Art Market Monitor

Global Coverage ~ Unique Analysis

How Hard Is It to Get Into TEFAF? Dealers Answer

by

Tefaf 2013

According to Stefano Baia Curioni there ware 3 art fairs in 1970. This expanded to 36 in 2000 and 189 in 2001. Earlier this year, we counted no less than 288 art fairs listed in The Art Newspaper for 2013, and this list was not all inclusive.  Georgina Adam has stated that the proliferation of art fairs is the greatest change in the art market in the twenty first century. With this in mind, AMM spoke with some of the gallerists at the opening preview of TEFAF Maastricht to find out what they thought.

Millicent Wilner, a director at Gagosian Gallery, London summed up in brief the opinion of many of the dealers we spoke with:

‘Fairs are certainly great opportunities for galleries to present their artists and materials.”

Most of the gallerists noted the convenience that a fair holds for collectors “who have busier lifestyles than ever, not only privately but business wise.” (Manuel Ludorff of Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf.)

Peter Osborne of Osborne Samuel Gallery, London explained:

“The art fair represents the best possible opportunity for a collector to see a lot of top quality things under the same roof in one trip. You don’t have to go up and down 25 main streets in 25 different cities to see everything.”

It’s hardly breaking news that the fair trend has lead to a decline in gallery footfall, particularly for smaller galleries or galleries outside the market hubs of New York or London. With the demanding costs (of not just of money, but of time, staff and artists) that fairs place on galleries, what are the reasons galleries are fighting for attendance at the most prestigious fairs?

“If you can get into an art fair you’re standing up to be counted. If you’re an emerging gallery and you go up against Gagosian at an art fair, logically you have an equal chance to do business. If your galleries are next to each other in the street it wouldn’t necessarily apply, but at an art fair people do the fair. A lot of young galleries are only established because of the fairs.” states Osborne.

Managing Director of The Armory Show Noah Horowitz noted in a panel discussion in 2011 how the perceived stamp of quality that attendance at certain fairs can be tough for some galleries. He points out that many galleries don’t have enough staff or enough artists to do all the main fairs. In a world where art fairs are becoming the new dimension in both viewing art and selling art, he acknowledges how the next generation may Google the gallery right away, and if you’re not on the list of ‘important’ fairs, then you may not be considered an important gallery. Georgina Adam has also pointed out that galleries may be afraid of being seen as rejected by the selection panel of fairs.

Some, but not all dealers agreed that the fairs vetting committees (especially in the case of TEFAF which is known for its grueling vetting not only before but also during the fair) act as a stamp of quality to collectors for the galleries and work that is being exhibited.

“Every artist if different. You have to find out the history of the artist, the period in time, quality, condition and stuff like that and it takes a lot of time. And at a fair like Maastricht you get the best quality from all over the world. It’s the best place to go to and learn about certain things” notes Ludorff.

Robrecht Ve Vocht of Gallery Delaive. Amsterdam comes at this point from another angle:

“Art fairs rely on if you attend other art fairs. TEFAF is very hard to get into and you have to show if you’ve attended a certain degree of art fairs and a certain degree of exhibitions. So in that case it is true that your status come from attending art fairs but I’m not sure if this applies to all collectors. It depends on the collector I think.”

Most of the dealers remarked that fairs are places you can find new clients and showcase things to people who normally wouldn’t see them. Not surprisingly, it was agreed upon that Basel, Art Basel Miami Beach, TEFAF and Frieze were the fairs that were cited as the cream of the crop, with galleries mentioning specialist smaller fairs depending on the genre of art they catered for.

Manuel Ludorff of Galerie Ludorff, Düsseldorf (a gallery attending TEFAF for the first time this year) explained how due to their attendance at TEFAF they may now scale back some of the smaller fairs in Europe and branch out to fairs in the United States, using these fairs to establish new relationships in the US and build the gallery’s name Stateside.

Fair or foul: more art fairs and bigger brand galleries, but is the model sustainable? (The Art Newspaper)

Contemporary Art and its Commercial Markets: A Report on Current Conditions and Future Senarios (Panel Discussion)

Talking Galleries 2011: The Future of Art Fairs (Book)

TEFAF: Global Sales Drop 7% in 2012

by

Screen Shot 2013-03-14 at 15.01.34

 

  • Global sales in 2012 contracted by 7% to €43.0 billion
  • Sales in the Chinese market fell 24% to €10.6 billion while the US experienced an uplift of 5% year-on-year to €14.2 billion.
  • The US regained the top percentage of global market share at 33% while China dropped to 25% and the UK remained in third place with 23%.
  • The volume of transactions in 2012 fell by just under 4% to 35.5 million.
  • The heaviest buying is concentrated at the high end of the market for the best-known artists.
  • Contemporary art was the largest fine art auction sector, with 43% share by value, and reaching just under €4.5billion, its highest ever recorded level.
  • Modern art was the second largest sector with a 30% share. After sales of €3.8 billion in 2011, sales dropped 17% in 2012 to €3.2 billion.

