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Are brick and mortar art galleries the loss leaders in an art world, potentially spiraling beyond viable limits? More than ninety art fairs now define the rhythm of globalized art business. This development has profoundly altered the relationships amongst artists, gallerists, and collectors.

This panel discussion explores and critiques the impacts and challenges – legal, ethical and business – of the rise of art fairs. This is part of an initiative to create dialogue amongst lawyers, artists and emerging and established art professionals working in the primary or secondary markets.

Moderator: , Chair, Committee on Fine Arts, New York State Bar Association, Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law (EASL) Section, Attorney and Faculty at Sotheby’s Institute of Art

Panel:
, Gallerist
Elizabeth Dee, Gallerist
, Attorney at Stropheus Art Law
, Litigation Partner at Sullivan & Worcester LLP

A video of Ed Winkleman’s PowerPoint presentation can be found in the section on his presentation below. A dedicated audio recording of Elizabeth Dee’s comments also precedes her text.

Judith B. Prowda

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More than 90 art fairs define the rhythm of globalized art business. There are dozens of NYC art fairs. In fact, when Richard and I were planning this program we made the strategic decision to schedule it between Frieze NY, and Art Basel in Switzerland. With the rise and rise of art fairs, sheer survival in the commercial art context now requires galleries to participate in a half a dozen or more art fairs a year – from New York to Maastricht to Dubai to Hong Kong to São Paolo – with stops along the way.

Some dealers make as much as two-thirds of their sale at fairs. Art fairs have indeed transformed the business of art and even the production of contemporary art. For serious collectors the international art fair circuit is an imperative, while visiting only a few of galleries in NY, London and Berlin seems – well – almost quaint. I recall arriving a few minutes before the opening at The Euro¬pean Fine Arts Fair (TEFAF) in Maastricht and being crushed by a crowd of eager collectors who gathered impatiently for the doors to burst open at 11AM on the dot. And TEFAF is perhaps the most subdued of fairs.

On the positive side, art fairs create a global art dialogue; galleries introduce works fresh from artists studios to the international stage. For the past three years Frieze has commissioned artists projects that have been curated by Cecelia Alemani. Frieze also offers a daily program of keynote lectures, panel debates, and discussions on diverse cultural topics. And let’s not forget the glitzy parties.

Fairs have also been criticized. Participation in an art fair is a very expensive proposition – from a highly selective application process, to fees for booths shipping, insurance and travel. Mid-tier galleries which can’t afford these costs are often left at the gate. Increasingly they are confronted with the financial unsustainability of their brick and mortar.

Also – and I leave this to our gallerists to address – is the question of art production and the responsibility of dealers who may have to pressure artists to turn out a high volume of new work in order to satisfy the demand¬ing art fair calendar.

Along with the rise of art fairs, is the emergence of complex legal and ethical issues. For example, and these are but a few on the legal side – how are relationships among the relevant actors distinct from traditional dealing? How are negotiations affected? When is the handshake deal an enforceable contract? When isn’t it? What about warranties of title and authenticity? Whose jurisdiction laws apply in title disputes if a work is stolen? That of the consigner, or the good faith purchaser, or the country from where the object was stolen? Suppose a work was shipped or looted abroad without an export license? Or it turns out to be a fake, or is seized by the bank as collateral on a loan? What are the consequences?These are but a few of the legal issues.

And there are ethical concerns as well. How are conflicts of interest addressed when dealers are evaluating other dealers in the application process? Are decisions about gallery placements at the fair – fair? Are rising costs making it impossible for some dealers to compete? How are a dealer’s fiduciary duties to their artist affected?

To parse all this out, we will begin with Ed Winkleman. Ed is co-owner of Winkleman Gallery and also co-founder of the Moving Image Art Fair. He is the author of the eponymous blog that demystifies the gallery system, and the book, How to Start and Run a Commercial Art Gallery, published in 2009. Ed will offer an overview of the research on art fairs he is conducting, in preparation for his upcoming book, Selling Contemporary art: How to Navigate the Evolving Market.

