PAD London 2015 – The Best In Show

If a fair can be called ’boutique’ because of its (smaller) size and (higher) quality, then PAD London is that very thing – and remains one of the year’s great highlights. Taking place during ‘Frieze Week’, the 9th edition of the fair finds an eager and ready market of the world’s big spenders and designers, and is for many galleries the busiest time of the year.

Founded in 1996 by 18th century furniture and drawing specialist Patrick Perrin, PAD London (which also exhibits in Paris) has evolved from an antiques fair to a very different arena of all things eclectic. Here you will find a carefully edited collection of museum quality modern art, photography, design, decorative and tribal arts exhibited by over 60 of the world’s best galleries.

PAD London’s distinctive blurring of all boundaries between art and design, between antique and modern, between Western and global and not least between high culture and low culture, is reflective of a wider phenomenon that many fairs including Masterpiece and Frieze are increasingly acknowledging.

The dynamic fashion for cross collecting is very much in tune with the times, as the rather more static historicism is everywhere under assault. Indeed today eclecticism permeates almost every aspect of our lives, from our musical and culinary tastes to architecture, interior design and fashion. Former ideas of high culture and low culture have collapsed and even the moral content of the arts and design – in the sense of being able to judge what is good and what is not – has dissolved into a post-modern morass of cultural relativism.

So if as a rule it’s all anarchy and chaos in culture today, how do galleries and fairs like PAD London make judgements on quality? At PAD London decisions about which galleries will be exhibited are made by a changing selection committee, comprised of some of the most notable galleries in their respective fields. But what is the criteria they exercise to make such judgements and what therefore makes a good collector and a good collection? These are some of the questions we put to a handful of exhibitors.

What emerges is a consensus view that judgments on quality are predicated on a fine balance between rational and emotional responses to the work. The rational element refers to the critical and experienced eye that is only acquired by education, for example by regularly visiting museums and fairs and showing an interest in the underlying narratives of things. It is only then that a collector can afford to exercise an emotional response to things. And this is in many ways more important, as it is the resultant individualism or idiosyncrasy of a collection that sets one apart from the other, and which even has the power to create new markets which didn’t previously exist. A case in point is the great French art dealer Paul Durand-Ruel who gambled everything on his own vision of beauty with his unrelenting championing of the initially unpopular Impressionists… and won.

In today’s deconstructive cultural environment in which all certainties are trashed and concepts of what constitutes ‘truth’, ‘beauty’, ‘quality’, ‘taste’ and ‘luxury‘ are now considered to be purely subjective, fairs like PAD London can only be a beautiful and fascinating snapshot of what we currently value. ‘Culture’! What is it and what does it stand for? Who knows! But whatever it is, it’s all up for grabs… that is as long as you have the cash.