I will admit I snapped last week. It hit me like a ton of bricks. I used to have a bit of FOMO when I missed something like Frieze London, because I sort of like the pomp and circumstance of it all. You get people in a tent, some who love art, some who love money, some who just need to be seen, some who look bored, some who look sweaty, some who drank too much at noon, some who just want a cigarette break, some who hate the lighting, some who are just looking busy and some who are mysteriously so busy they can’t look at you as you enter the booth.

This year really felt different, from afar. This year felt like the most “social-media-turned-guardians of art’s future” content I have ever seen in all my years of covering this industry and the makers in it. It appeared as if this was the most attention ever given to content-creation and creators giving their curated temperature of a fair rather than any substantive coverage. It felt like the art market was trying to look outside of the typical media coverage for a sort of justification to exist, a sort of desperate curation of positivity that felt dull and prescribed and not of this time. It felt like instead of having difficult conversations about where we are heading as a collective group of interested investors in art’s overall health, it seems like we are just passing the baton over to social media influencers to put the art world and market into the algorithmic cycles to seem less contentious and more like the ice cream museum on steroids.

The art market is literally the dominant conversation when it comes to the art world these days, so much so that I didn’t really see one iota of conversation about an artist or the art being featured in London last week. I heard a lot about the attendance, the sales mood, how much collectors were excited, galleries were tentatively hopeful and just the overall feeling of hiding a dread that is actually part of the world mood these days. My feed was escapism from the world’s problems… at an art fair… in 2025.

I know art fairs are mostly about conversations of investment and forecasting, money and sales, but our international dialogue about art this year has been solely about the market with very little consideration for the art itself. It is as if the art being made isn’t really important to everyone’s social media presentations and more about the ambiance and market conditions that the work is being made in. Which has merit, but we have forgot to actually write, produce and create content about the art itself and the artists who make it. There seems to be a huge vacuum. And I have a suspicion, especially in the case of Frieze, most of the content I saw, felt like PSA’s to make the fair look good as opposed to talking about the more difficult and often intricate parts of the art-making process, or the substance of all the great works being made by both emerging and established artists.

This is key. This is a good time for the actual art. This is one of the first times in history where emerging and established artists are creating a hybrid of contemporary conversations, which is rather exciting considering how much we still talk about gatekeeping. There has been, quite substantially, a shift to something far more interesting when it comes to gallery programming around the world. It’s not perfect, but it’s evolving.

What is getting highlighted in all this algorithmic rhythm of constant gratification in social media engagement is that we actually don’t have that much to say on these platforms. I can’t believe I’m saying this considering I have spent over 20 years as an art journalist… but we don’t need to talk about art every hour. It’s not really needed. We don’t need to turn art into the same bullshitted content cesspool that we have taken all other creative endeavors into. We don’t need this much. We need less. We need better, and we need less.

I repeat: we really don’t need this much content. The tropes and trends of walking around talking about the connections you see in your own life as it somewhat parallels art market tendencies (or just the over-excited clamor of a poorly edited videos with huge closed-captions that don’t even really show any art) have actually made the art world just the same as everything else: it’s becoming boring, predictable and lacking in substance. We actually don’t need so many opinions and opining “in the moment” content, so much as we need an actual focus on the artist’s themselves as they navigate one of the most profoundly tyrannical moments, globally, of the last 90 years.

This isn’t my personal call that we here at The Unibrow can do it better. I understand that there were times when I was at Juxtapoz (which was considered non-critical journal by some colleagues in media) where we could have benefitted from less pontification ourselves. But I would argue that what we have now in that void is quite the opposite of carefully considered content and more a personification of how much social media influencers feel only comfortable with their own selves at the center of the content for fear of not getting into the right party or champagne-sponsored “room” at the fair’s press preview.

What I do understand is that budgets have changed. Art magazines, art sections of newspapers are under-funded or not funded at all. But when the stakes couldn’t be any higher for the reasons to document and discuss art, when market uncertainty should have opened the door for more generous and in-depth understanding of art in times of censorship and war, we are left with content that just feeds the beast of an empty scroll. I also think the real power-brokers of art are scared to admit that things aren’t going well, and in that insecurity are trying to create as sterile of an explanation or discourse as possible.

We have found ourselves in a circuitously vapid era of engagement, we all know this. What I want right now from these constant creators are stories about what they see in art as opposed to what they see in themselves as they socially surround themselves in art. —Evan Pricco

Above image from Frieze London 2021, photo by author