Our next speaker is Elisabeth Dee. Elisabeth is the owner of the Chelsea gallery, Elizabeth Dee, and is the co-founder of the art fair, Independent New York. She has produced a number of groundbreaking, first and international exhibitions of an impressive roster of artists. She was also included in Art + Auction Magazine’s list for the 100 most powerful figures in the art world. Elizabeth will report on the chances and risks that art fairs impose from her perspective as a dealer and a founder of an art fair.

Our next speaker is attorney Richard Lehun. Richard is one of the founding members of Stropheus Art Law, one of New York’s pioneers in the provision of unbundled legal and business services to artists, gallerists, collectors and museums. Richard is one of the few people in the US to have completed a doctorate in fiduciary law cross-appointed between McGill and Harvard Law School, and is responsible for gallery, museum and auction house ethics and fiduciary duties at Stropheus Art Law. He’ll be looking at the ethical problems that fairs raise and how their potential is impacted.

Our final speaker is Nick O’Donnell. Nick is a litigation lawyer at Sullivan & Worcester LLP and the practice group leader of the firm’s art and museum group. He has spoken frequently on the topic of WWII restitution litigation, including at a conference in Heidelberg last January about the Cornelius Gurlitt affair. Nick’s widely read art law report offers commentary on legal issues affecting visual artists – the visual arts community. Nick will present on legal issues that art fairs carry with them.

I’m grate­ful for my employer, Sotheby’s Insti­tute of Art, for gra­ciously host­ing this event, as so many New York State Bar Association, Entertainment, Arts and Sports Law (EASL) Section, events, in this beau­ti­ful space which is my sec­ond home. This pro­gram is part of an ini­tia­tive of EASL’s Fine Arts Com­mit­tee to cre­ate dia­logue amongst lawyers, artists, and emerg­ing and estab­lished art pro­fes­sion­als work­ing in the pri­mary and sec­ondary mar­ket. Two years ago we pio­neered a pro­gram on legal issues for artists and gal­leries dur­ing Bush­wick Open Stu­dios Week­end, geared to the pri­mary art com­mu­nity. Last Octo­ber we held a pro­gram on Gallery Ethics and have posted an audio pod­cast and tran­script of that pro­gram on the Stro­pheus Art Law web­site, and we will do the same for tonight’s program.

So please join me in welcoming our illustrious panel and our first speaker, Ed Winkleman.

Ed Winkleman

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Good evening everyone. I would first like to start off by saying thank you to Judith and Richard for organizing this panel and what I’m going to share with you, as the previous thing mentioned, is just some of the research from my upcoming book. Its title is self explanatory, but in the context of what we’re talking about today – going further and say it really does focus on contemporary art, but the discussion today will extend beyond just that. The book is designed to help dealers strategize with the changes of in the art markets since I wrote the first book, which was about the fundamentals of opening and running a commercial art gallery. One chapter in particular that defines a big part about what has changed since 2008, when I wrote the first book, is the chapter: The Rise of the Art Fair. I’ve read a lot of the literature as well as interviewed some of the directors of major art fairs in the world as preparation for the book, and this part is what I am going to share right now.

Since 2002, despite the quote you’ll see at the top sup­plied by Georgina Adams, the num­ber of art fairs in the world has exploded, and there’s a num­ber of quotes through­out the pre­sen­ta­tion that I won’t read out, because they’re really there for fla­vor. I think I do want to read this one just to set the tone. The num­bers here do tell the story. In 1970 there were just three main events – Cologne, Basel and the Brus­sels-based Art Actuel. The num­ber has mush­roomed in the past decade from 68 in 2005 to 189 in 2011. Georgina [Adams] wrote that in 2012. I’m cur­rently count­ing every art fair in the world, and among con­tem­po­rary fairs only – that’s fairs that show con­tem­po­rary art – I’m up to 220 and I know I haven’t counted them all. If I add in the fairs that I know that exist that don’t include con­tem­po­rary art, the num­ber is close to 300 at this point. So, even from the time that Georgina wrote that, the num­bers are con­tin­u­ing to rise. And they are show­ing no signs of stop­ping just yet. Why the explosion?

