But a good deal of the special cachet of SOFA CHICAGO is more ephemeral, difficult to analyze precisely. For reasons that are too subtle or transitory to nail down too securely, this is the commercial fair that is currently THE fair, the almost mandatory annual meeting ground of gallerists, artists, collectors, critics, curators, and the public interested in the art and issues it presents. SOFA CHICAGO has served that function for about the last ten years, and shows no sign of not continuing to do so into the future. But what is SOFA CHICAGO? According to its website, it’s “a fair of contemporary decorative arts & design.” In Art + Auction in 2004, I noted “Galleries representing artists who work in glass make up the largest population of SOFA CHICAGO, followed (in order) by ceramics, metalwork and jewelry, wood, fiber, and ethnographic material.” While I’m not sure that order still holds in 2008, I would guess that 100 years from now some future art historian will try to figure out why there were different art fairs for different art materials in the late 20th and early 21st century, why some avenues toward artmaking—painting, say, or photography—end up in one art fair, and sculpture in glass or clay ends up in another, how we make those distinctions, how the art fairs (and museums, galleries, collectors, magazines, etc.) enforce them, and what it says about the different communities that comprise the art world. Some future art historian will do that, but not me. The art world is so enormous, a multi-billion dollar industry employing literally thousands of people, that some reasonable segmentation of it into subsections makes sense to me. I don’t carp when there’s no sports on the Food Channel; if I’m watching the Game Show Network I don’t wonder why I’m not seeing any Shakespeare. Materials that have had long historic and traditional sympathies generally can be congregated together, specialization has taken place in art as well as in almost everything else, and training and tradition has led to organizing some aspects of artmaking by medium. SOFA reflects that and carries it toward the future. Indeed, if I might, part of Mark Lyman’s major legacy may be more than his ongoing organizational and entrepreneurial skills, his ability to plow through the literally thousands of details and decisions necessary to make this fair—and SOFA NEW YORK too—happen, and his ability to so in such a way that it seems effortless. It has been augmented by his recent efforts to articulate the changing face of art produced in materials such as glass, wood, clay and metal. Lyman has called such art “post-craft,” and identified it broadly as “a further embrace of the abstract and sculptural
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over the functional, marked by increasingly sophisticated intellectual content, and experimentation with new materials.” As someone who struggles regularly with these concepts, I like to call all of this “term-warfare”— I greatly appreciate his efforts here, as we’re still bedeviled by terms such as “craft” and “artisanry” and “functionality” and “decorative arts,” and we sense there’s some hierarchy being played out here. But in many ways, these are starting (thankfully!) to become distinctions with less of a difference, much like the “Is it craft or is it art?” conversations of the 1970s. While tastes can vary, of course, and some of us remain straddled with prejudices for and/or against one artistic medium or another, any individual who walks through SOFA CHICAGO and doesn’t think he or she is observing cultural production of the absolute highest order, competitive visually and intellectually with any art produced in any medium elsewhere, is simply not looking or thinking hard enough. And there – and this is key – is no place on earth that makes that point as well or as succinctly as SOFA CHICAGO. More than any magazine or book, more even than any museum, SOFA’s annual threeday conclave makes the case for its material through the independent efforts of the 100 galleries that comprise it, augmented by interesting in-house programming, and it makes it in such a way as to enthrall its participants and propel its future. SOFA is indispensable.
Author’s note: For the record, I moderated a panel discussion at SOFA CHICAGO some years ago, organized by another entity, and to the best of my knowledge have to date never received compensation from SOFA for anything. While I have briefly interviewed Mark Lyman by phone and e-mail a few times for various publications, I don’t recall having ever met him personally, and have no relationship with him or with SOFA outside of my responsibilities as a critic and journalist. James Yood teaches art history at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago and directs the New Arts Journalism program there. He writes regularly for GLASS and American Craft magazines and is Chicago correspondent to Artforum and Art on Paper. Published in celebration of SOFA CHICAGO’s 15th anniversary.