The Art Newspaper

Building the brand

Big fairs take the corporate cue and multiply internationally

By Melanie Gerlis. From Art Basel daily edition
Published online: 14 June 2011

One of many? Will the Art Basel name eventually have global recognition (Photo: David Owens)

basel. Art Basel opens to VIPs today at a time when the art fair scene is undergoing a radical transformation. In the space of three weeks in May, Art Basel announced it was acquiring ArtHK; Frieze said it was launching a classic art fair in London and a contemporary fair in New York; Berlin’s Art Forum said that its merger with rival Art Berlin Contemporary (ABC) had collapsed and that its 2011 event was cancelled, and the India Art Summit (now the India Art Fair) set out its ambitions to be a more international event alongside a 49% investment from Will Ramsay and Sandy Angus, two of the Hong Kong fair’s original owners.

Short-term, such changes are proving a headache in the event-crammed calendar, as the Hong Kong fair has already discovered (it moved its dates from May to February, only to have to move them swiftly back to May on discovering that February is to the Chinese what August is to the French: a serious holiday season.) The Hong Kong fair is now in the same month as the first Frieze New York and that city’s major auctions, and very close to Art Basel. “There’s never a perfect time for a fair,” said ArtHK director Magnus Renfrew.

Longer-term, the effects are more fundamental, as fairs—like auction houses and galleries before them—behave like corporations. “It’s a much bigger art world now. There are more galleries, collectors and institutions so [fairs] will naturally reflect this,” said Art Basel co-director Marc Spiegler. Top of the tree are today’s big brands—Art Basel and Frieze—which, like Sotheby’s and Christie’s, need to keep pace with each other (and those auction houses) to survive, ideally knocking out some of the competition at the same time.

The biggest problem seems to be how to keep these corporatised fairs fresh and edgy, with enough supply of good art. “There are so many fairs, they can’t all be great,” said Mary Sabatini of Lelong (2.0/E12). “You can’t make them all amazing,” agreed Courtney Plummer of Lehmann Maupin (2.1/J9). For others it’s more of an ideological issue. “It’s a great fair, but it’s also now part of the big global art fair machine, which is not why I went into the art world,” said dealer Kate MacGarry (1.0/S12), of ArtHK.

And pity the poor satellite fairs. It’s a struggle to think of a contemporary fair that doesn’t have a separate section for young artists or space dedicated to an emerging country, previously the domains of the offshoot events. Frieze Frame seems to have delivered the killer blow to the young art fair Zoo, and the Latin American Hot Art Fair is not returning to Basel this year after five editions. Basel’s Art Unlimited, a separate section for large-scale projects, is only open to the main fair’s galleries, limiting the field. Amanda Coulson, the director of Volta (Dreispitzhalle, until 18 June), said even “main fairs getting bigger are not going to kill off all the satellites. The good satellites [ones she said have ‘a clear profile’] provide a different experience entirely…”. She acknowledged, however, that the fair scene has become “much more corporatised, pretty much every major fair is owned by a massive company and that tends to change the flavour slightly”.

Fair organisers insist that this will not lead to event homogenisation. “We have no desire to do the same show three times a year,” said Spiegler. However, added his fellow co-director Annette Schönholzer, it is important that there is a “Basel standard”. The reassurance of the Basel brand offers security to some international dealers, who now have to select from a myriad of fairs every year, each of which is potentially the most important revenue generator for their business. “I wish I could get the footfall in a gallery show that I get in a fair,” said Victoria Miro (2.1/N7). The time and money invested in each event means that dealers can’t afford to get it wrong, either way.

For now, it is difficult to predict exactly which other fairs will go the way of Berlin’s Art Forum. Some—Fiac in Paris, Turin’s Artissima and the ADAA Art Show in New York—have a loyal following that should guarantee returning dealers. In Asia the markets are new enough to leave room for short-term manoeuvre. But some fairs, including Art

Los Angeles Contemporary, ArteFiera (Bologna) and Art Rotterdam, all experienced the effects of competition from the international circuit this year and rely increasingly on local support. New York’s Armory Show also struggles to stand out from the crowd; if successful, Frieze could prove fatal.

Meanwhile, the galleries are sampling them all, particularly in Asia, hoping that the dust will settle after 2012. “Like with any enterprise, the market will decide,” said dealer Daniella Luxembourg, visiting Art Basel this week.