This is the fourth of a four-part series from Art+Auction magazine in which key art-market players weigh in on the future of the field.
L.A.'S STORY
Over the past few years, the attention L.A. receives has been steadily increasing. But in the last three to five months we’ve seen a lot more people. Groups on Pacific Standard Time tours aren’t just visiting museums; they’re seeing the galleries, too. Pacific Standard Time was a vital thing to have happen because it was so content-oriented as opposed to personality-based. It presents a massive, instant postwar history that you can pick up in one fell swoop, and I know people are collecting based on what has been included.
People take notice of the big New York galleries opening branches here—Matthew Marks just launched with an Ellsworth Kelly show. But younger galleries are doing well too: David Kordansky has opened another location, and other dealers in Hollywood, like Overduin and Kite, have intimate but strong programs.
Not every city needs an art fair, however. The new art fairs this year were in September—who wants to leave their summer holiday and run off to L.A. before doing Frieze, FIAC, Artissima, and Miami?
—Tim Blum is co-owner of Blum&Poe, a gallery that, with its 2003 move, helped pioneer the Culver City Art District on L.A.’s Westside, an area that it still anchors.
A SAFE HAVEN
With the world around us full of doubt, it seems the art market in general, and the contemporary art market in particular, are stronger than anybody would imagine. It appears that the fear in other markets and world economies makes art feel like a safe tangible asset. The confidence is still there.
I tell my clients, “You will have to compete to get the best works,” and the success of the top pieces at last November’s contemporary sales proved that. At the same time, you have to be cautious, which means being more selective than ever.
The key in our business is access to the work. Once you have a great object, finding a buyer is not the most difficult part. Also you need to assure potential sellers you can get the best possible price for their property. We don’t keep inventory; we’re just looking for works for our clients.
After the financial crises, at the end of 2008 and through 2009, private dealers were preferable to auctions. A lot of works came to us or to other private dealers, especially after the auction houses dropped the idea of guaranteeing them. Consignors, for understandable reasons, started to be very careful about bringing works to auction. That lasted for 18 months or so, until Giacometti’s Walking Man sold for $100 million at Sotheby’s London in February 2010. That sent out a signal that auctions could produce very strong prices again.
—Philippe Ségalot is a partner in the private art dealership Giraud Pissarro Ségalot.
FAIR SHAKE-UP
At the major fairs, the top of the line in anything is still selling because the people with money still have money. It’s easier to sell a $2 million picture than a $15,000 picture. That’s why the model now is to bring in the right people—collectors who will buy big-ticket items—and not worry if you don’t make any money in the gate.
I think there’s an oversaturation of fairs around the country. But dealers are optimists. They will try a new event and will keep it going for two years, maybe three. They figure, “Oh, we saw great people. We didn’t make any money, but we’ll get ’em next year.” So most fairs make it to two or three years before falling apart. But there’s no question there are too many regional ones.
The events that are still succeeding tend to be the association fairs. As for independent shows, major dealers have the money to participate in any fair; everybody else doesn’t. For my Outsider Art Fair, I’ve had to make concessions to dealers. And the antiques business is hurting still, especially the brown-furniture end of it.
In New York in particular, things are shifting quickly. Frieze is siphoning off many of the European dealers from the Armory Show. The Park Avenue Armory space just hired its first artistic director, and eventually it will be doing 80 percent theatrical and music productions. Right now the venue hosts more than 10 art shows each year, but I expect that by 2017 fewer than half a dozen will be left. With all the changes, organizers need to come up with fresh ideas. I need to do things I’ve never done before to make sure the right people come in.
—Sanford L. Smith has managed art and antiques shows for 32 years. This November he will launch the Salon of Art and Design, focused on contemporary and 20th-century work, at the Park Avenue Armory, in New York.
MAKING CONNECTIONS
Although this remains a time of great uncertainty, recent experience shows that economic volatility doesn’t mean the art market slows down. Everyone predicted, for example, that the satellite fairs around the big art fairs would disappear as soon as the economy contracted. What’s been striking is the extent to which that prediction did not come true.
In a way, the last couple of years served as a "stress test" for the whole model of big international shows such as Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach. Because we work with such long lead times, the economic volatility doesn’t change what we do; but it makes us focus on our tasks with greater urgency. People clearly understand what a critical role we can play in the success or failure of our galleries in reaching beyond their core collectors. That is a major reason why galleries come to shows like Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach—to activate existing relationships with collectors and to meet new collectors.
As a gallery in these shows, the only way to stand out is by bringing great material and presenting it to maximum impact—that forces people, even in a difficult economic moment, to make the jump. So, while it’s hard to predict sales at this year's Art Basel shows—because that's tied to the economic environment—we do know that our galleries will pay attention to the lesson of recent times and combine great works to create strong stands.
In the next five or ten years, we will see a lot of important collections, built especially by younger Latin Americans and North Americans, filled with artworks that were bought either at Art Basel Miami Beach or through contacts first made at our show. Today’s newer collectors, who are terribly stretched for time, often first come into the art world through the art-fair space, not the gallery space. It allows them to access the major galleries of the world without doing all of the legwork. But in the long run, those stronger collectors start making time to see galleries and museum shows.
So for us a great show is not just about the sales made that week, it’s about building a market for galleries that allows them to sustain their program over time. It’s not just about those four or five days, it’s about the long-term relationships between galleries, collectors and institutions that keep their artists moving forward.
—Marc Spiegler is co-director, with Annette Schönholzer, of Art Basel and Art Basel Miami Beach, whose parent company, MCH Group, recently acquired Art HK, the contemporary fair based in Hong Kong.