The second edition of the online VIP Art Fair opened yesterday with a preview launching on Thursday. Featuring 135 international exhibitors the fair received over 10,000 unique hits in the preview day alone – with 54,000 people registered so far and the number steadily climbing.  The tech glitches of last year are a distant memory of the past and celebrating its first birthday – the fair holds great promise for the future of online art sales.

Browsing the booths, I was impressed to find that the focus this year was heavily on video art with premier galleries and emerging art spaces alike utilizing the format as a platform for showcasing film and video works.  Video is seldom presented at fairs, given the cost of space and the fleeting attention spans of the viewers. The ability to play the works full screen and get a survey of where the medium stands at the moment is very effective and unique to the online browsing format.

James Cohan Gallery chose to present Bill Viola’s three channel video of landscape and figure titled Poem A, ($200,000 – $250,000) while Marian Goodman highlights Eija-Liisa Ahtila’s Vaaksauora – Horizontal, made of 6 recombined video segments depicting a sweeping pine seen on its side ($65,000 – $100,000).   Epitomizing this trend, Elizabeth Dee Gallery showed a booth exclusively made of video works and artist interviews with Jeff Keen, Miriam Cahn and Ryan McNamara.  Galerie Thaddeus Ropac presented a 24-hour, 24-country live-streamed performance by Terence Koh – LIGHTNING STRIKING AT BOTH ENDS OF A THOUGHT, which took the viewers into private spaces around the globe for an intimate and at times bizarre dioramas.

The online fair has many great features worth exploring, including virtual tours as well as interactive maps which allow the visitor  to plot their own route and share curated ‘playlists’ of artworks with others. Additionally, there are two new spaces to explore: a special Focus section where galleries present exhibits of a single artist and the Editions and Multiples hall where visitors can find artist editions published by museums and institutions. There are some great deals to be found in the latter section, such as an etching by Baldessari, Heart (with Pearls), available for merely $2,500 from the Independent Curators International booth.

The fair is free to sign up for and runs until February 8, 2012. Elena will be reporting on the sales and reactions as the fair continues. @elenasoboleva

Before the VIP Art Fair launched in late January, Jane Cohan said the fair’s success would be measured against the traffic generated by other international art fairs.  Because users would have to register with the site to enter the fair, she said, VIP Art Fair would have accurate numbers.

Buried at the bottom of the Financial Times’s story on the fair is that final count: 41,000 registered users.  ArtBasel Miami Beach says 46,000 persons came to their fair. Both Frieze in London and the Armory Show in New York claim 60,000 attendees for their 2010 events. And ArtBasel itself had 62,500 visitors.

VIP Art Fair: A Virtual Failure? (Financial Times)

Total Number of Registered Users: 41,000

Total number of times that artworks were viewed:  7.65 million

Total number of zoom views/videos watched:  420,000

Total number of artist page views: 42,300

VIP Art Fair

• Rudolf Stingel’s 2002 work, “Die Birne,” priced between $500,000 and $1 million by the London dealer Sadie Coles HQ, was the most expensive of the confirmed sales

World’s First Online Art Fair Draws Fire From Galleries as Works Languish (Bloomberg)

Judd Tully is the master of the art market press corps and peerless at uncovering the deals but his “fair report” from the VIP Art Fair ends up with just two sales. One from the organizer and a second from one of the first dealers to sign up:

• James Cohan sold Fred Tomaselli‘s 2010 “Study for Night Music for Raptors” for $200,000
• David Zwirner, who sold Chris Ofili‘s polished 2006 bronze “Mary Magdalene (Infinity)” for $375,000 to an American collector.

Despite Some Sales and Optimism, Dealers Report Fuzzy Connection With Flawed VIP Art Fair Debut (Artinfo.com)

The Sydney Morning Herald reports on at least one sale from the VIP Art Fair at Anna Schwartz Gallery:

Since midnight Saturday she has been at home in her library in her PJs watching and waiting for interested buyers to enter her ”chat room” or the ”VIP Lounge” to nibble at work by her stable of artists […] Schwartz said she and one staff member in Melbourne and a representative in London had fielded only 10 inquiries. She has had three conversations ”that might result in real sales” and, late yesterday, sold a painting by Jan Nelson for US$27,000. Asked where the buyer lived, Schwartz said: ”I have no idea.”

Pyjama-clad Dealers Wait for a Byte at Online Art Fair (Sydney Morning Herald)

After opening at 8am Eastern Standard Time in the United States, the VIP Art Fair struggled under the load of interested attendees. The site currently carries an advisory note warning that the site is slow response rates due to “the overwhelming number of visitors from around the world.”

At 2pm, visitors to gallery pages were met with PHP errors.

Anyone with further information?

While the site problems are surely an embarrassment to organizers, they can be satisfied with the proof of concept surrounding the fair measured by the response rates.