The Rise of the Art Fair
WHAT HAS CHANGED?
For art fairs, the numbers tell the story, as Georgina Adam noted in The Art Newspaper in 2012: “In 1970, there were just three main events (Cologne, Basel and the Brussels-based Art Actuel). But the number has mushroomed in the past decade: from 68 in 2005 to 189 in 2011.”1 In early 2015, and excluding art fairs that do not present contemporary art, I counted over 220 international art fairs (see Appendix A for their months, locations, and websites). Add in fairs that do not include any, or much, contemporary art and the number is closer to 300. Indeed, a new art fair is announced seemingly every month now, making any exact number a somewhat limited data point.
How one segment of the art industry that barely existed a few decades ago could grow so quickly is attributable to numbers as well, but these are harder to calculate. As any dealer who has done an art fair knows, there is no reliable way to tally the amount of art sold by all the dealers participating in them. Not only do dealers spin how well they are doing at fairs, ever conscious of the impact that the perception of how well they are doing can have on the reality of how well they are doing, but because fairs are predominantly opportunities to meet new clients, who may not buy at that first encounter but do later on, knowing exactly which sales to attribute to a fair is not a simple calculation. Still, the TEFAF Art Market Report 2014 said that dealers had reported 33 percent of their total sales came via art fairs in 2013.2 For some people, the rest of the numbers the report supplies on dealer sales are controversial, given they need to be qualified in so many ways, including “33 percent of how much?” (dealers are not very forthcoming with accurate sales totals in or out of art fairs) and how they are felt to distort what is happening outside of New York. Indeed, any global total of dealer sales strike many insiders as educated guesses at best.
A number easier to estimate, though, because costs like travel, accommodations, shipping, and booth fees are much more public, is how much it cost galleries to support so many art fairs a year. The 2014 TEFAF report noted that dealers had to shell out €1.9 billion (or $2.5 billion) to participate in fairs in 2013. How this relates to why art fairs have proliferated still requires a bit of speculation. I know from talking with many dealers that some galleries had very good art fairs in 2013 and 2014, while others had not so good ones. Galleries with six-figure or higher average price points generally reported much better returns on their art fair investments (see Chapter 5 for more information on how the top and emerging levels of the market reportedly did much better than the middle of the market during these years). Then again, larger galleries most likely paid much more for larger booths, more staff, more shipping, and so on. The overarching conclusion we can draw, though, given how galleries are doing more art fairs than ever before and have been for several years now, is that they view doing so as worth the extra hassle and expense.
Dealers who have been around for a few decades will tell you that fairs were not always thought to be as potentially profitable as they are today. If they had been, the market would have arguably supported many more of them much sooner. When I worked my first art fair in 1994, as an assistant to another dealer, breaking even was viewed as a huge accomplishment. The goals of an art fair then were to network and advertise. Indeed, even today, galleries do not always break even at fairs, let alone make a profit. Most dealers complain a great deal about how arduous the fairs can be, and despite great booms in the art market in the past, this many fairs never popped up before. So how did we get to this place where so many fairs exist now, and dealers feel so compelled to participate in them? What follows is a mix of admittedly subjective observations and more verifiable conclusions on what art fairs have come to mean to the contemporary art market since the recession in 2008. In short, three additional factors (beyond the potential money to be made) seem to be at play in the rise of the art fair: (1) a perception that fairs can be not only profitable—for organizers, if not always dealers—but that they are also easy to launch; (2) a transfer of power from the galleries to the fairs themselves; and (3) a growing shift in where collectors prefer to buy art.
Easy to Launch
Some dealers will point to the 1994 Gramercy International Art Fair (the ground-breaking effort launched by four art dealers and held in New York’s Gramercy Hotel) as the beginning of the rise of the art fair, but it would take nearly ten more years before the hundreds of imitators we see today would be created. Moreover, by that time, the Gramercy International Art Fair had morphed into The Armory Show, one of the world’s major art fairs with its own growing list of satellites. For me, the spark that truly ignited the current explosion of art fairs happened in 2003, the year that Art Basel held their second edition of Art Basel in Miami Beach (ABMB) and, more importantly, the year the New Art Dealers Alliance (NADA) held its first satellite fair at the same time a few blocks away. Up until that moment, most new gallerists understood the importance of getting into art fairs for raising their profiles, meeting new collectors, networking with other galleries, etc. Yet a basic assumption among dealers I knew then had been that it was probably a better use of your time and money to continue to lobby the selection committees of the major fairs than to risk too much at the handful of smaller international fairs that existed at the time, believing they would not contribute too much to your prestige or collector list but would still cost you a chunk of change, as sales were likely to be low.
After that weekend in December 2003, however, breathless reports of what happened began trickling back across the gallery world. Many of the thirty-five young galleries there had sold out their entire booths during the first few hours, and several reportedly made more money over the next four days than they had in their galleries over the previous six months. All of a sudden, the potential benefits of smaller art fairs were seen in a whole new light. As news spread, the perception became that a new or smaller art fair could also be a means of making boatloads of money virtually overnight. Although their first edition basically included any gallery who had expressed interest in participating, by the time NADA began accepting applications for the Miami fair in 2005, they received more than five times the number of applications than they had spaces available.
In addition, like the Gramercy International Art Fair, the NADA fair had been conceived and launched by a group of young gallerists, without much real experience in such productions. That fact, plus the previously unimaginable financial success of NADA, seemed to convince a number of other dealers and entrepreneurs alike that virtually anyone could launch an art fair. By 2013, ABMB had at least fifteen bona fide satellite fairs orbiting it (not counting less formal events that were organized that weekend), and reports were that sales at most of them were very satisfying for their participants.
Today entirely new art fairs are continuously launched by dealers or others with no previous experience. Many of them do fairly well in gaining press, selling out booths, and attracting collectors their first time out as well. In May 2014 a small new fair called NEWD was launched in the Bushwick district of Brooklyn, NY, a neighborhood where many artists have studios and several galleries have popped up, but that most collectors are still unfamiliar with. A particular promotional challenge its young organizers (Kate Bryan and Kibum Kim) took on was launching a fair that coincided not with another major fair, but rather with the popular Bushwick Open Studios event. Although they had some experience working in galleries and auction houses, neither Bryan nor Kim had any previous experience organizing a fair, and yet their first time out, the press for NEWD was strong, their presentation was given very high marks, and reports were that sales were quite respectable.
That is not to say an art fair does not still require a great deal of work and planning; just that there is no particular up-front experience required. My co-owner in Winkleman Gallery, and co-founder in the Moving Image art fair, and I can confirm it requires hundreds of hours long past when normal gallery work is complete to produce an even smaller fair. When we launched the Moving Image art fair, we took the experience we had participating in other fairs, asked as many fair organizers as we could for advice, and then essentially made up the rest. Also, and still somewhat amazingly to me, the first edition of Moving Image, in New York in 2011, took place only six weeks after the first invitations to galleries went out. In Chapter 9, we’ll look more closely at the logistics, opportunities, and challenges for dealers who launch their own art fairs. They remain a great deal of work, but how straightforward it can be to launch a new one has contributed to their proliferation.
