For a city that is trying to cut down on its tourist numbers, Venice does seem to hold a lot of events whose sole purpose is to attract more people. The most recent of these, alongside the Biennale and the film festival, was Homo Faber. This fair, which ran for the month of September, offered an opportunity for visitors to appreciate the skills of the world’s finest craftspeople, or, in certain cases, the finest crafts brands – but more of that later.
The fair is put on by the Switzerland-based Michelangelo Foundation, whose aim is to support excellence in craft. At the opening of the fair this was reframed as celebrating the ‘best of what man can create’. The fair was held in the monastery of San Giorgio; it is hard to contemplate a more elevated setting for a fair devoted to beautiful objects.
In case we were in any doubt about the motivation behind the fair, its title pointed us in the right direction. Under the banner ‘Homo Faber: the Journey of Life’, how could we suppose that what we were about to witness was anything other than profound? In an exhibition ‘art directed’ by the director Luca Guadagnino, who was usefully also in the city for the film festival, the rooms were named after the universal phases of life such as Birth, Celebration (apparently a phase that is characterised exclusively by eating and drinking) and even the Afterlife. It’s hard to argue with such lofty experiences.
The other aspect to this fair that seems to suggest unassailability is the numbers. More than 800 objects were displayed. They came from some 70 countries. This is an international, mass affair – so it must be important. Yet the scale works against some aspects of craft. Many of the objects on show might be made by vast companies – Dunhill, Van Cleef and Arpels, Buccellati, to name a few – but plenty more were made by solitary craftspeople who had worked sometimes for years on a single object.
One example of this was an extraordinary boxwood jug that took three years to carve from a single block of wood. Here was a skill taken to a level almost inconceivable, were it not for the craftsman who had enacted such a thought – sadly not in the conception room but in a room titled ‘Inheritance’. It appeared alongside two exquisite Korean mourning hats woven by hand, a lesson in the eloquence and poignancy of handmade objects. Perhaps these works were more powerful for being allowed to speak directly to a culturally specific tradition of making, something that was absent elsewhere in the display.
As our work on the most recent 40 Under 40 showed, craft is particularly compelling at the moment partly because it allows makers an opportunity to consider form at its most essential, but also because it allows a striking conversation with different histories and traditions. It was sometimes hard to hear these conversations at Homo Faber despite the portentous titles of the rooms. Largely, they were blocked out by the QR codes that littered the displays. In fact, every single object had its own code. The reason: each object was for sale and these codes were the way to buy your version of what you saw, immediately. The fair, for all its talk of exploring human experience, was nothing more than a sales vehicle, or, if you prefer, a department store with excellent room settings. Frieze London and Art Basel Paris are about to open – Frieze with a new tent and a new layout. It should perhaps be remembered that if the main thing a fair is foregrounding is the price tag, it can be hard to appreciate the creativity on display.