Investing in art – becoming cool by osmosis at The Other Art Fair, Brick Lane

The Other Art Fair and the Moniker Art Fair, Old Truman Brewery, Brick Lane

Since I had kids, the main excuse I have to go to the urban cultural hybrid and epitome of Shoreditch’s trend scene, Brick Lane, is to take them bowling at the ever popular All Star Lanes. Although I work in the area, I am, these days, about as far from hipster as you can be wearing a beige trench coat, and the wearied grimace of a practised parent whose kids are perfectly content in functional fabric, despite my best efforts to style them up.

Taking the kids to an art gallery, had, until recently felt like a bit of a pointlessly pushy parenting activity, that sort that made you feel both worthy, and somehow uncultured, like buying Miffy Goes to a Gallery for toddlers, or Kandinsky by Numbers from the Tate tourist trap.

Oh, we’d enjoyed the Lego exhibition, The Art of the Brick, also at the Truman Brewery last year  because it engaged them with the familiar made different, but still, taking kids (now aged 7 and nearly 10) with a disproportionate amount of energy to see actual “works of art” at an actual gallery always elicits a similar amount of enthusiasm as going to a “National Trust property”. Not unwilling exactly, but griping all the way, nonetheless.

So I was expecting feet to drag as we boarded the bus to go to The Other Art Fair, on Brick Lane this Sunday. But, having exhausted even their own passivity with a morning on Minecraft, there were no refusals – perhaps testament to my bribe to get them bagels en route. And far from the buzzing crowds of Sunday’s market feeling stressful and inappropriate,  as it has done when we’ve gone there in the past, the kids, after one bagel, some redunculously good value millionaire’s slice (approximately 70p, and as cheap as you’ll ever find it London) and a fruit smoothie, took in all in their stride, testament as much to how pissed they both get on sugar, as to their now advancing years. They are, in fact, rather fun company these days, rather than like herding tantrum- prone kittens, as they were in the past.

  

In fact, our discussion, as we threaded our way through the crowds, set the tone of the event, when Jonah asked how a sign saying “no poor people” outside a coffee shop could ever be ironic, eliciting a discussion about urban gentrification in the wake of the Cereal Killer riots.

Alas, we are part of the new breed of middle-class incomer, with plans to attend both the cereal café and Lady Dinah’s Cat Emporium up the road – for all the “free the cats” graffiti currently sprawled on its shutters – for both kids’ birthdays to come (you have to be eight appaz, to dine with cats). We’ve taken full advantage of both soaring house prices – and the raft of hipster coffee shops –  thanks to fact that we bought in when the area was, in anyone’s estimation, pretty fucking crumby.

Having taken the obligatory shots of the kids absorbing the local street art, the exhibition was, in fact, also right up their street. At the Moniker Art Fair, subversive pieces taking off Disney in the style of Banky’s Dismaland, or poking fun at brands they know, they were old enough to get the joke, rather than asking why Snow White and Cinderella were kissing.

In fact, their maturity at handling the art on display was a little disconcerting. They soaked up a lime green pencil sketch of A Spread Anus with barely a chortle, although both loved Zoe Moss‘ Stormtroopers holding up an “I’m with Stupid” sign that appealed to their tween-age sense of humour, while Jamie Ashman’s faux naive portraits of gimps and 18th Century queens appealed to mine.

 

A long discussion with Jonah about “why art is a good investment” elicited a request to buy, with his pocket money  (accrued over many weeks, I might add) a satiric work where the Mars chocolate bar logo spelled out Wars.

A lot of the cultural references on display turned popular culture on its head, with works depicting Russell Brand, by Walter Koch, and the V for Vendetta masks duplicated myriad times across a installation bank wall, complete with a bitcoin dispenser, seemed slightly out of date (particularly given mine all got swallowed when Mt Gox went bust). But we all enjoyed the Stormtrooper crucifix and the picture of Mickey Mouse emerging from R2D2, as it piqued the kids’interest for the rather more grown up works at The Other Art Fair, beyond.

