Television fans may have spotted that the latest season of And Just Like That continues to rehash the storylines of its forebear Sex and the City in, if not a minor, certainly a lesser key. In the most recent episode, the great train journey that Carrie (Sarah Jessica Parker) took with Samantha (Kim Cattrall) to San Francisco in season five is reconceived as a trip to Virginia. When Carrie is asking her two old friends and a new one if they would accompany her, they are unable to commit – and this is where Rakewell became interested.
Charlotte (Kristin Davis) declines the trip to Virginia because her entire week is taken up by TEFAF, the European Fine Art Fair. She explains this, in her prim, all-knowing way, as ‘the European Fine Art Foundation’. Charlotte was always the arty one in Sex and the City and has returned to work in a gallery in And Just Like That.
We soon get a glimpse of what happens inside the fair. Much of what we see is accurate but, as with AJLT’s portrayal of real life, some things seem slightly askew. The production designers have used the correct typeface on the (fictional) gallery names on the booths. The very specific lighting of the aisles is on point. And the show’s art directors have clearly clocked that TEFAF has a reputation for floral decorations, as the main doorway is festooned with flowers – though in the TV show they are somewhat brighter and less subtle than TEFAF’s. The main doorway seems to have the word ‘TEFAF’ emblazoned on a wall behind it, making it look more like the entrance to a catwalk than a fair, but this is a small quibble. This set is clearly the work of a TEFAF aficionado.
What is curious is how this version of TEFAF works. The art-selling subplot becomes a commentary on ageing (natch) when Charlotte’s younger colleagues insist that they do all their selling at nightclubs and that she must join them or she shall miss out. Rakewell is unsure if the modus operandi of every gallery is quite so collegiate.
The nightclubs themselves look exactly like the nightclubs from Sex and the City and so seem about 20 years old, but perhaps that is the nature of nightclubs. And, of course, when Charlotte finally visits a club with a client, a Dutchman named Rolf (little do the writers realise the reason TEFAF is in New York is to attract New Yorkers to TEFAF rather than Dutchmen to New York) – she fuelled by espresso martinis, he by a certain white powder – he confesses his love for her. Surely all fairgoers wish that this is how business were done.
But there is one more anomaly. As if to show that women of a certain age still have all the power, the mother of one of Charlotte’s children’s school friends approaches her to buy a work that she saw in the ‘pre-TEFAF show’. While the art world is often in a lather about pre-selling at fairs, this seems like a step too far. No gallery has yet been seen to mount an exhibition in preparation for an art fair. While both SATC and AJLT have become famous for setting trends, Rakewell is very keen for this particular fashion not to take off.
A TEFAF spokesperson has informed your correspondent that in fact, the fair had ‘nothing to do with the appearance of TEFAF in the latest episode’, but that its inbox had nonetheless faced ‘an onslaught of messages’ about it. The writers’ depiction of the European Fine Art Fair might seem a little fanciful, but a world without artistic licence is not a world Rakewell would wish to live in.