Art Basel in Miami is one of many international art fairs. Olafur Eliasson’s “Your Shared Planet” at a booth there in 2012.
By GRAHAM BOWLEY
In just the past few months Gordon VeneKlasen, a New York art dealer, flew to Hong Kong for that city’s first global art fair; gave a party for 50 at Harry’s Bar in Venice; installed an exhibition at his gallery in London; spent three days schmoozing American collectors in San Sebastián, Spain; and then jetted off to Switzerland for one of the biggest events of the art-world calendar, Art Basel.
Mr. VeneKlasen, 51, who has been a dealer in Manhattan for 25 years, recalls a simpler time, just a decade ago, when he could sit in his gallery on East 77th Street waiting for buyers to step through the door.
“It was a much gentler life,” he said. “You were in your gallery, and people came to you. The travel was for very special purposes, and it was not constant. Now, they have us marching.”
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.
But their disruptive economics are not only shaking up dealers’ lives, they are also shaking up the art market, especially for galleries below the top tier.
While large galleries can — and do — pay the art fairs’ hefty fees and the cost of this globe-trotting existence, others find they are priced out or can’t compete. The ripple effects are starting to be felt in prime gallery districts like the Upper East Side and SoHo in New York.
“For a midsized gallery,” said Christopher D’Amelio, 47, a Manhattan dealer who closed his own gallery this year to become a partner at a larger one, “everything is a challenge.”
Large galleries with deep pockets are expanding their empires with new galleries in Beijing or Hong Kong. Yet fairs around the globe are, more and more, where the art world does business.
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, according to the European Fine Art Foundation’s Art Market Report by Arts Economics, which surveyed 6,000 dealers.
For some, the share is even higher: according to Mr. VeneKlasen, 75 percent of his sales 10 years ago were made in his galleries, but now nearly two-thirds of revenues are earned on the road.
The Arts Economics report said that some dealers attended up to 10 fairs a year.
“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, who spoke this year after returning from Art Basel. “Some of the dealers I had met in Basel, it was crazy. They had been to Hong Kong, then Venice, then Berlin and London. It is hard to think in the 12-month calendar of any month when there is not an art fair. It is pretty intense.”
Some galleries showing younger, more contemporary artists can still attract people from the street, and attendance is up, gallery owners say. But for more established artists, with more expensive work, dealers have to go where the customers are. According to the Web site artvista.de, which tracks art fairs, about 10 million people visited art fairs or other events like the Venice Biennale in 2011.
One longtime art collector, Howard Rachofsky of Dallas, used to buy his art mainly in New York, but in the past year has traveled to fairs in Basel, New York and London.
“You want to see art, and you want to see the people behind it, get to know the gallerists and, ultimately, the artists, and the easiest and most efficient way of doing this is at an art fair,” Mr. Rachofsky said.
“It is really about networking and seeing an art gallerist from Düsseldorf and a gallerist from Madrid 50 feet from each other, and getting a chance to spend a few quality minutes with each one of them,” he added. “That is the reason we go.”
For dealers, the life takes a lot of planning, and it is expensive. Galleries must build inventory to take on the road, and ship it, produce catalogs and send installers ahead to prepare the art fair stand, which becomes their temporary but important face to the world. Mr. VeneKlasen, for example, this year hired an emerging visual artist, Aaron Curry, to design his booth in Hong Kong, shipping hundreds of silk-screen panels from Los Angeles. Some big New York galleries then send as many as 20 employees to staff the fairs; travel, hotels and parties for collectors, as well as insurance and installation for the art, can push the cost past $300,000 for one fair alone.
“We used to sit around in the gallery on a Saturday afternoon hoping someone would come in,” said Arne Glimcher, of the Pace Gallery in New York. “What we are dealing with now is destination shopping. We have to be in different places. We bring the art to the collector rather than bringing the collector to the art.”
Some dealers only reluctantly take part. Paula Cooper, the New York art dealer, attends some fairs because they allow her to see work from numerous countries in one place. But mostly she sends others from her gallery, decrying the loss of what she describes as a more thoughtful time even just five years ago when she could sit with artists and collectors and talk about art. “It is just like any business in the world now,” she said. “It is becoming a global enterprise.”
Mr. Glimcher, too, said he preferred others from his gallery to make the global trek.
“Fairs are beneath the dignity of art,” he said. “To stand there in a booth and hawk your wares — it is just not how you sell art.”
The fairs also have an impact on artists, who are producing work according to the demands of the art fair calendar rather than their own creative rhythms.
Not everyone can play this game. While some smaller dealers get better exposure by showing alongside bigger galleries at fairs, many struggle even to get past the long waiting lists for entrance into the fairs, while those that win access must work hard to recoup the costs, including the booth fee, airfares, hotels and entertainment. Just a booth can start at $15,000, go to $40,000 or so for a midsize gallery, or even $100,000 and above for a larger space. Marc Spiegler, director of Art Basel, said the fairs are not just for dealers, but have become a melting pot where everyone in the art world can connect.
“Now you see every curator and museum director going to the fair, and artists, too,” he said. Art Basel attracted about 86,000 visitors to Switzerland over six days in June.
In this environment many of the biggest galleries at the top end of the market are thriving, but those at the bottom are contracting. The Arts Economics report found that sales by dealers with annual revenue of less than 500,000 euros fell 17 percent in 2012, whereas sales for dealers with annual revenue exceeding 10 million euros rose 55 percent. Worldwide, the top one-tenth of dealers account for more than 60 percent of total gallery sales above 20 billion euros.
This harsh economics is reflected in New York’s art districts, and while a few galleries are adding space or opening in neighborhoods like the Lower East Side and Bushwick, Brooklyn, others are faltering, brought low by a host of pressures that include rising rents, competing Web sales and the incursion of big auction houses, which are trying to sell more art through one-to-one sales.
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.
Mr. D’Amelio ran his own gallery with a business partner on West 22nd Street in Chelsea since 1996, surviving the terrorist attacks on New York and the most recent recession. He said there was still a place for midsize galleries like his had been. But he closed his gallery in January and became a partner at David Zwirner, one of the prestigious larger galleries that offers the business resources — a staff of back-office assistants, public relations officials, a high-quality Web site and brand recognition — necessary to function in this newly global marketplace, namely the ability to lure the best artists and take their work to the richest buyers.
“It is completely international,” said Mr. D’Amelio, who will attend Expo Chicago next month as the circuit starts up again after the summer. Dealers must travel to get to know the wealthiest art buyers in the market at any time, he said. “If you don’t, then your artists will leave you for a gallery that does.”