Transcript generated automatically by AI and may contain errors.
Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Good morning, everyone. My name is Robert Diamant. I am a gallerist based in Margate. I am partner at Carl Friedman Gallery, and I've been there for about 16 years.
And it's actually how I met today's guest, Matthew Slotover, the incredible founder of Freeze Art Fair, Freeze Magazine, Tockless, the beautiful restaurant, which actually last time I was here, I had to leave an event to rush to Tockless to host another event. Yeah, and also the Fort Road Hotel in Margate.
And Matthew's recently also become a trustee on the board of Turner Contemporary in Margate, the museum. And over the last kind of 11, 12 years, there's been a huge regeneration of the town, which has been a real privilege to be part of. And I also host a podcast called Talk Art. So thank you for being here. So Matthew, can we talk a bit about you growing up?
Because I was really fascinated about how you got to the place of actually founding Freeze magazine way before the art fair and way before all your other kind of entrepreneurial activities. What was it that first caught your imagination about the art world or artists?
Yeah, well, I studied psychology at university. I've never had a day's training in art or art history in my life. Growing up, I loved design, photography, but I didn't really understand contemporary art. It just didn't grab me. And historical art didn't really mean anything to me. I was rejected from my school for my art O-level course because my drawing wasn't good enough.
So I always kind of maybe had a bit of an interest, but it was just never sparked. And I left university. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I knew I didn't want to do psychology. And I had a friend at St. Martin's, and we began to look at art. And it was just around the time that all of the Damien Hirst, Carl Friedman warehouse shows were being shown. And I just thought it was amazing.
Rob's gallery that he works with, it's his partner, Carl Friedman Gallery. And Carl... He's like the ghost in the room because he was almost my kind of mentor right at the beginning. Someone said, you've got to go and see this show. It's in a warehouse in Brotherhive.
And we walked in and it was just this huge warehouse with beautiful white walls and grey floor with Damien Hirst's Flykiller piece in it and Michael Landy and like lots of amazing artists and Carl had curated it. And I just got talking to Carl and I met some of the artists and I just thought, wow, these people are amazing.
They're not like anyone I've met in my quite sheltered academic life so far. And they're exciting. And this is something amazing. And I started to read all the art magazines like Flash Art, Art Forum. And I'd grown up with The Face and Blitz and ID and loved magazines actually. I'd been involved in a magazine at college. Magazines were really like the thing then.
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Chapter 2: How did Matthew Slotover's early experiences shape his career in the art world?
proper art and take it seriously I mean Adrian was subsequently very supportive of that whole generation but I remember that moment it's like I can't believe he wrote that and so we just began to think well maybe there should be a magazine that is all of these things that's not boringly written badly designed and about the interesting art that we saw around and And it took a while.
And the early issue of Freeze, one of the things that most people spoke about was the design and the logo. And the logo at the time was quite radically exciting. I think people were quite surprised by it and it really caught people's attention. And I know you had billboards all over London with the specific type font with the word Freeze on it.
yeah well that's funny you pick that up yeah typography was a big thing at the time this was 1991 and desktop publishing was just coming in so you're all too young to remember what desktop publishing is but it's typesetting on the computer which we were one of the first magazines in the world to be desktop published and it meant our bills went you know from 5 000 pounds to 500 pounds because we could do it ourselves and one of the amazing things about it was you had a mac and we had
we literally had one of those nine inch black and white screens. And every time you scrolled the screen, it went like that. Like it was really, really slow. And we did the magazine on that. But you could change the typefaces. So you could choose your own typeface.
And there were all these people, mostly on the West Coast of the States, making amazing, crazy typefaces that didn't look like anything else. And the logo is, I think it's adapted from a font called Triplex that was one of these new typefaces. And we had a lot of fun with that.
We changed the typefaces every issue and advertising agencies would buy the magazine to show their clients and do ads with these typefaces in them. So it was a bit of a thing, the typeface. It's funny you pick up on that. I don't know where you got that from.
No, but also you co-founded the magazine at the time. One of the first collaborators you had was Tom Gidley, who's now also a partner of yours with the Fort Road Hotel, but also Amanda Sharp, who came in, I think, initially as advertising, but then obviously became your kind of business co-conspirator, co-partner.
But the thing I was looking back to is it started out almost like as a passion project. And I felt like there was a real germ there, the DNA of the whole of the thing that's gone on to become such a global brand. really started out of this idea of discovering new ideas, but also helping others discover.
And I feel like you guys all shared this idea of wanting to translate what might seem alien or even not genuine, you know, in terms of what Adrian Searle had said about Damien Hirst. There were a lot of skeptics about this new kind of conceptual art that was the kind of modus operandi of that generation. But can you speak a bit about that importance of discovery?
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Chapter 3: What inspired the creation of Frieze magazine and its unique approach to art?
It wasn't just the reality we all knew. And it really aligned with things like the development in fashion of spaces like Dover Street Market and Comme des Garcons.
and this very highly elevated other world kind of experience that when you entered any of these spaces you would probably want to spend crazy amounts of money because i don't think you were actually feeling like you were in the normal world it's not real money and also it wasn't like an existing building because most art fairs even if you think of like art fairs now in london a lot of them are in kind of conference centers or exhibition centers
where you know you might have had like a it fair the week before and it still feels like that energy but you created these worlds that from the minute you walk in it felt kind of elevated and different and you worked with david adjo didn't you on the first one yeah that was the that was the idea we wanted it to feel like a festival not a trade fair art fairs are essentially trade fairs but it's a bit like the magazine the way we put so much into the design of it
With the fair, we thought, well, it's not just the art. It's the food, it's the design, it's the architecture, it's the experience. It's really important. If you're going to go somewhere, you might as well be nice and keep people there. And so, yeah, the options are you go to a trade fair venue, you go to a disused building, or you build your own.