I point back to what happened at the NADA Art Fair in Miami in 2002 as the beginning of this notion that the world needed more art fairs. If you were in Miami in 2002, you’ll know that Nada was a satellite to the Art Basel Miami Beach Fair, and a very roughly organized fair by a group of young dealers. It didn’t cost very much to participate but within the four days the fair that took place, those dealers generally sold their booth out one, two, or three times over, and brought in perhaps more money than they would see through their galleries in the space of the six months previous to that. So the perception, as word trickled out, that the galleries had just made boatloads of money at that one weekend in Miami, started to change about what an art fair could be, how much it would cost to produce one, who was qualified to organize one, and eventually more and more people started beginning their own fairs, because demand just exploded.

In 2002 roughly 48 to 60 galleries participated in the NADA in Miami. The applications for the 2003 fair were four or five hundred range. So many more galleries were immediately interested in participating in that fair. Another thing that happened, though, was in response to the recession in 2008. If you’d asked any dealer at the time when they were looking at how the financial crisis impacted their ability to participate in art fairs, they would have expected the number of fairs to start dwindling. We were already having a conversation similar to this one in 2007-2008. There were so many fairs and people expected the recession to start knocking them down.

But one of the inter­est­ing things that hap­pened was a shift in per­cep­tion of who was respon­si­ble for get­ting col­lec­tors to the fairs. One of the peo­ple I inter­viewed for my book is Annette Schön­holzer, the direc­tor for new ini­tia­tive for Art Basel, and she said it was a sur­prise for her, when in 2008 and 2009, gal­leries started to come to her say­ing: “Where are the big col­lec­tors that we’re used to? They’re not here. You have to bring them here.” And Basel was say­ing: “We pro­duce the fair, we put the best gal­leries and the best art in the fair, you’ve always been respon­si­ble for bring­ing the col­lec­tors.” So, being the fair that they are, Basel said: “Okay, this is what you want us to do we will go out, we’ll increase our VIP pro­gram. We will do what­ever it takes to find the new col­lec­tors that are avail­able, as well as make sure the exist­ing col­lec­tors you know and love come to the fair.”

One of things that started to happen, though, is when they would reach out, as they would increase their VIP programming, they would send every participating gallery a package of VIP cards, and those galleries would send their cards out to all of their VIPs. Not surprisingly, some collectors would receive twenty or more VIP cards in the mail. And because they had so many extras, they would distribute them to their friends, and their friends were very often not VIP collectors. So, what you would see in the VIP lounge or at the VIP events were some of the people that the program was targeting, and then a lot of people that it was really never designed for.

So, the fairs start telling the galleries: “You give us your list of collectors and we’ll send out the VIP cards so that they’re not all getting multiple copies. That practice, in and of itself, shifted a huge amount of the power to the fairs. The fairs now had the quintessential collectors list. They had every person who has gallery’s VIP list in the world. And rather than see art fairs start to dwindle, in response to the recession, we started to see their power grow, and their numbers grow.

The other thing that is critical is that during all this time, 2002-2014, we systematically as dealers started to train collectors – that you will see the very newest, the very best, the most exciting work by our artist at the fairs. And even if they were buying them in advance, collectors started getting accustomed to the idea that this is where I purchase art. And this is where I can get an overview of the best art in the world. So, why am I spending as much time going around to all the various galleries? Now some collectors of ours have been collecting for 30 years will willingly admit that they have gone more and more to fairs and less and less to galleries individually because of this.

So, that’s the longest I am going to spend on any one of these slides, but I think that’s important for the background here. So the bottom line in terms of money out, the TEFAF Art Market Report is generated once a year. It’s commissioned by TEFAF. It’s released in conjunction with their fair in Maastricht, and it’s perhaps the best accumulation of data and statistics on the market.

It is still considered somewhat controversial because its author, Dr. Clare McAndrew, doesn’t have what some people consider the strictest methodology. Her sample sizes aren’t necessarily what somebody coming from an industry that uses reports like this as part of their business would consider that significant. But it’s the best data available. So, it does still influence perceptions. And in 2013 she reports that the total amount of money galleries spent participating in art shows was 1.9 billion Euros, and that’s money that comes from the galleries only. So, if you continue to the money – the entire art market was estimated to be 47 billion Euros in 2013, and dealers reported that 33% of their total sales were made at fairs.

