Slow life

Art is the drug

Alex James

13 October 2007

Alex James's first column for The Spectator

The Frieze invitation didn’t extend to my wife, who, having been excluded, immediately declared that she wanted to go. This is the great gypsy trick of contemporary art: it manages to trade on its power to exclude. Exclusivity is where science falls down. Science is always apologising for being difficult and pretending that it’s simple. Science could easily be as cool as art, though. It has been in the past. Goethe’s definition of genius as ‘the ability to put form on the indeterminate’ applies equally as a definition of art or of science. Science is knotty, but it’s always intriguing. If rich people spent as much time considering Riemann manifolds as they do talking about their art collections, then they’d know more about what shape the universe is, and even the vaguest sense of the universe at its largest scale is something that’s really worth having.

Still, if my wife had been invited she probably wouldn’t have gone. She would have wanted to go to Art Basel in Miami instead. It’s better. I’ve never been to Frieze, but Miami must be better. It’s bigger and the people there are richer, greedier and more insecure, so the frenzy of art shopping is more exhilarating for the casual observer, although it’s always hard to remain casual at these shock-and-awe bunfights. Once you’ve bought into attending one of these events you enter the great pyramid of the art hierarchy. There are always several invitations to each party in Miami. The high-rollers are invited first, at around 6 p.m., talk about money and buy art; then the famous people and press arrive around 8, talk about each other, and consume all the free champagne and caviar; and everybody else rolls up at 10, when all that’s left are Becks and bagels, hence ‘art bagel’, the Miami party crowd’s affectionate name for the event. Funnily enough, the universe might be bagel-shaped, but that’s another story.

My band, Blur, commissioned the artist Julian Opie to design our ‘greatest hits’ sleeve. He did a fantastic job and rose to fame around the same time. I later bought the portrait of the guitar player, and I had to buy my own portrait again when my book came out. I don’t have an art collection. I just keep buying the same pieces, every so often. Even though I’ve only bought one piece of art, albeit several times, every art gallery in London and several in New York have tracked me down and I get a lot of art spam, probably about the same amount for art as for penis enhancement — a barrage of emails, post and even text messages from dealers telling me about new shows that will ‘change my life’. Art is a drug and the pushers are the most cunning marketing minds of the post-modern world.