This month’s Frieze Art Fair marks Neville Wakefields last stint as curator of Frieze Projects, the fair’s freewheeling not-for-profit program, and he’s going out with a bang: For one of the projects, he invited the Polish artist Monika Sosnowska to create the illusion that a scale model of Warsaw’s Palace of Culture and Science has crashed through the fair’s tented roof. Wakefield himself, now 46, has taken something of a freewheeling approach to his career, bouncing between roles as varied as creative director for the young fashion designer Adam Kimmels company and cofounder of Destricted, a compilation of films on sexuality in art. No stranger to the art world’s commercial side — he has organized shows for Mary Boone and Barbara Gladstone in New York — Wakefield spoke with Sarah Douglas about curating in "impure environments" and why there’s been a lot of "crap" on the market.

Are Frieze Projects interventions into a market context?

Yes. They need to intervene into the economic or social fabric of the fair in a way that an artist creating something in a booth generally doesn’t.

What drew you to curating projects at an art fair?

One reason is the impurity of the environment. I’m interested in what happens to work there and what it has to do to survive in that context. That said, given the number of biennials, generationals and whatnot we’ve seen recently, I don’t think that in many ways the fair is any less pure as a showing environment than some of these huge surveys we’ve gotten used to.

Except things aren’t being sold in those exhibitions.

Well, we would be somewhat deluded to think that things weren’t being sold from out of the "Younger Than Jesus" show [at the New Museum in New York last summer].

Or the Venice Biennale.

Yeah. It’s simply that that’s not the aspect being foregrounded.

Is the recession good for art?

Up until this point, demand has exceeded supply. It’s been easy to sell anything. So there’s been a ton of crap on the market. That’s going to change. I do think that’s good for art. Art has become bloated along with the economy. That doesn’t mean that no good art was made during the period of bloat. We just had to suffer more bad art because there was less natural financial selection.

You make a lot of studio visits, especially in your current role as co- curator, with Klaus Biesenbach and Connie Butler, of next year’s "Greater New York" at P.S. 1. How are you seeing artists respond to the changes in the market?

There seem to be a lot more collectives working, like Bruce High Quality Foundation. They’re not that bound up in an idea of commercial success. There will be a renewed interest in the idea of art as an educational practice. Piero Golia and the Mountain School of Arts in Los Angeles is an example. The deference toward the commodity market is definitely gone.

This is your last year curating Frieze Projects. Why are you leaving?

Three years is a good amount of time to do anything, particularly of this nature. Frieze Projects is not like a museum. It changes quickly and benefits from a reasonably high turnover of people.

"Conversation With Neville Wakefield" originally appeared in the October 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's October 2009 Table of Contents.