I’ve done the math and I hope its right. The total money that galleries sold at fairs, and that’s not the total profit, that’s just the money they made per se, that’s just sales, was close to 16 billion Euros. So it’s more or less 8 Euros per Euro they spend at fairs. I should note that doesn’t represent the money made by every gallery at every level.

The top-tier galleries are probably making much more than that, and the lower level galleries, especially in the mid level, are quite lucky very often if they even break even. So because galleries in the emerging market or in the contemporary market generally have a 50/50 split with their artists, a gallery is probably selling twice what they are paying to participate in the fair, but they’re only receiving half of that, so it’s a one to one. This chart is probably hard to read from the back of the room, but it breaks down the sources of sales for galleries as recorded in 2013, and you can see that 33% is attributable to fairs. The breakdown is 19% for local fairs and 14% for international fairs. This is a chart showing where the most galleries are located.

You can see cities like Paris, London, New York, Tokyo. That’s not surprising that they have the most galleries. This isn’t a finalized chart, but the idea is to show the number of galleries correlates to the number of fairs that these cities also produce. So, a city with a red star on it is a city that has either a lot of fairs – or high profile fairs, very influential fairs. A city with a blue star is a city that’s either going up or coming down in terms of the number of fairs, or the importance of the fairs they have. An example might be São Paolo is coming up, its fairs are coming up its fair are gaining in importance. Berlin is going down. It’s either losing its fairs, or they aren’t as important as they used to be.

Basel is at the bottom by itself. It doesn’t have as many galleries as other cities, but it has the most important fairs, arguably. Despite that geographic dispersion of where the fairs take place, where the sales take place is pretty isolated to the United States. The TEFAF report of 2014 found that 75% percent of sales at art fairs take place at art fairs in the United States. And if you ask – and they did – the dealers around the world, 91% of them said that they needed to participate in just as many or more fairs in the United States because of those sales. If you ask galleries in New York, most will report that everything else being equal they’ll do their best business in Miami.

There’s something psychological about it. It’s where sales happen. We cynically refer to it as it’s like shooting fish in a barrel. The impact of this fair culture, this rise of the art fair on dealers includes statistics of some galleries reporting going to 15 fairs a year, that’s more than one a month. The impact of that on their gallery practice – is they either need to bring on more staff or they themselves are on the road up to 90 days of the year. That’s 90 days they’re not in their gallery, they are not with their families, they’re not as close as they need to be with their artists.

It’s having both a financial and a personal impact on the dealers. And as this quote from a New York Times article about the life on the road of the art dealers illustrates, it’s shifting the culture from this genteel practice where you would wait for someone to come into your gallery or you would have this leisurely conversation with them, to one where you’re constantly on the road and everything is happening much more quickly.

The impact on artists is probably ten times worse in my opinion. At the fairs, the top metric of the success for any given artwork is whether it’s sold or not. And that starts to influence what artists give their galleries to take to the fairs. They want to be a success. They want the piece at the fair to sell. Also, for the galleries to get into the best fairs, and to please the collectors that come to those fairs, there’s an expectation that to every fair you’re bringing something new.

I’ve had a num­ber of col­lec­tors com­plain as they were walk­ing around one of the fairs we were par­tic­i­pat­ing in: “I saw that at this other fair” I saw that at that gallery, at a show they had.” And the per­cep­tion is that artists can’t be doing very well if a piece I saw in a gallery is now at a fair, or a piece that I saw at one fair is now at another fair. And so to cre­ate the impres­sion that all of your artists are very suc­cess­ful as well as to please the col­lec­tors that come to the fairs to see some­thing new, gal­leries are con­stantly say­ing: “I need some­thing new,” and by say­ing that the artists are respond­ing to it.

Even if an artist has a very clear head about it their still com­part­men­tal­iz­ing their prac­tice. They’re mak­ing some works specif­i­cally for the fairs and the other work that they’re com­pelled to make. So, the over­all impact of this is some­thing that peo­ple are now refer­ring to as “art fair fatigue.” And you’ll see a num­ber of arti­cles and the lit­er­a­ture about it.