A TRANSFER OF POWER
Looking at the art market today, it is perhaps easy to forget that in the very early days of the Great Recession, the world’s top political and business leaders were shocked at how quickly some of the giants in global finance collapsed. Huge corporations went belly-up, people were genuinely very worried about their futures, and even if you still had plenty of money, with so many others in the world losing their jobs or losing their homes, for a while it came to be seen as insensitive to buy luxury goods, at least in a context as conspicuous as an art fair. In December 2008, many dealers at the fairs in Miami went home very disappointed; 2009 was even worse for some of them. That this turn of events was even possible came as a bit of a shock to many younger dealers who had only opened their galleries after the turn of the millennium, so strong had the market been up through 2007.
The power that any art dealer wields can be measured to a very large degree by the strength of their relationships with the people who buy a lot of art. Being able to pick up the phone and have the world’s most important collectors actually take your call is what in essence separates those who will truly succeed in the gallery business from those in the “also-ran” category. These close relationships are carefully nurtured and fiercely guarded, but in the early days of the recession, when art dealers could not even get collectors’ personal assistants on the phone, the gallery world responded in part by panicking and handing some of their hard-earned power over to the fairs.
Speaking at the Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona in November 2013, Clare McAndrew noted in her presentation “Tomorrow’s Art Market: Where Will It Be?” that galleries had reported significant drops in foot traffic over the past several years. McAndrew said, “It’s just more difficult to get people out of their homes and their offices. People are quite happy to buy online and at auction and stuff but not happy to go and visit a gallery as much maybe as they used to. Obviously fairs are a big thing. The market’s become this event-driven vehicle, and . . . buyers’ loyalties have shifted to the fair itself rather than to the gallery, which is an issue that dealers are facing.”
It is difficult to get any art fair organizers on the record about this shift of loyalties, but the perception is that it is real and that it came about in part because of VIP passes. During the early days of the recession, when dealers who had been used to making money hand-over-fist at the fairs, particularly in Miami, saw a noticeable drop in the numbers of top collectors in attendance, they put pressure on the fairs to do something about it. After all, they were paying top dollar to participate. Keep in mind that the art fair model, before the age of opening-day feeding frenzies and countless satellites, had been that the organizers produced the fair and the galleries personally invited their collectors. It had never really been part of the deal that the dealers openly held organizers responsible for ensuring that a certain volume of certain collectors showed up, let alone that they spent money at the fair.
Still, in an effort to try to please the panicked dealers, the art fairs began experimenting with more impressive and glamorous VIP programming to encourage top collectors to return. Depending on whom you ask, this led to or merely coincided with what happened next, but everyone agrees the fairs ended up victims of their programming’s success to some degree. Because many of the galleries counted the exact same top collectors among their “VIPs,” they all sent the same few hundred collectors the VIP passes the fairs had doled out to them, with the result being that VIPs receiving dozens of extra passes were happy to distribute them to their friends or colleagues at work or even their chauffeurs, many of whom did not collect art, but nonetheless showed up at the various VIP events and occupied the VIP lounges at the fairs. When dealers complained that the VIP events were overrun with people there for the party and not for the art, the fairs next responded by asking the galleries to forward them their VIP lists, so they could collate them, send out the passes themselves, and thereby eliminate duplicate passes being sent to the same collectors. This worked better for keeping the VIP programs exclusive, but now the fairs possessed the best contact list of top collectors in the world, certainly better than their average participant, and could reach out to them with any message they chose. In short, where collectors were previously viewed as clients of the galleries, increasingly they had become clients of the fairs. The relationship had shifted.
This is not the only factor leading to the shifting loyalties. Two others include the sheer number of galleries that exist now (and the corresponding inability of any human to know them all) and the shorthand that has evolved in determining where a gallery stands in the overall pecking order based on which fairs they do and where their booth is located in them. We will examine the implications of that for smaller galleries in Chapter 5, but will note here that this method of ranking galleries seems to be becoming more pervasive the more time galleries spend at fairs. It also heightens the perception that a gallery must be of a certain quality to be accepted into a certain fair. “Gallery X does Frieze London and Art Basel in Miami Beach” is a statement that tells insiders quite quickly a great deal about Gallery X’s prestige and influence, or so it is increasingly assumed. This shorthand, whether entirely accurate or not, has become one way collectors have learned to manage their limited time in cities with many satellite fairs. It is assumed that you will see a certain level of quality at Fair A and much less so at Fair B, which in turn makes collectors who see themselves as more discerning gravitate toward Fair A and systematically associate a higher level of quality with any gallery participating in it than they do galleries relegated to Fair B, even though the reality is that both fairs include a range of galleries. As a result of such shortcuts, though, many collectors you meet during the fairs in Miami now can tell you which fair they purchased something from but not necessarily which gallery. In this way, the fair has become the brand that collectors trust, the brand that sells the art, displacing the gallery to a large degree.
All of this leads many dealers to feel extreme pressure to get into the more prestigious fairs. That in and of itself is not new (dealers have always wanted their galleries to be seen only in the highest-quality contexts), but combined with how dealers are reportedly making more of their annual sales via fairs, it can create a particularly excruciating tension in their own branding efforts. You feel you simply must do a fair in Miami, because you really need the money, but your first (or second) choice did not accept you and now you have to weigh the hit to your prestige that participating in Fair C might cause versus the hollow echoes in your bank account that not doing any fair at all will ensure. Add to this that no matter how hard you lobby them, some of your collectors would not be caught dead at Fair C, and the power that the fairs (and their selection committees) have over a gallery’s financial well-being becomes even more starkly obvious.
Most detrimental of all, though, is how viewing the fair as “the brand they trust” makes collectors less reliant—in the middle and emerging sectors of the market anyway—on developing a personal relationship with the dealers they meet there. A collector in Miami saying “I bought this painting at NADA” has communicated all they need to about its perceived quality and probable price point to contemporary art market insiders. Which gallery at NADA they bought it from might tell them more, but increasingly it does not matter as much as it used to. None of which prevents a dealer from working to develop that relationship regardless, but it makes that relationship more difficult to cement via that interaction, which used to be one of the main points of participating in fairs.
A Growing Shift in Where Collectors Prefer to Buy Art
The transfer of power from galleries to fairs corresponds with another shift whereby collectors increasingly buy art via means other than walking into a gallery space, which only a few decades ago was virtually their only option. To underscore this shift, below I borrow a table of data developed for a slightly different issue in Chapter 5 but which still relates to this. In a survey I posted online, 108 anonymous collectors from North America, Europe, Japan, and South Africa (at least a few of whom I know, from their emailing me behind the scenes, are regularly listed among the world’s top 200 art collectors) submitted the following responses to the question “What percentage of the art that you collect now do you find in a traditional art gallery visit (as opposed to online or at a fair)?”
| How much art do you buy in a traditional art gallery visit? | Responses |
| Less than 10% | 14.8% |
| 10-25% | 15.7% |
| 25-50% | 13.9% |
| 50-75% | 22.2% |
| 75-90% | 25.9% |
| All of it | 7.4% |
Because it was designed for a different context, I admittedly did not think when I posted this to ask them to differentiate between art fairs and other non-gallery channels, but still, nearly half of the respondents indicated that today they buy less than half of the art they collect by walking into a gallery.
