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Slow life

Art is the drug

13 October 2007

Alex James's first column for The Spectator

The invitation to the Frieze Art Fair was a bigger parcel than anything that arrived on my birthday. It looked like a kind of ambassadorial visa package to a higher realm, and spa. Art invitations now outweigh fashion invitations. I mean they weigh more. The events grow ever more lavish as the art bubble perpetuates and stretches and puffs itself wider. There is more money flying around in the art world than there is flying around in space, the whole of the rest of the universe beyond the planet: perhaps as a species we’re still looking vainly in mirrors when we should be looking in telescopes.

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