Three takes on the VIP Art FAir

From Over the Net

... on balance VIP did feel like the future. The future in much the same way early laptops and brick-sized mobiles phones did back in the day. Awkward and a bit cumbersome but, once you'd had a taste, impossible to live without.

From Art World Salon

The VIP Art Fair is not Facebook. It’s not a social media platform and was never billed as one. Rather, it is the first successful attempt at bringing something like an Art Basel or Armory Show to your browser. But here’s the thing: “Users are fickle.” And VIP learned that lesson the hard way.

From Art Fag City

Since the fair launched this weekend (it runs through January 30th), the first and only online art fair, has been riddled with problems ranging from connectivity to disappearing chats and navigational problems. I’ve heard rumblings from many dealers wanting their money refunded, and many collectors claiming they aren’t going to deal with the site any longer. “[It] was a complete day of collector torture,” collector Mike Mao told me over Facebook the day of the fair’s debut.

[VIP Art Fair was a week-long online-only contemporary art fair, an experiment in moving the art fair experience into the digital/social medium]

Mostly unrelated: How Artists Must Dress

Whereas a dealer must signal, in wardrobe, a sympathy to the tastes and tendencies of the collector class, an artist is under no obligation to endorse these. Rather, the task of the artist with regard to fashion is to interrogate the relationship between cost and value as it pertains to clothing, and, by analogy, to artworks.

A better breed of art fair?

In a recent post on ArtWorld Salon, Marc Spiegler ponders Gallery Weekend Berlin as an 'antidote' to art fairs.

Gallery Weekend Berlin - Marc Spiegler, ArtWorld Salon

For GWB, 29 galleries hold openings on Friday night, and pledge to open on Saturday, Sunday and Monday. A pocket-sized programme is distributed. Dealers hold private dinners on the Friday night, and on the Saturday night there is a gala event, to which every participating dealer can invite six guests. Speigler writes:

"Now, an artworld idealist might say that good galleries should not have to coordinate their openings and engineer a big social occasion to attract out-of-town visitors. As a realist, however, I think it’s an excellent strategy. Much like an art fair, it leverages the strengths of many galleries - their artists and their networks - to mutual benefit, while acknowledging the time-crunched lives of today’s artworld players. Plus, the galleries get to show their artists in spaces the dealer chose to fit their program."

Which in itself is an antidote to the restrictions placed on dealers at this year's Auckland Art Fair.

Collecting: same or different?

Continuing on from last week's post about the Auckland Art Fair, two pieces of writing on hedge fund type collecting.

On artnet.com, an article by Charlie Finch titled 'A New Market Theory of Art', which concludes:

"Herd behavior by collectors at art fairs is stimulated by these new realities [hedge fund type collecting]. Nobody wishes to strike gold, because they already have gold: what these collectors want is status and cachet and, let’s face it, more gold. Greed is good. But art suffers in this context, because it functions solely as an economic and social marker, always subject to immediate obsolescence, should economic realities change. Yes, everyone is making money, but the money is really making them."

And Edward Winkleman, who's commenting on the Finch article in a post titled 'Looking for Fairness in the Age of Art Fairs'.