Arrived this morning and slept a good bit in the middle part of the day because of jetlag. The area I’m staying in this time is in the old French Concession, just off  Huaihai Road. Walking around today, I noticed lots of “walking word” tickertape screens. They are nearly always in some kind of liminal space, although the messages on them vary a lot — from “don’t park your car here” to today’s prices on gold outside a jeweller’s. Just up the road is a restaurant that seems to be a bit like a sushi bar in layout, in that you sit at a counter opposite the person who is preparing your food. Above him is a screen showing some sort of entertainment (the same on every screen). These screens also face the street. So, presumably there is that basic thing at work of something bright and shiny and moving that catches your eye and you want it, so you’ll go in there for dinner, or so they hope. Lots of screens like this in Huaihai Road shop windows and just inside the entrances, too, from what I could see in a taxi on the way in from the airport in a rainstorm. I guess the restaurant is aimed at singles and couples who don’t have any more to say to each other and therefore don’t want to look at each other across a table — a big market, perhaps. But this also made me think about what Zlatan said in his research report about the café where, according to the owner, people kept asking where the TV was when he took it out, so that he had to get a new one! Maybe it’s something people take for granted now but notice when it’s not there.

This evening, I found myself at an art event. Today is the last day of the Shanghai Art Fair, and so I guess lots of art curators and dealers (often one and the same thing) are in town. Samantha Culp had invited me to attend the screening of some new films by Singaporean video artist Ho Tzu Nyen — Earth and Zarathustra. David Teh, whose organization Just Perfect, represents Ho, was at the art fair with his work, so that was the connection there. Samantha held the event upstairs at the Shanghai branch of Café Sambal, which is just about to open. The space was upstairs, where there is a bar and at the end beyond it, a data projector which can also project video and a screen. The space itself was airy and simple, and seemed appealing to me.

However, I was also struck by how difficult it was to find, being way down a little alleyway. On the one hand, this is a sort of public screen, and it is clearly designed to enhance the appeal and multi-functionality of the space. In the old days, when projectors were much bigger, I guess an owner would have thought twice about installing one. But these days, they are much more discreet. On the other hand, given how hard the place was to find and how it was upstairs and so on, it’s not that “public”. This is the tightrope that “art” walks — trying to be public, but also trying to be exclusive to up the value on the market. I’m not from that world, and I always find it a bit of a queasy mix.

Coming to this from the Chinese indie film scene, it did not seem like a strange place to do a screening at all. Here in China, it is quite usual to use a café, bar or anywhere else that might have a projector, and to improvise. Since audience is largely by personal invitation with much texting and so on, difficult to find locations do not present such a problem. The questionable legality (and the minimal budgets) of such events means that they are not advertised in the paper or online! People always wander in and out, talk, drink and so on. This is quite normal. But during the evening, talking to David Teh, I realized this would not be so normal for an artist in Singapore (or anywhere else outside China, I guess). The poor quality of the data projector was a concern, and the mode of attention would not usually apply. Of course, that then raises the question of what usually happens with gallery video art here (e.g. Yang Fudong), and I’m not sure. David mentioned how Zarathustra had been made in conjunction with the Brisbane biennial (if I understood correctly), and they had given him a top quality screening space for it. David was clearly concerned about the low quality of the data projector’s image (too dark) and the  speakers not being good enough quality.

This rather exclusive scene also made me think about a lot of other things. I appreciate that many of the people in the art scene are driven by their love of the art and their determination to find ways to sustain it. But, coming out of a rapidly disappearing legacy of public screenings that operate on ticket sales more than on the patronage of the wealthy, I have mixed feelings about the transfer of every kind of film that is not a Hollywood blockbuster out of movie theatre venues and into art venues. Even public funding can be said to be funding by the people through their taxes, and it’s sad that it is disappearing for alternative cinema in so many countries, and that it basically does not exist here in China. What’s the point of making video art that is going be sold for thousands of dollars in limited editions to collectors (if you are lucky) and not seen by the public? (I guess the same thing could be said about paintings). Anyway, what I’m trying to say is that this made me think about the political and social consequences of the migration of alternative cinema from the movie theatre to the art scene.

In one sense, it is enabling more experimental artists to hang on and even to thrive, but it seems to me it can become a very small self-enclosed circle totally dependent on a few patrons and curators. Maybe some artists don’t care about being engaged in a larger social and cultural sense, but then that’s the kind of art I find it difficult to summon up much interest in. In the conversations at this event, two things seemed to be going on. On the one hand, the curator/dealers were concerned about the market (understandably enough), which means patrons. So, that means a scene is not mature unless there are local collectors buying. I heard people saying they’d had lots of interesting conversations at the Shanghai Art Fair, but no sales, for example. Second, it means a lot of the conversation is about trying to establish shared judgments about different artists and their work, because this is going to translate into the way they are rated and then priced and pitched as investments to the buyers (should any be found). But, then what? The hard disk goes into a drawer somewhere while we wait to see if its value goes up?

Obviously, some people, e.g. Apichatpong and Jia, are able to work across the art and film scenes quite effectively, mixing patronage with awards and wider audiences to have a real social/cultural impact. But maybe they are few and far between and I guess that is very difficult to do.

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