They are expensive and necessitate a gallery’s small staff traveling the world at pretty much all times, coordinating the shipment of expensive artworks while standing under the bright lights of convention centers-possibly hungover because they went out for mandatory relationship-building drinks with local collectors the night before.īut artists are clearly making enough work to support the fairs, and galleries can’t afford not to do them.
Most galleries have been bemoaning “fair fatigue” for about a decade now because fairs are a big headache. This year saw the purchase of The Armory Show and EXPO CHICAGO by Frieze, continuing optimism about Asia in the face of general market retraction and an art world still trying to understand the place of its institutions in the 21st Century.įrieze’s parent company Endeavor set the stage for an effective fair market duopoly encompassing it and MCH Group, owner of the Art Basel fairs, and the coalescence of these entities make them feel ever more powerful.
The cooler market can only account for some of the sweeping change-though “it is a correction, but not a collapse,” according to Christie’s CEO Guillaume Cerutti, as quoted in the Financial Times. The past year has been one of more transformation than usually occurs in the art world in any given twelve-month span.