I enjoyed the less obviously ironic works, which made a virtue of the area’s gentrification, like the beautifully rendered screen prints of old gas cylinders that still loom over  – and slightly mar the graffitied tow paths up to Broadway Market from my house in Bow, but look fresh and rather pretty when silhouetted against bold colours in the works by Clare Johnson. I would have liked to have bought one, but sadly I don’t have a spare 650 quid, though there were smaller prints available for cheaper. But even the kids appreciated the more low key works, such as Jacob Sordergren’s vivid panels and Rennie Pilgrem’s trippy stripes, while detailed, illustrative works like Andy Wilx’s Panda caught Ava’s imagination for obvious reasons.

Of course, the showstoppers, like Tracy Emin’s “To the moon and back” halo provided excellent social media fodder (although I think this body of work shamelessly rips off of the infinitely more eloquent Jenny Holzer, whose epigrammatic phrase projections must surely have provided inspiration for this, no doubt, extortionate version. And, dressed for it in a pale pink lacy shirt and pink and beige bowling shoes by Clarks (but which I often pass off a Chanel’s) sitting for a selfie in Carolina Mizrahi’s powder pink room was accompanied by a reminder from the very lovely artist to hashtag any photos I put on instagram (sorry – I’m not that sophisticated, but here’s a blog shoutout anyway.)
And I told Jonah I wanted him to buy me an Elle Kaye taxidermy unicorn when his YouTube Channel (Jonah Minecraft, if you’re interested) goes viral, but I expect by the time he can afford it, all I’ll want is a one-way ticket to a Dignitas clinic in Switzerland. It’s a bit like living in Bow, as I keep telling the kids – it’ll be really nice round here by the time we’re dead.

 

 

For a gallery experience – for any day out with the kids, in fact, it was jolly good fun, buoyed up on delicious grapefruit and vodka cocktails (while the kids enjoyed ginger beer with fresh strawberries, compliemntary with my press tickets, courtesy of Chloe Nelkin consulting. And when Ava’s classmate arrived a bit later – part of the bribe to get my kids to go in the first place, with his artist parents who hadn’t slept, and four-month old brother in tow, looking a little flustered, we were glad to relieve them of the older half of their offspring so they could enjoy the gallery in peace, rather than submit to the groans of a six-year-old who has probably spent half his childhood in galleries.

By that time, Tom had the headache he usually reserves for shopping centres, so we headed to the local park –  where we found the Wars logo graffitied on a wall, so we took snaps and saved Jonah £70 pocket money – although we are planning to get the “I’m with Stupid” print by Zoe Moss for them for Christmas. If ever there was an investment to be made in their childhood, it’s probably – and rather cynically –  to be found, these days in art, which is to say in buying it, rather than making it.

And in any case, the whole experience was starting to remind me of yet another subversive pisstake of our time, the tongue-in-cheek Ladybird book by artist Miriam Elia, for which she promptly got sued, before Lady brought out their own range of satirical titles such as The Ladybird Book of the Hipster – an ideal gift for all wannabe Shoreditch dwellers, in perhaps the most cynical thing that has ever happened anywhere ever.

As Jonah remarked that he could have produced much of the art on display, I wryly remarked, “but you didn’t” before explaining how it is only the fame of the artist that makes the work of art worth anything in the first place, destroying the final shreds of his innocence in the process- well almost.

The last vestiges were lost when we found a dead bird beneath the Wars graffiti , which I promptly took a picture of, and asked him if it was art. He told me it wasn’t , because I wasn’t famous enough, while Ava looked as though she might like to burst into tears. It would appear, I have become a parody of the pushy Shoreditch parent after all.  Oh dear.

Later, climbing on a triangular monument with a hole in the centre in nearby Allen Gardens, Jonah told me it looked Illuminati. I know he’s my son (and I’m an embittered cynic, and avid Trews ex-aficionado) but where on Earth has he got that cultural reference from? Minecraft, Tom muttered – probably. But if ever I have managed to produce an already world weary not yet ten year old, there’s nothing in the gallery that could shock him, and whether that’s a bad or a good thing, I’m afraid I just don’t know.