This next table shows the progression in the number of art fairs mega-gallery David Zwirner has done each year since 2006 (as listed on their website):
| Year | Number of art fairs |
| 2006 | 5 |
| 2007 | 5 |
| 2008 | 7 |
| 2009 | 3 |
| 2010 | 7 |
| 2011 | 9 |
| 2012 | 15 |
| 2013 | 15 |
| 2014 | 20 |
Except for the dip in 2009, which reflects a response to the start of the financial crisis (keeping in mind that decisions on which fairs to do need to be made many months in advance), Zwirner has very steadily increased how many fairs they do each year, to where they are virtually doing two a month. This is despite the author of a profile on David Zwirner concluding that, “Selling at fairs . . . is perhaps his least favorite element of art dealing. ‘This is the most commercial part of what we do,’ he said. ‘It’s almost perverse.’”3
Why Zwirner would constantly increase his participation in his least favorite element of art dealing is answered in the profile by the author concluding that for Zwirner, fairs are “immensely profitable,” but another mega-gallery owner put it even more succinctly. Larry Gagosian explained (to CBS News journalist Morley Safer) that he participates in art fairs because “For me it’s a place to sell art. It’s a place to make money. The art fair has become a huge part of our business.”4
One component of this shift away from buying art in galleries that is not often discussed is how it corresponds, quite necessarily, with the growing globalization of the contemporary art market. Walking into a gallery to make a purchase is infinitely more convenient when the gallery is local. In an interview for this book, New York-based collectors Joel and Zoë Dictrow, who were ranked among the world’s top 200 collectors by Artnet News magazine in 2015 and who have been collecting contemporary art since long before the proliferation of fairs, insisted that visiting local galleries is still important to them, but clarified how New York galleries do not represent some of the artists that interest them:
Consider us old-fashioned; we go to see art exhibitions at galleries and museums. Visiting galleries still is the main way we make discoveries and follow the careers of artists whose work we acquire. Though we usually need to see work in person to make acquisition decisions, exceptions happen. There have been instances in which we’ve made a commitment to acquire an artwork on the basis of a respected gallery sending us JPEGs. Usually, we know the artist’s work very well, but not always.
We have several artists in our collection that we have only seen at art fairs because they are not represented by New York galleries. Recently Peter Davies and Katherina Grosse are two artists whose work we’ve acquired because we “discovered” them at art fairs.
Other collectors, often with incredibly busy schedules, freely cite how much more practical fairs are for them in trying to keep up with so many galleries popping up. Fairs enable them to quickly get a snapshot of what the market trends are, see which artists are selling well, meet new dealers, and hopefully even learn something new about contemporary art, all vetted by experts in the field. Obviously the full scope of art being made and shown in galleries, but not brought to fairs for logistical reasons, makes this a limited snapshot of the overall market, but with up to 300 galleries per fair, there are currently no other means of seeing this much work for sale in person this conveniently. Moreover, many of the dealers outside New York I talked with for this book insisted that “fewer purchases by collectors walking into your physical space” is virtually an irrelevant issue for them. How fewer can you go than “next to none”? Theirs has always been a business of mostly taking the offer to the collector. Hearing New York dealers complain about decreasing foot traffic often leads them to simply roll their eyes.
It is clear that this shift has not eliminated the need for gallery spaces, though. Not only do artists still want exhibitions and major fairs still require dealers to maintain a physical space, with regular hours and a certain number of publicly accessible exhibitions every year to participate (see Chapters 5 and 9 for how that is changing somewhat among the satellite fairs, though), but many important collectors still value the exhibition experience enough that it is not viewed as going anywhere anytime soon. In an interview for this book, New York-based mega-collector Glenn Fuhrman said of his and his wife Amanda’s collection:
We still buy almost everything in the traditional sense. For a number of reasons we haven’t been able to travel to the air fairs the way we used to. The art fairs have gotten less important, because you now get JPEGs of everything, and even for the New York dealers, sometimes I’ll go see the work before they get shipped, so you can go see them in New York. And so there hasn’t been a ton of things that I’ve bought at art fairs of late. I still think the preference is to still be in a more cultivated environment and see the work and discuss it with the dealer.
Indeed, in an essay titled “Great art needs an audience,” the art critic Blake Gopnik chided “art dealers who believe galleries are no longer necessary,” arguing quite convincingly that “art acquires its market value because it has cultural worth.” Gopnik also quotes Art Basel director Marc Spiegler on the issue:
“What artist wants to show with a gallery that can’t offer them exhibitions?” says Marc Spiegler, the director of Art Basel. This fair, incidentally, only admits dealers with physical spaces. “We stand for a gallery-centered vision of the art world,” Spiegler says—although I’d say that fairs themselves risk undermining that vision.
Spiegler also suggests that an impressive new space can coax new and different work out of artists who might otherwise repeat themselves. And even though the gallery may no longer be the place where art gets sold, dealers still need to have one as a social space for clients to visit, and for the prestige.
Spiegler points to the “geopsychographics” of gallery space: “The space and architecture that a gallery chooses, and its location in the city, tells you a lot about its approach. Some collectors may never come to the gallery itself, but they still want to know it exists.”5
It is difficult sometimes, when the bills are pouring in more quickly than any checks from sales, to justify maintaining a space that “collectors may never come to,” but most dealers have simply accepted it as a cost of doing business (not all, though; we’ll examine some “post-brick-and-mortar models” in Chapter 7). For many dealers, presenting exhibitions in their space is their business to them, and the fairs are merely a means toward keeping them open. Whether you like them or hate them, and despite some speculation that we had reached the saturation point (which we will examine below), new art fairs do continue to launch nearly every month, and if the end to that is coming, as of now there are still over 220 Contemporary Art Fairs a year.
How the Rise of the Art Fair Is Impacting the Industry
Accepting that art fairs are perhaps a necessary evil does not mean dealers cannot play a role in making them “less evil.” In the strategies section below, we will look at a few strategies for managing and/or maximizing the benefit you get from participating in fairs, as well as how their organizers can perhaps make them less stressful. To fully understand the issues in play here, let’s first examine the impact that the rise of the art fair is having on dealers, their artists, and their relationships with their collectors, as well as their influence on the globalization, and standardization, of the contemporary art market.
Impact on Dealers
For New York dealers, at least, the rise of the art fair represents a different way of doing business entirely. An article in the New York Times in 2013 titled “For Art Dealers, a New Life on the Fair Circuit” provided a good illustration of how:
In just the past few months Gordon VeneKlasen, a New York art dealer, flew to Hong Kong for that city’s first global art fair; gave a party for 50 at Harry’s Bar in Venice; installed an exhibition at his gallery in London; spent three days schmoozing American collectors in San Sebastián, Spain; and then jetted off to Switzerland for one of the biggest events of the art-world calendar, Art Basel.
Mr. VeneKlasen, 51, who has been a dealer in Manhattan for 25 years, recalls a simpler time, just a decade ago, when he could sit in his gallery on East 77th Street waiting for buyers to step through the door.
