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The art market: The biggest fairs around the
world
By Georgina Adam
Published: June 6
2009 02:07 | Last updated: June 6 2009 02:13
As you read
this, the art world – curators, critics, artists,
dealers and collectors – is moving en masse from
Venice to Basel, where Art Basel celebrates its 40th
edition.
The event, which opens on June 10, has grown from
small beginnings into the world’s premier
contemporary art fair. The reasons for Basel’s
success range from the breadth of its offerings –
from classic modern masters to emerging artists in
Premiere and Statements sections – to a wide
programme of add-on events. And a number of
satellite fairs, the main ones being Liste, Volta
and Scope, offer opportunities to discover the
youngest, edgiest artists.
One thing that
distinguishes Art Basel from other fairs is Art
Unlimited, where artists display ambitious,
large-scale works in a separate, 12,000 sq metre
hall. A panel chooses the works, which this year are
by 59 artists and include monumental “Cloud”
paintings by the German conceptualist artist Sigmar
Polke and a “Speaking tree” by the Indian artist
Bhati Kher, hung with 2,500 fruits that are actually
human heads.
A major event this
year is the re-enactment of “Il Tempo del Postino”,
first unveiled to great acclaim at the Manchester
International Festival two years ago. This artistic
experiment turns the notion of how art should be
approached on its head. Instead of visitors setting
their own time-frame for looking at a work of art,
the 16 participating artists – who include Olafur
Eliasson, Doug Aitken, Tino Sehgal and Liam Gillick
– make a series of artistic acts within a theatre,
so setting the time agenda. The show is curated by
the French artist Philippe Parreno and Hans Ulrich
Obrist and includes, for instance, Doug Aitken’s
American cattle auctioneers patrolling the aisles
and “selling off” members of the audience.
Of course, the
major question this year is how Basel will do
commercially.
Some important American buyers have decided not to
attend and 10 US dealers have dropped out of the
satellite design fair, Design/Basel. Exhibitors have
the choice of either playing safe by bringing
saleable, “domestically sized” works of art by
established names or taking a “hang the recession”
attitude and showing something radical, but not
necessarily commercial.
On the whole,
recent auctions and fairs have demonstrated that
buyers are looking for known names and that pricing
is crucial.
The satellite fairs around The Armory Show in New
York in March did surprisingly well with very
low-priced works. Recent auction results have shown
that works will sell, but at deep discounts. With
the slow-down in sales, dealers are also
cutting prices, in some cases even making losses in
order to keep their cash flow up. While 10
per cent to 15 per cent discounts used to be the
norm, they are now having to go to 25 per cent, in
some cases, to clinch deals. The problem, they
say, is how to wean collectors off these higher
discounts when the good times return.
Far more
classic offerings come up at two London fairs this
week. The
Grosvenor House fair, opening on June 11 and marking
its 75th anniversary, is traditionally the flagship
event for the British antiques trade, but has been
hit by the current disaffection for much in this
category, particularly its traditional backbone,
furniture. And the fair is not helped by its
location, in the depressing underground ballroom of
the hotel of the same name. A number of dealers,
including Johnny Van Haeften and Konrad Bernheimer,
have defected to exhibit in their own Master
Paintings week in July, and some stalwarts have
disappeared, including Norman Adams. But the
organisers say that this has allowed them to update
the event by bringing in new exhibitors, including
the Reel Poster Company, which specialises in
vintage film posters, and modern paintings
specialist Whitford Fine Art. It continues to June
17.
If Grosvenor
House is the grande dame of the British
antiques trade, Olympia is its frisky younger cousin.
Sited in the vast and luminous Olympia complex, the
fair brings together 260 dealers and is known as a
source of quirky and unusual art and antiques,
making it a firm favourite with American decorators.
The event, adding more modern works to the mix, this
year inaugurates a new section, Photo@Olympia. The
fair opened last week and continues until June 14
As light relief
from the heavy-duty art touring in the Venice
Biennale, visitors could also visit a small art
gallery in the Giudecca to admire and even buy
watercolours painted by ... a horse. The part-Mustang, part-Quarter named Cholla was “discovered”
after being shortlisted for an international
watercolour prize in
Italy in 2004.
When the abashed jury discovered the painter was a
quadruped, they saved face by giving him an honorary
mention. Original Cholla works are currently for
sale at the Giudecca 795 art gallery, priced at
€2,000 ($2,834) each, with cheaper prints
available, according to gallery director Rosalba
Giorcelli.
Georgina Adam
is editor-at-large of The Art Newspaper
Copyright The
Financial Times Limited 2009 |