A visitor enjoys a striking exhibit by Niyi Olagunji shown by Tafeta Gallery during the 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair at Somerset House in London on Oct. 8.
Getty ImagesFor gallery owners, artists, and collectors, life before the pandemic often involved getting on a plane and going to Paris, Los Angeles, or maybe Shanghai, to attend the next splashy art fair.
But all that was upended, of course, as the pandemic shut down fair after fair. First to announce a closure was Art Basel Hong Kong, which canceled its March fair in February and moved many of its galleries to online viewing rooms, or OVRs.
That effort was a success, with many galleries such as David Zwirner and Hauser & Wirth, selling millions of dollars in works—rare for digital sales before 2020. Subsequent efforts by Frieze Art Fair in New York, and Art Basel, Switzerland, were considered “even more user-friendly and comprehensive,” Suzanne Gyorgy, global head of art advisory and finance at Citi Private Bank, said in the firm’s annual report on the art market.
Once art advisors like Gyorgy got the hang of it, “we were able to go through art fairs with clients on Zoom, sharing our screen,” she says, adding that it worked surprisingly well. Many galleries were more transparent about pricing, and they offered access to so much more content about artists and art history on their digital platforms than was readily available at a physical fair.
Other benefits? “Our feet never hurt; we were never too hot or too cold,” Gyorgy says.
Early indications are that many art fairs will take what they learned from 2020 into the new year, offering hybrid events in some cases featuring OVRs as well as in-person fairs, while others are postponing events to late spring or fall.
“ Although art fairs are commercial platforms, they are really there to provide context, such as exhibitions and artist presentations, in-person contact with gallery owners and staff, and more importantly a place for networking and social interaction. ”
The 1-54 Contemporary African Art Fair postponed its annual fair in Marrakech, Morocco, in February 2021 and will instead hold an event at Christie’s in Paris in January with 19 galleries, as well as an online fair. Frieze New York will have a scaled-down version of its fair May 5-9 at The Shed at Hudson Yards with about 60 galleries (instead of the usual of about 200), although all galleries that would have participated at its usual Randall’s Island venue have the option to participate online.
The European Fine Art Foundation (TEFAF), meanwhile, moved its Maastricht 2021 fair from mid-March to a shortened event from May 31 to June 6, with previews beginning May 29. In March 2020, the fair was also a victim of the pandemic, as organizers cancelled it four days early.
This mix of hybrid fairs and postponements is to be expected as vaccines are still not yet widely available, making it difficult to know how safe it will be to hold in-person events with hundreds of collectors and gallery owners flying in from all over the world.
“I believe people’s appetite for international travel will be limited,” says Anders Petterson, founder and managing director at ArtTactic, a London research firm.
While art fairs became adept at selling virtually this year, Petterson argues that the move online was more challenging for art fairs than for auction houses, which not only created new online sales, and accelerated offerings of digital technologies to display art online, but also created hybrid live-streamed sales to create more of the feel of an auction’s urgent atmosphere.
An online fair, by contrast, “just isn’t comparable to the ‘live’ experience and never will be,” Petterson says. “Although art fairs are commercial platforms, they are really there to provide context, such as exhibitions and artist presentations, in-person contact with gallery owners and staff, and more importantly a place for networking and social interaction.”
It’s those interactions, “where collectors meet, exchange views and rumors, intelligence about who’s buying what” that are “crucial ingredients for a well-functioning market,” he says. “These social elements have been very challenging to replicate online.”
One of the luckiest fairs in 2020 was The Armory Show in New York, which was able to hold its event March 5-8 at Piers 90 and 94 along the Hudson River in Manhattan, just as Covid-19 cases began to emerge in the city. As the fair opened, its leadership announced the 2021 event would be held at the Javits Center in September instead of its usual March slot.
The move takes the Armory away from a hard-to-get-to spot spread out over two locations to a roughly 250,000-square-foot venue that will allow for 20-foot aisles, and big open lounges, according to fair executive director Nicole Berry. And the new September dates fall at a time when many experts believe life will be returning to some sense of normal.
While it didn’t have to postpone or cancel, The Armory Show did move into the digital realm in April with Armory Access, sponsoring an online exhibition on its platform for a single gallery once a week.
The featured galleries were part of the “Presents” programming at the fair highlighting exhibitors 10-years-old or less. These younger galleries “may not have had the means or resources to create their own online viewing rooms,” Berry says.
Given that travel restrictions could still be in place in September, or that fair participants and collectors may still be wary of large gatherings, the Armory Show will offer digital elements to the fair. And it plans to lean into its connections with the city of New York, in part by holding large activations in public spaces, such as artist Jeffrey Gibson’s live performance just before midnight on March 7 in Times Square.
“Being able to do more performances, more site specific work, not only emphasizes our relationship with the city, and being an important part of the cultural fabric,” Berry says, “it’s also another opportunity for our galleries to showcase their artists.”
Before the pandemic, many in the art world complained about the dizzying number of fairs (at least 300 globally in 2019, up from 55 in 2000, according to The Art Basel and UBS Global Art Market Report 2020).
Among growing concerns has been the impact of fairs on the environment, given that they require dealers and collectors to fly all over the world, and that the events themselves require building up and tearing down often huge event structures, creating waste. These concerns have even spurred a group of London galleries and commercial arts professionals to form the Gallery Climate Coalition, aimed at reducing the carbon footprint of the commercial art world.
Petterson expects these issues could become even more important post-crisis, leading to a sustained reliance on digital initiatives, including hybrid art fairs with online elements in addition to physical events.
“The pandemic has forced the art market to re-think their customer journeys—from a heavily in-person experience towards a more omni-channel experience,” Petterson says. “In the longer-term, this would make the art market more resilient to potential future disruptions that we have experienced this year.”
Yet those trends will be balanced by what Berry is learning in speaking with exhibitors, peers, and collectors, and that is, “you can’t capture the magic that happens at a fair on a digital platform.”
Gyorgy agrees. She was among those who were always on a plane pre-pandemic. While she hears people saying they won’t ever go back to that, she says, “honestly, if I could go to an art fair in Taipei, I’d hop on a plane in a minute!”
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