I’ll be participating in the Boston International Fine Art Show from October 23-25. When preparing to participate in such venues, I always think of Samuel Johnson’s definition of second marriages: “The triumph of hope over experience.”
Setting up, you’re enthusiastic, confident that the works you have carefully selected will find favor, and hopeful that you’ll meet a new collector who will develop into a steady client. Packing up on the last day of a lackluster show, you’re berating yourself as an idiot and asking why you persist in presenting art to Philistines who wouldn’t know a good painting if it ran up and bit them in broad daylight.
Yet dealers go back, again and again. Why? Because art fairs in the last 20 years have become the primary commercial venue for seeing art. Dealers in contemporary art must continue to host a regular schedule of shows, since their artists demand it, but I wonder if even this will change.
A dealer in 19th and 20th century art who had spent many years on 57th Street in Manhattan summed up why he was about to close his ground-floor space there and move to a smaller, less public space uptown. “Look,” he told me as we sat in his old space, “I get maybe two or three people a day wandering in here. On the other hand, the art fair in Maastricht costs me $150,000 to do, but I see 60,000 people in ten days. I’ve decided that renting a booth in a fair like that is a more efficient use of my money than paying the insane rent here.”
Art fairs are good for collectors because they can comparison shop. I’ll be exhibiting the lovely Jasper Francis Cropsey painting below in my booth.
I won’t be surprised if other dealers have works by Cropsey in their booths. A visitor to the fair can thus easily compare quality and price for several Cropsey paintings, getting a quick art market education in the space of an afternoon.
For contemporary artists, though, I’m not sure that the effect of fairs is altogether healthy. Art fairs do not reward subtlety. For every collector who can screen out the bustle and concentrate on each painting, there are dozens who simply stroll the aisles, stopping to enter a booth only if a piece catches their fancy.
As fairs become the primary venue, therefore, the artist increasingly feels that he or she has at most 15 seconds to catch viewers and pull them in. There’s a temptation to go for big and splashy, to make a piece that will scream out amid all of the works surrounding it.
This temptation is nothing new, of course. A hundred and fifty years ago, an artist who hoped to exhibit in the French Salon had a similar problem. If he painted a small still life, his painting was liable to be hung near the top of the wall, just under the rafters. Would it not be a better strategy to paint a large portrait or a grand historic scene, something that might command a position “on the line,” as eye-level was called?
History catches up with us all, and today a ravishing but tiny still life by Courbet is more valued than a monumental battle scene by Delaroche. But it’s hard for an artist to try to look 20 years down the pike when there are bills to be paid today.
Well, that’s the artist’s problem. I hope that I’ll see you in Boston or at another fair soon.