“It was a much gentler life,” he said. “You were in your gallery, and people came to you. The travel was for very special purposes, and it was not constant. Now, they have us marching.”6
Similar to how mega-galleries are seen to be forcing other galleries to expand more quickly than they might otherwise (see Chapter 2), it is the sense of resentment in phrases like “they have us marching” that pinpoints one significant change here. Running an art gallery used to be among the most personally satisfying and individualistic endeavors imaginable. Not only were dealers their own boss (other than answering to their artists and their collectors, that is), but because there had been far fewer fairs, a good deal of their time could be spent thoughtfully researching art and trends and plotting how their gallery participated in the culture of their time. The pace of participating in so many fairs has not only left much less time for such lofty (but personally satisfying) endeavors—arguably also contributing to a subtle, but clearly unfortunate homogenization of the art that more represent—but fairs have also made dealers beholden to a much wider group of other players, like selection committees and fair directors. Their personal business decisions are now judged by a much larger and powerful jury that has considerable influence over their fortunes. As a result, the business has become much less individualistic.
Even for dealers located in places that never afforded them the luxury of waiting for people to come to them, the increase in the number of fairs they now feel compelled to do represents a significant change in what it takes to run their gallery, including greater cash flow (because you have to pay the fairs up front), additional staff (for fairs, plus to cover the gallery when they are away for fairs), more travel, less time available for studio visits or collector visits, more time away from their families, and increased personal stress from such a hectic schedule. At a panel discussion on art fairs sponsored by the Fine Arts Committee of the Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law Section of the New York State Bar Association and hosted by Sotheby’s Institute of Art in May 2014, the mid-level art dealer Elizabeth Dee noted that “her annual budget for participating in art fairs now hovers around $250,000 compared with a range of $25,000–$35,000 a decade ago.”7 This increase corresponds with normal overhead increases as well. The rise of the art fair has simply made running an art gallery more expensive across the board.
The fairs are also influencing other business decisions, especially for mid-level galleries. When their artists’ prices reach a certain price point (generally considered to be above $25,000), an expectation rises from both that artist and their collectors that dealers must present that artwork at the larger fairs. This comes in part because art at such price points is viewed as worthy of the more prestigious context the main fairs represent, but it is also a practical sales consideration. Collectors tend to spend at different price points depending on the fair they are visiting. In an interview for this book, NADA director Heather Hubbs confirmed that dealers who have brought higher priced artwork to NADA fairs have “found it challenging.” Even if collectors happily spend a small fortune on a single artwork at the main fairs, she noted, when “they come to NADA, they are not expecting to pay that price, so it’s hard to have super-high-priced work at NADA because they are not there expecting that. They are there for discovery, the deal before it becomes huge.”
Mind you, NADA is considered, hands down, the best of the satellite fairs in Miami, and yet still collectors expect not to pay above certain prices for what they purchase there. This expectation can drive mid-level galleries to do whatever it takes to get into the main fairs. We’ll examine more closely the range of pitfalls in that decision for mid-level galleries in Chapter 5, but as the influential Belgian collector Alain Servais noted in an interview for this book, this drive to “be present at the main fairs” is seriously impacting the smaller galleries:
They’re really killing themselves or drying themselves up doing art fairs. They’ve got to pay up front for everything, and they never know: it’s success or failure. They put their life on the line every time. And they’re hoping they will make a step up and it will become recurrent, and the real pity is they end up bringing the same artists who sell like hotcakes to each fair and in my opinion the quality of their presence at the fairs decreases. It’s a vicious circle of standardization.
Impact on Artists
There is no question that artists far and away prefer having their work presented in a gallery context over an art fair. As Chuck Close once quipped, “I think that, for an artist to go to an art fair, it’s like taking a cow on a guided tour of a slaughterhouse.” Even if a gallery chooses to present work by a single artist in their fair booth—thereby better contextualizing it, unlike in gallery exhibitions, where artists are hoping for good sales, good press and the dialogue that can emerge about their work over its duration—the top metric for the “success” of any artwork at fairs is generally whether it sold or not. I have been discussing the fair context with artists for well over fifteen years now, and while there has evolved a subtle acquiescence to the fact that fairs are increasingly where the art sells now, having artwork not sell at a fair has two consequences beyond lost revenue. First is the stress it puts on the artist’s relationship with the dealer who failed to make the sale in this “slaughterhouse” with no other redeeming quality other than its facilitation of quick transactions. Second, and more importantly, it risks influencing what the artist decides to create moving forward.
In a 2012 article in The Guardian newspaper, artist and arts consultant Afshin Dehkordi questioned “the influence of fairs on artistic practice,” citing two examples where the impact was obvious:
[A]n Iranian artist-curator commented that Western curators were coming to Iran on shopping trips, chaperoned to the same artists’ studios, buying work wholesale to feed a new appetite for contemporary Middle Eastern art from wealthy overseas private collectors. Over time, he observed artists adapting their work to match the tastes of buyers – a bit of calligraphy here, a woman in a chador there . . . cue sale. [. . .] Or as one fine art photographer confessed: “I churn out editions of this particular series for the art fairs; it sells, it pays for my art practice.”8
There is a chain of pressure here that leads back to the artist’s studio. To get into the best fairs, dealers often need to propose something major that will gain the approval of the selection committee. To please the collectors who visit their fair booths and often object if the dealer is presenting work they already saw at their gallery or, heaven forbid, at another art fair, dealers need access to a steady supply of “fresh” artwork. Combined, dealers struggling to break into the bigger fairs (which also make decisions based on how well your past booths looked at other fairs) simply must propose new, attention-grabbing artwork to stand out for selection committees and please their collectors for every fair they do. Even if dealers do not directly pressure their artists to constantly give them new, outstanding work for each fair, artists can see that it is the other gallery artists who do supply it that are presented at the fairs most often.
Many art fair organizers are aware of this pressure, but have not yet figured out how to minimize it. Annette Schönholzer, who was the director of New Initiatives at Art Basel when I interviewed her for this book (but has since resigned that post), concurred that “a gallery who wants to be accepted into some of these art fairs, including Art Basel, obviously has to convince their artists to bring particular work.” Moreover, she noted how the specific sectors that are most amenable to admitting new, younger galleries at Art Basel are so competitive that the selection process puts “more pressure on the artists to deliver something special, spectacular, unique, and site specific.”
Impact on Collectors and the Dealer-Collector Relationship
Above we looked at how the shifting of loyalties from galleries to fairs has made the art fair context less fertile ground for developing new, close relationships with collectors, but the pressure of maximizing the potential of the very expensive real estate they occupy for four or five days at a fair is frequently leading dealers to sabotage themselves in that regard as well. Asked how he thought the rise of the art fair has changed the art buying experience, Glenn Fuhrman told me many collectors feel they now have “a shorter period of time to make decisions”:
Certainly at the art fairs it has gotten that way, and I think to some extent there’s potential for some backlash on that. I mean it used to be at art fairs, it was clear you had to make a decision, but you could have it on hold for a couple of hours or a day. I’ve been at art fairs where I’ve said, “Can you hold this for me for just an hour, so I can walk around and think about it?” and they’ve said “No. You either want it or, if you don’t take it, I’m going to sell it to somebody else.”