And people said to us, if you can find the space to build your own, it's by far the best because you have control over everything. It's much more stressful and more expensive. And massively difficult. Now we have one of our fairs, one of the freeze fairs is in New York in a building. It's so easy in a building compared to building a tent. I mean, it's just no comparison.
You know, it's like a breeze. It's really difficult being in a tent. We've had lots of problems. We had insects and flies. We had a sloping floor for the first 10 years. We had climate's been a big thing. I mean, it's really difficult. But it does allow you to choose your own restaurants. She's an architect. So architects, yeah, we've had amazing architects.
David Adjaye did the first three years, and Caruso St. John, Carmody Grook, Universal Design Studio. In New York, we used Soil, who did this incredible design that was like a curve. So for us, that's been one of the most fun things. And then also our passion, restaurants. We had amazing restaurants at the fairs. So, you know, we've had... River Cafe, Umu Locatelli, Rochelle Canteen.
I mean, just tons of, I mean, Maison Francoise is there at the moment. So, you know, almost every great restaurant in London has done the fair. And that just gives people, I don't know, it elevates it, it makes it more fun to go to. It keeps people there because they're like, well, we want to go for lunch and then we'll still stay. It's really important.
And if you're going to have food, you might as well be good.
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Chapter 4: How did the Frieze Art Fair evolve from a magazine concept?
um even people them collective there's lots of different local organizations who are getting grants smaller grants from arts council or you know they're applying for different funding but it's tough for them and a lot of them are being funded by other artists so like lindsay mendix a ceramicist who's and artist who's become sort of more well known in recent years so she often makes like additions and gives a hundred percent of the funds from those additions to the space
that then helps other artists. But what I've noticed is that a lot of the artists showing in those young galleries are now getting international shows. Some of them are showing in, like, LA and New York with sold-out shows. They get signed up by galleries.
So from having their first ever solo show in a public space, one of these ones in Margate, they're ending up getting careers out of it, which is a beautiful thing. So I do think it's really important to try and nurture these younger, grassroots kind of artist-led operations.
There's something very credible about it being artist-led, you're absolutely right. I think when things are too manufactured by funding, I don't, you know, I'm not against Arts Council funding, I think it's great, and everyone wants more. Having said that, when things are organically done without funding by artists... Somehow the art world thinks, well, there must be something going on here.
Someone's not trying to promote this. So Lindsay has been super important. She started this festival called Off Season, which is in January. It's a weekend in January. And the first one was last year. The second one was this year. And I think about six weeks before it started, she just said to everyone in town, if you're an artist, put something on, we'll list it.
It could be in a restaurant, it could be in a studio, it could be in a bar, whatever it's like. And I think the first year there were 100 shows, the second year there were 150, a lot down one road, North Down Road, and a lot of people came. And there was literally no funding the first year. It was a website, it was a web page, it was an Instagram, that's it.
But it was organic and it was led by an artist.
The second year, they had something like 300 artists involved or more even. And Madonna came and saw it and went into people's apartments and houses and saw their art exhibitions.
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Chapter 5: What challenges did Matthew face when launching the Frieze Art Fair?
I mean, it's really doing something amazing. But I agree, actually. There is, in a way, you can't strategize it because once you over-strategize stuff, people just aren't interested.
Even Tracy or different people I think before I knew her I thought there was a lot of strategy in it because I came from a music background originally where there is a lot of marketing and strategy and deliberate choices or moves you make but actually in the art world it's much more organic than that and I think people often like yourself you're a great example of someone that trusts their instinct and yes they have strategy on a business kind of wider picture level you have to have some strategy but I think in the day-to-day running of things a lot of it is more like spontaneous.
Yeah, people are quite skeptical about the art world, aren't they? Before they know it, they think it's a con, a fix. Like, why is this worth so much money? It's just subjective. Why should I believe you? People just want to pull the wool over people's eyes to make money. Nothing could be...
The more you get to know people in the art world, the more you realize even the top dealers, they actually just really love art, and they probably could have done something else that could have made more money, but they love it, and they want to support artists, and they want to put on great shows. That's basically it. Everyone's in it.
The art world's very broad, I suppose, and there are pockets of areas that I wouldn't trust. But that's what Freeze was trying to do, I suppose, with... You know, free stands behind every gallery that's in the fair. There's a very rigorous selection procedure.
It takes three days and an international group of changing galleries that chooses all of the galleries and the different committees for each fair. And, you know, they really look at every single proposal and every and no gallery has the right to be in every year. Everyone has to apply from scratch every year. It's a pretty open, rigorous process of galleries being judged by their peers.
I also like this idea in Margate of the restaurant scene because that's also really grown and a lot of cool chefs from like big restaurants in London have left with their families to get bigger houses because they can actually grow up with their kids with a small garden or something.
But they've set up all these restaurants with like 10 tables and they're incredible and they're getting amazing reviews from like Grace Dent and different like reviewers and a bit like Top Class I think there is this connection between art and food and I think it's really great when we can all come together and work together
And Tracy's even opened Perfect Place to Grow now, which is like a food charity where she gave them a small building and they're running a cafe out of it. But they teach people how to work in the kitchen, but also to work in the front of house. And Margate has one of the highest unemployment rates for young people.
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