Trending

Jessica Johnson visited Art Basel Miami and made this list of current art trends.

- inkjet prints on canvas using imagery sourced from the web
- decorative fabrics wrapped around stretcher bars and presented as paintings
- rainbow gradients
- compounds poured on canvas with airbrushed shadow effects
- simplistic emoticon imagery (palm trees, rainbows, clouds, smiley faces, etc)
- clumpy ceramics with sloppy glazes
- exposed stretcher bars
- dirt as a medium on canvas
- framed photographs without glass
- process abstraction
- metal as a surface for painting, screen prints, etc

What was absent;

- video art
- neons
- work with any political content (or any content that wasn't about process and/or materials)

Big eyes

After a scan of some dealer galleries, a best-of show in LA and too much time on Google, here’s some of what to expect from art in the next 12 months.

• Plants in pots, in arrangements and in fragments
• Large mirrors and reflective surfaces
• Installations in stand-alone rooms
• Tiles and more tiles, on the floor, on the wall and on the ceiling
• Performances (many of them based on work by Yvonne Rainer)
• Collectives and groups
• Ceramics, ceramics and more ceramics
• Rumbling bass sound tracks
• Small abstract paintings that remind you of other paintings you've seen
• Artist statements printed onto the gallery wall
• Things made of bronze that look like they are made of something else
• Artists writing printed in handouts
• Artists curating other artists as their own work of art

Deep Frieze

The Frieze Art Fair opened this morning and OTN walked the halls on your behalf. You can also count on our special operative Big Ears having them both to the ground over the next few days, but in the meantime a quick sum up of what was everywhere you looked and what was nowhere to be seen.

Everywhere: cut glass, silver, cast objects, drawing and painting over photographs, birds and Paul McCarthy

Nowhere: neon, video, curtains, chandeliers and skulls

Image: Paul McCarthy's giant Balloon dog based on Jeff Koons's very large Balloon dog based on a regular party clown balloon dog

Child’s play

Turner prize winner Jeremy Deller’s work Sacrilege is doing the hard yards for the Olympics as it is dragged round the country as light ent. And so it should being a 35-metre bouncy castle that looks like Stonehenge. 

It's all part of wave of BC art that has been trending over the last few years - more fun than skulls, doesn’t break like white neon and definitely safer than swinging on chandeliers. 

Images: top left, Jeremy Deller’s Sacrilege and right, White Bouncy Castle by William Forsythe. Middle left, Brook Andrew's Jumping Castle War Memorial, right, Laughing my guts out by Andy Best. Bottom left, NZ's own Inez Crawford with Bouncy Marae and right, Drift by David Cross