Those are examples, I would say, of very short-sighted dealers. Most dealers, if you say “I need a couple of hours to walk around and think about it,” they’re going to say, “Fine.” But even the fact that there was somebody who said “No, you can’t. You have to decide right now” was to me a statement of a total change in the market and the process, and a bit less caring about the collector and who ultimately bought the work, as opposed to just making a sale.
Another, more subtle form of pressure on collectors rises from the increased globalization of the contemporary art market and how international an audience the major fairs attract, in terms of both the participating galleries and other attending collectors. As we will discuss below, it can take a gallery doing a fair in a foreign country several years or more to build enough confidence among collectors there for that fair to turn profitable for them. While this seems a particularly expensive process for dealers doing international fairs, who frequently grumble how too many collectors only support their local artists, Annette Schönholzer explained this from the collector’s point of view:
[Because of] the way that collectors start collecting—often regionally and then nationally—going international is a huge step. You have to imagine that if you take collecting seriously that it means a lot of time and engagement and learning and expertise and personal relationships with local artists in the best of cases. I recall an Argentinian collector telling me that whilst they were growing this amazing national collection, even the step into Latin American was huge because all of a sudden everything you thought you knew about art was questionable, and taking the steps of going, “OK, I’m going out there and starting to really collect internationally . . . I am going to trust my gut feeling of what I see, I’m going to make those choices, I’m going to pay for those choices,” is a huge challenge for people on a personal level.
Influence on the Globalization and Standardization of the Contemporary Art Market
There is a bit of a chicken-or-egg component to sorting out the influence that art fairs are having on the globalization of the contemporary art market. On one hand, many major fairs require applicants to have an international roster of artists, so they are clearly influencing programming in that regard. On the other hand, dealers frequently learn of new artists they are interested in at the international fairs, as do collectors. It does seem obvious that the explosion of fairs around the world has made it easier for dealers to meet more international collectors. As Schönholzer put it, “I do think international fairs are one of the ways that dealers can try to enter new markets that otherwise would not be possible to do. If you want to start selling to Latin American collectors, you can go to Miami Beach, but chances are you only meet a small portion of the collectors there because everyone is competing for their attention. But if you go to the Rio art fair, or if you go to Bogota, or one of the younger generation art fairs, that’s where you can meet more.”
Globalization is only one component of fairs’ influence. Another, for better or worse, is standardization. Let’s face it, if you see photography flying out of the booth across from you at Fair X, while all the expensive-to-ship sculpture you brought is being ignored, it cannot help but inform what you bring to Fair X the following year. In a piece on the highly regarded art blog, Hyperallergic, Editor-in-Chief Hrag Vartanian recently asked “Is All the Stuff at Art Fairs the Same-ish?”9 To many dealers, even those working hard to balance the integrity of what they present at fairs with the reality of why they do them, it was a rhetorical question. Not only can they tell you the price points and perceived quality of what you are likely to find at many art fairs, they can easily predict the percentage of abstract painting versus video you will find there as well. After several years, each fair seems to exert a degree of conformity despite their committees’ best efforts.
Here again, though, we have a bit of a chicken-or-egg question in play. As Schönholzer explained, some standardization is a matter of necessity:
Art fairs do have a fairly large influence in standardizing the way you put things on display. I think that’s just part of exhibiting at an art fair. To a certain degree, part of the role of an art fair is to try to create an equality in the way that things can be put on display. Creating certain sized booths, certain type of lighting, carpet, design . . . creating a situation within which then the gallery can express their own specialties of either their artists or how they actually tend to curate their shows.
Heather Hubbs echoed this advantage of some standardization, relaying how, because many of NADA’s galleries are often doing an art fair for the first time, there is some “training” involved. (She shared that Sam Keller, former director of Art Basel, had once joked with her, “You train them how to participate, and then we take them.”) Hubbs also noted how a standardized format, including a list of things you can or cannot do, not only enforces some of the best practices in how inexperienced galleries install their work or run their booths, but also helps new collectors as well. She tells of an overheard conversation between collectors who raved about a satellite fair with standardized booths being so much better than one many insiders would have rated as much higher quality, because they found the latter fair’s looser format too messy and confusing.
Fairs have some control over minimizing too much standardization in how they also require participants in different sectors to adhere to certain guidelines. Schönholzer noted:
Art fairs also drive the way that exhibitors display things by creating different sectors. Quite frankly, that’s part of the reason why art fairs have sectors to help diversify, to create focus, to avoid having 300 galleries overhanging their walls or filling their booth space with sculptures or whatever, which clearly wouldn’t benefit the artist or collectors.
So how do struggling dealers process all this information into a strategy for optimizing their art fair expenditures? More immediately for many dealers, perhaps, how do you get into the more desirable fairs or, once in, what must you do to stay in them? To find out, I sat down with Annette Schönholzer and then later with Heather Hubbs, whose fairs are arguably the world’s top contemporary art fairs for more established galleries and top fairs for emerging galleries, respectively. Given how fierce the competition is to get into these fairs, if you follow their advice for any other fairs, you will likely be in good shape. In addition to how to get in and then stay in, the strategies section below also looks at the importance of matching your art fair goals to your resources, fair fatigue, and the growing sense that biennials are the best art fairs.
STRATEGIES FOR NAVIGATING THIS CHANGE
How to Get In
I covered the basics of these next two sections—“How to Get In” and “How to Stay In”—in my first book, but that was written before the art fair had taken on the do-or-die significance it can have for dealers today. So I want to reframe this a bit, with very precise advice from the art fair organizers themselves about questions I hear dealers debate all the time, to help communicate a more concrete impression of what works and what does not work when attempting to muscle your way into the fair of your choice. In a nutshell, the same basic advice any dealer gives to artists about how to get into a gallery applies to how to get into a fair: do your homework on what fairs or sectors within fairs match your program; submit a killer proposal; and make a personal connection with the fair, particularly with the members of the selection committee.
Most fairs are very happy to discuss their application process at length during their slow periods. I have directly asked the directors of major fairs that our gallery applied to, “What should I do to ensure our application stands out?” All of them were very generous with their advice, but again, I timed my inquiry considerately. Part of doing your homework to learn which fairs match your program may involve simply reaching out to the various fairs’ directors and judging (by their enthusiasm about your application) what your chances are. They will all be courteous and encouraging, but there will be telltale hesitations in their voice if you truly stand no chance of being accepted. In the same way dealers understand why a blue chip gallery would not likely work with an emerging artist, be realistic about the likelihood of your being accepted into certain sectors of the more established fairs, and who your competition for those slots probably is. Here’s a clue: if the fair was very interested in having you apply, they would make sure they warmly invited you to apply, beyond simply sending you an email announcement because you had applied before. Otherwise, chances are your application will be one in a large stack of others from galleries fighting for the same few openings.
