Is an art fair fair?
Everything you don't want to know about 99% of the market.
Sunday, 30 March, 7 pm. Drawing Now Paris art fair’s 18th edition is officially closed.
As I watched the sold and unsold artworks being wrapped up, the notebooks and iPads tucked away with their lists of contacts, started emails, and flagged web pages of foundations, collections, art centres, museums, I was taken over by a huge appreciation for those hard working people, as well as conflicting feelings of accomplishment and inadequacy. It was a good year, all things considered – and by “all things” I mean the terrifying political and economic crisis leading to human breakdown, not to mince my words.
By looking at the international roster of galleries, it became increasingly obvious that most people have no idea what the art market is and does beyond the sensationalist articles in the press about auction sales, or ravaging takes about its speculative commodification of art, namely by the 1%.
I also felt that I was living and participating in a transitional moment in the art field. (I’ve been the artistic director of Drawing Now Paris art fair since 2018.) The world at large is undergoing a massive tectonic shift which affects most fields, especially the gap between North America and Europe. Some people think it’s being so stretched that it will bounce back to where it was and others are realising that the world isn’t changing that much. Rather, the global life we live is revealing its guts.
30 March 2025. Drawing Now Paris art fair after the galleries dismantled their booths.
It was impossible not to think transversally while watching all these agents of the art system labouring away. Some disappointed, a lot of them happy, thankfully, but probably all of them realising that we’d been living in a weird bubble for 6 days. I was contemplating the paradox of the fair: as a system, it is touched by current politics and their catastrophic economy, but as a “product” it also has the ability to create a suspended moment in time where anything goes for the sake of it. It’s a combination of the two; magical moments do occur among daunting evidences of market flows.
Nevertheless, and whether we like to admit it or not, art delivers horrific realities through beauty (to put it in simple terms); even the works tackling colonialism and its aftermath, war, authoritarianism, disease, the acceleration of climate change… Art makes us experience them through a form of exchange and through the elaboration of form, and the latter is the object of aesthetic projections.
The work of Tunisian artist Farrah Khelil and Roméo Mivekannin, born in the Ivory Coast and living between France and Benin,(both nominated for the Drawing Now Award) tackled issues of geo-displacement with such beauty that the discussions around them focused (also) on the mesmerising ability of the art to produce enchantment. [By the way, this year’s winner, Susanna Inglada, also works with political issues so this is not at all about the prize, which filled me with joy; I had visited Inglada’s studio a couple of years ago; she, and her work, are stupendous.]
I think enchantment is probably one of art’s biggest strengths. We prefer to ask of it what it cannot do in the great majority of cases, which is to directly affect the socio-political machine, the economy. But we must ask what and where the power is, even in art where a form of powerlessness is denounced. And in a context where the appreciation of the work will reposition it in the collection - exhibition - public acquisition of the work, or not.
Enchantment is quite a strong tool – it negates time, it takes over, it imbues us with positivity, it makes us look, it casts the spell of making us hold two different realities at the same time. Both Mivekannin and Khelil disturb the European relation to its own history by framing it with a heterogeneous one. This enchantment produces a sort of mitosis of the mind. Art is a hybrid form of creation, both subconscious and conscious, incorporating elements of its Time inasmuch as historical data is of the present as much as in the past. Made of both compulsive testimonies and critical distance, art works are a virtual space indented onto the fabric of reality, mirroring it, distorting it, re-making it.
Série Les Modèles de l'histoire de l'art - Eleonora di Toledo d'après Bronzino, 2023, Bains d'élixir et acrylique sur toile libre, 168 x 137 cm. © The artist and Galerie Eric Dupont.
Art fairs promote art and artists on an extremely visible stage. They are the theatre of an aggressive form of passion aimed at the art object but also the people who produce it. We’re talking about a moneyed passion, but also an institutional, journalistic, social media, corporate one. It has been argued that artists expose their identities which become commodified - art is the obvious culprit of identity politics. In that sense, the world out there is reflected in the art fair booths: there are the artists who tackle history and bigotry in their own terms and how it might affect them or their community and then there are the artists who feel imprisoned by it and find an alternative language tackling the same subjects, at times, but obliquely. A senior feminist artist told me once that she is not like “those women artists who only talk about the body and its excretions”. Fair enough. I love her abstract work but I’m also fond of Ida Applebroog’s vaginas (and no, it wasn’t Cueco featured below).
Marinette Cueco, Entrelacs, Juncus capitatus. 80 cm x 60 cm.
© Bertrand Hugues. Courtesy Galerie Univer / Colette Colla
An art fair is a space where these complementary artistic strategies co-exist without the vigilance of a curator – but which do strangely mirror curators’ weird adaptability to opposing artistic “poethical” stances. There has been quite some talk about how “curated” the fair was this year, but it means something different. We were praised by the elevated choice of works and their coordination within each booth. I admire the galleries in their choices; we do move from one intense experience to the other: utopia, dreams, hidden archives, gendered realities, explorations of space and material, disability, popular culture, contemporary gardens, minerals, and so many more.
