A heady atmosphere of spending hung over the opening of this year's Art@Agnes, the "art fair in a hotel" that has in the last four years become a regular fixture of Tokyo's art world. Take 20 to 50 years off visitors' ages, strip them of their designer clothes and their well-polished courtesies, and you'd be left with a group rather like children barnstorming through a lolly shop on pocket-money day.
Most of the 33 galleries that rented rooms in The Agnes Hotel in Tokyo's Kagurazaka district for the three-day event last weekend brought along art designed to fuel the fire of the spur-of-the-moment purchase. Small paintings or editioned photographs by well-known artists were going for anything from ¥10,000 to a few hundred thousand.
Who could say no to a clever set of six photographs by designer-turned-artist Naohiro Ukawa? His "San Francisco Earthquake/Loma Prieta" showed a funky and infectiously carefree woman who had apparently confused seismic shifts for disco riffs, and was just ¥39,000 at Nanzuka Underground gallery (room 307). Very cool, and with a big-name signature to boot, it said one thing: Buy! And a Japanese collector did just that — within 30 minutes of kickoff.