Carefully reading the sector descriptions and application instructions for any fair is another important part of your homework. Here again, the fairs are always very friendly about explaining anything in their instructions you may not clear on. Noting that the differences between the various sectors at Art Basel should clue you in as to which is right for you, Annette advised, “I think it’s important to read carefully what the regulations are and what those opportunities are for the different sectors. If you are applying to Survey rather than Positions and Nova in Miami, it’s a big difference. It gives you different ways of displaying who you are as a gallerist and putting your artists on that platform. I don’t think it’s wise for any first-comer, young gallery to try to get into the main gallery sector first. It’s just that you are setting yourself up for a disappointment, unless it’s a gallery that everybody has been trying to draw in and has been resistant.”
Art Basel in Miami Beach and the NADA Miami art fair are both extremely hard to get into. As Heather told me, “Miami has gotten harder and harder because it has gotten better and better.” In short, the galleries already accepted into these fairs are “bringing their A game,” and you stand little chance of displacing them if you do not propose something their committees will view as an “A+.” Every fair you ask will assure you that submitting a killer proposal is the most important part of getting accepted. While I am not convinced that is the case for every fair (as we will discuss below, networking is sometimes more important for even the top fairs), there is no doubt that a sloppy or uninteresting application is a huge waste of your time and the committee’s time. And wasting the committee’s time is one surefire way to guarantee you will never get into a fair.
As Annette told me, “Let’s not forget there are up to three times as many applications as there are spaces available, so it’s important that your application is actually submitted the way the art fair asks you to, and I think that would be the case for any art fair. Don’t try to surprise the committee with a mock-up or something that may not be possible for them to review when they have to do their selections. Although you might think you are going the extra mile, that might be the wrong mile to go.” Basically, the advice is to make sure the format requested is exactly what you send. Heather shared the same advice, but added, “When a gallery applies to the fair I can tell if they spent half an hour on [their application]. It’s obvious. You can tell if somebody really spent a lot of time, really put the effort in, and did something great.” You can take from that that half an hour is not even close to the amount of time the galleries competing with you for those booths are spending on their applications. A killer proposal will be well-considered, look professional, be well-written, have excellent images, and communicate that you are serious about bringing something extraordinary to this fair. If it is not all those things, save yourself the application fee.
No art fair application instructions will tell you this, but Heather and Annette both emphasized, as Annette put it, that a “personal relationship is everything” in this arena. Like nowhere else in our industry, getting into an art fair is about who you know. Wait. Scratch that. It’s actually more about who knows you. As Heather told me, “Making sure the committee knows who you are is huge; especially when it comes to a competitive fair. A fair that gets a lot of applications, that is hard to get into, if they don’t know you, they don’t know your program or your artists, your chances are super slim. Unless you are coming from a place far away, and you are the only application, then they might give you a little bit more of a look and be willing to do some more research. But otherwise, I think they kind of need to know more about you, because it’s just too hard. And if you have someone on the committee who is lobbying for you or two people lobbying, or three people lobbying for you, that just always increases your chances.”
Having served on a selection committee for a fair, I can confirm that proposals from galleries that no one on the committee knows, especially if they are located in major art centers, rarely receive more than a cursory review. The thinking is, given how social the art world is, and how much energy everyone spends networking, if you were doing something interesting, someone on the committee should have heard of you. Making sure they have heard of you, by visiting the committee members’ galleries, introducing yourself, asking them questions about the fair and the application process, and ensuring you add them to your email list, so that when your application comes up for review it is not the first time they have encountered your name, is simply a requirement.
A few other things about how to get in should be considered here. First, there is a perception among some younger galleries that the major contemporary art fairs let the longtime participants bring whatever they like (including secondary market inventory of questionable relevance in this context, but which they know they can sell), whereas the only way newer galleries can hope to get in is by proposing presentations suited to their outlying sectors and even then only by proposing something that really stands out. By their nature, such proposals are often more difficult to sell. The conclusion from this that I have heard is that the fairs rely on (some have said “exploit”) the younger galleries to bring in “street cred,” while the more established galleries simply get to cash in.
Annette told me that at Art Basel this topic was discussed by the selection committee, openly and matter-of-factly. They admit up front that galleries doing those outlying sectors are taking a risk, but they expect galleries only to submit such proposals because they truly believe in those artists. They also expect dealers to understand this is business:
I don’t mean to sound cynical. But I’ve seen young gallerists go to their limits in a Statements booth, and by doing so obviously creating something that you really cannot sell. A great, great piece, but really not sellable, and by the end of the fair they are on the verge of a nervous breakdown, going, “What am I going to do now? I haven’t sold it.” And you look at their booth and think, “Wow. You really went all the way, but that was your choice, you know. We can give you a platform for your artist, but we can’t sell the work for you.”
She clarified that the problem was not only that these sectors exist and some dealers do not account for the true risk, but that they exist now at many fairs. Art Basel was the first to create them, and that did help create an entry point for younger galleries, but now many fairs have them, and so some younger galleries are proposing booths they really cannot sell as often as three to four times a year. As I see it, this pattern stems from galleries feeling so desperate to get into the major fairs that they seem to delude themselves into thinking such proposals might be more sellable just because they will be viewed by major collectors or curators at a major fair, when very little really changes about what is sellable and what is not in such contexts.
I suggested to Annette that many younger dealers may look at the various sectors, again desperate to get into the fair, and think “any of these sectors will do.” She agreed but added that if you read the sector descriptions carefully, “you can make an assessment of where you think you can show your strengths best. But again, it’s a combination. For the solo sectors, often a committee will get more excited about a particular installation, which is easier than for a list of artists they have never seen before. So you can get their attention, but there is a risk with getting their attention, because then you have to follow through.”
Another issue to understand better is related to the fact that many fairs are expanding, opening up branded fairs in new, somewhat less-tested markets. The perception some galleries have about those new fairs is that by spending the money to do them, they will improve their odds of getting into the major fair in a more tested location. For example, it was assumed that during the first years of Art Basel in Hong Kong, not only was it easier to get in there than it was in Basel or Miami Beach, but by doing Hong Kong you increased your odds with the committees for Basel or Miami Beach. I asked Annette about that directly. Unfortunately, it almost works the exact opposite:
My recommendation is don’t go to Hong Kong because you think it’s easier to get into than Art Basel in Basel. Sure, maybe you gain more exposure to management of the art fair and to the committee, etc. because you are there, but Asia is a really tough market. I mean that shouldn’t be your main reason for doing it because the competition [for Basel and Miami Beach] is going to become even more fierce because more and more Asian galleries are going to want (and rightly so) to come to Basel and to Miami in the future.
How to Stay In
If you want to see an art fair organizer become really animated, ask them about the things participating galleries should avoid doing at a fair if they ever hope to get back in again. We are no different about Moving Image, I should note. Fairs are insanely intense, high-pressure and very social events with so many moving parts, so many personalities, and so many things that can and do go wrong, that any dealer who cannot play and work well with others becomes a distraction that often is simply not worth it. Of course, the reality here (as elsewhere in the art world) is, as Heather put it, “Obviously if you are a desired gallery . . . your program is strong and you are desired in the fair . . . and you are an asshole, people are going to put up with it a little bit more, which is sad.” And which is true, but dealers have been blacklisted from fairs for overestimating just how desired they were.