TEFAF Art Market Report 2013: The Global Art Market, with a focus on China and Brazil. Prepared by Dr. Clare McAndrew

Will The High Line be The End Line for Midsize Chelsea Galleries?

by

Earlier this week, Katya Kazakina reported for Bloomberg that Magdalena Sawon is leaving Chelsea fifteen years after moving Postmasters Gallery from SoHo to the Chelsea space.

“This is my last season here. I am unwilling to pay $30,000 a month,” said Sawon, whose 3,800-square-foot gallery occupies a ground-floor space on West 19th Street.

The midsize art galleries that helped transform western Chelsea from a dead area adjoining the West Side Highway into New York’s major art hub are being squeezed out of the neighborhood by booming real-estate development and rising rents.

A familiar story, one may say, that could be gaining momentum once again. The migration of art galleries through New York is a tale that could once again be in its opening chapter. From West 57th Street in the 1950s and 1960s to SoHo from the mid-1970s, progressing to the current contemporary art hub in Chelsea. András Szántó (2003) has pointed out (in his detailed description of the emergence of Chelsea as the center of the New York art market) that while neighborhoods such as West 57th Street and SoHo have gentrified ever since, neither area was home to the retail or hospitality businesses that appeared since galleries opened their doors in the area. Sound familiar?

“Every developer in the city wants to be in West Chelsea,” said Stuart Siegel, senior vice president at CBRE”

“The mid-range galleries are going to just vanish from Chelsea,” said Sawon, who expects that “anything radical or experimental” will become rarer as dealers seek to cover expenses by staging more-predictable shows that do well commercially.

“You won’t find much experimentation if the rents continue to escalate, because those kinds of galleries won’t be here,” said Chelsea gallerist Casey Kaplan. “They’ll be priced out.”

With emerging galleries dispersed all over the Lower East Side, which is poised to become home to experimental French art fair CUTLOG this May during the Frieze Art Fair, it will be interesting to see if any Chelsea based galleries join galleries such as Lehmann Maupin and set their sights on spaces in the vibrant neighborhood.

 

Desperate Art Galleries Give Up as Chelsea Rents Double (Bloomberg)

Szántó, András (2003) “Hot and Cool. Some Contrasts between the Visual Art Worlds of New York and Los Angeles.” In New York and Los Angeles: Politics, Society, Culture, edited by David Halle. Chicago: University of Chicago Press

In Conversation: Director of Pulse Art Fair, Cornell De Witt.

by

Image courtesy of Tara Israel

AMM sat down with Cornell DeWitt, Managing Director of Pulse Art Fair, to find out what Pulse Miami wanted  to convey to the public, how the fair dynamics are evolving and what makes Pulse different from other art fairs.

Laura Roughneen: Cornell, how long have you been the Director of Pulse Art Fair?

Cornell DeWitt: I’ve been in the job about two and a half years, which means that this is my third Pulse Miami, as I started just before the fair in 2010. But then I’ve also done two Pulse New York’s and one Pulse Los Angeles, so I believe the math on that is that this is the sixth Pulse fair that I’ve put on.

LR: What’s the aim for this fair?

 CDW: At the end of the day, the idea is to keep making it better and better every year. But where things really coalesce is when we start to put together the Special Projects. Pulse galleries are a phenomenally strong group of galleries. The art fair landscape is changing so much all the time, and we do have a fair amount of turnover but not nearly as much as some of the other fairs.

LR: In what way do you think the fair dynamic is changing?

CDW: It’s definitely becoming more mature, but that’s where we really try to mix things up. With the Impulse Section, we can always bring in new galleries, and what’s exciting is that, for example, last year we had a young gallery from London in Impulse called Man and Eve, and they were showing an artist by the name of Larissa Nowicki, and Larissa Nowicki won the Pulse Prize, and her career has just been going from strength to strength. She’s been doing residencies all over the country, doing shows, and now Man and Eve have graduated to the main section of the fair and they’re doing a group show. We also have an artists called David Ellis, who shows with Joshua Liner, who won the Pulse Prize in New York in 2011, and since then he’s been collected by the Margulies and so many phenomenal collections, and now Josh is in the main section of the fair doing a more comprehensive collection of his artists. So it’s a constantly evolving process and it’s a process that’s build in.

LR: Is there a theme you try to capture with Pulse?

CDW: We don’t set out to look for a theme. Things happen very organically, which I think is very strong. After all the galleries are accepted and we have our list set up, galleries can then propose Special Projects, and that’s really where it starts to coalesce. We have sixteen Special Projects. This is Carlos Rigau’s work, he’s a very popular artist from Miami; we have Zackary Drucker who’s a young, transgender performance and video artist who’s a critics starlings these days, he had a screening at PS1 recently, he’s getting a lot of curatorial and critical attention. We have Casey Neistat doing our Pulse Play programme, and he’s definitely out of the mainstream of the art world. He specializes in these guerilla-style YouTube videos. He also does Op-Docs for the New York Times, which are short, documentary videos that are essentially opinion pieces.

