Art review: ECA Degree Show, Edinburgh College of Art

In the Edinburgh College of Art Degree show this year, Ladina Clément has made an elaborate spoof of a dealer’s stand at an international art fair. There are red spots, business cards (blank), canvasses (blank and cast in plaster, one broken), a video of the balletic, white-gloved hands of an art handler. There is even a painting composed simply of red spots, but behind the stand the dealer lies collapsed either in exhaustion or despair. It is a nice satire of the corporate market forces that shape the art world and the dealers who service them. But in fact it is the curators working as a highly self-interested, professional cadre, quite as much as the dealers, who have led art down the primrose path of non-material, ideas-based art that it has taken in recent years.