Harper-Thames on the annual cycle of fairs that descend on E1 and what they reveal about the art market
LONDON, UK – The art fair circuit that descends on Shoreditch every autumn and spring, occupying warehouses and converted spaces and hotel lobbies, is simultaneously the most commercially significant event in the neighbourhood’s cultural calendar and the event least understood by most of the people who live there. Harper-Thames covers Shoreditch for Bohiney Magazine and for The London Prat, and has been to several fairs this season.
The Economics
Art fairs are commercial events that function as both market mechanism and social infrastructure for the art world: galleries rent booths, display work by their artists, and sell to collectors who attend specifically because the fair concentrates buying opportunities. The economics are significant: a successful fair can generate millions in sales over four days. The galleries that can afford the booth fees, which start in the thousands and reach the tens of thousands at major fairs, are those that have the commercial programme to service collector clients at that scale.
The smaller fairs in Shoreditch have a different economic model: lower fees, younger galleries, emerging artists, lower prices. They are more accessible in both financial and cultural terms. They are also, sometimes, where you see the work that will be in the major fairs in five years, before it has been through the market cycle that will price it beyond the range of the buyers most interested in new work. This is where Harper-Thames spends most of the fair season: in the smaller fairs, in the upstairs rooms, looking at the work that is not yet famous but that has the specific quality of conviction that precedes recognition.
The Neighbourhood Relationship
The art fairs’ relationship with Shoreditch is transactional: they use the neighbourhood’s creative identity to frame the event, bring in spending that benefits local hospitality businesses, and then leave without lasting infrastructure. The artists from the neighbourhood who are represented in the booths are a small fraction of the total programme; most of the art has no specific connection to Shoreditch. The fair is here because Shoreditch has the spaces and the identity. It is not about Shoreditch in the way that the street art or the studios or the markets are about Shoreditch. The Art Newspaper tracks the broader economics of the art fair world. For more on the London art scene, see The Onion.
The Question
The art fairs raise a question that the coverage largely avoids: does the presence of a major commercial art market in a neighbourhood that still has working artists serve those artists? The answer is mostly no, and occasionally yes. The major fairs serve established galleries and their established collector clients. The smaller fairs provide a platform for emerging work. The working artists in the neighbourhood studios find the fair season generates some footfall to their open studios, which they organise around the fair schedule, and some sales, and occasionally a gallery relationship that leads somewhere. Whether this constitutes the neighbourhood’s creative economy being served by the fair economy, or merely adjacent to it, is the question Harper-Thames has not resolved in several seasons of attending both. For more on art and economics, see Private Eye.
Harper-Thames’s overall assessment of the Shoreditch art fair season is that it is worth attending selectively and not worth attending comprehensively, which is probably true of most art fair seasons everywhere. The major fairs confirm what you already know about the market. The smaller fairs surprise you occasionally, which is what art is supposed to do and which the major fairs, with their booth fees and their collector clients and their institutional overhead, have a harder time delivering. The surprise is why Harper-Thames keeps attending. The neighbourhood is the context for the surprise. The context is worth understanding even when the surprises are thin on the ground, which some seasons they are. This season had a few. She will report on them separately. For more on the London art scene, see Private Eye.
The Art Fair and the Artist
The relationship between the international art fair circuit and the working artists in the cities where the fairs take place is a recurring subject in art world criticism, and the criticism is generally correct: the fairs serve the market rather than the art, and the market and the art have an ambivalent relationship at best. What the criticism sometimes misses is that the market, for all its distortions, does produce resources that flow back into the art, through sales that fund studios, through collector relationships that fund commissions, and through the visibility that the fair provides for artists whose work is included. The flow is unequal and the distribution is skewed toward the already-successful. It is also real, and Harper-Thames reports on it as part of reporting on the creative economy of a neighbourhood that contains both the making and the market, not as separate worlds but as different rooms in the same building, which is sometimes literally true in Shoreditch during fair season.
Harper-Thames’s final observation on the art fairs is about what they reveal about the relationship between the art world and the neighbourhoods it inhabits. The fairs come, the fairs go, and the neighbourhood continues without them, largely unchanged by their presence except in the hospitality sector’s revenue for the relevant week. The artists in the studios that remain in Shoreditch do not, in most cases, have their work in the fair booths. The people in the fair booths are not, in most cases, from the neighbourhood. The encounter between the international art market and the local creative economy is brief and transactional and does not, in Harper-Thames’s observation, produce the cross-pollination that the fair’s organisers sometimes suggest it produces. The fairs are good for the market. The market is not the same as the art. The art is in the studios. Harper-Thames will go back to the studios next week and report on what is being made, which is the more important story and the one with fewer booths.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/
