Too Many Art Fairs?

The Economist takes a look at art fairs and the search for quality art to sell.

The Economist reports

Most of the greatest works of art are in museums—“prisons for art”, as one frustrated dealer calls them. While contemporary artists can keep replenishing their market, earlier paintings, bronze sculptures, objets d’art, antiquities, medieval carvings, porcelain and antique jewellery were created by those now dead. Not everything is locked away in museums, of course, but as the lifespan of collectors increases, so does the time their acquisitions are off the market. David Rockefeller, whose vast collection will be auctioned by Christie’s next month, died aged 101.

At the same time, there is more money chasing art and antiques. Demand is keen, as is evident in the growing number of fairs. TEFAF in Maastricht, with 282 exhibitors, is the best as well as the biggest of them. But it is joined by other events: long-standing ones like the Winter Antiques Show (New York), the Biennale in Paris, and BRAFA (Brussels), as well as ambitious newcomers such as Masterpiece (launched in 2011) and Frieze Masters (2012), both in London, and Maastricht spinoffs TEFAF Fall (2016) and TEFAF Spring (2017) both in New York. TEFAF’s newly announced global strategy promises still more.

There is no lack of interest—but there simply isn’t enough fine work to stock them all. So many fairs have had to change focus or to specialise. BRAFA, long famous for medieval art, has shifted towards contemporary art. Masterpiece emphasises a luxury shopping experience. Meanwhile TEFAF Maastricht, the market leader, had come to be accused of complacency, seemingly stuck in an opulent rut, its fame as a source for important Old Master oils having outlived their availability. Indeed, in 2017 the fair looked downright thin. Your correspondent heard variations of “it’s all over” from, among others, a collector, a visiting (hoping-to-buy) dealer and even one of the fair vettors.

But 2018’s edition of the fair, which ended last month, proved that TEFAF Maastricht isn’t past it—yet. The fair had given itself a shot of aesthetic adrenaline. Dealers worked especially hard, and were lucky enough to find outstanding works. Sales reflected this. Alan Darr, curator of European works of art at the Detroit Institute of Art, reports that while on past trips to the fair with his museum’s patrons they bought a single piece, but this year they chose three. Strong sales were the result, in turn, of a new approach to buying.

Traditional collectors focus on one genre, material, period or maker. Their number, however, like the amount of old art in circulation, is shrinking. Replacing them are people “attracted to what is unusual”, says Peter Schaffer, an owner of A la Vielle Russie, specialists in antique jewels and Russian objects of art who exhibit at TEFAF. “It could be a rare material,” he explains, “like the tiger agate used in a Fabergé tray, or the unusual combination of amethyst and jade in a pair of earrings.”

This year, Maastricht provided both unusual materials and unusual combinations. Less than an hour after the preview opened, a European collector bought an 18th-century, diamond-studded ivory perfume flacon. Shaped like a seated Chinese scholar, it would be right at home in Dresden’s Green Vault, the greatest surviving collection of princely treasures. A large, sensitively carved 17th-century boxwood relief, “Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane”—a new attribution to the Master of St Sebastian’s Martyrdom—is an archetypal old-style collector piece—yet one of those interested in it had just been considering an Egon Schiele drawing. The Botticelli gallery from Florence brought a 17th-century, life-sized, carved marble elephant’s head from a Palermo villa. Its buyer adheres to no single collecting sphere. His house is hung with old masters, but this elephant-head wall fountain will be spouting in a garden full of contemporary sculpture. Fabulous gold boxes small enough to hold in one hand were a favourite princely treasure, and Adrian Sassoon, a gallery, showed how the same idea could be executed in a contemporary, technically sophisticated re-imagining. Admirers made a bee-line for “Mandala”, a feather-light and translucent bowl of sunshine woven from 4,000 metres of gold wire. (Giovanni Corvaja, its maker, achieved this by avoiding solder by working within vacuum chamber where gold could bond to itself.)

Just as reading news on mobile phones loosens loyalty to—or even awareness of—its source, long-term relationships with a specialist dealer weaken when buyers mix the works they buy without concern for matching them. This, alongside the dearth of high-quality work in circulation, poses a fatal risk to some dealers. If they are to survive they will have to rethink, perhaps radically, everything from what they stock to its display and marketing. Some are taking steps in that direction, but their efforts are haphazard attempts to add contemporary works to portfolios merely because their colours or shapes are related. Perhaps dealers will find collaboration works well. If, for example, Koopman Rare Art had borrowed “Mandala” from Sassoon and showed it along with their gold boxes what a sensation it would have been; the best of the past and present in dazzling conversation, attracting interest to both.

It is impossible to know what TEFAF Maastricht and similar fairs will look like in a decade, but it seems certain that the difference between now and then will be far greater than previous decades have seen. For even the most storied fairs and dealers, the message is clear: they must change or disappear.

Source: The Economist 

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