ArtBase

Art Fairs are essentially a commercial enterprise. Basically a company rents a huge warehouse, advertises in as many art publications as possible and then sells the booth spaces in the said warehouse to a whole bunch of commercial galleries. The trick, of course, is not to pick just any warehouse. It has to be a space that is readily accessible, near some nice restaurants, and preferably close to where art buying public hangs out (notice locations in Miami, London, New York, Basel, Hamptons). Also, some of the art fairs (SCOPE, ARCO, most likely others) are quite selective about which galleries they bring in. Galleries have to actually submit a proposal for what they are planning to show i.e. curatorial intent has to be demonstrated.

From artist point of view looking at Art Fair websites can be quite interesting. First of all this is one more source for new art to look at, although for the most part these tend to be on the conservative (mostly painting, photo, sometimes video) side. After you pay $10,000 for the booth, plus shipping, plus install costs you want to recoop your losses as soon as possible :)

Another thing to look at are potential galleries to work with. This is a bit tricky. Generally upper tier art fairs, like Art Basel or Armory, will have galleries that younger artists can't really touch but smaller fairs like Scope, NADA, Bridge will have some galleries that are themselves just starting out. Sometimes these galleries will have open submission policies other times you can just call them up and ask if they accept unsolicited submissions.

Basically if you are interested in the commercial route and don't live in a major metropolitan area, art fair websites are great for gallery searching.

QUICK "MARKET" NOTE: Art fairs and festivals are attended by museum curators. This is one of the links between private commercial galleries and public museum spaces. Gallerists (if they are good at what they do) actively try place work in museum collections. As soon as the work is in a museum, it has the "official stamp of approval" and subsequent works from the artist can sell for more:)

Of course, recent emergence of art auctions as a serious force make all this stuff even more complex and kinda rob museums of some of their star making power. However, as a younger artist in North America, you don't have to care that much about auctions...

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