So we have both ends of the spectrum: Brand new galleries as well as ADAA member galleries. And that’s also something that happened organically.

LR: O.k. Can you talk a little about your vetting committee?

CDW: Well I’m the head of the committee, but it’s a lot of galleries that have been with the fair for a long time, and then for instance we have a lot of German galleries, and Stefan Röpke is on the committee. We’ve been trying to branch out to more European galleries so now we have Nieves Fernández, which is a legendary Spanish gallery that is now run by her middle daughter who’s on the committee and she brings that historical perspective that she gets form her mother, but as a young gallerist is really keyed into the younger galleries in Spain and Southern Europe so that’s a great asset. We have Thomas Von Lintel who’s previously worked as a director of a major German gallery for a long time and is a very experienced dealer. And we now have Luis De Jesus, a young gallerist from Los Angeles who is well known and a real driver in the Southern California community.

LR: Regarding the architecture of the space, why does Pulse Miami attract galleries? Is it evolving in any way?

CDW: People come to Miami and find themselves spending five hours in a convention center. And while there’s amazing galleries and art there, why would you want to do that in Miami? We have amazing galleries and art here, and you can go in and out, come rest on the hammocks, sip some coffee and champagne, and then go back inside and see some more work. It’s the enjoyable experience for the collectors, and that makes the galleries happy. We tweak the flow a bit each year. This tent was new last year, we used to have Impulse in the main building and we moved it there last year and it’s worked out great. So we’re always looking to make a great visitor experience and I think that’s what makes it special here.

 

Many thanks to Cornell DeWitt for taking a time out to talk to AMM at Pulse Miami.

Highlights NADA Miami

by

NADA Miami 2012 showcases a range of work from sophisticated solo projects to glimpses of artists who, while still growing in practice, display signs of sincere promise. Here is a small selection of artists worth remembering.

Marko Mäetamm presents a solo project, Our Daddy is a Hunter, 2011 at emerging Estonian gallery, Temnikova and Kasela. This installation encompasses watercolor drawings, sculpture, print and video. Drawing on the dual viewpoints of both father and child, this series tenses on the line between dark and playful. Highly personal, Mäetamm unfolds before the viewer his personal anxieties at the pressures placed on a modern day, working, family man. The sculpture in the corner is a portrait of Mäetamm wrapped in a living room rug, not standing upright yet not on the floor, willingly captured in this domestic situation. With imagery of the father hunting his family in their domestic environment, the watercolors create mixed anxiety for the viewer. The handwritten text reads from a child’s perspective exerts such as:

“Our Daddy has a big hunting gun, It is very heavy, And very dangerous, And it makes a big noise, When our daddy starts to shoot”

This child, however, also wants to be  just like daddy when he grows up. This childlike reverence of the father figure as a hunter, unaware of the dangers that await him in society as a man, strains against the imagery above, and somehow reverberates out into the viewer the mixed emotions and anxieties felt by Mäetamm himself. However, the playful nature of the drawings reminds us that this is a modern day family life, and while these strains may be placed upon the man of the house, it is a place he has willingly placed himself amongst the family he loves.

At Brennan & Griffin , Sandeep Mukherjee’s Devour, 2011 captures attention without demanding attention. This subtle work, elegant in execution, is created with acrylic and acrylic inks on duralene (a polymer film.) With a range of brushstrokes and exquisite mark making, Mukherjee engages the viewer with a material practice based on instinct and improvisation. The final form grows from a combination of organic material influences and an organic, intuitive process. He is interested in blending the process of image with generic iconography. With Devour the dark area could represent a plain, the colored area a generic, organic form (such as a seashell) though Mukgerjee references such forms implicitly.

Bischoff Weiss wowed with a challenging and complex solo presentation of Raphael Zarka. A risky and demanding presentation for an art fair audience, this booth, for those who paid due time and diligence to the work, delivered a highly sophisticated presentation. Since 2001, Zarka has been assembling a mass of forgotten or neglected sculptural forms in a series know as Les Formes du Repos (Resting forms.) 

According to Suzanne Cotter: Zarka captures the sculptural possibilities of these forms as images, such that the abandoned, the disused, and the forgotten become sites of potential, with a lexicon of formal associations that runs from Plato to modernism to postminimalist sculpture. 

Years of living as a keen skateboarder have enabled him view the geometry of shapes and surface dynamics of objects in a way that the standard observer of such opportunities would fail to perceive, his work opening up this dialogue to the viewer.

 

Images courtesy of:

Jessica Silverman Gallery

Lautom Contemporary

Temnikova and Kasela

Brennan & Griffin

Independent Curators International

twitterfacebooksoundcloud
Privacy Policy
Terms & Conditions
California Privacy Rights
Do Not Sell My Personal Information
Advertise on Art Market Monitor