For Art Dealers, a New Life on the Fair Circuit
THE NEW YORK TIMES
By Graham Bowley
NEW YORK--- Globalization has come to the art market, and dealers are being forced out of their comfortable galleries in venerable art capitals like New York and London and jumping on a worldwide carousel of art fairs from Miami to Hong Kong to Basel to São Paulo. By offering what a gallery cannot — seemingly endless gawking at artwork, artists and celebrities — the fairs are as popular, glamorous and fizzy as Cristal, attracting both the new moneyed classes that fly in from Kiev, Shanghai, Doha or Abu Dhabi and the serious American collectors who now prefer to do their browsing at fairs at home and abroad. [link]
By Graham Bowley
NEW YORK--- Globalization has come to the art market, and dealers are being forced out of their comfortable galleries in venerable art capitals like New York and London and jumping on a worldwide carousel of art fairs from Miami to Hong Kong to Basel to São Paulo. By offering what a gallery cannot — seemingly endless gawking at artwork, artists and celebrities — the fairs are as popular, glamorous and fizzy as Cristal, attracting both the new moneyed classes that fly in from Kiev, Shanghai, Doha or Abu Dhabi and the serious American collectors who now prefer to do their browsing at fairs at home and abroad. [link]
- “In the early ’70s there were four major art fairs; in the 1990s, 50; and suddenly now there are 180,” said Linda Blumberg, executive director of the Art Dealers Association of America.
- Dealers worldwide earned about 36 percent of their sales on average through local or international art fairs in 2012, an increase of 6 percentage points from 2010.
- The Arts Economics report said that some dealers attended up to 10 fairs a year.
- The biggest galleries at the top end of the market are thriving, but those at the bottom are contracting.
- According to the Web site Galleries of New York, which collates real estate data, the number of galleries in the big art districts has declined in the past few years — galleries in West Chelsea have fallen to 282 from a peak of 364 in 2007; those in SoHo have dropped to 87 from 337 in 1995.
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