There are even clever little articles on how to deal with art fair fatigue, what shoes to wear and what spot to be is forming around airports, etc. Despite art fair fatigue, though, 45% of dealer felt that they will still invest in more fairs internationally. I think it’s said that there is a cultural backlash, where more and more dealers are saying: “I want you the collector to come to my galleries, instead of just meeting me at the fair.” A lot of dealers are saying just that to their collectors: “Come visit me. You won’t see at the fairs what we’re doing at the galleries. It’s important for you to be involved in the dialogue that’s happening in the gallery, and for you to come to the gallery.”

And some galleries in Chelsea have enough in the gallery and they don’t see the need to increase the number of fairs they are participating in, but remember that 17% of the sales happening is local, and for New Yorkers, they’re local for US fairs that are selling the most anyway. So, and that is it. Thank you.

Elisabeth Dee

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I didn’t prepare a formal presentation, because we have so many tonight, and I’m typically Ed’s sparring partner, someone to play that role. Ed, thank you so much for giving us your insightful analysis on the situation with fairs and what the risks, rewards, and consequences can be. I’m going to speak primarily from, or just engage a little bit, primarily, from the gallerist’s point of view, because we are the two gallerists and art fair founders.

I founded a fair called Independent, which takes place twice annually in March and November at the former DIA Center for the Arts. And I think it’s really critical to talk about the dynamic of fairs, vis-à-vis those that were founded by gallerists and run by gallerists, and those that have become more institutionalized, or more of their own private enterprises.

Art Basel was founded by Ernst Beyeler who was a very impor­tant noted gallerist, a his­tor­i­cal gal­lerist. And I think it’s impor­tant to think about gal­lerists com­ing together to col­lab­o­rate on the issues of the day and present them mutu­ally. What Ed said was so insight­ful. With the shift to a more cor­po­rate cul­ture of art fair man­age­ment, gal­lerists have lost cer­tain pro­tec­tions that they once enjoyed. I’m not say­ing that there have not been ben­e­fits in that things have become more of an open and trans­par­ent mar­ket for col­lec­tors and for other gal­lerists to see what’s truly going on.

When you have 180 gal­leries from all over the world one is able to get a great index – how­ever, I think there are cer­tain con­cerns that gal­lerists only know and cer­tain infor­ma­tion that gal­lerists only trade with each other, that can inform and develop fair cul­ture in a more mean­ing­ful and in some ways more pro­gres­sive way. And that is why Ed and I both have started fairs with our gallery col­leagues. Would you agree?

Ed Winkleman: Yeah. Elisabeth and I were on a panel all together at Art Basel last summer, and it was about the way that galleries who have been in business for a while aren’t necessarily surviving as well as the top-tier are. And the moderator said in response to what was talking about the number of fairs we were doing and the costs, and the personal costs: “But you both started fairs yourself, so aren’t you both responsible for this in some way?” To which our response was: “We started alternative fairs that are actually not only art driven, they are gallery-centric. Both of our fairs are trying to solve some of the issues that we see with some of the bigger fairs. I think that the fair model itself has a long way to go to even catch up what the galleries are able to do. I don’t even necessarily think that even the galleries are the quintessentially best context in which to view art. My favorite place to view art is in a collector’s home. But I think, through efforts like Independent and some of the fairs out there – pushing the model here and there, experimenting with it, trying to find a better way – because I don’t think the fairs are going away. But I think they have a long way ago.

Elisabeth Dee: I com­pletely agree. I also think that given the kind of econ­omy that we’ve cre­ated, as gal­lerists, doing gallery-cen­tric fairs, it’s allowed for more kinds of exper­i­men­ta­tion in the art fair model. When I first started in 2002, one of my first fairs I ever did was NADA. I think that my costs annu­ally in doing fairs, as an emerg­ing gallery, was prob­a­bly 25 or 30 thou­sand dollars. Now I spend over a quar­ter of a mil­lion dol­lars in fairs, and I’m not a large gallery. And I still want to develop artists and intro­duce artists and develop strate­gic, cura­to­r­ial sup­port for my artists – not just sales. And to me that bal­ance is crit­i­cal for the devel­op­ment of artists in a sus­tain­able way.

