Co-Owners of Blum and Poe, Los Angeles
WHITEWALL: So tell me a little bit about your booth this year.
TIM BLUM: This year, either consciously or subconsciously, we probably did something based on how the market’s been going, so we’re not showing a lot of really high ticket items. We’re showing things that are in a way younger, and things that aren’t super expensive. They aren’t total unknowns, but the price point isn’t three million dollars. It’s within the more affordable range.
WW: What piece are you really excited to show people this year?
TB: Matt Johnson, a young L.A. sculptor has crafted three pairs of sneakers out of wood. The laces are tied together and they’re draped over a cabling. If you’re in the city you see kind of shoes thrown over a telephone wire, and often it represents someone who died, like a tombstone. So we have these three beautiful pairs of shoes draped over a cable in the booth. They represent George Carlin, David Foster Wallace, and Bobby Fisher.
WW: What are your impressions about the financial turmoil that MOCA has found itself in?
TB: We’re obviously intimately involved in MOCA, and we have been for a long time. It’s an amazing institution for the community and the country and the world. So you become speechless really. The fact that it’s even happening is on one hand shocking and on the other hand not surprising because we do know a lot about the museum.
JEFF POE: The silence that’s coming from the museum is incredibly irresponsible. They should craft some plan and put it out there. By not saying anything it’s just making the situation much worse. Perhaps how this is being dealt with is indicative of why they got into this in the first place. At the same time, people should understand that clearly the curatorial end of MOCA has done a phenomenal job and have nothing to do with the situation as it is. They are not responsible,
WW: How do you think that art fairs have changed gallery practices since they’ve become the main place to circulate art?
TB: The art fairs have been one of the biggest influences on how art is presented distributed sold. People became obsessed with the fair culture, and that became their life. It’s how they mediated things. I think it’s great it’s going to get trimmed back. It kind of goes along with the ADD that everyone seems to have in culture now. Everything was always too available. Even with the sellers and dealers controlling everything, everything was way too available. And I think people get sick of that. I think it’s good to be a little more rare.
JP: What the fairs created was an entropic situation where New York isn’t important, and London isn’t important. And what that’s done is allowed for other places to be on the same plane as New York and European galleries. I think that’s the most important part of what fairs do. You don’t have to make an artist from New York any longer. You can do it from L.A. and Berlin.