Both Heather and Annette had similar lists when I asked them what kind of things dealers do that keep them from being invited back. Heather’s first:
One is not being nice. Another is just overhanging, doing a terrible install. A really sloppy install; it’s not well received. Also doing something completely different than what you proposed, without saying something, is a big no-no. No one likes that. We’ve had internal problems between galleries occur, outside of us, but maybe at the fair, and sometimes getting that feedback is a problem. If somebody complains or says: ‘By the way, you should know that A, B, C, with this gallery that did the fair happened.’ You have to play well with others. Which is surprising how many people don’t. . . .
Oh yeah, and not paying. Not paying is really bad, especially with us [NADA fairs are organized by a non-profit organization]. Because we just can’t afford it. And we’re cool, we’re really lenient. We have a set schedule. If you need a payment schedule, whatever, we are fine with it, we can work with you. But you have to say something.
Not playing well with others was high on Annette’s list too:
We are open to anyone’s complaints, but some people have better ways of voicing their frustration than others. Although I understand the emotional side of everything, and we all get emotional under pressure, it’s just not a wise thing to yell at a show manager in your booth at any time, whether during your install or during the show when you are disappointed about your sales, or whatever. I think we try to stay fair, and I doubt anybody has ever been excluded from the fair because they had a moment.
I think it’s fair to state your opinions. Do it in writing. Do it when you have slept on it. It is important for art fairs to hear if they are doing a good job or not. It is important. But it’s a question of how you do it.
Annette also focused on presenting only what you had proposed and had been accepted by the committee (otherwise “that would be the beginning and end of your relations with the art fair”). She said fairs understand that dealers have to work with and satisfy their artists, but as Heather also noted, the key here is to keep in touch with the fair about any changes well in advance, and not to simply show up with something that surprises them.
Not getting back in to some fairs, may have nothing to do with your behavior or the quality of your booth, particularly if you participated in one of their entry-level sectors. Annette noted that the nature of those sectors creates up to seventy percent rotation of their participants each year. One strategy to consider here is a stepped approach to Art Basel, laying out a three-to-four-year plan whereby you get accepted into the “123” sector first, move to the “456” sector next, and all the while look and behave like you belong in the Art Gallery sector, so when you apply for it in year three, your odds are considerably better. Unfortunately, only about ten percent of the Art Gallery sector changes year to year, though, so a strategy that anticipates remaining longer in sector “456” is probably a good Plan B.
Match Your Goals to Your Resources (Or, Understand What You’re Getting Into)
Two ideas that galleries might keep in mind emerged while discussing how dealers can best match their art fair goals to their resources with the fair directors. Heather shared a very eye-opening observation that emerging galleries (or mid-level galleries trying to ramp up their art fair presence) should take note of:
The trend I’ve seen is when [new galleries] start off, they don’t too [many fairs] until maybe little bit into it. Year two or three they start doing two to three art fairs a year, but I feel like by about year five some of them are doing six to seven fairs a year. I don’t know, but it is like there is a turning point, when they do [a] bunch for a while, and they start cutting back to about four or five.
I discuss this turning point in Chapter 5 under the context of a possible “peak fair” realization. That is, for galleries with staffs of three to six people, I suspect there is a maximum number of fairs a year the average gallery can do before the disadvantages outweigh the advantages, no matter how profitable each fair may look on paper. The strain on staff (leading to turnover), the lack of attention to gallery artists and exhibitions, and other factors conceivably make any more fairs than five a year an overall liability, even if they still make money. It’s a theory.
In discussing whether the belief that doing an art fair in a European country often takes an American dealer at least three years to see a profit (because of the time it takes local collectors to warm up to them and their program) was even longer for the markets in Asia, Annette confirmed that it seems to be, but warned against thinking that was the only consideration here:
For Asia, you have to do more than that, and that is why we occasionally ask a gallerist who wants to participate in Art Basel in Hong Kong . . . Are you in it for the long haul? Are you willing to go an extra mile? It’s not enough to show up at the fair. I think those dealers who have become more successful in the region are the ones who really do the mileage, they travel, you know, throughout the year, they follow up and meet the people that they met at the fair. They don’t do everything by email, they show up on their doorsteps, and they create a relationship. We all know everything in the art market is very, very much about relationship and trust. In Asia, culturally speaking, trust is the major driver in all business interactions—it is the trust with each other that drives the deal.
In other words, do you have the resources to develop the relationships it will take to make an investment in an art fair in Asia truly pay off? It will likely require more of an investment from you than the cost of a fair or two. Matching your goals to your available resources is therefore a key strategy in where you expand your art fair efforts.
Fair Fatigue
As noted above, there is speculation that we have indeed reach the apex of the rise of the art fair, and things will begin cooling down from here. In January 2015, in fact, Scott Reyburn reported in the New York Times that “art fair ‘fatigue’ may resolve itself.” His evidence isn’t entirely convincing, but hope springs eternal:
Dealers and collectors have been complaining for years that there are too many art fairs. “Well, the heyday of art fairs seems to be over,” Skate’s Art Market Research proclaimed on Jan. 19, reporting that 1,032,792 people attended the world’s top 20 art fairs in 2014, a 7.4 percent decline from the previous year.
The Art Newspaper’s 2015 calendar lists 269 fairs, nine fewer than last year. An additional absentee, announced this month by the Florida-based organizers David and Lee Ann Lester, will be their American International Fine Art Fair, which specialized in traditional art and antiques.10
Reyburn noted that the closing of the Lester’s fair is attributable predominantly to a shift in taste away from antiques into Impressionist, Modern, and contemporary art, which does not sound like the death knell for the fairs we have been discussing. A drop in attendance at the top twenty art fairs could reflect simply higher attendance at the bottom 200-plus fairs, as well. In short, it seems too early to send condolences to the art fairs just yet. Even if David Zwirner drops back to only fifteen art fairs a year, discussing strategies for managing “fair fatigue” still seems a good use of time.
When Hurricane Sandy devastated the Chelsea gallery district in 2012, Art Basel director Marc Spiegler walked around to the galleries cleaning up their muddy spaces, including many of us who had never participated in his fair, asking for suggestions on what the fair, whose Miami Beach edition was less than two months away, could do to help make getting there and doing the fairs easier for the galleries. I told Marc I wasn’t sure, but I very much appreciated his interest and concern. Indeed, it reflected well on the Art Basel organization that they were so proactive in looking for ways to help, and so in our interview I asked Annette what might be done to alleviate “fair fatigue.” As with Sandy, there were no easy answers, but Annette was happy to brainstorm with me. At first she was hard-pressed to think of anything, but then something quite significant came back to her:
Well, I think as a fair organizer, what you try to do is you try to make the process of applying, of getting there, being there . . . we try hard to make that the most pleasant experience we can make it. It’s work, right? It’s work. . . . I’m not sure if art fairs can take the burden off of the galleries. I think we can make whatever is in our power a more pleasurable experience, but we can’t take on the responsibility for those who choose to do ten art fair a year. I mean that’s really what we are talking about with fair fatigue, right? Besides, the art world has become such a busy place. I think we are all exhausted about all kinds of things. . . .