So, when you work with many fair organizations and their economies, which are very expensive, you can see your profit margins going all the way down to 50% or 30% of the revenue that you would normally have in the gallery. One has to really analyze and consider those factors. And I think that what we’ve been able to do with Moving Image, which is Ed’s fair – which is devoted to video art, and keeping costs to a place where gallerists can afford to take the risk of introducing new material – or Independent, which is also equally inexpensive, even for the emerging gallery in Europe that may be doing their first fairs of their gallery’s career and their artist’s career.

It’s really important to be able to think about new creative economies for gallerists that aren’t selling things that are a million dollars on the stand, and who want to develop a dialogue and a programmatic curatorial conversation around their program. I think it’s wonderful that we now have so many fairs to choose from, in terms of how we spend our time and our own personal research of galleries and their programs. And I think it offers a lot. I think these kinds of initiatives help the gallerist face the realities of the economy as they grow and develop as galleries.

Ed Winkleman: You have one thing there I’m going to read off of, because I think this is a really interesting point, in the context of this conversation would be great to talk about: the ethical question of galleries being the gatekeeper’s to these fairs. They’re so important and 33% percent of your sales and your competitors have a say whether or not you get in to better fares.

Elisabeth Dee: We switched topics, okay. Because that wasn’t a part of your talk, I didn’t want to introduce a new topic. But, as we know fairs impose certain challenges for the gallerist who is looking to enter a system that already exists; whether it’s Frieze at 180 galleries or art Basel at 200 galleries. Many of the galleries have been are there for many, many years, with very strong programs – and it’s very competitive.

Main­tain­ing a posi­tion in those fairs is also com­pet­i­tive, and the decision-making process of these fairs is extremely prob­lem­atic from my point of view. There’s no sys­tem for rat­ing your peers. When you’re invited to be on art fair selec­tion com­mit­tees, of which I have been on many, I have been pon­der­ing this ques­tion: how does one objec­tively ana­lyze a pro­gram wants to be part of a fair. What’s the eval­u­a­tion sys­tem? How do you eval­u­ate cura­to­r­ial pro­grams on a basis of merit against other gal­leries that may be of a dif­fer­ent gen­er­a­tion, but still work­ing with the pri­mary mar­ket? How do you han­dle aspects of their own rep­u­ta­tion in the field? What is their stand­ing with col­lec­tors? What is their stand­ing with artists? Have they sim­ply careers of artists and put them into the pro­gram, or have they actu­ally done strate­gic devel­op­ment for those artists? There are no clear fac­tors to address this.

And when gallerists get together, even really, really accomplished gallerists may be very unaware of certain programs in certain geographical regions or certain generational regions. I feel that the fair can be often at a disadvantage making decisions about its content and its participants based on a group of dealers that may not have the right tools in order to evaluate this properly. You also have factors of politics involved, because dealers do work together. They often share artists. There is often a long history of working together or competing with each other.

There can be a lot of political factors that are unfair in evaluating other galleries based on subjective experiences that people bring to the table when they have to vote. And this can be quite problematic for many galleries who can be part of these fairs and for the reason of one single committee member be eliminated from the fair for many years and have to deal with the issues that ensue once one was part of something and is now no longer able to participate – nominally for the artists they represent. But the financial impact can be often huge and sometimes extremely debilitating to certain galleries. This is something that I think this has not been clearly addressed in the fair system and I think deserves to be

Ed Winkleman: I totally agree. I don’t know what the answer could be. With Moving Image we have selection by a curatorial advising committee, so it’s not other galleries choosing the participants, it’s curators, but even that is far from a perfect system. I don’t know what would be the perfect system honestly.

Elisabeth Dee: And at Independent we’ve gone the totally opposite route, where no, it’s invitational process with one curatorial advisor, and we have no system for application because we don’t feel we have an adequate system at hand to evaluate those applications.

