Art Fairs
The Art World’s Floating Center
By Peter Frank
(ABOVE: Art Los Angeles Contemporary 2011 Opening Night at Barkar Hangar, photo by Mark Sullivan / wireimage.com)
Los Angeles has just finished a month-long round of art fairs. Three of January’s four weekends saw art galleries cluster together in Santa Monica and downtown Los Angeles, struttin’ their stuff before a curious, perhaps glamorous, hopefully hungry audience, more art-world than not but peppered with many, er, civilians. At least three more art fairs loom on the horizon, scheduled for the beginning of the fall. And that’s just in Southern California.
The rest of the world is no less art-fair-happy. From East Coast to the Far East, art fairs occur almost every week of the year, attracting galleries from around the world and around the block under the fluorescents of convention centers and merchandise marts of various far-flung urban centers. Art has grown into an immense international market, and that market has grown its own business devices, of which art fairs have become the biggest, boldest, and most insistent. Beyond the auction houses (themselves expanding and diversifying their services all over the globe) and the mega-surveys of contemporary art boasted by cities from Sao Paulo to Sydney to Sharjah, the art world has shivered into a round robin of art fairs. Where there are galleries (and sometimes where there aren’t), there are art fairs. And where there are art fairs, there are art people – including some, at least, who shouldn’t be there at all.
Artists, for instance. Art fairs are trade shows, pure and simple. And the trade is in goods – more or less unique wares. These are not merely collectibles, they are peculiar things, valued for their uniqueness by people who (ironically) want what other people have. The last people who should roam these halls are the makers of such peculiar things. Fairs focus on what artists mustn’t: the disposability of their work. As critic Dave Hickey once put it, “An artist visiting an art fair is like a cow visiting a slaughterhouse.”
(LA Art at the Los angeles Convention Center with over 100 galleries represented)
On the other hand, the volume of art presented at even smaller fairs entices artists curious about what’s going on outside their studios. The hodge-podge proffered by a typical art fair outstrips the volume (if hardly the quality or even variety) of any museum, and skews to the new. So artists feel compelled to be there or be square. If they approach art fairs simply as sloppy museums, they can benefit from the visit. But if they go planning to sell art dealers on their wares, they’re in the wrong place. Dealers are at art fairs to find new customers, not new suppliers (although they may horse-trade and even plot among themselves to trade and share objects and artists alike). Art merchants want to see checkbooks, not resumes.
The rest of us don’t have to sweat such angst. Most gawkers can take in the art and the energy as if at an artistic county fair. As long as we don’t ask too many stupid questions, we’re welcomed, or at least tolerated. Who knows, maybe one of us will get bit by the art-collecting bug. Those already bitten, of course, are in pig heaven. Collectors and curators get to shop to their hearts’ content while having armies of kisses planted on their hindmosts.
(Visitors admire some of the work on display at PhotoLA, photo by Sergio Luis Estevez from LA CANVAS)
State of the Fairs
Sales at this year’s PhotoLA were promising with collectors and buyers showing up in great numbers to find the next piece for the collections, or their clients.
A few examples:
Singer Gallery sold a large group of Catherine Wagner photographs to a major private collector (with a public photography foundation).
Rifelmaker (from London) and Kaycee Olsen (from Culver City) did well, as did 21st editions and Monroe Gallery.
Stephen Cohen Gallery sold a major Roger Ballen image for $14,000 to a private collector from the Northwest.
Most of all, however, art fairs are for the trade. Art dealers participate in fairs to sell as much as possible, but even more to make contacts, with one another and with one another’s clients. Fairs are physically and fiscally taxing, so dealers hope they can sell enough to make back costs and to meet people they can sell to and horse-trade with down the line. Art fairs are only secondarily about the stuff in them; primarily, they’re about the networks that come out of them.
There are a growing number of galleries that exist only at art fairs. Normally, galleries show objects in real (or, if you would, brick-and-mortar) spaces. Battered by the caprices of a business prone to extremes, however, more and more art dealers choose to exist publicly only in the art fair context. The rest of the time they’re dealing over the phone or the Internet. Indeed, Internet and art fair work symbiotically, one providing 24/7 virtual access to gazillions of artworks, the other providing temporary real access to those works.
Twenty years ago, of course, Internet dealing was just a gleam in the eyes of a few forward-looking dealers. But, then, the first art fairs started only two decades earlier, and were more like omnibus yearly reviews than like trade conventions. Now, the one-two Internet-art fair punch not only supplements brick-and-mortar dealing, but threatens to supplant it altogether. Once we can spend our lives bouncing from art fair to art fair the way we toggle from art site to art site, galleries will be over.
In the meantime, however, galleries, too, proliferate…
