fair rather than the MAF. Not Fair was the alternative satellite to the MAF. It was curated exhibition in Collingwood at 12 Peel Street and The Grace Darling Hotel. Its curators, Sam Leach, Ashley Crawford and Rebecca Richards had put together an exhibition that has been mentioned more times to me in the last two years than the MAF.

The loss of the MAF is not a disaster for Australian art. Australian art has changed so much in the three decades since the art fair started. Looking at the 1988 art fair catalogue Patrick McCaughey’s introductory essay about the Australian art in the eighties was about a contemporary art scene that had just emerged. In the 1988 art fair where there was only 21 galleries involved. Of the Melbourne galleries that were exhibiting in 1988 only Australian, Niagara and Tolarno galleries are still operating. Tolarno Galleries is one of the galleries whose non-participation this year ended the MAF.

Art Market @ No Vacancy

On Friday night I was at the opening of No Vacancy’s Art Market. It was a mini-art street art fair with over a dozen little stalls. There was free entry, unlike at the major art fairs. There were photographs, stencil art, drawings, illustrations and prints of illustrations; custom toys, soft toys and sculptures; jewellery, badges, cards, packs of cards, t-shirts, skateboard decks, artists books and zines all by young emerging artists and designers. The range of merchandise that is being produced in this young art scene with its street art and illustration influences is amazing. This is not like the stuff on sale at some Sunday market’s craft stalls; it has been better organized than that, even, in a way, curated as there is a consistency of style.

The art market also had a 2^nd hand book stall and a stall selling clothes. On Friday night a one-man band was entertaining the hundreds of people making good use looping on a digital delay.

Many young people are participating in an affordable democratic art market. That people are choosing to buy art and fashion from local practicing artists rather than the mass marketed images or picking up the crumbs from the high-end art market. Rock’n’roll, punk and hip-hop have all played their part in forging resilient independent tastes. People know what art is and they know what they like. And the Art Market at No Vacancy gives them the opportunity to buy it.

I didn’t go to the The Weekend Australian Art Melbourne 09 at the Royal Exhibition Building. I’ve been to previously when it was known as the Affordable Art Fair and I’ve been told me not much has changed. I wouldn’t go unless they paid me; I can go to several of these galleries for free four or five days any week, why do I need to pay to go to The Weekend Australian Art Melbourne 09? Art Asia Pacific (#60. Sep/Oct 2008) reported on the proliferation of mega-exhibitions in “Biennials Gone Wild”; where art fairs have grown in budgets and visitor numbers into the millions. The effects of the current economic depression have yet to impact on these events although Art Brisbane 09 has been cancelled. I enjoyed No Vacancy’s Art Market as it is more alternative and more affordable.