Ed Winkleman: But there’s no question the impact of certain galleries can be huge and politics plays into it. The chatter that goes around after the list comes out for any big fair…

Richard Lehun: But I think both of you are speaking to very key issue. that I’m also trying to give a structural analysis to, but I’ll wait to do that. I want to just underscore that I think often from a legal point of view, we often as lawyers are not necessarily paying enough attention to. I think the very fact of being able to bring the issues out into the open, to be able to frame them, and to bring stakeholders in and have stakeholders address those problems is very key to whatever a solution might be. The greatest difficulty is to have stakeholders feeling like they’re somehow affected by the process, for which there is no voice or language. And that’s one of the things that were trying to do with these outreach events is encourage a community that has been long entrenched in a kind of self-mythology, which is been both self-serving and also protective. But some of these protective strategies about information, about one’s own positioning, might be devastating bad in times of turbulent change – where the exchange of information and the building of mutual understandings about outcomes, desirable outcomes are necessary, and where those things can’t be done ad hoc anymore, independent of what powerful actors can do on their own. But a collective understanding can only be achieved by this type of bringing to language, bringing into the foreground the multiplicity of issues that you guys are speaking of. I’ll turn the word back to both of you.

Judith B. Prowda: Absolutely. Please Continue.

Elisabeth Dee: We talked about the position of protecting the gallerist. We talked about the need for a peer rating system and how the fairs are organized. One thing we touched on was the cost, but we didn’t really go into that in great detail. I think that also deserves a few minutes. Because, when one art fair raises their prices, the other art fairs that are competitive with that fair tend to follow suit.

We’ve seen that before, especially in recent years the cost that has increased, particularly in New York and London. Galleries fight very hard to sell over these costs, to make their enterprises worthwhile there. The question that I keep asking myself and as gallerists, I think we ask together is – what rights the galleries have and what responsibilities do fairs have to the galleries with regards to these costs.

Clearly a light bulb doesn’t cost $2000 an outlet doesn’t cost $1000, even a Swiss one. As a gallerist, you start to feel like you’re not the client. And we are the clients of these fairs. We generate the revenue for the fair, and we also generate the revenue for all the artists, for all the creators of the works in the fair and that is our unique responsibility. But we do not have leverage over how these costs are allocated. We don’t have a clear system for addressing them with the fair organizers, which clearly have to make a profit as a sound business, but to what degree? I don’t know about the statistics, maybe you do, but I have heard that the application to Art Basel … just the fee alone … I can’t remember how much we paid for that.

Ed Winkleman: Four to six hundred dollars …

Elisabeth Dee: … four to six hundred dollar application fee. And given the level of applications they have, because of their stature, they do well over one million dollars on application fees alone. Now is that being given back to the project, and in what form? And how does one responsibly handle that. This is something that I’d like to see addressed in a more systematized way.

Ed Winkleman: I think I can flesh this out a lit­tle bit. From talk­ing to some of the director’s of the fairs for the book, they col­lec­tively report not mak­ing as much money as it looks like they’re mak­ing, and that may not be sur­pris­ing but the details are. There is a build­ing where an art fair takes place in a major city. I won’t give too much away, that I think, 10 years ago, cost $70,000 to rent for the week, or week and a half. It now costs over $400,000 in 10 years. So, it’s not the fair that is just always rais­ing their prices. It’s every­body around them know­ing peo­ple are com­ing for this fair. I’ve got a cap­tive audience.

If you try to get a hotel in Miami during Basel on Miami Beach, you know that everybody’s caught on. The costs are through the roof, across the board. And if you’re working with union workers to assemble or produce your fair, you’ve got a bunch of extra costs and things there. I don’t want to give any names but almost to a person, each Art Fair organizer has a long list, from their point of view, of rising costs which would make it impossible for them to lower their prices that they charge the galleries.

Elisabeth Dee: I still believe that fairs are a place to exhibits innovation in the field and when fairs cost this level of money to participate – how can one afford the risk of introducing new ideas? New ideas and new artists become risk factors for gallerists, and so that’s what you’re not seeing, innovation. One could be seeing it if there was some way to have a forum where some of these conversations could be discussed and responded to with art fair organizers. I think we’d be in a better position, I think we have the better content.