Something recurring -- a style, a mood or a tendency that threads its way through the previous 12 months and, in doing so, traces a theme -- that's what I look for when it comes once again to appraising another year-in-art. This time round the resonating word is "representation."
For appearance sake
While friendly champagne-and-cheese opening-party chats with an enthusiastic emerging artists is a delightful way to make a living, I've said it before and I'll say it again: The Tokyo art scene, from the black-clad comely gallery assistant, to the shiny white Apple laptop at the reception desk, remains something of a simulacrum, an attempt to re-create, as if on a movie set, the atmosphere of New York City's West Chelsea or London's Hoxton Square. The difference -- and this is not a small difference but a fundamental one -- is that there is almost no contemporary art market in Tokyo.
The relative social and economic uniformity of Japan from the postwar to the present did not engender a class of wealthy sophisticates with rarefied sensibilities, people who take pleasure in hanging the next big art thing on their wall to impress all their friends at dinner parties. Most Tokyoites, even affluent ones, do not have homes with expansive dining rooms, a temperature and humidity regulated basement and an attic storage space. Heck, most people in Tokyo don't even have wall space. And so the successful Japanese artists continue to be those who can sell their work overseas.