Frieze Art Fair is launching in New York later this week. The fair has been targeted by an Occupy Wall Street offshoot called Occupy Museums ostensibly for setting up on Randall’s Island to skirt the city’s powerful unions. But the movement also resents the fact that art collectors’ payments are not more equitably distributed. One of Frieze’s co-Founders blames this mistaken notion of equality on the false promise of Bravo’s reality show competition for artists, Work of Art:
“Over the last 10 years, the art world has tracked global economic change. In America there is a more politicised awareness of inequality between class and wealth. At the same time, more people have decided that art can be a career. They’ve seen art reality TV shows and they think they can make a career purely out of their work. That’s an unrealistic expectation so a lot more people feel disenfranchised,” she says.
London Frieze braves backlash to fly the flag of British culture in Manhattan (Guardian)