Speaking about costs, especially for young galleries, there is one thing I do want to add. Art Basel did lower the price for [the] Positions [sector] again [this year]. But it’s this interesting phenomenon, you know, it always feel like a drop on a hot stone for gallerists, because the day after they forgot already that you have lowered the price. It’s like you get a standing ovation, you are the good guy, and by the time the fair is over everybody’s demanding a further price reduction.
Lowering the price of an art fair certainly counts as a big thing art fairs could do to alleviate fair fatigue, but as we will discuss more in Chapter 9, very few fairs have anything close to the profit margins most dealers believe they have, so I would not hold out much hope for that becoming widespread. Still NADA offers a “Projects” option, which Heather described as “very small, very inexpensive booths at the fair, and they been very successful.” Sometimes, simply having any viable excuse to be where the fairs are is all it takes for dealers to maximize their revenue in that context.
That brings me to another thing I think more fairs might work on that we are already experimenting with in the art fair we co-founded. The model for Moving Image was designed to give dealers as much flexibility as possible in when they felt they needed to be at the fair. We do this with a carefully structured schedule and a forwarding service to let participants know as soon as someone makes an inquiry about their artwork if they are not present. This idea emerged from an experience we had visiting the former German fair, Artforum Berlin. We were only visiting the fair. We did not have a booth. But unlike friends of ours paying full price to participate, we were free to enjoy the VIP events such as private collection tours or parties, visit museums, visit other galleries, and so on, and we sold a pleasantly surprising amount of artwork in the process. Several of our gallery friends who were stuck in their booths all day had sold nothing by the end of the fair. Clearly there are risks of losing sales because no one was in the booth, but our Berlin experience suggested that keeping dealers tied to their booths is something art fairs might try to find ways to be more flexible about. We can report that many art dealers have sold work at Moving Image even though they never set foot in the fair building.
Aside from not doing so many fairs, there are some simple things dealers might try to make the experience less taxing, as well. Annette put the essence of the main one quite simply: “I think that sometimes galleries can do themselves a favor by getting themselves organized in groups, you know, in shipping, things like that.” We have tag-teamed on shipping with other galleries for years, and while the savings can be nice, there have also been times when the logistical headaches of co-organizing schedules and such made it even more fatiguing, so it would definitely be a case-by-case solution. In the end, perhaps the best way to not get so fatigued is to pace yourself, despite what seems like a can’t-miss opportunity. What good are you really doing your artists or your gallery if, by the third fair in as many weeks, you’re not at your energetic, persuasive best? There are diminishing returns in every endeavor.
One final thought on fair fatigue involves how the rise of the mega-gallery made me wonder whether we might see a parallel rise in fairs: something like a mega-fair. I asked Annette what size she thought was the biggest Art Basel would ever expand to and she replied, “I think that the golden formula has been no more than 300 galleries per fair, no matter where it is.” We discussed how the expectation is often that, for the price of admission, one should be able to see everything at a fair, and how if the fair is too big, it creates a negative impression among visitors. For Moving Image, we experimented with a larger fair, only to have collectors tell us it was too much. So we’ve settled for a total duration of video works that one could conceivably watch in about four hours. In short, a good way to lower fair fatigue is probably to keep any given fair’s size to a manageable minimum.
Biennials Are the Best Art Fairs
The general perception for years has been that there is a significant difference between art fairs and the growing list of international biennials (which have been viewed as a much less commercial context for presenting contemporary art), but major collectors are not convinced of this. In a report in the Financial Times on the Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona in October 2014, Georgina Adam wrote:
“There’s no point in pretending any more; biennales are as commercial as art fairs,” was a point stressed by curator Mark Coetzee, at the Talking Galleries symposium in Barcelona this week. . . .
Coetzee is director and chief curator of the Zeitz Museum of Contemporary Art Africa (MOCAA) which is being built on the waterfront in Cape Town and due to be completed in 2016. The $120m building is funded by former Puma chairman Jochen Zeitz, now a director of luxury-goods group Kering.
In fact, added Coetzee, “99 per cent of our acquisitions are made in biennales. Fairs cannot provide the scale of works we want, nor the critical importance; artists push themselves more for biennales.” 11
During the Q&A of my own presentation at that symposium (on strategies for mid-level galleries; see Chapter 5), Mark had asked me directly whether dealers shouldn’t focus their efforts on attracting the attention of the big biennial curators rather than doing so many art fairs. In May 2015, Alain Servais reiterated Mark’s claim about biennials, and threw in museums for good measure, in an interview with Andrew Goldstein on Artspace:
The artist will give his best for a museum, which he will not do when it comes to sending a work to an art fair. I’m speaking from experience. I was once speaking to an artist in New York about how it’s really tiring to see “art-fair art,” if you know what I mean—art with a lot of sugar and a lot of whatever is necessary in that market to sell. The guy said to me, very candidly, “You’re right, because I was at the booth of my gallery at Frieze New York and I considered my work . . . it’s not that I’m disowning it, but I must recognize that I did it for selling.”
. . . When you get to the biennial level, then, the artist will try to give their best. That’s when you can judge them in some way.12
When Goldstein asked him to spell out how exactly buying art from a museum or biennial works, Alain said simply, “You look at the little texts on the walls. If it says, ‘Courtesy of X Gallery,’ what does it mean? It’s for sale! So I call the gallery from the museum, I send them a little picture, and I say, ‘How much is this piece?’ And that’s why I want to go to the opening of the Biennale.”
While it is hard to dispute that little texts on the wall do indeed usually mean the art is for sale through that gallery, my response to Mark Coetzee had been simply that it was viewed as impolite for galleries to insert their commercial concerns into conversations with biennial curators, and that many dealers respected at least the veneer of a distinction between the two contexts. On further reflection, though, I should have added that he and Alain represented a certain class of collector who may indeed buy big, important works from biennials, but, even if thoroughly exploited, the total number of sales that represented could not possibly keep the world’s contemporary art dealers in the black, so what might be gained needs to be weighed against what the dealer might lose. Having a biennial curator choose one of your artists may undoubtedly be the best context you can possibly hope for to make a sale, but overtly courting that for commercial purposes will likely backfire at some point.
SUMMARY
Many contemporary art dealers feel compelled to participate in more art fairs than ever before. It is therefore a fortunate thing that there exist more art fairs than ever before, and seemingly new ones are launched every month. It is unfortunate, however, how feeling the need to do so many fairs has often negatively impacted art dealers, their artists, and their relationships with their collectors. Many observers are also concerned about the influence the demand for artwork to take to fairs can have on what artists make in their studios.
Accepting that in an era when foot traffic in galleries seems to be decreasing and collectors are reportedly buying less from traditional gallery visits, art fairs offer dealers an option for making the sales needed to keep their galleries open. Therefore, strategies on how to get into the best art fair a dealer can, as well as be invited back, are important for those struggling to navigate this burgeoning terrain. Art fair organizers are generally quite generous with their advice to potential participants, so dealers should not be shy about asking for guidance. There are also some common-sense things any dealer can do to try to keep a productive balance between the demands of their gallery and taking their show on the road.