Do art fairs reflect globalisation and imperialism? They certainly do since they are commercially international, or at least “glocal”. They’re a culmination of colonial extractionism and exploitation, then industrialisation and its labour, then the planetary ramifications of its products thusly obtained, and the culture that goes with it, which incorporates what we consider contemporary art to be. However, art fairs also reflect contexts, and locate these generalisations in specific histories and experiences. They are realist rather than utopian. Sometimes they can be realistically utopian.
Therefore, an art fair is not fair – it doesn’t represent everything, some very good artists don’t have galleries and others do not find a commercial interest beyond a few works, or institutional resonance within them. But again, what do we mean by that? “Institutions” are relayed by non-profit and artist-run spaces. An art fair is a stage and it is used by its actors to the best of their abilities, which are varied, and depend upon economic stability. The post-Covid reinforcement of international art fairs may re-introduce this “glocal” phenomenon. Galleries are starting to geo-locate their own interests in places such as Dubai, Geneva, Paris and – surprisingly, or me being biased – Lisbon. We may be discovering that beyond old established markets there are other territories – and new generations – worth creating a dialogue with, provided we/they’re open to it.
The thing is: art fairs are where people now buy work. We’ve become too good at the game. In my own humble territory of drawing, I closely follow and invite institutional representatives to come and visit, and I follow the artists’ work as much as I can to guide visitors, professionals, amateurs, professors, artists etc. Fairs such as ours are also a meeting point for academics and artists, who create together (books, seminars, workshops, etc.). We’re not only a market place, as it were, we’re a professional rendez-vous that stimulates the “art system” beyond the mere purchase of a drawing. However, for the galleries, the challenge still continues to be the sale, within this web of potential for their artists because without it, neither of them survives.
The thing is, when we speak about art fairs, we often speak about artists – and mostly how and if their best interests are defended. However, it is not often discussed how galleries go through this process. Would artists exist without galleries and art fairs? Would artists still create? Of course. Look at all the women artists recuperated by the market in their seventies, already retired from whatever job they had. They delight us with a body of work ranging across decades, unperturbed, freer than their more exposed peers, perhaps. Expressing oneself through visual art is a necessity for most artists which doesn’t – always – depend upon an audience. But most of these artists, I’m sure, would have preferred to be in the market before they reached the late stages of menopause.
The reality is that art fairs, contrary to what was science-fictioned during the Covid pandemic, are here to stay. They create and enhance a unique combo of foundations, art advisors, private collectors, patrons or “amis de [insert museum]”, artists, celebrities, art producers, collector collectives, creatives-at-large, to name just a few. They’re part of the art system as a whole. One of the biggest changes I see happening is the difference between the galleries who create a trans-national or regional network according to their profile and those who are implemented in one single place / country. Collectors – and even institutional art professionals – are simply not going to galleries anymore.
Therefore fairs may not be fair but they’re important, at least for a certain profile of artist. They keep artists alive and well, able to produce their art. They also operate as a rotating platform, especially the human sized ones such as us. But although the market has a far wider reach currently, it cannot do everything, such as art cannot negotiate peace with a bellicose nation. If we’re talking income, there is so much work potential for artists, independent curators and writers whose expertise is creativity, in industries such as gaming, education, health, economy, AI and new technologies, and so many more. I would love to see the end of the cycle of artists graduating to become professors for lack of a real professional engagement in society beyond their artwork.
Selling is and has always been intricately linked with influence. Nevertheless, what constitutes “influence” changed radically. Whether more conservative art lovers like it or not, there isn’t a clear path for artists anymore. Some of them are senior white and male but they’re looking at other ways of existing by creating schools, accessibility, social projects or simply not demanding the same drunken adoration Serge Gainsbourg did (so as not to mention anyone in our small milieu!); a lot of them are displaced or second generation immigrants, and even people who started later in life; others are looking into materials and practices that are both ancient and technologically rooted in AI; just to name a few examples. Hybridity is the name of the game.
This doesn’t, however, concern major museums and galleries, and super established artists who invite celebrities to their studios to create together and who are mostly North American. Another phenomenon of the world “outside the fair” is that having a portfolio career such as mine reflects how ramified things have become, but more precarious in Europe, unfortunately. I wrote about this here.
But it also transpires in celebrity management who is now turning to creative / industrial territories beyond show business. I don’t know who is convincing actresses and actors or singers that they have to branch out, but it is certainly happening. Who doesn't have a Tequilla or a cosmetics brand to sell amongst actors and actresses? Strange that they don’t want to become gallerists or art fair founders! It would be great to join forces and support a varied market where everyone has its place.